Report: UK tabloid hacked into voicemails

[Stephen Morgan]

play together, stay together. or is it birds of a feather...?

Of course. Private Eye has an interesting bit about Tony Blair get the government of Sierra Leone to drop an investigation into a deal whereby they gave 80% of their natural resources to a man called Frank Timis, a former heroin dealer with a long record of stock market scams, a fake Romanian gold mine, for example. Turns out they've been working together. But that's OT.

[gnosticheresy_2]

BANG!



BANG!

This should have been one of the great stories of all time. It has almost everything — royalty, police corruption, Downing Street complicity, celebrities by the cartload, Fleet Street at its most evil and disgusting. One day, I guess, it will be turned into a brilliant film, and there will be a compulsive book as well.

The truth is that very few newspapers can declare themselves entirely innocent of buying illegal information from private detectives. A 2006 report by the Information Commissioner gave a snapshot into the affairs of one such ‘detective’, caught in so-called ‘Operation Motorman’. The commissioner’s report found that 305 journalists had been identified ‘as customers driving the illegal trade in confidential personal information’. It named each newspaper group, the number of offences and the number of guilty journalists (see above). But, as the commission observed, coverage of this scandal ‘even in the broadsheets, at the time of publication, was limited’. The same reticence has been seen, until now, over the voicemail-hacking scandal.

By minimising these stories, media groups are coming dangerously close to making a very significant statement: they are essentially part of the same bent system as News International and complicit in its criminality. At heart this is a story about the failure of the British system, which relies on a series of checks and balances to prevent high-level corruption. Each one of them has failed: parliament because MPs feel intimidated by the power of newspapers to expose and destroy them; and opposition, because Ed Miliband lacked the moral imagination to escape the News International mindset — until he was forced to confront it all by the sheer horror of the Milly Dowler episode.

That leaves the prime minister. He finally woke up to the kind of company he has been keeping on Tuesday when during his Afghanistan visit he declared the Milly Dowler revelations ‘truly dreadful’. David Cameron has repeatedly displayed an inability to make a distinction between right and wrong. The press ought to have stepped into the breach. Unfortunately, we in Fleet Street have forgotten that the ultimate vindication of journalism is not to intrude into, and destroy, private lives. Nor is it the dance around power, money and social status. It is the fight for truth and decency.

http://www.spectator.co.uk/essays/70756 ... -say.thtml

[gnosticheresy_2]

[MacCruiskeen]

Well, god help Britain, because I have a feeling people are going to need to be distracted from this. Something tells me there's going to be another "7/7" soon.

[Byrne]

Well, god help Britain, because I have a feeling people are going to need to be distracted from this. Something tells me there's going to be another "7/7" soon.

Mac, I know what you are getting at, but re 7/7, I think it is the other way around - the NOTW phone-hacking connection becomes the anniversary story this year, rather than any analysis of the recently completed pisspoor inquest, bereft of questions that should have been asked....

The NOTW 'phone-hacking' story has been gestating for years. It is dolloped out in doses every now & then, whenever something needs shuffled off the front pages/editorial/analysis sections.

[gnosticheresy_2]

BANG!

REALITY MANAGEMENT

Johann Hari's defenders - and practically every defence of Hari served to further underscore what a complacent self-serving Oxbridge club so much of the UK broadsheet commentariat is - might have pathetically seized upon the News of the World hacking story in order to underplay their boy's misdemeanours, but the reality is that the Hari and the News of the World situations are part of a single crisis that also includes the Ed Miliband "these strikes are wrong" video and ongoing cyberwar (Wikileaks, Lulzsec, 4Chan). Perhaps the reason that the Assange/ Zizek dialogue was so disappointing is that Zizek's basic point about the crisis of symbolic efficiency is now so clear that it doesn't require much elaboration. It is one thing our knowing about the corrupt practices that the power elite routinely engage in; it is another for that knowledge to be officially validated. The space that power needs to manage reality is disappearing.

