More News of The World hacking allegations

[Keevan_Colton]

From what I've heard he was an old school journo, as in hard drinking and drug taking, so a heart attack or similar would not be outside the realm of the reasonable.

[SpaceMarine93]

Depends. A murder could be disguised as a natural death. So there's also that possibility as well. Then again, nobody seen any breaking in or anything, so the journalist probably died of natural causes.

Either way, the investigation had taken a big hit.

[Alkaloid]

Watching the coverage of the Parliamentary inquiry now. It's amazing how many questions are being answered with "I don't know," and I don't think I've heard an answer yet that wasn't prefaced with "I don't know the specifics but..." or "as far as I'm aware."

They also claimed that there are currently no plans to start a new Sunday tabloid in the News Stable.

[Dartzap]

I was most amused by the look on Murdoch Jnr's face when Adrian Sanders explained 'wilful Blindness' to him.

[Dartzap]

Rumours abounding that David Cameron has been summoned to the 1922 committee tomorrow. Thats generally bad news for a Tory party leader.

[Alkaloid]

Ooooh, exciting, a demonstrator got in and went after Rupert.

[Keevan_Colton]

So...according to him he was raised by a father that wasn't rich...

[Alkaloid]

Fucking disgusting. They had a commentator on the channel 9 broadcast here from The Australian (a News Ltd paper) doing the final analysis of the whole thing, and what he took from it were that the questions asked were vague and unfocused, the Murdochs are brave and honourable people, and because of the foam pie tray whatever it was getting throw at Murdoch, the whole process was rendered illegitimate, and the questions that were asked and the answers given no longer matter, because all the coverage will go to the demonstrator. Unfortunately, about that at least, he's probably fucking right.

[Dartzap]

Fucking disgusting. They had a commentator on the channel 9 broadcast here from The Australian (a News Ltd paper) doing the final analysis of the whole thing, and what he took from it were that the questions asked were vague and unfocused, the Murdochs are brave and honourable people, and because of the foam pie tray whatever it was getting throw at Murdoch, the whole process was rendered illegitimate, and the questions that were asked and the answers given no longer matter, because all the coverage will go to the demonstrator. Unfortunately, about that at least, he's probably fucking right.

Total amount of time spent on the pie on BBC News at 6: a minute. Time focussed on the Murdochs crass lack of corperate management: all of it so far. The news bulletins arnt falling for it.

[Zaune]

Depends. A murder could be disguised as a natural death. So there's also that possibility as well. Then again, nobody seen any breaking in or anything, so the journalist probably died of natural causes.

Either way, the investigation had taken a big hit.

I don't think Murdoch's foolhardy enough to resort to outright murder to silence potential witnesses for the prosecution, though I daresay he must be getting pretty desperate by now, but if my theory about a blackmail attempt backfiring is correct then in some jurisdictions he'd be facing charges of exactly that.

Still, I'll reserve judgement until the results of the post-mortem examination are known.

[Lord Pounder]

Depends. A murder could be disguised as a natural death. So there's also that possibility as well. Then again, nobody seen any breaking in or anything, so the journalist probably died of natural causes.

Either way, the investigation had taken a big hit.

I don't think Murdoch's foolhardy enough to resort to outright murder to silence potential witnesses for the prosecution, though I daresay he must be getting pretty desperate by now, but if my theory about a blackmail attempt backfiring is correct then in some jurisdictions he'd be facing charges of exactly that.

Still, I'll reserve judgement until the results of the post-mortem examination are known.

If the dude was, a Keevan suggested, a coke snorting alcoholic how hard would it be to make sure he got a little extra in his nose candy, something to speed up the heart enough to cause a heart attack?

[Crown]

It's so strange hearing Murdoch talk, I keep forgetting he has the rather distinct Australian accent. Is that how the devil will sound like too?

[Pelranius]

Fucking disgusting. They had a commentator on the channel 9 broadcast here from The Australian (a News Ltd paper) doing the final analysis of the whole thing, and what he took from it were that the questions asked were vague and unfocused, the Murdochs are brave and honourable people, and because of the foam pie tray whatever it was getting throw at Murdoch, the whole process was rendered illegitimate, and the questions that were asked and the answers given no longer matter, because all the coverage will go to the demonstrator. Unfortunately, about that at least, he's probably fucking right.

I doubt the foam pie will mean very much in the long term. It might have genuinely affected things if there wasn't the whole question about the Metropolitan Police and Brooks's legal troubles.

[Zaune]

The Economist weighs in.

Street of shame
A full judicial inquiry is needed immediately to clean up British journalism

Jul 7th 2011 | from the print edition

NOT for nothing is it known as the gutter press. The allegations that the News of the World, Britain’s biggest Sunday newspaper, broke into the voicemail of a murdered teenage girl, is a stain on the newspaper and on News International, its owner. But the stench is much more widespread. As new allegations of lawbreaking surface, journalism itself is reeking. So are Britain’s politicians and especially its police.

