'Thank You & Goodbye'
The News of the World's final front page was curt and to the point but whilst the nation's halfwits eulogised about how the disgraced Sunday newspaper was a trailblazer in journalism, events of the past week have seen sympathy from elsewhere in incredibly short supply.
Bruce Foxton could see where the Rupert Murdoch-owned paper was heading, six years before it devolved into tabloid format, when he penned The Jam's 1978 single 'News of the World' yet - if you believe the NOTW's final parting shot - 7.5million others couldn't.
Twenty-three years on and Foxton's lyrics remain a relevant guide to the mindset of tabloid journalism and its flag bearers. The 55-year-old may have sat at home on Thursday afternoon with a telling smile on his face as the news of the paper's demise began to break.
Hacking the phones of MPs and celebrities, coincidentally not the nonentities they fawned over on a weekly basis, was wholly inappropriate but accessing the voicemails of missing schoolgirls and relatives of soldiers killed in combat plunged new depths.
NOTW was a popular newspaper on Merseyside, where its reviled sister publication The Sun is still actively boycotted after their slurs on the 1989 Hillsborough disaster, and indeed throughout the United Kingdom. And herein lies the problem.
It was a beacon for indecency which has spawned a degenerate nation's penchant for voyeurism. It fed these desperate individuals by glorifying anyone who would reveal whom they had slept for a princely sum and unethical methods of news-gathering and entrapment.
One of the paper's former reporters turned journalism lecturer once told me a story of how a female colleague was sent to Barbados with the sole remit of bedding a then Liverpool footballer because they had a suspicion that he had been playing away from home.
Many a competent, Liverpool-centric journalist has left a career in their native city to pursue one with NOTW. Several have tried to justify their defection, vociferously declaring that they are joining a good, honest publication with a long-standing history in the industry.
But whilst some of their colleagues speak publicly, their current silence is deafening.
NOTW will undoubtedly return, albeit under a different title, but if anything good is to come from this absolute mess, it should be a much-needed and long overdue shift in the tabloid journalism psyche.
Removing the toxicity whose fingerprints are all over this scandal is imperative, be it those responsible for the phone hacking or shameless News International chief executive Rebekah Brooks, who inexplicably retains the full support of the equally brazen Murdoch.
Murdoch's stranglehold on the British media itself also needs to be broken as it has been lowering the industry's standards since the early 1980's whilst his proposed takeover of BSkyB appears precarious after these despicable revelations came to light.
There is still a place for good, investigative journalism in this country but it will only happen if people demand it; be it within the industry itself or the people who read the papers.
As Foxton himself once said: The truth is in what you see - not what you read'.
Giant Spectacular Waste of Money
(Sun 22/04)
The End of the World
(Sun 10/07)
A Taste of Their Own Medicine
(Sat 04/12)
A Dangerous Precedent
(Tue 23/11)
...And the Circus Leaves Town
(Sat 11/09)
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