Twitter mob or Twitter revolution? NOTW and the journalism dilemma

By Tristan Stewart-Robertson COMPANY X has been dumping toxic waste in a river. Government officials have been paid off. The police turn a blind eye. Local children are getting ill. The situation must be exposed to public scrutiny, the corrupt officials shamed into action. A local reporter manages to access the voice mail of a Company X employee, the key evidence to publish the story. The reported hacked the phone, illegally, but saved countless residents from a deadly toxin. But what if the hacked phone belonged to a missing 13-year-old girl and then messages were deleted, giving her parents the impression their daughter was still alive? [caption id=“attachment_39297” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“The grand hypocrisies of a hypocritical age is that we want supreme privacy and anonymity online as well as our 15 minutes of fame. Christopher Furlong/Getty Images”]  [/caption] In Britain, a private investigator working for the News of the World (NOTW) tabloid paper did just that. And the fall-out has shut down the paper after 168 years and sent the media and political classes scrambling to recover. As many as 4,000 people may have had voicemail messages on their mobile phones hacked. One former editor of the paper has been arrested, as well as the former royal correspondent, who has already served time for the offence. The hacking first came to light in 2005 but until last week, the victims were celebrities, politicians or other public figures who elicited little sympathy from the British public. But when the Guardian newspaper revealed that murder victim Milly Dowler’s phone was hacked, outrage ensued. The NOTW also allegedly hacked the voicemail of relatives of victims of the 2005 London terror attacks and even of those of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. By Thursday, NOTW publishers News International took the dramatic step of shutting down what was the world’s biggest selling, English-language newspaper and getting rid of 200 staff, but not the former editor, Rebekah Brooks. Previously wronged celebrities and some commentators hailed the demise of the paper as a victory for decency and “proper journalism”. Unfortunately, “proper journalism” never sold nearly as many copies as the NOTW. Even though its sales had dropped by 36 percent in a decade, no “quality” paper came close to the 2.6 million sales. The lines demarcating “news” and “infotainment” have been blurring for many years, whether through the obsession with royal lives and loves, or simply the faces behind our film and TV choices. Company X dumping toxic waste clearly falls into the category of “public interest” and the frantic messages left for a missing 13-year-old do not. So what about all the cases in between? Who now decides what information the public NEEDS to know, and what information might just entertain them? Sometimes hailed as the great democratising force, social media is exerting an ever more prominent role, particularly because the press points it out. Commentators obsessively look to social media as the source of Middle Eastern revolutions and the downfall of the NOTW because it both fascinates and confuses them. Essentially Twitter and other social media forms have become a technological embodiment of what the tabloid press has always done: build up heroes and then demolish them. That fits perfectly with the end of deference to institutions, a point repeatedly made in Britain in the past week. The end of the NOTW, or the “crisis of the press” is described as the third pillar of trust to fall away, after banks and politicians. In the Middle East, the end of deference has allowed popular uprisings, mixing social media and genuine protest against armed power, something comfortable Britons don’t have to worry about. But is it a Twitter revolution? Or just a Twitter mob? In May, the British media was in a flutter because a major footballer had taken out what’s known as a “superinjunction”, meaning not only can you not print or broadcast any of the information a person is trying to hide, but you can’t even admit the injunction exists in the first place. Somehow, the name of the footballer was revealed online and within less than 24 hours, 76,000 Twitter accounts tweeted his name. Then a newspaper claimed that the availability of the name online had made a mockery of the injunction and proved that it was no longer sustainable, and so named him. Should superinjunctions be allowed to protect a company from revelations about causing environmental damage? Of course not. But conversely, should there now be no possibility of any privacy at all? Or should the Twitter masses make those decisions exclusively? Again, we come back to the clash over how decisions are made about right and wrong, ethical and unethical, the public right to know, and the individual right to privacy. Was the alleged phone tapping by the Congress-led government last year to protect the public, or to spy on private lives? Was WikiLeaks right to publish the private correspondence of government officials last year? When I was a reporter at a Scottish daily paper, we once withheld details of a planning application. The public thought the property was going to be used for drug addicts, but had we published that it was for women fleeing domestic abuse, it would not have been a safe haven. And on the opposite side of the coin, a woman called to complain about a story that made a little girl cry. She was the daughter of someone convicted of a serious crime that was in the public interest to print. Inside we reporters there exist the same moral conflicts that exist on a grand scale in society. Where is the line between public and private. The grand hypocrisies of a hypocritical age is that we want supreme privacy and anonymity online as well as our 15 minutes of fame. We want data security while demanding CCTV watch us everywhere for personal security. And we want politicians and celebrities to be perfect role models all while buying into the tabloid press daily to see which one has failed. And for the employee of Company X, dumping toxic waste, his crime might be public, but his own family might still be entitled to privacy. These conflicts won’t disappear with an axed tabloid newspaper, nor the social media revolution. Disclaimer: I have, a few years ago now, been paid for freelance stories and tips by the Scottish editions of the News of the World (NOTW) and the daily sister paper, The Sun_, and more recently by the_ Sunday Times_. I stand by those individual stories._ Tristan Stewart-Robertson is a Canadian freelance reporter based in Glasgow, Scotland, operating as the W5 Press Agency. This piece was written exclusively for Firstpost.