Phone Coverage

After the excellent Deborah Orr, an article by Sebastian Shakespeare yesterday to make the blood simmer. The phone hacking scandal, he says, is dominating the news agenda at the direct expense of the famine in Somalia. It's true that were there no hacking scandal the famine would be more widely (though perhaps no better) reported, but does that make us insular, as he suggests? There's a worthwhile debate to be had about the diminishing coverage of international news in the print media, but the truth is there is almost always a story that invloves more sorrow, hardship and death in another corner of the globe, and it's beyond hopeful (verging on the utopian, even) to imagine that these often tragic situations will be given perpetual prominance over the domestic. In a perfect world all eyes would be trained on Somalia and our resources dedicated to lifting the famine there, but such wishes ignore that even in a global age our concerns remain alarmingly local.

Besides, can newspapers really be blamed for obsessing over the downfall of their biggest rival? Only 6% of us receive the majority of our news from the papers. It is the BBC, whose reporting of the hacking scandal has been woeful, that has questions to answer.