Murdoch’s downfall? The before and after effect

Facing MPs this week Rupert Murdoch cited the sale of government documents to the Daily Telegraph. He hinted there was something wrong with the methods used to break the scandal of MPs expenses. Putting aside ‘public interest’ justifying nefarious activities, there is another similarity with his situation that Murdoch didn’t mention.

It was over a period of months and years that MPs gradually stretched the limits for the kinds of things they could claim on expenses. Signing off a duck pond did not happen overnight. And so it is with phone hacking. Nobody would have signed off on Milly Dowler’s phone if it had been the first time a hack came to an editor asking for help getting into someone’s voicemail. It was a gradual slide.

For starters, journalists have been using dodgy means to gather info of one sort or another since the dawn of their profession. When electronic methods of doing this first appeared, it probably seemed no different particularly from buying someone a few pints and getting them to be unduly indiscreet. What nobody had anticipated at that outset was the scale of what would occur.

This is a function of the networked, Information Age we live in. Electronic intelligence-gathering, not long ago the preserve of MI6 and the CIA, is to use the jargon ‘scalable’. Where once it took a great deal of time to gather personal information about an individual together in one place, now it can be done in a few clicks. No more hours spent trawling dusty folders in the Land Registry or Passport Office.

So it started with the pleasingly simple – and apparently legal - ability to hear the voicemails of celebs. It ended with a newspaper giving the family of a murder victim straws to clutch.

It was a gradual, incremental slide. Those running corporations and governments need to be on the lookout. Like being unaware of the aging process when you live with someone, it’s only as you a see a picture of them 20 years ago that you suddenly recall how much younger they looked then. Generals fear ‘mission creep’. Incrementalism is all around us.

Problems occur when things cross the line unnoticed. The justification is the immediate precedent rather than a rounded view taken from a step back. It seems to be logical that you can do Y, because it’s not that different from X which has been done already. You need to be aware which end of the alphabet you’re at though.

Take American policy in the Vietnam war. This is another classic example of incrementalism that got out of hand. President Kennedy starts off with a few military advisors in the early Sixties. By the time of the Tet Offensive in 1968, the American public were surprised to hear of a US artillery officer saying without apparent irony: “we had to destroy the village in order to save it.”

This was one of the defining moments in the war. When the so-called logic of the generals was blown apart as being absurd. The US military view of the war had a strong internal logic, but the whole edifice become detached from the world around it. By 1968 it existed adjacent to, but quite separate from, reality.

The artillery officer jolted the American public into seeing the wider perspective. The Milly Dowler hack did the same for the British public, as did the duck pond for MPs expenses. Incrementalism is belatedly halted when an incident simply too bizarre to ignore occurs. And so the emperor stands naked for all to see.

The examples I’ve used here are just the first ones that came to my mind. If you can think of others, I’d love to hear from you