With the 'Milibot' video, the offscreen manipulations of PR came off less like a dark art and more like surrealist comedy - Miliband for all the world resembling an ROM entity from Existenz, only capable of giving one pre-prepared response no matter what the question. The exposure of Hari's manipulations is significant, meanwhile, because (as Petra Davis argued on her Twitter feed) it showed how his construction of "commonsense reality" depended on techniques proper to fiction . Reading Hari's pieces back, it's quite astonishing how crass these techniques were - a "she drew on the omnipresent cigarette" here, and "he asked for more wine" there, inserted between screeds of pirated text. It's like Hari's "interviewing" career is one long postmodern prank, and, really, this episode ought to be liberal empiricism's equivalent of the Sokal scandal. It was fitting that the DSG exposure of Hari started with Hari's hatchet job on Negri, a masterclass in liberal propaganda and kneejerk loathing of theory - privately educated Hari reassuring his readers that he couldn't understand Empire, therefore they shouldn't worry about reading it. The old we don't read it, so you don't have to.... routine. The Negri 'interview' crudely alternates between personal attacks on Negri and appeals to self-evidence (of course communism is evil, why won't this bad tempered old man admit it?) Yet Hari's conclusion - "this is where revolutionary Marxism comes to die. It has been reduced to an obscure parlour game for ageing bourgeois nostalgics" - now itself reads like a relic of a bygone world. The "certainties" and self-evidences of the near-past are unravelling quicker than we can keep up.

As for the News of the World story, it is clear that it is not just about the News of the World or phone hacking. A whole ruling class, a whole mode of governance, stands accused. All the signs are that neoliberalism's standard tactics of containment - offering an individual as scapegoat-trophy in order to deflect from a structural tendency - are now starting to fail. News International are trying to re-sacrifice a scapegoat they've already served up (Coulson) but the process is out of their control and now has its own momentum (which is sure to drag other newspapers into its wake before very long). What was made to look like a series of disconnected incidents now appears as what it always was: a worldwide web of corruption whose byzantine murkiness resembles something out of The Wire or a David Peace novel. A dark network comprising private investigators, the criminal underworld, tabloid newspapers, multinational media conglomerates, the police, politicians, the banks, and the bodies supposed to regulate them (who are at best impotent, at worst part of the problem) cannot now be kept hidden from public scrutiny. This is less a conspiracy than a network of complicities: fear on all sides, nobody trusting anybody else, the whole thing depending on who's got the goods on whom ... Cops watching hacks watching cops; threatened politicans looking for favours ...

What characterises capitalist realism is fatalism at the level of politics (where nothing much can ever change, except to move further in the direction of neoliberalisation) and magical voluntarism at the level of the individual: you can achieve anything, if you only you do more training courses, listen to Mary Portas or Kirsty Alsop, try harder. Magical voluntarism, naturally, also drives the tabloid culture of individual blame (resign, resign!) in which the tabloids themselves are now caught up, although, as Zone Styx noted, News International clearly expects far more from public service managers like Sharon Shoemith than it does from its own executives.) Individualise, individualise, insists capitalist ideology. Note the way in which the media sought to reduce the Lulsec story to Ryan Cleary, or the way in which the clueless Peter Preston finds the idea of a collective entity such as DSG unfathomable.

A manageable level of cynicism about the media actually serves the capitalist realist media system well. Since the media stands in for the public sphere, if journalists and politicians are perceived to be "all liars", as they widely are, then there is no hope to be had in public life at all. Hack expulpations appeal to a market Hobbesianism: they are giving people what they want but what they won't admit to liking. When, pickled in the jouissance of self-loathing and their other stimulants of choice, the hacks style themselves as "princes of darkness", they see themselves as reflecting the public's own disavowed cynicism back to it. Nobody likes working in the sewers, but don't you all love the pretty little globules of sensation that we dredge up for you?. Similarly, Glenn Mulcaire whines that the NOTW put him under pressure for results, this isn't only an excuse - what we're seeing here is in part the consequence of the intense competitive pressures at work in print media as its market share declines. Negative solidarity again: a race to depths so infernally pressurised that only alcohol-breathing subhuman crustaceans can survive there. (You only have to look at ex-NOTW hack Paul McMullan to see that.) As one by one those who played their part are dragged into the light, the old bullying sneers become familiar plaints: that's reality, we couldn't help it, that's how things are now ... But we must hear their excuses as indictments of a system: behold what a wretched state overwork and pitiless competition can reduce human beings to.

