George Orwell was no fan of the News of the World

George Orwell was no fan of 
the News of the World 

The essay quoted by the News of the World in its final editorial was no defence of muckraking journalism. But George Orwell would have been amused to find his words taken out of context

No fan of the News of the World ... the writer and journalist George Orwell.

Photograph: CSU Archv / Everett / Rex Features

The aftershocks of the earthquake at News International have turned out to be global. At the epicentre of this upheaval, however, the affair has been bizarrely English. 

The tipping point of the crisis was an English murder trial (the Milly Dowler case). The main casualty so far has been an English Sunday newspaper for which there is really no equivalent in the world's media. And when it closed, the News of the World referenced an essay by the great English writer George Orwell <  > as an essential part of its claim to a place in what its editorial called "the fabric of Britain, as central to Sunday as a roast dinner." 

Leaving aside the sad decline of the Sunday roast for a moment, I think Orwell himself would have been amused to find words that he actually published in 1946 being used to justify the News of the World's importance within the English journalistic tradition. 

What Orwell actually wrote, in an essay entitled "The Decline of the English Murder", was as follows: "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." 

Even in 1946, Orwell was referring to a bygone age in British working-class life. It's not contemporary, in any sense, and it's not flattering. Orwell makes the point that, implicitly in the good old days, a really juicy English murder would be "re-hashed over and over again in the Sunday papers". 

If he were alive now he would hardly hesitate to add that hacking into a tragically murdered schoolgirl's mobile telephone was precisely the kind of behaviour one would expect of a newspaper dedicated to re-hashing such stories. 

At some point since the year 1984, and possibly before, Orwell became a contemporary English secular saint whose words are routinely taken out of context to justify media behaviour in a way that would have horrified the plain-spoken, free-thinking Orwell of "As I Please" . And no question: he would have been the first to pour scorn on such misappropriation. Perhaps he would say, quoting Malvolio, that "The whirligig of time brings in his revenges."
Font: The Guardian