BACK in 1974, the actions of two journalists helped bring down the president of the most powerful nation in the world.
In 2011, the actions of a number of journalists helped bring down a newspaper - their own.
Newspaper journalism has come a long way since Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford... sorry, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward used their investigative skills to unravel the Watergate scandal and ultimately unseat Richard Nixon from the US presidency.
That long way has apparently been straight down.
The News Of The World phone hacking scandal, for all its dastardly and despicable qualities, didn't really surprise anyone. Journalists - proper journalists working for proper newspapers that deal with proper news stories - have always looked down upon tabloid rags like News Of The World as... well, tabloid rags whose primary aim was not to inform and educate but titillate and inevitably dumb our society down even further by making stories out of sex scandals, celebrity shennanigans and other "news".
As for the public, well... do a quick straw poll at your local drinking hole and the public opinion of journalists will land somewhere between used car salesman, people smugglers and defence lawyers of child rapists. The NotW scandal pretty much confirmed what a lot of people already thought about journalists - that we're devious evil scum who would do anything for a story, including hack into the phone message banks of murdered teenagers and dead soldiers or illegally access the medical records of sick children (as former UK PM Gordon Brown is now alleging).
Not all journos are like this. In fact, very few use such devious tactics. There are many, many great journalists out there, still doing amazing work, uncovering deception and corruption, informing the public and "keeping the bastards honest", in the words of Don Chipp. I'm certainly not one of them, but they're out there.
Dear reader, please do not tar all journalists with the same brush. Most of us are good, decent, hard-working people. The NotW journalists responsible for these invasions of privacy are not. They are guilty of serious crimes. They and any of their superiors who were in-the-know about such activities should be dealt with accordingly.
While the NotW's undoing has been of its own making, there is another side to it. Certainly, I'm not going to defend the paper's actions at all - unlike former editor Paul McMullen, who features in a fascinating clip on YouTube where he defends the tabloid to hack-victim Steve Coogan and former BBC director Greg Dyke.
But it is worth noting that NotW sold approximately 2.8 million copies per week (according to Wikipedia - it's 5 million according to McMullen). This is more than The Age and The Herald Sun combined.
People were reading the NotW. Would the tabloid have been so willing to break the law in search of the next celebrity drug escapade or sex scandal if no one was reading the damned thing? Probably not. Or did people only read it because it was there? Perhaps. We may be getting into chicken or egg territory here, but it's safe to say that roughly 2.8 million Britons were actively encouraging the paper to write the type of stories they wrote.
This does not excuse the NotW at all. Nothing excuses what they did. But the public gets the media they deserve, and in this case they got a bunch of celebrity-obsessed gossip merchants willing to stoop to incredible lows to fill their pages with information that barely qualifies as information, let alone news. What does this say about its readers.
You buy such a publication at your own peril. I'm not suggesting all of them use the kind of dirty tricks perpertrated by NotW. But think about the kind of stories and photos they're publishing and think about how they obtained that information? Do you really need to know about the latest sex-capades of a sporstman? Or which supermodel threw a drug-fuelled tantrum? Is that really news?
If you want to read about what Brad and Angelina are up to instead of the state of our nation, that's fine. If you're intrigued by the sexual peccadilloes of politicians instead of the future of our planet, read away.
But as I said before - the public gets the media they deserve.
And here's that clip mentioned above:
Ma tt Neal writes for Plainly Speaking, a regular blog put together by the editorial team at Victoria's Warrnambool Standard website.
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