All of which means that a few sackings here and there will clearly not suffice. What is needed, as Dan argues, is total media reform:

The current structure of power and decision-making in the media cannot now be allowed to remain unchanged. The employees of large media organizations have monopoly control of decisions about what is investigated and what prominence is given to the results of investigations. They have been unable or unwilling to use this monopoly power in the public interest. Accordingly it is time to assert our democratic right to communicate freely amongst ourselves. Each of us must take some some fraction of the commissioning power, the power to initiate and publish inquiries. If we do not our public life will remain a mess of officially sanctioned fairy tales, crocodilian excuses, and grotesque abuses of the innocent, in which market forces and elite prerogatives set the limits of our understanding and hence of our capacity for self-government.
In the House of Commons emergency debate today, many MPs had the relieved and faintly bemused air of the henchmen and victims of a bully who can't quite believe that the tyranny might be nearing its end. As Assange said on Saturday- and as Dan Hind also argues in The Return of the Public - the function of corporate media has been to isolate people, to make them distrust their discontent with a world controlled by business interests. What has combated this is the production of new collectivities of dissent, both online and in the streets. What we're seeing in this extraordinary moment of transition is a reality management system imploding from within at the same time as it is being undermined from outside. And, this is only the beginning - you haven't seen anything yet.

http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/011851.html

I'm going to repeat this again, as it is important:

A manageable level of cynicism about the media actually serves the capitalist realist media system well. Since the media stands in for the public sphere, if journalists and politicians are perceived to be "all liars", as they widely are, then there is no hope to be had in public life at all. Hack expulpations appeal to a market Hobbesianism: they are giving people what they want but what they won't admit to liking. When, pickled in the jouissance of self-loathing and their other stimulants of choice, the hacks style themselves as "princes of darkness", they see themselves as reflecting the public's own disavowed cynicism back to it. Nobody likes working in the sewers, but don't you all love the pretty little globules of sensation that we dredge up for you?.

[Byrne]

some background :

In 1969 Rupert Murdoch purchased The Sun newspaper in 1969. He turned it into a trashy tabloid and it was not long before it had become the best-selling daily newspaper in Britain. Later that year he purchased the News of the World, Britain’s largest selling newspaper.

The two newspapers advocated extreme right-wing policies over the next ten years and played an important role in the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979. He continued to support Thatcher in her decision to create mass unemployment by reducing spending on the public sector. This policy also undermined the power of the trade-unions. This enabled the Tories to pass anti-trade union legislation that helped Murdoch win his fight with the print unions.

In 1981 Murdoch purchased The Times and the Sunday Times. He also created News Corporation that controlled all his media interests. This includes film and television companies such as Sky and Fox and a large number of newspapers and magazines in the United States and various other countries. It has been claimed that he is the most important political influence in the western world.

In the late 1990s it became clear that the British public had turned against the right-wing Tory government. In the 1997 general election, the Murdoch press supported the Labour Party. This would have come as no surprise to those that had watched Murdoch’s behaviour in Australia. He had supported their Labour Party in the past. However, when they gained power with his support, they turned into a right-wing authoritarian government.

The same thing happened in Britain. After he won the 1997 election, Tony Blair abandoned his left-wing agenda and showed himself to be a Thatcherite. According to Lance Price, who worked for the Labour government, Blair would always consult Murdoch before introducing any new policy.

Murdoch was also a great supporter of the illegal invasion of Iraq. Every one of his 179 newspapers also supported this policy. He claimed at the time that the invasion would result in lower oil prices and an increase in stock market shares. His newspapers also played an important role in persuading the public that Iraq had WMD.

When Blair became unpopular with the British public he joined the plot to get Gordon Brown made the new prime minister without an election. Brown had been under the control of Murdoch for many years. However, after six months it became clear that Brown would lose the next election and so Murdoch’s newspaper’s began to support David Cameron.

