Leveson

For those of you that follow British Politics and other related news will be aware of the current ongoing inquiry into 'phone hacking'. This court case has now escalated and has brought not just celebrity victims to the stand but also high value politicians such as Tony Blair and most recently David Cameron as the inquiry decides whether there was any foul play by ministers and PMs regarding the media coverage they recived.

This is rather a complex subject, and whilst i don't want to 'dumb it down' too much, i feel that getting into the fine detail would be irrelevant to help me explain and examine what i intend too.

The basic jist of what has been happening most recently in the inquiry is this: Politicians are being accused or meeting with high ranking editors and even owners of national newspapers and engaging in 'under the table' deals in order to secure support from that particular newspaper. As im sure you know, all national papers have some sort of general political slant, for example, during the time of Tony Blair the SUN newspaper was in high support however when Gordon Brown succeeded him the sun made a controversial jump over the 'political neutral zone' in favour of the conservatives. David Cameron has this past week been attempting to convince the court that there was no 'foul play' involved in that aforementioned event and that no such immoral behaviour ever occurs.

David Cameron did however seem rather shaken up by then end his time in the stand, often referring back to his "foggy memory". The evidence however did not look good for him, he met with James Murdoch (son of Rupert Murdoch, who owns the largest share in the media industry in the world, including many of the main national newspapers in England) 15 times while he was in opposition and has been stated to have met with over 1,000 journalists during his political career.

Irrelevant to the evidence, all of which is circumstantial, David Cameron denies that there is a "nod wink" relationship between the Tories and the Murdoch family.

I am focusing on the Prime Minister because of his position, but there has been a whole host of high ranking politicians, and journalists who have crawled out the 'woodwork', all have been making accusations and all have been accused in equal measure.

Apart from outlining the recent events in the inquiry i also want to give my slant:
When you are talking about media and politics, it is important that you consider that it is a fine equilibrium; Media keeps politicians in check simply by posing the threat of negative press and Politicians keep media in check through its legislation and such like, however in many ways the two subjects are like 'oil and water' but in other ways they are like 'fish and chips' (cant have one without the other).

When corruption creeps into politics and media...then both entities collapse and that is what is being investigated in this inquiry, personally i feel that the people of power have attained and remained in power through the deals that no one knows about, with lots of 'winks and nods'. Time will only tell what is uncovered, but hopefully both the Media and Politics will be the better for it.