Tracey Barnett: This week, journalism meets humble pie hypocrisy

Opinion

I always reassure my mother that most journalists are pond scum two days a week, tops. What confounds the rest of mere mortals is that the other five days we wear Superman undies and can melt kryptonite between our thighs. It's finding the sum total of what we do that gets truly messy.

This week, it got very messy in that other island at the top of the world. Despite the tsunami of coverage, what most of us don't want to admit is that Rupert Murdoch's muckraker-run-amok tale is screaming out a story that no one in my profession really wants to write about.

It took Hugh Grant to revitalise England's push for separation of power between press, police and politicians. You know, the middle-aged movie star who bags Julia Roberts in half his movies by stuttering over a Dido soundtrack.

If that is the measure of Rupert Murdoch winning the first salvos in this dirty little war, this octogenarian and his posse are doing just fine, thanks. As the bulldog-faced mogul sat at a parliamentary hearing table bleating out his rehearsed line about this being the humblest day of his life, what did 95 per cent of my colleagues cover? Pie. We saw ad infinitum Murdoch's wife, Wendi, spiking a pie-in-the-face attempt on her husband, 40 years her senior. The in-depth coverage; she was a former volleyball player.

Immediately, the Glitterati met the Twitterati and even Jemima Khan was putting out tweets strewn with schadenfreude-orgasms of delight. So much privileged snark waiting to breathe free.

And what a cracker of a story Murdochians have given us. One minute you have Scotland Yard heads rolling straight towards Downing St, the next, a dead whistleblower and now a bag containing a computer, cellphone and papers found in the trash that (oh my!) happen to belong to the arrested editor's husband. Thus, finally giving credence to man's genetic reluctance to take out the trash for the remainder of all history because it might bring down the establishment.

Journalism's job is not supposed to be sleeping with the enemy. It's reporting who they're sleeping with - or so it has become. We, in the good-guy press, just don't like to talk about how grey that white hat gets in reality. Or worse, how muddy it will always be.

It's not just that 10 out of the 45 staff on Scotland Yard's press team used to work for News International that makes this scandal so poignantly unkempt.

Or that might be why 11,000 pages of scandal documents sat dormant in some office in Scotland Yard for almost four years. Or that editor Rebekah Brooks got £3.5 million ($6.6 million) as "severance". Or that the number of hacking victims initially identified was eight, when today that estimate is about 4000. Or that Murdoch's minions reportedly deleted emails equivalent to 500 editions of Encyclopedia Britannica, according to ProPublica.

The biggest hypocrisy of this story for those of us in journalism who are celebrating the fall of the Wicked Itch of the West is our own.

It is a journalist's grandest conceit that what others do to sell newspapers is a completely different business from reporting the news. Those of us who wield a stilo for a living pretend the two don't sleep together. But every once in a while, like this week, we have to wake up to that fact.

On the benign side, that's why you saw an inordinately large photo of a very attractive homecare worker in a low-cut dress who had been in a crash taking up a full third of the front page of this paper recently.

You wonder how many will call out our own in a business that breathes on the mantra of transparency.

But it is also a different end of the same tether that saw the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal come out with an embarrassing editorial defending its owner, terminally diminishing any paper's most coveted asset, editorial independence - at least until a new owner can clean up the tainted ink.

The final irony is, Rupert Murdoch will end his career in a blaze of scandal that would normally feed his empire, not destroy it.

Sure, we celebrate the fall of a man who started in dirty journalism and went on to make good journalism dirty.

But in the blind frenzy of exposing this fabulous mud, I ask those in my profession to remember this. It is a fallacy to believe that the colour of your own hat is white. Only the very best ones learn how to balance not playing well with others.

In one way or another, Rupert Murdoch is puppeteering in the same way my profession never want to believe we dance to all the time, pretending that we don't speak with a compromised voice every single day. We always will.

The key is not to tell your mother.

www.traceybarnett.co.nz or Twitter @ TraceyBarnett