Greatly improved by death

Here's one from the Senior Editor (Politics) at the New Statesman I can agree with:-

When did the News of the World morph into Princess Diana?

Stop the mawkishness and sentimentality.

I was rung up by BBC, Sky and al-Jazeera producers over the weekend and invited on air to discuss the demise of the News of the World. I declined. I just don't care. About the NoW, that is. The brand. The paper.

Before some of you start baying for my blood, I do, of course, care about the 200 or so people who've lost their jobs -- but Murdoch and Brooks are to blame for those job losses and not, as the Times's Roger Alton ludicrously argued on Channel 4 News last week, "the comfortable middle-class mothers of MumsNet", or the BBC, or the Guardian, blah blah blah. (On a side note, I can't help but notice that the NoW was one of the papers constantly calling for sackings and redundancies in the public sector.)

What's really annoyed me over the past 72 hours or so is the way in which people have been bleating on about the paper's demise as if someone's died. The outpouring of "emotion" for something that, let's be honest, most of us had little to do with, or little interest in, is reminiscent of those nauseating days and weeks after the death of Princess Diana in August 1997.

The most irritating claim, however, is that we should mourn the passing of the world's "greatest investigative paper". Really? Was the NoW behind the exposure of torture at Abu Ghraib? The failure to find WMDs in Iraq? The MPs' expenses scandal? Cash for questions? Thalidomide?

Too right! I was reminded of some obnoxious MP keeling over and then everyone in the House paying tribute to his - whatever they can think of. Some people and things are greatly improved by death.* The News of the World was one. Was! Was! Was! Did you ever think you'd live to see the day?

*Saki

Comments

[Allan]

Fine post. I object to the current take on these trauchles that if the 'lower orders' hadn't bought it we'd be better off. When I grew up on a council scheme on a Central Belt in the 1950s the Sunday paper of choice for most families was 'The Sunday Post.' Politically, culturally,intellectually this was little better than the Screws: it peddled reaction [it was a non-union shop]politically and socially [in spite of the surname of its Kailyaird writer Francis Gay]and it inculcated a couthy wee vision of a Brigadoon Scotland. I'm delighted that my parents were willing to top up my paper-round wages to let me, in my adolescence, buy the 'Observer' in its place -- though I still love, oddly, Oor Wullie and the Broons. In an entirely post-modern way you understand........