#hacking up not much

Is it me or is the Millie Dowler aspect of the phone hacking scandal a bit over-blown?  Obviously I do not wish to sound unkind to the family, no one deserves what they have been through, but this has been going on a while, but one cannot help but feel that it is time to move on from this now.  But I must confess I thought that before the phone hacking scandal.  The latter has of course been covered in enormous detail, not least by The Telegraph. 

            This does not bode well for their involvement in the current saga.  The logic for their being a protagonist in this story is, as I understand it, that the interference with Miss Dowler’s mobile phone meant that messages on the answering service associated with it, were deleted.  This was apparently taken as objective evidence that she was alive.  Is it me or is that logical argument just a bit weak?  If someone is rushed into hospital, medical staff do not attempt to telephone the patient as a worthy alternative to checking for vital signs.  Why would they?  This may seem a harsh comparison, but even if we take the argument on its own merits, there are enough holes in the logic for the whole thing, whether one is in an emotional state or not, to fall apart very quickly.  There was apparently a focus on which messages were there or not, not apparently when they were left nor when the phone itself was turned on, nor where it was.  All of this information is well available and any assiduous investigation would have taken it up.  Further, it would have been a far better indicator of when and where the phone had been used.  But even if it had not been available, or not seen as reliable, the fact that messages were listened to or not proves nothing.  There is, as it turns out correctly, that it was she who was listening to them.  One would probably not have suspected hacking, knowing what we did then, but the killer may easily have done this, either out of curiosity or boredom or a host of other reasons.  This would all have been days, or even weeks after the beginning of police involvement anyway, after they would or should have taken action.  It just does not add up.

            This is not a defence of hacking or of News of the World,  or indeed anyone else, right or wrong, I hasten to add.  It just seems a very intellectually thin justification for publishing the story.  What this suggests is that there was an ulterior motive for publishing this.  The Guardian is not a News International paper, so they could publish it in a way that News International papers could not.  Did they want to see it fall?  Perhaps the NewsInt Empire had over-reached itself and it was a time bomb waiting to explode.  This was the straw that broke the camel’s back, then.  If you will forgive the mixed metaphor.  I wonder which camel we will have after the dust has settled.