Lets adore and endure each other

Why does there always have to be someone to blame?

According to the media and the politicians, we are constantly in a fury about someone who must be censured, sacked, or bombed without delay.

Are we? Or do the shouty people want us to be furious so they can get the credit for sacking or bombing the problem away?

Look at the recent furies: Immigrants - too many. Bankers - lunatics. MPs and their expenses - cheats. Arab despots - cruel. Bent newspapers - awful. Who will be next?

Andy Worhol said we were all going to be famous for 15 minutes. Maybe we are now going to be infamous for 15 minutes. The fickle finger of fate will point at us one day and Newsnight, Channel 4 News, the Daily Mail and Parliament will all be howling for our blood like the witchfinders of old.

But only for 15 minutes. After that, no matter how dastardly it was, the scandal can be put to one side and replaced by the next awful thing.

And not in the summer. When the politicians and the media stars are at their Tuscan villas, the anger subsides. Normal life can flourish.

Enjoy it while you can. Come September, they will be back, the political parties will have their conferences and we will all be told who to be angry about again.

Or, we could take the advice of the best graffiti in London:

Witchhunt

The hacking scandal has provoked the biggest witchhunt for many a year.
Rupert Murdoch, the News of the World, News International, the police, Sky, David Cameron are all being burned at the stake.

The News of the World are clearly guilty of doing dodgy deals with private investigators and the police. Those deals may have brought them stories no one else knew about - the exclusives Sunday papers need because no ordinary news happens on Saturdays - but if they had stopped to think, they would have realised that it would look bad for them if those deals were ever revealed.
But no newspapers stop to think. They all focus on the next publication. Anything further ahead will be tackled when it arrives. Anything which happened yesterday or further back is forgotten, unless a writ turns up. There is no forward planning, no ‘where do we want to be in six months, a year, five years’. It’s all about tomorrow’s paper.
Newspaper managers ought to think a bit about the future, but they spend too much time fire-fighting what the flaming journalists insist on doing today, whatever the cost, and what they did yesterday which five lawyers want to sue them about. It is more difficult than running an insurance company and requires managers who know how to balance the freedom journalists want with the restrictions the law places on companies.

The police are clearly guilty of not investigating the dodgy deals done by the private investigators and by their own officers. They never have been good at sorting out their own mess. Senior management at fault again.

David Cameron is guilty of not checking out the skeletons in Andy Coulson’s past before hiring him to look after the Government’s skeletons.

Rupert Murdoch is guilty of not separating his businesses well enough and not separating himself from the picture well enough. Murdoch has been the devil to the Left since the Wapping battles over his British newspapers. He is the devil to many American liberals because of Fox News. He has not raided the pension fund as Robert Maxwell did, or upset the shareholders as Conrad Black did. All he has done is be a very good businessman.
Labour MPs are now demanding that he should not be allowed to buy complete control of BSkyB because of the dodgy deals done by the News of the World.
The News of the World is part of News International. BSkyB is a separate company. Different managements. Different corporate ethos. No one has suggested that Sky News has done anything wrong.
The only link between the companies is Rupert Murdoch.
He must make sure that a problem in one newspaper does not infect the whole business.


One final thought. The Guardian has been investigating this story for many months. Who is it getting its information from?