Voicemail listening AKA “Phone Hacking”

The media are under attack – by themselves!

Apart from the deleting of certain messages, I’m not sure anyone cares that much about the listening to voicemails – more people cared about the custard pie than the rest of the story.

..but the media feel threatened  so are showing that they still do set the agenda even in these internety days. By using ambiguous terms like Phone Hacking and going OTT by saying people are “victims” of it as if they’d been stabbed they’ve been able to keep this going for weeks and get parliament involved.

I’d say most people accept that surveillance by a multitude of private media companies was actually a good thing.
Sure it may have gone too far and they listened to too many people’s messages and so that’s why they got the slap in 2006 – fair enough.

The alternatives are either let things go on which shouldn’t or that people should know about, or nationalise it and leave all the spying to government – who then aren’t watched themselves.

Imagine it was real hacking and they’d got into private CCTV cameras.  There’d be outrage and they’d stop – But then crimes would go on and the people would shout “Do something”. So in RIPA style, the government could come along and demand they get a feed from all the cameras whenever they want.

So instead of papers just telling others of wrongdoing we have expensive and scary big brother style snooping by people who can arrest/fine you.

Really, it’s a bit of a non-story – a leftie distraction from their failing Euro. Which is why they are calling for Cameron’s blood even though there’s no logical reason for that, but they let Brown lie to parliament and Milliband to have a dodgy advisor still in place.

Cameron & government has shown to be weak by going along with it and extending parliament and even cutting short a foreign visit – this isn’t a national crisis.

oh.. and I’ve seen “hackgate” used a couple of times now – I sincerely hope that is with high irony on both parts of the word.

And yeah I get that it’s silly that I’m moaning about the media setting the agenda but then talking about it myself.