As Sky commentators now realise, boorish comments ruin careers when management decides to pay attention, writes ANN MARIE HOURIHANE
IT IS being revealed very, very slowly that journalists from News of the Worldhave – allegedly – been hacking into the telephones of celebrities in order to discover fascinating titbits of information about their private lives. Yes, you could have knocked me with a feather.
Rupert Murdoch has flown in to the UK to reassure people that none of his newspapers would tolerate any illegal activity, which is nice.
Last week former News of the Worldreporters explained that hacking into telephones was absolutely routine in the Nineties and Noughties. Back in those early days reporters would phone a celebrity mobile and then try to guess the numerical password to the message mailbox.
I would call this chancing your arm more than anything else. After all, if reporters are going to go through your dustbins, then playing the lotto with your password is not that different. The broadsheet papers who profess shock at these tactics are happy enough to lift the tabloid stories that result.
My own macho news gathering has been much more muted: “Hello, Mrs Hitler, I wonder if Adolf might be there? Oh, is he? Well, when he gets out could you possibly get him to give me a call? Yes, to you too. And the kids. All the best now. Bye. Thanks a lot now, Mrs Hitler. Bye now.”
An interesting aspect of the ex-News of the World lads (and they are mostly lads) talking out of school is the confirmation they offer of police co-operation with the tabloid reporters. For money. The price for the police providing the registration number of a car, one reporter clearly remembered, was £200.
Other information changed hands for much more. In the UK some people are saying that the investigation into tabloid phone hacking has been sluggish for exactly this reason – the police are involved.
Over here we should be careful before we get superior: it would be a foolish person who would argue that gardaí never passed newsworthy gossip on to reporters.
In a wholly unrelated incident in the United States, a sports commentator, Ron Franklin, was fired after 25 years of service for addressing a sideline reporter, Jeannine Edwards, thus: “Listen to me, sweet baby, let me tell you something”.
The two were at a production meeting. When Edwards objected to being spoken to in this way Franklin said: “Okay, then listen to me ***hole”.
You could call it an eerie echo of Sky’s sexism row, but it happened about a month before.
Think of that young assistant referee, Sian Massey, who last Saturday was working on the sideline of the Premier League clash between Liverpool and Wolves and ended up both in hiding and all over the front pages of the tabloids – simultaneously. In the newly acquired photo of her, which was published mid-week, Sian Massy was wearing a strappy top, and dancing at a party. Women, eh? Sian Massey had been the subject of sexist comments by veteran Sky Sports commentators, Andy Gray and Richard Keys.
We had an opportunity to hear the remarks which had been recorded and released for broadcast by helpful people who obviously loathed Andy Gray and Richard Keys like poison.
On the plus side Massey has been praised for her coolness in giving one particularly controversial decision about the offside rule which was later proved to be correct. Inquiries from young women in the UK wishing to become referees have increased greatly.
On the minus side, as far as I’m concerned, lies pretty much everything else in what we must probably call this sorry saga. Gray and Keys – and particularly Gray – seem unattractive characters who are very well paid for commentating on football matches. It is hard to care whether they lose those jobs or not – Gray was fired and Keys resigned – but care we must.
Because all three of these stories involve the death of privacy and of some sort of psychological shelter for those who work in public. Privacy, like many 20th century concepts, has been overtaken by technology.
The tabloid reporters are not content with hacking into message boxes anymore. The technical crew in television stations can avenge boorish behaviour within 24 hours. A few inappropriate seconds can ruin a long and probably harmless career; in the States Ron Franklin is suing for something called wrongful termination.
I have no problem with the bounds of the locker room being pushed back until saddos like Gray and Keys are meeting in a phone box.
Young women in sport must be supported in their work, as far as that is possible. Although what is hurled at them from the terraces is so obscene, and therefore not up for public discussion, they must be helped to deal with it.
And I’ve no problem with the privacy of celebrities being protected, as far as is feasible.
But some of us are cynical enough to wonder when exactly management started to care. Many people are horribly abused at work by well-paid bullies. Many employees routinely break the law in order to succeed. Management tolerates both situations until it stops suiting them.
We should not be starry-eyed enough to think otherwise.