Tabloid Shab-loid

So it's been a month since returning to cold, rainy Britain and time has flown by. I've been very slack recently in writing here, but now I'm back to normality (almost) I hope I can re-start a continual stream again. Today will just be a quick one as I need to get on with holiday preparations, that's right, I'm off again! Costa Rica this time, for three-weeks, I promise this is the last, well for a short while anyway.

I've spent the last month catching up on things that I have missed. Current affairs have been pretty jam-packed in the UK recently, but I can't go without mentioning the atrocious News of the World saga that has broken this week.

It has been discovered that journalists hacked the phones of not only celebrities and politicians, but those of murder and terrorism victims. This awful discovery have touched  the families of victims Milly Dowler as well as Holly and Jessica, awakening awful memories that I'm sure their parents have tried to put to rest. In the case of the Dowler family, the alleged phone hacking even led them to believe that Millie was still alive as voice messages were being deleted from her phone. Victims and survivors from the terrorist attacks in London were also targeted by these journalistic spies, searching for that attention grabbing by-line.

David Cameron has called for an enquiry and condemned the revelations. However, questions are already being raised about the future of the News of the World as well as the broader picture of the tabloid industry in the UK. Some have blamed the Brit's hunger for gossip and scandal which have pushed journalists to these desperate measures, whilst others have blamed it on the nature of the cut-throat tabloids where if you don't fetch a scoop, you're out. If our craving for gossip is to blame, what has pushed us to such extents of voyeurism? Many now call for greater control over the media and its output, but this in its own right leads to questions of media censorship and the nanny state. The UK prides itself on the notion of freedom of speech, but if our media was heavily censored, would this give greater control to government, and consequently infringe upon democracy? Whatever the decision and result, someone is culpable and I find it hard to believe that the previous editors were blissfully unaware of these sordid under goings......

Speak soon.