Murdoch seemed untouchable. All leading politicians were too frightened to take him on. They knew he would use the whole of his media empire against them if they did that. Then something happened yesterday that might give us the opportunity to remove this terrible influence on British life.

The story begins in 2006 when members of the royal household complained that they believed that their mobile phones had been hacked into. The anti-terror police investigated the case as they feared it might be connected to a Muslim terrorist group. A few months later, Clive Goodman, a journalist working for the News of the World, and Glenn Mulcaire, a private detective, were arrested. Mulcaire confessed to hacking into the royal family’s mobile phones to listen to their voice-mail and that he had been paid to do this by Goodman.


In January 2007, Goodman was sentenced to four months in prison and Mulcaire got six months. Andy Coulson resigned as editor of the News of the World. He claimed that he knew nothing about this phone hacking. Anyone with any experience of newspapers knew that Coulson was lying. No editor would ever publish a potential libellous story without knowing the source of the story. Goodman was portrayed as a rogue reporter.

Les Hinton, the chairman of News International, appeared before a parliamentary committee and told MPs he had carried out a full investigation into the case and he was convinced that Goodman had been acting alone. The Press Complaints Commission also claimed they could find no evidence that Coulson knew anything about these illegal activities. Although he was strangely not interviewed by the PCC.

On July 9, 2007, David Cameron appointed Andy Coulson as Conservative Party Director of Communications on a salary of £450,000 a year. Why? Maybe because he is the man who knows all the secrets of the politicians.

The police supported this view that Coulson did not know anything by not bringing anymore prosecutions against News of the World reporters. However, we now know that the police did have a great deal of information about large-scale phone-hacking by Murdoch’s journalists. For example, Glenn Mulcaire had been paid £2,000 a month as a retainer fee for News Corporation. Evidence suggests he had been working for 37 different journalists. Mulcaire’s work had resulted in several scoops including those against the socialist politician, Tommy Sheridan, David Beckham (Rebecca Loos) and Sven-Goran Eriksson (Faria Alam).

Why did the police not follow up cases against these 37 journalists? How much did Murdoch pay to the police to stop these prosecutions?

The problem is that some policemen earn extra money by selling information to the press and other interested parties. One of them tipped off Gordon Taylor, the chief executive of the Professional Footballer’s Association, that his phone had been hacked by Glenn Mulcaire. He therefore decided to sue News Corporation. In September, 2007, News Corporation paid Taylor and two of his football contacts, over a £1 million in a case that was held in secret. The people involved promised not to reveal details of the case. The High Court then joined in the conspiracy by sealing the evidence obtained from the police.

Someone, we don’t know who, tipped off Nick Davies, a reporter, about what had happened and the story appeared in yesterday’s Guardian. Rupert Murdoch immediately announced he knew nothing about this £1 million payout. This surely can be proved to be a lie.

The Guardian also provided a list of some of the people whose phones were hacked by Mulcaire. This included several cabinet ministers, including John Prescott, the former deputy prime-minister. This obviously has implications for national security. However, Prescott insists he was never told by the police that attempts had been made to hack his phone.

The most amazing response was from the police. Assistant Commissioner John Yates, quickly issued a statement that the police were unwilling to reopen the investigation into the case. Yates was of course the man who led the investigation into the corruption of Tony Blair and decided that he should not be prosecuted for any offences. I wonder how much money he was paid to reach this conclusion? How much was he paid for yesterday’s statement.

Other than the Guardian and the BBC, the rest of the media are doing what they can to ignore this story. One former editor of the Sun claimed yesterday that the whole story is a “socialist conspiracy”. The reason that even non-Murdoch papers are ignoring the story, is that they have also relied on illegal phone-hacking to get their stories and are worried where all this will lead. How many journalists will end up in prison for these offences?

Code: Select all

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=6382&st=360&p=169543&#entry169543

[MacCruiskeen]

This is less a conspiracy than a network of complicities: fear on all sides, nobody trusting anybody else, the whole thing depending on who's got the goods on whom ... Cops watching hacks watching cops; threatened politicans looking for favours ...

