Even if you’ve never heard the word, you know exactly what it means.
A Westminster University professor, reacting to the news that Britain’s largest Sunday paper had been felled by scandal, pronounced himself “gobsmacked.” The word combines the northern English/Scottish slang gob (mouth) with the verb smack to describe a state of astonishment akin to being hit in the face.
Communications prof Steven Barnett was talking about media magnate Rupert Murdoch’s decision to close the 2.6 million circulation News of the World over spiraling allegations that it had published stories obtained by hacking the private voice-mail accounts of thousands of people.
“Talk about a nuclear action,” the professor told Reuters. And yes, killing a 168-year-old newspaper over journalistic transgressions is a dramatic gesture. But the transgressions themselves were gobsmacking, even in Britain’s freewheeling tabloid news culture.
News items about Prince William’s knee injury or Prince Harry’s visit to a strip joint are the sort of thing readers love about the News of the World’s sex-and-celebrity driven coverage. But Scotland Yard got involved in 2005 after the royal family became suspicious that the princes’ voice mails had been hacked. In 2007, a reporter and a private investigator hired by the paper went to jail for intercepting royal staffers’ messages.
New allegations suggest widespread eavesdropping on ordinary citizens, sometimes under tragic circumstances. In a story first reported by its rival The Guardian, the paper is accused of hacking the cellphone of a missing 13-year-old girl, Milly Dowler, writing stories based on information obtained in voice-mail messages and even deleting some to make room in her mailbox for more. In the process they destroyed evidence and gave the girl’s parents false hope that she was still alive. She was later found murdered.
The paper is also accused of hacking the voice-mail accounts of victims of terrorist attacks on London’s public transit system in 2005 and families of British soldiers killed in Afghanistan and Iraq.
It’s all too much, even for the Brits whose appetite for sensational headlines put the News of the World at the top of the lucrative Sunday tabloid market.
Readers abandoned the paper in droves, its parent company’s stock tanked and its advertisers bailed. The backlash is seen as a real threat to Murdoch’s attempted takeover of broadcaster BSkyB, which seemed greased until the Dowler story broke.
But don’t lie awake crying for the News of the World. Its death is all about damage control. Some 200 employees will lose their jobs, but former editor Rebekah Brooks, now head of Murdoch’s UK print operations, apparently will keep hers. And there’s nothing to stop the News’ six-day-a-week sister paper, The Sun, from launching a Sunday edition. We’ll be gobsmacked if it doesn’t.
