I cannot join a mass movement for which
Hugh Grant is a spokesman. Understandably, Mr Grant has a grudge against London
tabloids. For years they have pursued him, photographed him, lied about him,
and shamed him. He fought back. He won. The News of the
World is dead.

But when the star of Four Weddings and a Funeral becomes a star of a campaign to kneecap
the international media conglomerate News Corp, something stinks.

A couple of months ago in the New
Statesman, Mr Grant published an account of how he had secretly recorded an
incriminating interview with former NOTW journalist Paul McMullen. The
Guardian described this as “fearlessly calling Rupert Murdoch to account”.
Now he has become a hero in the Guardian’s campaign to stop secret tape-recording
and phone taps by the gutter press. The Guardian’s editor says that he would love to employ him as a columnist – but can’t
afford it.

Stranger people have been hailed as prophets.
But it seems odd for an actor whose image has been built as much on his extracurricular
activities as on his films to be applauded as an authority on journalistic ethics.

This is the kind of thing that happens in moral
panics. The front pages of newspapers in the US, Canada and Australia -- where the
NOTW was unknown – are now chewing on the bones of five-year-old crimes by
seamy journalists and the responsibilities of News International’s board.

The New York Times, never last out of the
stable in a stampede to reach the moral high ground, is breaking its own scoops
about skulduggery in News International management.

Bizarrely, there has been more media
coverage of the slimy working habits of NOTW journalists than there was of the
sexed-up dossier which former Prime Minister Tony Blair used to drag the
United Kingdom into the Iraq War.

As a result of the deceptive tactics used
by Blair’s office, about 180 British servicemen died, and who knows how many
Iraqi civilians. How many have died as a result of phone hacking by News of the
World?

Feelings have certainly been hurt and
shamed as a result of phone hacks by journalists or their private detectives.
The family of Milly Dowler, a 13-year-old schoolgirl who was abducted and
murdered in 2002, was outraged. And rightly so. NOTW
journalists hacked into her mobile phone message bank and listened to
messages left by family and friends. To make room for more messages, they deleted
old ones. This gave false hope to Milly’s family and could have destroyed
evidence. Then journalists had the gall to interview them about their hopes
that she was still alive.

This was sordid, inexcusable and illegal.

As was hacking into the phones of grieving relatives
of British soldiers killed in action in Iraq and Afghanistan. In addition, NOTW
appears to have been giving “backhanders” to police and Scotland Yard in return
for information. Bribing the police is serious business. Those responsible
should face justice.

But all of these actions, however despicable,
did no violence. Ordinary members of the public whose privacy was violated have
a right to protest being manipulated by News of the World. But is that sufficient
justification for the tsunami of outrage generated by competitors of News Corp? As media expert Tim Luckhurst wrote in the UK Independent, "It is no insult to people who have been shocked and hurt by the News of the World to recognise that phone hacking is simply not the most appalling thing the British press has ever done."

Now the public is being manipulated again,
this time by the top end of town, whose indignation over NOTW seems matched by disdain
for its readers. Ned
Beauman, an as-yet-unpublished British novelist writing for the New York
Times, expressed – hopefully tongue in cheek – the social gap between the London
tabloids and the London broadsheets:

“Although The News of the World was one of the most popular papers in Britain, I know no one
who read it and have never read it myself. My news media intake is high, but I
still live in a very tiny bubble, so I have no real idea what the average
British person likes to sit down with on a Sunday, just as I have no real idea
what the average British person thinks, wants, eats or smells like.”

The phone hacking scandal has been fuelled by
the unpredictable eruption of the bubbling volcano of average British persons’ sentimentality.
In 1997 it exploded with the death, funeral and burial of Princess Diana. Fourteen
years later Britain is once again luxuriating in a hot tub of overpowering and
utterly disproportionate emotion.

But in the searing words of American writer
James Baldwin in Notes of a Native Son,
“Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion,
is the mark of dishonesty.”

Isn’t there something absurdly dishonest
about the Guardian’s humbuggery? This is the newspaper, remember, which
published the stolen Wikileaks cables. Just think for a moment. Who profits by
the humiliation of Rupert Murdoch and News Corp? Who profits if his executives are
enmeshed in a web of allegations and investigations?

In the UK the answer is the Guardian which
competes with the London Times, a News Corp title. In the US, it is the New
York Times, which desperately needs to hobble the Wall Street Journal, acquired
by Murdoch in 2007.

Public indignation is being deployed as a
weapon in a cultural and commercial assault upon Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp and
its media outlets. Murdoch desperately wants to buy out the broadcaster BSkyB. His
rivals and enemies fear that Murdoch will turn BSkyB into a trans-Atlantic Fox
News, fouling British air with conservative social values and reactionary
politics.

This is hardly a secret. Late last year the
coalition’s Business Secretary, Vince Cable, was
taped by undercover reporters from the Daily Telegraph posing as Liberal
Democrat supporters. He told them that he would block the purchase regardless
of the merits of the case. “I
have declared war on Mr Murdoch and I think we’re going to win,” he told them. Murdoch clearly has powerful enemies in the British establishment.

(Very few complaints, by the way, about the
ethics of this particular sting.)

The industrial scale of the NOTW’s hacking
and the inability –or unwillingness -- of his executives to purge rogues from
NOTW has become the perfect excuse to paint Murdoch as not “a fit and proper
person” to control a UK television channel. The scandal has come at a perfect
time to disrupt his bid and to embarrass the Tory half of the governing
coalition.

Rupert Murdoch’s tabloids are a reeking
blot on British cultural life. But you have to be one of the gormless fops
played by Hugh Grant to believe that the war on News Corp is anything more than media pitbulls fighting to be top dog.

Michael Cook is editor of MercatorNet. He
has no financial or other interest in News Corp.