Anne Applebaum: Just Another British Tabloid Scandal

Anne Applebaum is an op-ed columnist for the Washington Post.

“It is Sunday afternoon, preferably before the war. The wife is already asleep in the armchair, and the children have been sent out for a nice long walk. You put your feet up on the sofa, settle your spectacles on your nose, and open the News of the World. . . . In these blissful circumstances, what is it that you want to read about? Naturally, about a murder.”

I am not the first person to quote the opening lines of “Decline of the English Murder” in recent days, and no wonder: George Orwell, who composed that droll little essay in 1946, placed the now-defunct News of the World in its historical and cultural context as no one else could. Orwell’s mid-20th-century British tabloid reader first eats a lunch of “roast pork and apple sauce, followed up by suet pudding.” Then he settles down to drink tea and read scandalous stories, preferably involving the “chairman of the local Conservative Party branch,” a “strong Temperance advocate” or someone equally respectable. Britons spent many Sunday afternoons that way for decades before Orwell wrote those words. They have gone on doing so ever since.

Over the next few days, many pundits will lament the decline of the press, the rise of sensationalism and the rampant commercialism that led News of the World reporters to hack into the telephone voice-mail accounts of murdered schoolgirls, divorcing celebrities and grieving parents. But in truth, there is nothing new about any of this in Britain. Although the technology has changed, the practices in question — paying the police for stories; the use of subterfuge to obtain personal information; the persecution of celebrities, politicians or victims of violence — are, in the British tabloid world, very old. Certainly they predate Orwell....