the brilliantly leaping gazelle

The British press love a scandal. But it has to be the ‘right’ kind of scandal, obviously. The ‘right’ kind of scandal usually involves sex, the more depraved the better. This gives the press the benefit of allowing details of the depravity to be discussed in salacious detail or as much detail as the press regulator or their readers will allow, whilst also giving them the opportunity to go full on outraged morality. It also needs a celebrity, or someone the press can quickly turn into one, because a good scandal needs a proper baddie, and if they’re rich, so much the better. Because in the twisted morality of the press nowadays, anything involving someone rich is automatically more worthy of attention than if the same thing happened to someone poor, and the richer they are, the more newsworthy it becomes by dint of that fact alone. 

If all these things are present, then politics can enter, ideally in the form of a political figure the press has groomed the public into hating. Finally, the person whose reputation is to be tarnished ideally doesn’t have any reputation left to be tarnished, having already been embroiled in many scandals and court cases over the years. To keep the lawyers happy, its better if they’re dead because as the dead can’t sue, speculation can run wild.

The news that broke yesterday that Peters Out was sacked by Stymied because of his relationship with Jeffrey Wrongun bears this out. It also bears out another truism about the press’s concept of the ‘right’ kind of scandal, one of which is of it being a scandal whereby the main scandalous elements of it happened years ago. Another being that, if either the victim, victims or perpetrator are not rich or has some other cultural cachet that renders them newsworthy, they should at least be foreign. It also means that if there is a ‘right’ kind of scandal, it therefore follows that there’s a ‘wrong’ kind of scandal, a scandal which elicits no prolonged scrutiny by the press, no headlines dominating the news cycle for months and definitely not where the victims are British, white and working class. That, as far as the press is concerned, is three strikes against them, which all but renders them invisible. Think I’m wrong?

 Then ask yourself exactly how long, and into what detail, did the press cover the Jeffrey Wrongun story, a story which up until recently, offered no plausible reason as to why the press were so interested. The British press, that is, given that none of his victims were British. Nonetheless,  the stories kept on coming and the resources, both financial and human, were seemingly endless in pursuit of discovering more about a matter of little or no consequence to the British public.

Wild speculation as to who else might have been involved in his sordid doings. Hints at a cover up. Political collusion in keeping his crimes hidden that stretched back years and implicated both parties. The royal connection. The suspicious death. It was like a news Hydra, one new angle seeming to create yet more angles to be speculated on. 

Eventually, and to their great relief, a Tangoed connection was found. Nowadays it seems any that scandal becomes more scandalous once Tangoed can be attached to it, no matter that to call the connections tenuous would be be to afford them a gravitas they ill-deserved. These were the clearly damning revelations that he’d sent Wrongun a birthday card and once had his photo taken with him. A photo that proves its own irrelevance by being seen; both men are clearly at least thirty years younger and all the card proves was that one incredibly rich American businessman knew when another incredibly rich American businessman’s birthday was. Or more probably one his staff did, which only emphasises how trivial the whole thing had become. 

Then one considers the press reaction to ‘the grooming gang scandal’. The very fact they called it ‘the grooming gang scandal was yet another obscenity added to the numerous other what was already enough of an obscenity such as to make the Jimmy Saville scandal a textbook example of officialdom at its best. ‘Grooming gangs’? They weren’t pampering fucking pets! They were rape/torture gangs and the sheer scale of what they did, the number of victims and different locations it took place in, is matched only by the abject failure at every level of the state.

The gangs operated in predominantly the North of England. At least 1,400 girls were abused in Rotherham and more than 1,000 children in Telford. The gangs were also active in Newcastle, Bristol, Derby, Oxford and Halifax. The victims were white and working class, and most were either in local authority care or else known to social services, whilst many of the perpetrators were mainly British Pakistani men. Much attention has been given to that fact and this isn’t what this post is about. 

I mention it only as an explanation as to why the press weren’t as dogged in their pursuit of this story, why they didn’t hold councils, the police and themselves up to the same excoriating scrutiny that they undoubtedly would have done had the races of both victim/perpetrator been reversed. Indeed, even looking at the wikipedia page for the ‘grooming gangs’ scandal, I was struck by just how much of it was devoted to refuting the fact that race had anything to do with it. The lady doth protesteth too much, methinks.

So unfortunately and for may reasons, the rape/torture gang scandal wasn’t the ‘right’ sort of scandal.  For one thing, it hadn’t happened years ago and far away and even worse, It had happened here, quite recently and possibly still is. To further compound matters, it was difficult, required the kind of actual investigative journalism our press no longer does and not just a rehash of information others had uncovered. Additionally, it questioned a foundational principle that underlines multiculturalism, namely that if assimilation had been achieved, and the British born Pakistani men who made up those gangs had been fully integrated, how could this evil have happened? 

For good measure, they might have asked why such evil flourished in different parts of the country, usually with the same victim/perpetrator profile and often with a similar modus operandi. They might also consider whether the fact that most of the towns where these gangs operated were run by Labour councils and that if this played any part in the abject lack of action. If a desire not to be seen as racist, to prioritise ‘community relations above all else, was only extended to one part of the community.  All of which demands perseverance in the face of official stonewalling, determination when confronted by blanket refusals to co-operate and the sort of fearless leadership needed when the lawyers get involved, qualities our press is not renowned for. Calls for questions to be answered are easier to ask if those answers will have negligible repercussions for those asking them and then only if there exists the will to ask them in the first place.

By focusing on Wrongun the press demonstrated yet again how poorly they serve the public and how, as the saying has it, what interests the public isn’t always in the public interest. Why isn’t the rape/torture gang scandal still in the news, why has a public enquiry still not happened? Why does the press think that we want to know anything about Wrongun, beyond the bare facts. Or be deluged with endless news concerning the assassination of an American activist? Is the American media as obsessed by our country as ours seem to be with theirs?

Far from being the impartial observers they delude themselves to be, loftily asserting the mantra to the Leveson Inquiry that they simply recount events without fear or favour and not create the news by reporting on it, they not only choose which stories to run and how long to run them for, but which to ignore. The real scandal is why some scandals become scandals whilst others do not.