Newspaper Crisis

The News of the World is soon to depart our news stands - a casualty of a greedy empire out of control.

Hundreds of jobs, and a long (168 years) and illustrious history are being sacrificed to save one woman, who should have already been fired. Rebekah Brooks was Editor at the time, and was either in collusion or completely incompetent if that level of criminal activity was happening in her news room.

This is also a bid to save the deal that will extend the empire, the purchase of BskyB in full - a deal already fraught with competition questions, and now with the extra slap of a big question over the integrity of News Corp.

Even the integrity of our two main partys is called in to question over this, with Andy Coulson (the former head of communications for David Cameron's Conservative Party, and Deputy Editor at the time of the hacking) possibly being arrested today. 

Labour don't get away clean though, despite Ed Miliband demanding change and that the government needs to be seen to take a firm stand to bring the press back in to line - but his own head of strategy, Tom Baldwin is another former News International Journalist who urged the Shadow Cabinet in January not to say anything "which appears to be attacking a particular newspaper group out of spite" and not to associate hacking to News Corporation's attempt to takeover BSkyB.

How did we let this happen? Over recent years the press have gained more and more control over our country, with politicians too scared of bad headlines and exposes to stand against them. 

Now we end up with Trial by Media (luckily two newspapers (The Sun and The Mirror, with The Sun being another News International paper) are being tried for contempt of court over reporting of the Jo Yeates case), and the news papers running riot over anything they think will sell a paper.

Do not get me wrong, I believe in freedom of the press, and that they have to have the power to investigate and keep government and business honest. That requires a degree of honesty, integrity and control that they no longer seem to possess though. There is a big difference over what is in the public interest and what the public is interested in.

Unfortunately our papers can no longer be trusted to do this - they have become the big business that needs investigation, rather than warriors for truth and justice keeping our society honest.

Breaches of the law and privacy aren't calculated against the good they will do, but will the extra advertising and sales be worth the fines they will incur.

What we need is a restructuring of press controls, and independent organisation with real power. A Committee made up from the Judiciary, various aspects of the media, the government and the common people. One with real power to investigate and then act on the investigations, weather that is to forward on to the Police, the Government or to place realistic fines themselves.

The fines would have to be large, most large media organisations will not notice a million pound fine, a large expose will generate far more income than that - the fines need to be large enough to hurt, to remove all profits make by that article and then some. That might make the media stop and think before acting.

If we fail to do this, then we risk the media gaining more and more control over our country, till the government become little more than puppets for the all powerful news barons . . .