{"id":10768,"date":"2011-08-19T15:27:14","date_gmt":"2011-08-19T19:27:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=10768"},"modified":"2011-08-19T15:27:57","modified_gmt":"2011-08-19T19:27:57","slug":"if-you-want-to-take-the-moral-high-ground-you-must-live-up-to-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2011\/08\/19\/if-you-want-to-take-the-moral-high-ground-you-must-live-up-to-it\/","title":{"rendered":"If you want to take the moral high ground, you must live up to it"},"content":{"rendered":"

James Delingpole<\/a> has a bit of advice for the BBC and the Guardian<\/em>:<\/p>\n

\n

The liberal-Left has many vices. But surely the most noisome one of all (in a crowded field) is its rank hypocrisy. If you\u2019re going to take the moral high ground — as Lefties will insist on doing at every opportunity — the very least you owe the world in return if you have a shred of compunction, decency or intellectual consistency is to demonstrate more integrity than those you are impugning. And if you can\u2019t do that, then bloody well shut up.<\/p>\n

In the last few months, you can\u2019t have helped noticing, the liberal-Left media, led by the BBC and the Guardian<\/em>, have been dwelling on the News International phone hacking scandal with a shrillness and hysteria and foaming moral outrage out of all proportion to the nature of the offence.<\/p>\n

Am I defending phone hacking or the leaking by police of confidential information to newsapers? Of course I\u2019m not. I think it\u2019s a horrible, grubby practice which must have left all the people who were victims of it feeling soiled and discomfited. But a) as we saw in the cities of Britain last week (and we\u2019re also seeing on the stock markets) there are many problems far more deserving right now of the media\u2019s crusading attention. And b) it\u2019s not as if News International\u2019s imprints which were the only newspapers playing this game. The gutter end of journalism is, of necessity, an unscrupulous, highly competitive business. Tabloid hacks stand or fall on the number of scoops they get over the opposition. It would be stretching the bounds of credulity to claim that other papers, besides those owned by Murdoch, have not engaged in similar dirty tricks.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

James Delingpole has a bit of advice for the BBC and the Guardian: The liberal-Left has many vices. But surely the most noisome one of all (in a crowded field) is its rank hypocrisy. If you\u2019re going to take the moral high ground — as Lefties will insist on doing at every opportunity — the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,28],"tags":[129,480,213,101],"class_list":["post-10768","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-britain","category-media","tag-hack","tag-hypocrisy","tag-newspapers","tag-tv"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-2NG","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10768","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10768"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10768\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10770,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10768\/revisions\/10770"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10768"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10768"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10768"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}