The arrest yesterday of Sun journalists over suspected payments to police and public officials doesn’t mean anything, least of all the closure of the Sun. Those arrested are innocent until proven guilty, and have committed no crime, so we ought to be fair to them.
True, the Sun hasn’t been spectacularly fair in the past to people such as Barry George, Robert Murat or Christopher Jefferies, who were all wrongly linked to serious crimes they hadn’t committed. They weren’t very fair either to brothers Mohammed Abul Kahar and Abul Koyair when the pair were arrested (and later released without charge) over a chemical bomb plot which the Sun reported as “imminent” according to its sources. But that doesn’t mean that the employees of the Sun shouldn’t be subjected to the fairness that their newspaper hasn’t always shown in the past.
Is the Sun in serious danger of going the same way as the News of the World? It’s too early to say, of course, but it’s always fun to speculate, so let’s imagine a world in which the Sun is doomed. If the Sun did set (yes, I went there) on Britain’s most popular paper, it could be seen as a disaster, as was the Screws’ closure some months ago. We could sit around mourning the loss of popular tabloid journalism, fearing that the futurewithout a pair of tits on page 3 and Hagar The Horrible might be something slightly more monochrome, less fun, more dull. That’s a concern, I suppose, though I don’t think those talented journos who work for the Sun will fade into obscurity, and if there really is a market for this kind of thing -and there appears to be, given its massive popularity – then people will be willing to stump up for it.
But look at how things have stayed exactly the same since the NOTW collapsed under the weight of its own wrongdoing. It’s not as if there’s
something missing that we couldn’t find anywhere else. Perhaps a couple of celebrities have got away with a bit of shagging in a Travelodge that they might have had exposed beforehand; perhaps some other issue of more vital public interest has not come to light, which would have been exposed thanks to the dogged determination of the Screws’ investigative reporters. We’ll never really know for sure.
It’s easy to depict a world in which the mung-bean-weaving flip-flopping Guardianista buzzkills have brought about the closure of a much-loved titan of journalism which in a way has weakened our ability to hold democracy to account with a free press. Inviting narrative though that might be for some people, that’s not really the case. If the Screws hadn’t done things that were unethical and wrong, they wouldn’t have offended their core readership and toxified their brand, and they’d still be around: that’s the top and bottom of it, and let’s not pretend otherwise.
It’s easy, too, to think that this is in some way a revenge by politicians against journalists, that those lily-livered liberals who rejoice over the demise of their tabloid tormentors are playing into the hands of the authorities, who have arrested more journalists this year than Robert Mugabe and who are clamping down on dissent. Also inviting, but also wrong – and besides, the Sun for example is such a roll-over-and-tickle-my-tummy faithfulsupporter of this government and its projects that it’s hardly providing a huge challenge to the powers that be.
A more likely scenario, perhaps, is that an ageing Rupert Murdoch, who has plenty of other projects to keep him and his empire busy that don’t involve seeing his employees ending up in police stations, might think that enough is enough, and try to sell the profitable but toxic Sun on to some other buyer. Why bother with these constant problems? It was the most humbling day of his life to date to appear before the DCMS committee, but perhaps there are more humbling days to come.
In the meantime, there isn’t any glee to be had at the potential redundancy of journalists, though that doesn’t mean the world would automatically be a better place with the Sun in it, nor that people don’t have every right to recall the unethical and unfair behaviour of that newspaper, among others out there. As a (largely) redundant former journalist myself, I know what it’s like to find a job in the media nowadays: not a whole heap of fun. If you don’t mind, though, I think I may reserve the right to not mourn the demise of the Sun, if it did happen – though I don’t think it will.
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