Talk about false dichotomies! A network of complicities does not preclude a conspiracy, or indeed a series or network of conspiracies. In fact, it practically presupposes them, just as it presupposes (and engenders) "fear on all sides" - first and foremost, fear of losing one's job, or at least fear of losing the goodwill of ones peers and employers.

It's an unusually trenchant little article by k-punk, not least because it's not about records, movies or horror fiction, but yet again he's disabled by his own quintessentially bourgeois inabilty to notice conspiracies even when they're positively biting him in the arse. For he too is a university lecturer with social and financial interests to defend, and outing himself as a "conspiracy theorist" would be a very bad career move. So "a network of complicities" it is. "Complicity" sounds nicer than "conspiracy", it's conveniently vague and unspecific, no heads will ever roll because of it, and he can carry on being the British hauntologist du jour, secure in the knowledge that those awful "conspiracy theorists" are digging up the vulgar facts that put flesh on the bones of his nifty but bloodless Theory.

"Fear on all sides." You said it, pal.

(christ, I am tetchy as fuck today.)

[gnosticheresy_2]

This is less a conspiracy than a network of complicities: fear on all sides, nobody trusting anybody else, the whole thing depending on who's got the goods on whom ... Cops watching hacks watching cops; threatened politicans looking for favours ...

Talk about false dichotomies! A network of complicities does not preclude a conspiracy, or indeed a series or network of conspiracies. In fact, it practically presupposes them, just as it presupposes (and engenders) "fear on all sides" - first and foremost, fear of losing one's job, or at least fear of losing the goodwill of ones peers and employers.

It's an unusually trenchant little article by k-punk, not least because it's not about records, movies or horror fiction, but yet again he's disabled by his own quintessentially bourgeois inabilty to notice conspiracies even when they're positively biting him in the arse. For he too is a university lecturer with social and financial interests to defend, and outing himself as a "conspiracy theorist" would be a very bad career move. So "a network of complicities" it is. "Complicity" sounds nicer than "conspiracy", it's conveniently vague and unspecific, no heads will ever roll because of it, and he can carry on being the British hauntologist du jour, secure in the knowledge that those awful "conspiracy theorists" are digging up the vulgar facts that put flesh on the bones of his nifty but bloodless Theory.

"Fear on all sides." You said it, pal.

(christ, I am tetchy as fuck today.)

I know, it's like "almost there, almost there" as he hurtles down the Death Star trench. It's frustrating.

[seemslikeadream]

Did Wall Street Journal Honcho Cover Up Murdoch Phone-Hack Scandal?
One of Murdoch's UK papers is in trouble over hacking private cell phones, including one belonging to a murder victim--and some familiar US faces may be part of the coverup.
July 6, 2011

A scandal involving phone-hacking by a right-wing newspaper tabloid owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation is threatening the administration of British Prime Minister David Cameron. Now the scandal is boomeranging back to New York, engulfing the top executive at the largest-circulation newspaper in the United States, the Wall Street Journal.

To clean up some of the mess, Murdoch has called upon the talents of former Bush administration Assistant Attorney General Viet Dinh, whose views on privacy are enshrined in the U.S.A. PATRIOT Act, and Joel Klein, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's union-bashing former schools chief, known for his phony claims of test-score gains.

The Crown Jewel and the Screaming Slime

Every corporate mogul likes to crown his empire with a jewel, and Rupert Murdoch is no exception. Having made a fortune acquiring screaming tabloids and making them scream louder, and acquiring a media company, Fox, now known for its ideological rabble-rousing, Murdoch wanted to buy his News Corp a little respectability. And so, in 2007, he purchased Dow Jones and its Wall Street Journal, the pinstriped, grey-at-the temples, oxford-shod media presence of the global financial sector.

As CEO of the Dow Jones Company, of which WSJ is a part, Murdoch installed Les Hinton, who had previously run News Corp's British newspaper empire, known as News International. Now it appears that Hinton may have won his prize spot for his part in an apparent coverup of a multi-year phone-hacking operation that likely involved an editor who went on to serve as the prime minister's spokesperson, and another who would go on to run all of Murdoch's UK papers.

