Sun Witchhunt Hypocrisy

After the CPS decided to drop potential corporate charges against the Murdoch press, as well as those which had been hanging over several serving and former Mirror Group journalists, the Sun wasted no time in cobbling together a shrieking editorial telling readers of a “£50m witchhunt”. The ranting starts from the word go: “WHO will take the blame for blowing £50million on the politically-motivated and fruitless war on the tabloid Press? Who will apologise to the public for that colossal waste? Anyone?”

That's what I bladdy think of youse bladdy Leveson bladdy Inquiry, ya bladdy Pommie drongoes!

Police doing their job, when it is inconvenient to Rupe and his troops, is “politically motivated”. And on it goes: “Now the phone-hacking probe and the deranged persecution of Sun reporters for paying for stories in the public interest are over, what do the taxpayers who had no choice but to fund it know? That a few News of the World journalists hacked phones and paid the price”. That’s not quite true, is it?

Consider this from Press Gazette: “Four years after the launch of Operation Elveden, the number of public officials convicted of misconduct in public office stands at 26 … Their sentences range from between 13 weeks to two years, and total more than 20 years”. All jailed after the Murdoch press shopped them to the cops.

Yet on rants the Sun: “No evidence that the company knew of it. No evidence of a cover-up”. Wrong twice over: the CPS decided it had insufficient evidence, which is not the same thing. And, as for the “cover-up”, whoever wrote the rant might like to consult the testimony of Rupert Murdoch to the Leveson Inquiry: “there's no question in my mind that … someone took charge of a cover-up”. There was a cover-up. YOUR BOSS SAYS SO.

But it’s Pa Broon’s fault, too: “So much, then, for Gordon Brown who - in a characteristic tantrum over The Sun ditching its support for Labour - hid behind Parliamentary privilege to smear us as ‘a criminal media nexus’”. Considering a Murdoch editor and several of his staff went to jail as a result of the Hacking Trial, that’s a fair assessment.

Even the Sun’s conclusion is woefully wrong: “an establishment reeling from its repeated exposure by Britain’s ‘feral’ Press seized a thin chance to muzzle us”. The press is an integral part of the establishment, and its failure to perform those claimed “exposures” is somehow missed by the Sun. And there’s something else they missed.

If they did nothing wrong, then why did the Murdoch press apologise in a series of newspaper adverts in July 2011? Why did Murdoch personally apologise before the Leveson Inquiry the following April? Why did they apologise for a third time, after the hacking trial? And, while you Murdoch poodles are having a think about that, what is the problem with proceeding with Leveson Part 2?

After all, if there’s “No evidence that the company knew of it”, and “No evidence of a cover-up”, it won’t be a problem, will it? Not unless you’re just desperately trying to get your readers to “look over there”, always looking over your collective shoulders at yet more evidence of wrongdoing emerging from your murky past.

The Sun protests too much. That’s because its hacks, past and present, are totally innocent of wrongdoing and pure as the driven snow. And if you believe that, you’ll believe anything.