In a development so grotesquely meta it could only happen in the 21st century, American sweetheart Savannah Guthrie has been reduced to begging for scraps of decency from the British press. Her mother’s case, a sordid tangle of legal fumbles and tabloid vultures, has thrust the corpse of media ethics back into the spotlight. And what do we find? Not a carcass picked clean, but a festering wound still leaking black ink.
Listen, I’ve covered the hacks and the hackery for decades. I’ve seen editors who look at a phone hacking scandal and think ‘how can we monetise this?’ But this latest chapter is a masterclass in dystopian journalism. Here is Guthrie, a woman whose face has launched a thousand teacup-destroying fits in American living rooms, standing in the rain outside a London courthouse. Her voice cracks. She says something about dignity. About the truth. About her mother, who I imagine is a perfectly lovely woman now caught in the crossfire of a Byzantine legal system and a press corps that would sell their own grandmother’s obituary for a catchy headline.
The British media – those glorious bastions of high-minded discourse, the guardians of public interest who gave us the News of the World and the Daily Mail’s ‘sidebar of shame’ – are now being examined under a microscope so powerful it could detect the hypocrisy on a Rupert Murdoch doorstep. The question being asked is not whether the press crossed a line, but whether that line ever existed. We are in a territory where the boundaries between reporting and exploitation have been eroded so thoroughly that the very concept of a line seems quaint, a relic of a bygone age when journalists wore hats and didn’t have to worry about their sources being indicted.
Let me tell you about ethics in journalism. I once wrote a column so incendiary it got me banned from three Fleet Street pubs. But even I have lines I won’t cross. For instance, I won’t phone hack a grieving relative. I won’t doorstep a woman whose mother is being dragged through the courts. I won’t, in short, turn a human tragedy into clickbait for the digital age. But here we are, with Guthrie’s plea echoing across the Atlantic, a desperate cry for help from a woman who thought the worst of her job was having to interview politicians with bad breath.
This story is not about Savannah Guthrie. It’s about every journalist who ever justified a grubby tactic with the sanctity of the public’s right to know. It’s about the crumbling edifice of press regulation in a country that gave the world the BBC and then drowned it in a sea of tabloid bilge. It’s about a system so broken that the only people who can fix it are the ones who broke it in the first place, and they’re too busy filing expenses claims for champagne and prostitutes.
So here’s my contribution to this ethical debate: maybe, just maybe, we can try being human once in a while. Not sensational. Not breakthrough. Not exclusive. Just human. But that’s not a story, is it? That’s not a scoop. That’s just decency, and in the modern newsroom, decency doesn’t sell papers. It doesn’t get clicks. It doesn’t even get you a free drink at the bar. Which is a shame, because right now, Savannah Guthrie could really use a friend. And all the press seems to offer is a microphone.