Britain has long had a scrappy press. A brutally competitive newspaper market encourages screaming headlines and intrusive tittle-tattle. In France a politician’s peccadillos may be kept quiet for years. In Britain they are splashed across the front pages. Britons know their newspapers are rude, excessive and unreliable. But they want them to draw blood from politicians and misbehaving celebrities.

Thanks largely to some splendid muckraking by the Guardian, it is now clear how one tabloid obtained some of its headlines. The News of the World seems routinely to have asked a private investigator to hack into mobile-phone mailboxes, which is a crime. Until this week the victims seemed to be celebrities, publicists, politicians and other journalists—the sort of people who, in the British mind, probably deserve what they get. But a lawyer representing the family of the murdered girl claims that police said her phone was hacked in a way that raised hopes that she was alive. The families of terrorism victims, dead soldiers and two other murdered girls are also said to have been targeted. If true, that is callousness heaped on criminality.
Far beyond the printing presses

Four deeply worrying questions emerge from this. The first is how a newsroom could run so far out of control. And almost certainly not just one newsroom. In 2006 the Information Commissioner explained that the use of private investigators was widespread. It is notable that Britain’s other tabloid newspapers, which love to kick a rival when it is down, have been disturbingly quiet about the allegations of phone hacking at the News of the World. It may turn out that the paper was merely the most enthusiastic, ruthless lawbreaker among several.

The second question concerns News International, the British newspaper arm of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. It has consistently ducked and twisted. For as long as they could get away with it, executives claimed the phone hacking was the doing of a rogue reporter. When that argument was demolished, they claimed few knew of wrongdoing. Rebekah Brooks, News International’s chief executive, told staff this week that it was inconceivable she knew of the alleged phone hacking when she was editor of the News of the World. Yet if the allegations are true, many journalists at the newspaper would have known about such practices, and failed to report them. That can only happen in an outfit that has lost any sense of right and wrong. The notion that its rivals were perhaps doing the same thing is no excuse.

Then there are the police. The initial investigation by the Metropolitan Police into phone hacking was pitiful. For years the cops sat on a huge sheaf of seized documents and did nothing. Sloppiness is one thing. But the police tend to be hand-in-glove with popular newspapers. An implicit deal applies: we give you stories, you raise the alarm about criminals on the loose. And, occasionally, put your hand in your pocket too. Files handed over last month suggest that police received some payments from the News of the World.

The politicians who have fulminated against the press over the past few days are tainted, too. Far from urging the police to conduct a full investigation, they have long cosied up to the tabloids. Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s powerful director of communications, came from the Daily Mirror. Andy Coulson, who resigned as editor of the News of the World in 2007, went on to run David Cameron’s communications machine. Fear seems to play a role. One member of the parliamentary culture committee alleged last year that members had been warned they could be targeted by newspapers if they insisted on summoning Mrs Brooks to give evidence against her will.

Black, white and red all over

It is a depressing mess—and one with wide consequences. As the Times, another Murdoch paper, has correctly pointed out, British journalism is in its equivalent of the MPs expenses scandal. Given the uselessness of the Press Complaints Commission throughout, this affair will only encourage demands for regulatory oversight of the press. This would probably do more harm than good. Britain already has the toughest libel laws in the world, which have been misused repeatedly to protect the rich and the powerful; and giving the state power to regulate the press is a dangerous temptation to governments.

So what should be done? Within News International anyone implicated directly in any aspect of this saga—not just the apparent phone hacking at the News of the World but the obfuscations since—should immediately stand down, pending a proper police investigation. Then there needs to be a judicial inquiry, with the power to call witnesses, including police officers, under oath. That should cover all newspapers, not just Mr Murdoch’s, and ferret out other dodgy activities, such as obtaining private medical records and credit-card transactions. If the result of such an inquiry is a bloodbath in Fleet Street and Scotland Yard, so be it. Mr Cameron’s refusal to push ahead with this forcefully is incredibly cowardly and shortsighted.

Some MPs have called for News Corporation’s purchase of the 61% of BSkyB it does not already own to be delayed, while Britain’s media regulator investigates whether the firm is a “fit and proper” owner of the satellite-TV company. That is a stretch. The acquisition, which this newspaper thought was fair, is a matter of competition law. The regulator can find a broadcaster to be unfit, and yank its licence, at any time.

It also misses the point. Mr Murdoch is a ferocious businessman who has helped steer media through a treacherous digital transition. But if it is proven that News Corporation’s managers condoned lawbreaking, they should not be running any newspaper or television firm. They should be in prison.

Don't know about anyone else, but I'd take the state having the power to regulate the press over the press having the power to dictate terms to the state any day of the week.

[Dartzap]

Don't know about anyone else, but I'd take the state having the power to regulate the press over the press having the power to dictate terms to the state any day of the week.

I honestly don't know why they can't just get Ofcom to extend their remit (oh wait, Murdoch wanted it gone) Wouldn't be that hard to jiggery poke the impartiality rules for papers so they can retain whatever biases they so desire, within reason.

