"AS YOU SOW .... "

“As you sow, so shall you reap.”

“Those who live by the sword shall die by the sword.”

The words quoted are two fundamental principles on which the world operates; the world is designed this way, and nothing will change it. These principles are so profoundly simple (as God’s ways are) that all may understand them, and they provide absolute basic wisdom for living. This week has brought an appalling example of the truth of their warning.


The News of the World newspaper lived on scandal; it died from scandal. One might argue that the hacking scandal which killed it was probably the biggest of the scandals that marked out the lurid course of its history. Sowing to the wind, it reaped the whirlwind; so quick to put the dagger mercilessly into people who were caught up in scandal, it found itself in less than a week pierced through by scandal and gone, the most popular Sunday newspaper gone. A just nemesis!


“The most popular Sunday newspaper” is the title it earned by virtue of its much larger circulation than any other Sunday paper. Why was that? An edition of “The Times” put fifty “News of the World” front pages as a border to a number of its pages. All, apart from the earliest, had massive and course headlines for the most unsavoury acts of behaviour, and clearly majored on sexual scandal. No person, not even royalty, escaped the pointing finger and the screaming accusations. This was the source of its popularity. The “Times” (a sister paper to the “News of the World”) was not using them to reprimand the “News of the World”, of course, but to cynically use them to liven up its own copy for the day. What a comment on our own society!


A “Times” editorial, commenting on the paper’s demise, bleated on about the importance of a free popular press for democracy, of the importance of telling everybody what the few knew etc. etc. How sad, it said, that the paper had gone! But scandal mongering is never in the public interest; it simply panders to the worst in human nature. It is a compete denial to the sort of responsible attitude that true democracy demands of its free press.


How could the perpetrators of the hacking have imagined that they would always get away with their illegal and callous activity? Their arrogance and hubris is simply mind blowing; sin always blinds, however. It was a re-run of the behaviour of the bankers, and of M.P.s with their expenses. It’s a disease of the age. As one letter writer to the Times pointed out, it’s all pointing to a dangerous and increasing level of corruption within society. Society needs to take a long look at itself, not to offload guilt on to the “bad few”.


Interestingly enough, the News of the World was brought down by the newspaper world’s new rival, the Website, Face-book, Twitter world. This put the pressure on the advertisers to pull out of the paper, and so rendered it “toxic”. Where will this new media world end up, one wonders? Thank God it blew the whistle on this outrage.


Bob




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