As he flies into this country - to do what exactly? To salvage his operation here? To oversee damage limitation? To apologise? - it is worth calling to mind just what exactly this man is. Not who, that's a matter for his biographers, but what he represents and embodies.
The great writer Dennis Potter memorably called his cancer Rupert, after Rupert Murdoch. And that, I am convinced, is precisely what Rupert Murdoch is. A malign tumour that has been sitting on one of the vital organs of our society - the media - for four decades and whose effect on the entire fabric that enmeshes our journalism with our politics, our judiciary, our police, our culture, our perception of ourselves, indeed our identity as a people, has been to damage it in the most insidious and pervasive way imaginable.
There has, yes, always been a market for tittle-tattle, there is, patently, a hunger for gossip and salacious stories, but while the great British public have to bear their share of responsibility for buying the lies, the trash, the made-up sensations, the half-truths and untruths peddled as facts, the misogyny, the homophobia, the xenophobia, the small-mindedness and intolerance, the thoroughly un-British unfairness of a small band of hand-picked henchmen and women, part family, part cronies, taking it upon themselves to threaten, bully, blackmail, intimidate and manipulate everyone from elected politicians to people who happen to carry out their work in the public eye to members of the royal household to anyone really they themselves consider 'fair game'; while it is true to say that much as every country gets the government it deserves it also gets the press it deserves, there is one fact that can't and mustn't be overlooked. Which is that the mindset - I can't bring myself to calling it a 'culture', as that would suggest there was anything in the least refined or civilised or even just human about it - which this man has instigated and spread is in itself as toxic as the brand he has just culled from his stable. You can create markets. As any drug dealer will tell you, you can manufacture (again, we can't justly call it 'cultivate') demand, even if it is for something that makes you sick. You can awaken, appeal to and feed into the lowest, most base instincts and by feeding them create more appetite for them. Like the sugar in sweets and the salt in crisps, you know it rots your teeth and gives you heart disease but you've tasted it now so you want more. What this man is responsible for, and if not single-handedly then most assuredly as its most effective, most efficient and most devastating operator, is the systematic destruction of ethics in journalism. This is a man who knows how to extract a price for everything and who knows the value of nothing, indeed. He is the nemesis of culture, the debilitating blight that has made it almost impossible, at times, for decency, in this country, to breathe.
As he flies into this country, this man, we are, I believe, within our rights to call for his arrest. He stands accused, personally and as the Chairman and CEO of News Corporation, parent company to News International, of the corruption, the interception of communications, the interference with a police investigation, that his people stand accused of. If he says he didn't know about them, I say he is a liar. And if he isn't a liar, then he is grossly, criminally irresponsible, because know about it, he should: these kinds of scoops do not come out of nowhere. And if he did know about it, and admits as much, he is, of these crimes, guilty. I believe we are within our rights to call for the arrest of his son, James Murdoch, Chairman and CEO of News Corporation Europe and Asia, and his Chief Executive of News International, Rebekah Brooks/Wade too. I believe we are within our rights to call for these people to be brought to justice.
Rupert, the cancer, ended up killing Dennis Potter. We need not let Rupert, the man, kill civic society in our country. We can excise him, or at the very least tame him. The rampant multiplication of his cells can be stopped, we have the wherewithal. And as for BSkyB: there is no way this person and the persons who do his bidding can be, in any meaningful way, in any way that doesn't make a mockery of language, sense and reason, be described as either 'fit' or 'proper'.
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