[Irbis]

...You know, one thing I noticed in my one year stay in UK was how much the press was full of lies about anything that happened on the continent, EU in particular. I heard from Brits it was due to political line of the publishers, who preferred fostering Eurosceptic posture. I wonder if that is going to change, with calls to have more objective press and all, but I won't be holding my breath.

[Lord Zentei]

Don't know about anyone else, but I'd take the state having the power to regulate the press over the press having the power to dictate terms to the state any day of the week.

Within limits, yes. They should be able to enforce standards of conduct, but I'm not too happy with giving them too much power over the press even in light of all of this. Just the minimum needed to prevent criminal misconduct and puppet mastery.

[Crown]

I don't believe this addresses the main issue; the question of monopoly.

For example if it were just NotW that Murdoch had owned, then all his staff's sabre rattling and bluster wouldn't have amounted to much. But the fact this guy has some outrageous market share of British media (something like 40% IIRC) it created a rather dangerous and precarious situation where he was able to effectively corrupt/bully/pay off large sections of the public sector and political establishment.

It was something that Maggie Thatcher willfully allowed him to get away with when allowing him to gobble up more and more of the tabloids, and then blatantly threw out the law when she allowed him to buy shares in Sky.

If there is no monopoly, then the actions of one stupid editorial team is limited to one paper, but in the case of News International it is just one giant hydra. For crying out loud, The Times loses something like £40million each year, it's being subsided by (or was) NotW and The Sun just so News International could have a thin veneer of being a credible news agency!

Further in this situation; if the Murdoch monopoly did not exist, then when this scandal first broke back in 2009 it could have been dealt with fully back then, but because he does have this monopoly any investigation was doomed because those doing the investigation were either; in his pocket or terrified by him (and in most cases both)!

[Flagg]

MSNBC

CNN's Piers Morgan drawn into hacking scandal
Ex-tabloid editor responds to allegations on Twitter, says 'lying smearers' are making accusations

Former tabloid editor Piers Morgan accused media and bloggers of being "lying smearers" Wednesday after a 2009 interview surfaced in which he appeared to admit that hacking phones for reporting purposes was tolerated on his watch.

Morgan, who edited Rupert Murdoch's now-defunct News of the World in the mid-1990s and went on to edit rival The Daily Mirror, was asked by the BBC's Kirsty Young how he felt about "dealing with people who rake through bins for a living, people who tap people's phones, people who take secret photographs."

Morgan, who replaced interviewer Larry King on CNN this past January, began his answer by saying that "not a lot of that went on," but then acknowledged that newspapers he worked for used information obtained by these methods.

"A lot of it was done by third parties rather than the staff themselves. That's not to defend it because obviously you were running the results of their work," he said in an excerpt of the 2009 interview posted on the BBC's website on Wednesday.

"I'm quite happy to be parked in the corner of the tabloid beast and to have to sit here defending all these things I used to get up to. I make no pretense about the stuff we used to do," he said.

The excerpt was also released by The Daily Telegraph.

The interview was resurfaced shortly after Guido Fawkes, a UK blogger who describes his posts as "Tittle Tattle, gossip and rumours," published what he said was "vocal and written confessions" that Morgan published hacked stories.
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Morgan tweeted on Wednesday morning, "I don't mind being wrongly smeared with all this #Hackgate stuff, I'd just rather it wasn't done by liars, druggie ex-bankrupts and conmen."

He later tweeted, "For those who don't know who @GuidoFawkes is, here's his biog. Not exactly Woodward/Bernstein is it?" He linked to a post on a different blog that said "the Fawkes blog has tried to smear Morgan based on inflating quotes from old interviews, hearsay about past stories, and even recycled items ..." It also accused the Telegraph of faulty reporting.

The phone-hacking scandal at the News of the World has rocked Murdoch's empire, prompting the media baron to close the title, fire top executives and abandon a bid to buy U.K. broadcaster BSkyB.

After a reporter and private investigator who worked for the paper were convicted and sent to jail for phone-hacking in 2007, the company said the practices were limited to a single rogue employee.

But more victims emerged and the crisis catapulted to a new level earlier in July when The Guardian newspaper reported that the alleged victims included the families of British troops killed in combat and murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler.

Trinity Mirror, the owner of the Daily Mirror, on Tuesday ordered an investigation into whether journalists there also engaged in phone hacking after a former journalist told The Independent the practice was "endemic" at the paper.

Later Wednesday, Morgan said on Twitter, "I'll be making no further comment on this #Hackgate nonsense. But important for everyone to know exactly who these lying smearers are."

Msnbc.com staff and Reuters contributed to this report.

At the site there's a nice picture of him arm in arm with Rebekah Brooks. I wonder how long until CNN shitcans him.

[Crown]

At the site there's a nice picture of him arm in arm with Rebekah Brooks. I wonder how long until CNN shitcans him.

I'd laugh my ass off if Piers gets dumped!