Media in the UK - Sh*t hitting the fan?
DOR
Two Ron Toe 9,905 Posts
This whole News of the World thing is pretty crazy. In so many ways... Terrible stuff.
Who will take a big portion of the blame in the end? People at paper? Coppers? The people who actually did the phone hacking? In the end, I think this is going to cost Murdoch a shit load of money.
Favorite bitchslap so far is the one Hugh grant laid down.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14052690
Who will take a big portion of the blame in the end? People at paper? Coppers? The people who actually did the phone hacking? In the end, I think this is going to cost Murdoch a shit load of money.
Favorite bitchslap so far is the one Hugh grant laid down.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14052690
Comments
Ford pulled their ads from the paper. Im hoping this will take Rupert Murdoch down, however unlikely.
Some real dubious connections there.
And when the normally right-wing, pro-Tory press start going after you, you know something serious is up...
From The Telegraph: http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/peteroborne/100095686/david-cameron-is-in-the-sewer-because-of-his-news-international-friends/
From The Spectator: http://www.spectator.co.uk/essays/all/7075673/what-the-papers-wont-say.thtml
But this is getting huge. Not only are major advertizes pulling out. But they are talking about stopping Murdoch's attempt to take control of British Sky Broadcasting. Which was pretty much a done deal.
There are going to be some major public inquiries into all of this.
Cameron may be the one who resigns when the dust finally settles. In a fair world...
Rebekah Brooks confessed that '"We have paid the police for information in the past." eight years ago. This is unequivocally a criminal offence of corruption.
NotW has released - according to its own timetable and its own selective criteria- evidence of phone-hacking, police payments and through civil settlements has 'confessed' to phone hacking - all criminal offences.
It's all tied-in. Police daren't raid the offices and seize the evidence as it will lead straight back to them... and successive British governments from Thatcher to the present.
And here's her bullshit retraction in April:
from: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/apr/11/rebekah-brooks-letter-to-mps
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-14062867
What exactly would it take for somebody to fail the ludicrous 'fit & proper person' test?
Has he set up the whole farce?
Because so many big names are implicated, a crazy amount of schitt is going to get swept under the carpet and then some other crap will be sensationalised to distract everybody.
The search for a scapegoat is underway to get the heat off the powers that be.
This schitt is going to spiral and spiral and spiral.. all we need now is some finger pointing at other tabloids in the murdoch network.. ideally The Sun.
ultimately, this will be the corruption story of the decade. there are so many different implications - that the police did nothing to investigate the claims properly - that tommy sheridan was wrongfully imprisoned - that princess diana's phone was being hacked - that the tabloids have for years, done whatever they wanted to get to the story, with total disregard for the law - it's going to change press in this country for good. and that's not a bad thing at all.
Hand-cuffs at last!
From the comments section of the Guardian:
Hard to discern.
very true..
b/w nice piece on NYT analysing the impact on murdoch, with a potted history of previous (in comparison micro-sized) scandals - including the "obama is racist" fox news one (a soulstrut classic) http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/07/business/media/hacking-scandal-poses-new-threat-to-news-corporations-image.html?pagewanted=2&hp;
Back when it was first breaking, and Coulson/NI thought they could just style it out, I remember saying to a few friends that it wouldn't surprise me if this story eventually led to a murdered kid or something equally terrible, and the corresponding investigations or trials being somehow compromised. The widespread indifference towards how it was affecting celebrities and politicians might have been down to the public reservoir of good will towards those sections of society, or specific individuals, being a bit dry (MPs on the fiddle, cunty popstars/footballers, etc). But it's now painfully clear that this shit was (is?) standard practice, and almost certainly not just at NI, hence the relative silence on the topic from Trinity Mirror and Express Group titles.
Meanwhile, in Tin Foil Hat Corner, BSkyB shares have tanked, which seems awfully convenient for anyone interested in picking up the 61% they don't already own...
It's funny how people would always worry that the government wanted to spy on them and destroy their lives, when all along it was the newspapers they should have been worrying about. And instead of picking on people who represent a threat to national security or The British Way Of Life, their targets are the likes of you and me, or people to whom something terrible has happened. Essentially, it's the sort of pernicious conspiracy that you find in the plot of a Bond film, but instead of it being incredibly cunning, involving underground lairs and stuff, it's just amounted to hacks doing something really really simple: something that only a real scumbag would do.
And that, in a nutshell, was their cover: the trusting belief of most people that nobody would stoop so low. Well, some of us may have always had our suspicions, but now we know. Nice one, Fourth Estate.
And the implications of widespread police corruption, and how high up it goes, don't bear mentioning. Which is handy, since hardly anyone's said a word about what might yet turn out to be the biggest, most damaging scandal of the lot.
Does this mean News International/Rupert Murdoch would rather sack an entire newsroom full of staff rather than fire Rebekah Brooks...? Classy.
Why oh why oh why aren't the old bill round there collecting evidence?
Can The Sun be next?
I have a feeling this is going to drag on for years and never be resolved with just a couple of low level guys taking the blame.
This is quite a interesting tactic by the Murdochs, they obviously value Brooks & the BSkyB deal > NOTW, and all their staff. (although they'll probably just be re-branded under part of the new The Sun.)
I guess Brooks probably has dirt on all of them (and not just from hacking their phones arf arf) so they wont want to piss her off, cause it would save her skin if she came out against them all, guess they want to keep her close.
http://webwhois.nic.uk/cgi-bin/whois.cgi?query=thesunonsunday.co.uk
coincidence?
posted that above.
the other tabloids should be worried.