Today, in Britain, Murdoch's tabloid empire is facing the ire of the public, a Scotland Yard investigation and the yanking of the curtain on its political alliances, thanks to a long-running scandal involving the hacking of voice-mail accounts by agents of its reporters and editors -- a scandal given new life when the Guardian, a liberal rival to Murdoch's right-wing outlets, revealed a cruel hoax played by News of the World on the parents of a murdered teenager. Eager to break news on the disappearance of 13-year-old Milly Dowler, editors at NOTW hired a private investigator to hack the girl's cell phone. They deleted some messages, giving Milly's family false hope that she was still alive and receiving her messages. Then the paper reported on the family's renewed hopes, based on the evidence created by NOTW.

This latest revelation comes on the heels of news that the paper hacked the voice-mail accounts of actors Sienna Miller and Jude Law, as well as staff members on the royal payroll (including Prince William's communications chief). The scandal has been unfolding for years, a genie reemerging from its bottle with renewed vigor. (Reuters has an excellent timeline here.)

Hoaxing a Dead Girl's Parents

The revelation that prompted today's furor -- the 2002 hacking of Milly Dowler's cell-phone -- is just the first in a spate of allegations over the last 24 hours implicating News of the World in similar operations on the voice-mail accounts of victims of the terrorist bombings of the London subway system in 2005 and possibly the cell-phone accounts of other murdered children. There are also credible allegations that the tabloid was paying law enforcement sources for newsworthy information.

This all comes as the British Parliament is about to give the go-ahead for News Corporation to purchase outright BSkyB, the nation's dominant satellite TV service, in which it already holds a majority stake. Now the deal may be off.

But here in the U.S., an unseemly tale is unfolding about the steady unraveling of ethics at the Wall Street Journal since Murdoch's purchase of the paper and the appointment of Les Hinton as its CEO.

Coverup by Wall Street Journal Chief?

In January 2007, during an earlier blip of the News of the World hacking scandal, Hinton, then executive chairman of Murdoch's News International operation, assured British lawmakers that he had conducted a thorough investigation of the scandal and determined that only Clive Goodman, the News of the World reporter assigned to cover the royal family, was involved. The newspaper's editor, Andy Coulson, had no knowledge of the systematic hacking of royal voice-mail accounts, Hinton said in testimony before the House of Commons culture committee. (Coulson went on to become communications director for Prime Minister David Cameron.)

But the Guardian reports that News of the World staffers claim that Coulson, who resigned his government post in January, knew all about the hacking operation. Rebekah Wade Brooks, who now has Hinton's old job in the U.K., is also implicated.

Murdoch appears to be quite concerned about a U.S. angle on the scandal. As early as last month, according to the British paper, the Independent, Murdoch sent a team of U.S. attorneys "to investigate the extent of phone hacking at the News of the World."

As is typical of the Wall Street Journal since Murdoch's purchase, the paper did not disclose today the role its chief executive played in delivering misleading testimony before the British parliament, notes Media Matters' Eric Boehlert. This is not surprising. AlterNet has previously reported on the paper's apparent partnership with David Koch's Americans for Prosperity Foundation, a relationship that is never disclosed in the Journal's reporting on the political activities of Americans for Prosperity, despite the fact that one of its editorial board members, Stephen Moore, has accepted at least $150,000 in speaking fees from the AFP Foundation.

The Journal did, however, disclose that it has paid settlements to several celebrities whose phones were hacked by the News of the World, and that those settlements were part of the work of a management-standards committee "overseen by News Corp. board members Joel Klein and Viet Dinh," who are also "deal[ing] with police." Dinh, while an assistant attorney general in the Bush administration, "played a key role in drafting the administration's USA Patriot Act," according to the Washington Post.

Where are the Watchdogs?

While the good-journalism watchdogs and groups are paying keen attention to the more sensational aspects of this latest Murdoch scandal, only scant attention (Media Matters being the exception) is being dealt to the Journal's abysmal editorial standards regarding full disclosure and political involvement. The hacking of individual phones constitutes an horrific breach of individual privacy, and the News of the World's reporting makes a travesty of the idea of journalism ethics.

