The News of the World debate and This Week’s guests

Selina Scott on This Week (click to watch)

Having watched last night’s This Week I was shocked and disgusted by the pisspoor attempt to engage in any form of meaningful debate over the recent phone tapping scandal.

The guest they had on, Selina Scott, was selected because she had been “stitched up” by the News of the World and was given several minutes to whimper on a out how much she had been hurt by it and how obtrusive the evil hacks from Wapping Fortress had been.
“It’s gut wrenching”, she bleated.
Who cares? I don’t. I wanted to listen to a serious debate over the position of Andy Coulson, why the police and CPS hid the evidence and payouts to phone tapped individuals and what of the position of News International (the presenter, Andrew Neil, former Sunday Times editor for 11 years under Murdoch might know a thing or two about this – did Scott bother asking his opinion? No.)
Why choose someone who is still clearly suffering from the story? What would be the chance of a proper debate with her? None.
She introduced her five minute segment holding aloft copies of Closer, Heat, OK! and Hello! explaining that this was where “most women” got their celebrity gossip from and that this was feeding the alleged behaviour by 27 NOTW journos to use private investigators, forgetting that virtually all celebrities featured in these magazines have sold their story to the highest bidder.

Selina Scott talking on This week (click to watch)

Then she called for Andy Coulson, former NOTW editor and David Cameron spin doctor, to be sacked.
She says if he was at the heart of Government after the next election he would be a “Society informer, just like Piers Morgan” (the NOTW editor who did the false story on Scott).
Piers Morgan a society informer?
If she genuinely believes that a man who has his “you were the best singer pound for pound” (what does that actually mean?) spiel into millions of peoples’ homes for six weeks a year is a society ‘informer’ then either she is being, at best, patronising, at worst, an idiot.
Continuing her ill-informed tirade, she said tabloid newspapers were at their most intrusive now.
This is simply not true. Back in the 1980s tabloid newspapers would regularly invade individuals privacy, expose individuals who had had affairs, or even those who had merely slept with someone. There were no privacy laws and no regulation of the press. As Roy Greenslade once told me: “That was the bad old days”.
Today there is the Human Rights Act 1998 which categorically protects individual’s right to privacy (when weighed up against freedom of the press), and there is the Press Complaints Commission (PCC).
Neither are by any means perfect but at least, in principle, they are attempting to create boundaries in which the press can function.
None of this was mentioned by the poor defenceless Selina Scott, and was left up to Diane Abbott to put some perspective on the debate.
Come on This Week researchers, next time you book a guest please make sure they know what their talking about. All she is is someone who had a horrid story written about her by a newspaper. Why does that mean she knows the issues? If a car hit me would I be an expert in mechanics? No.