A 'Red Top' Woe

I'm sure you have been following the situation with The News of the World's demise and the conversation in general about tabloid journalism and the practices it employed to get their stories.  A comment concerning the fear of politicians to address the influence of media stands out.  It was that politicians failed to challenge the media's behaviour because they were afraid of what they might reveal from their private lives.

I don't have a problem that people have private lives.  It is inappropriate, indeed invasive, to have access to all areas of another individual's life.  However, a person in leadership should have a personal integrity.  One commentator said recently that we shouldn't expect our leaders to live like bishops.  My response is, 'Why not?!' 

If you were appointing an MP to be Chancellor of the Exchequer you would want to know whether this person was managing their own finances well, or if they were struggling with a gambling addiction.  If you were appointing a new Home Secretary you would want to know if they were covering up a drug addiction or the fact that they used prostitutes.  We want integrity in the lives our leaders both church and state.  Jesus challenged the Pharisees in his time that they were like whitened tombs: lovely on the outside but rotten on the inside!  The challenge is the same for us today, we have allowed a person to be one thing publicly and quite another in private, and so have lost our ability to see and identify integrity!

No one is perfect!  We all struggle and we all fail at times, and whilst we are rightly appalled at the behaviour of some of the press the real scandal of the tabloids and 'Phone Hacking,' is that they were feeding a hunger in society for this kind of 'news'. 

So as we rightly voice our disgust at hacking the phones of the relatives of military personnel killed in Iraq, or the family of the murdered Millie Dowler, we must also act to curb our appetites that have encouraged this behaviour!