Yet the double-dealing of the Wall Street Journal -- its failure to disclose its executives' involvement in either the British phone-hacking scandal or the American political group from which at least one receives compensation -- corrupts the political culture of the United States. It's almost like somebody's afraid of Rupert Murdoch.

[coffin_dodger]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14070733

Smells like panic to me.

[hanshan]

...


seemslikeadream:
Quote:
Did Wall Street Journal Honcho Cover Up Murdoch Phone-Hack Scandal?

One of Murdoch's UK papers is in trouble over hacking private cell phones, including one belonging to a murder victim--and some familiar US faces may be part of the coverup.
July 6, 2011

snip

As is typical of the Wall Street Journal since Murdoch's purchase, the paper did not disclose today the role its chief executive played in delivering misleading testimony before the British parliament, notes Media Matters' Eric Boehlert. This is not surprising. AlterNet has previously reported on the paper's apparent partnership with David Koch's Americans for Prosperity Foundation, a relationship that is never disclosed in the Journal's reporting on the political activities of Americans for Prosperity, despite the fact that one of its editorial board members, Stephen Moore, has accepted at least $150,000 in speaking fees from the AFP Foundation.

The Journal did, however, disclose that it has paid settlements to several celebrities whose phones were hacked by the News of the World, and that those settlements were part of the work of a management-standards committee "overseen by News Corp. board members Joel Klein and Viet Dinh," who are also "deal[ing] with police." Dinh, while an assistant attorney general in the Bush administration, "played a key role in drafting the administration's USA Patriot Act," according to the Washington Post.

Where are the Watchdogs?

While the good-journalism watchdogs and groups are paying keen attention to the more sensational aspects of this latest Murdoch scandal, only scant attention (Media Matters being the exception) is being dealt to the Journal's abysmal editorial standards regarding full disclosure and political involvement. The hacking of individual phones constitutes an horrific breach of individual privacy, and the News of the World's reporting makes a travesty of the idea of journalism ethics.

Yet the double-dealing of the Wall Street Journal -- its failure to disclose its executives' involvement in either the British phone-hacking scandal or the American political group from which at least one receives compensation -- corrupts the political culture of the United States. It's almost like somebody's afraid of Rupert Murdoch.

Patriot Act ( & it's renewal) dispensed w/ individual liberty, Bill of Rights. Now they're crying about it?
Little late. When was the political culture of the US not corrupt? Journalistic ethics?


...

[tazmic]

Two days ago...

[semper occultus]

I think the headline "Gotcha" springs to mind

News of the World axed by News International

Sunday edition of Murdoch's tabloid to be last in the aftermath of political and commercial fallout from phone-hacking scandal

News International announced on Thursday that it is closing the News of the World after this Sunday's edition, with no end in sight to the political and commercial fallout from the phone-hacking scandal after 72 hours of mounting crisis.


Sunday's edition of the paper will be the last, News International chairman James Murdoch told News of the World staff on Thursday afternoon.


Murdoch told employees at the 168-year-old title: "The News of the World is in the business of holding others to account. But it failed to when it came to itself".


Murdoch said in a statement: "Wrongdoers turned a good newsroom bad and this was not fully understood or adequately pursued."


Murdoch also conceded the company had "made statements to parliament without being in full possession of the facts. This was wrong".


He said "the News of the World and News International wrongly maintained that these issues were confined to one reporter" and that the company had passed information to the police which would demonstrate this.


"Those who acted wrongly will have to face the consequences," he said.


Murdoch also said in his statement to staff that he had authorised out-of-court payments to victims of hacking: "I now know that I did not have a complete picture when I did so."


He added: "That was wrong and is a matter of serious regret."


It is the first national newspaper to close since Rupert Murdoch shut News International mid-market tabloid Today in 1995.


The News of the World was Rupert Murdoch's first UK newspaper acquisition in 1968 and its profits helped him build his publishing and broadcasting empire in this country and the US.


The title remains the UK's biggest-selling paper, with a circulation of 2.66m in May this year. In 1962, when the Audit Bureau of Circulations began publishing regular newspaper sales figures, the News of the World was selling 6.66m.


