The other day, someone told me a story about the moment a tabloid journalist decided to quit her job. She was paying a child for a photograph of a dead classmate when she suddenly asked herself: What on earth am I doing? How did I get here?
It’s a shocking story – or at least, it should be. But after the Leveson Inquiry, we know so much about the immoral and illegal tactics of a small section of the tabloid press that revelations like this have lost the power to genuinely shock. The celebrity obsession, the phone hacking, the invented stories… (of course, novelists invent their stories too, but the difference is that our characters are made up – or if we are inspired by real people, we go to a lot of effort to make sure there’s no resemblance to the real person, or to any persons living or dead, to our knowledge). These dirty tabloid tactics might prompt disapproval, but somehow we’ve ended up with a society in which they’ve become almost expected.
