A seemingly standard practice of hacking into the phones of victims of high-profile child killers, their families and the families of dead squaddies, coppers selling personal information to low-life journos, jobs in the media being offered to the offspring of various high-ranking Met filth in exchange for favours, the sordid and incestuous goings-on of the ‘Chipping Norton Set’, and the backhanders, backscratching and backstabbing that is inherent within the general corruption of the British law enforcement, mainstream media and political elite communities, are all the cause of much public scandal, shock and disbelieve these days. However the biggest question, relating to all these issues and the whole complex web that connects them has to be…Why the fuck are people surprised?
You mean to say that journalists, politicians and the good-old British bobby are, at times, less than honest?…Ye gad! Say it isn’t so!
I can only conclude that the general public suffer from a kind of collective dementia, does no one remember that the Sun accused the survivors of Hillsborough of looting the dead and pissing on the dying. An outrageous load of bollocks for which they have, twenty-two years later, still not apologised for. How the fuck can people be seriously surprised that the same shit-rag, its sister paper and the corporation that owns them engages in police bribery and widespread phone tapping of murder victims and their grieving relatives.
Now that the News of the World has fucked off for good we can only hope that The Sun will follow, although I doubt it. It seems that the British are willing to forgive contemporary mainstream journalism of any sin, after all where else will we get our daily fix of brainless celebrity shite, plastic tits and reactionary right-wing lunacy.
Things don’t sound terribly different in the UK than in the US on that front.