There's a campaign on Facebook encouraging people to boycott News International papers for life. I'm way ahead of them. I don't touch anything from the Murdoch empire.[^fn1]

I haven’t ever since the days of the Tories. Err, the old days of the Tories, I mean: the eighties; Thatcher; all that stuff we thought we’d done away with in 1997.

My reasons are much the same as those I wrote about in my fourth ever blog entry. Then, I was talking about the Saatchis, and how their name was anathema to me, because of the fact that they had helped the Tories get in all through the Eighties.

I have long held a similar despite for the Murdoch papers; enhanced by the tabloid ones being such trivial pedlars of rubbish and prurience.1

My kids occasionally complain about the fact that we don’t have Sky, but there are so many channels on Freeview (and Friends and My Name Is Earl are on E4 so often) that I don’t think they really mind.

And I must confess that, until the now-aborted bid to take 100% ownership of Sky, I thought Murdoch did own all of it. Turns out we could have watched 60% of it for all those years.

No matter how negatively I feel towards the organisation and its organs, though, I would never have expected the degree of criminality that they were apparently practising; just as no matter how negatively I might sometimes have felt about the police, I wouldn’t have expected such casual corruption from them. In the end I think we’ll understand that the police taking money from journalists is the worst thing about all this.

And yet on some level I can’t say I’m that surprised; disappointed, certainly, but not really surprised.

It’s all unravelling now, though, and we watch with joy and bated breath.

  1. Though all tabloids are like that, to be fair. ↩︎