A spokesman for the company would not comment on whether News International will continue to publish a tabloid title on a Sunday.


The News of the World has been NI's most profitable title for many years.


There are already industry rumours that the News of the World's stablemate the Sun could be turned into a seven-day operation. News International has already announced plans to move to seven-day working across its four titles – the Sun, News of the World, the Times and Sunday Times – and the internet domain name thesunonsunday.co.uk was registered two days ago, although the purchaser's identity is unclear.


Murdoch told staff some of them would be leaving the company and said that was a matter of regret. He paid tribute to their "good work".


There will be no adverts in Sunday's edition and any money already received will be donated to good causes.


The closure of the paper is a dramatic move designed to assuage public anger at shocking revelations about the behaviour of its journalists, but it is unlikely that NI's printing presses will be left idle on a Sunday.

Sky News reported that NI chief executive Rebekah Brooks was in tears as she told staff the title is to close.

Labour MP Tom Watson, who has been highlighting the phone-hacking scandal at the paper for two years, said: "Rupert Murdoch did not close the News of the World. It is the revulsion of families up and down the land as to what they got up to. It was going to lose all its readers and it had no advertisers left. They had no choice."

The News of the World, which has averaged about £660,000 in advertising income each weekend so far this year according to industry estimates, was already facing a widespread advertiser boycott on Sunday.

A revolt by advertisers gathered pace in the past 24 hours as Prime Minister David Cameron announced public inquiries into phone hacking and criticism of the paper's activities mounted from politicians and the general public.

There were also the first signs of a possible boycott by readers, with one independent convenience chain admitting on Thursday that it would not be stocking the title in its five stores across Essex and Cambridgeshire. The owner said he took the decision because one of his shops, at Ely station, is close to Soham where Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman were murdered.

Earlier this week it was alleged that Glenn Mulcaire, the private detective formerly employed by the paper, may have hacked into the phones of Wells and Chapman's parents.

The number of alleged phone-hacking incidents perpetrated by the paper in years gone by had also continued to grow, with the latest involving families of members of the armed forces killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. More details were also emerging about alleged payments by News of the World journalists to Metropolitan police officers.

Most NoW advertisers, including Sainsbury's, Asda, Dixons, Boots, Specsavers, Ford, Halifax, Co-op and Npower had already pulled their campaigns. It is understood News International only had four left – BSkyB, British Gas, Mars and Tesco.

The decision to close the paper is understood to have come following a meeting on Thursday between executives including Murdoch, who is also the deputy chief operating officer of NI-owner News Corp and oversees the UK business, Brooks, and the publisher's commercial managing director, Paul Hayes.

Rival publishers were said by media buying agency sources to be descending on advertisers like "ambulance chasers" looking to snap up potentially millions in ad revenue from the "toxic" News of the World, with companies responsible for more than £8m in annual spend pulling campaigns in the past 24 hours.

A number of media buying agency executives said they had been inundated with calls from rival publishers querying what the advertisers they represent might be looking to do with their budget.

"It is like ambulance chasing, calls are coming from rivals [newspapers], smaller publishers, radio and outdoor – you name it," said one senior industry source. "The NoW brand is now so toxic that by association clients definitely want out this weekend at least."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jul/07/news-of-the-world-to-close

[peartreed]

An old chain-smoking friend used to hack into my telephone - until his final coffin fit.

Still, such obnoxious intrusions must be controlled. It goes beyond pin number privacy. it involves addressing our own base urges.

Yellow journalism has tainted more than tabloids. It has exposed the popularity of prurient interest in the press. Even as Rupert Murdoch shuts down the News of the World there remains a global media appetite for vicarious Tom-Peeping of victims of violence, a horrific, hidden hunger.

The only way to control that is self-discipline, like children taught not to play in the yellow snow. Tell parasitic paparrazi to piss off. When enough outrage ultimately melts the immediate mass market into enough self-conscious guilty absorption, the media moguls might clean up their act.

http://news.ca.msn.com/top-stories/murd ... -the-world

peartreed