PaperBiro
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I have a feeling, this could change the British newspaper landscape and I can only add: Finally.
My response is:
Rejoyce, rejoyce, rejoyce!
I have a feeling, this could change the British newspaper landscape and I can only add: Finally.
Rejoyce, rejoyce, rejoyce!
Once there was a former Prime Minister who said Rejoyce, rejoyce, rejoyce when hearing that Maggie Thatcher had resigned.
Now there is another occation for such an outburst of joy.
The News of the World is no more. Now we need to fuck Murdoch in the arse.
Same here. The leader of the Norwegian Union of Journalists, for instance, has called the demise of the News of the World "the World of Newspapers answer to the demise of the Soviet Union". He has also stated "I will not miss it".This is making headlines here, too, you know...
Might have been a Thatcher quote as well.I think those are Thatcher's own words, actually, uttered after the freeing of part or all of the Falkland Islands. (A quick google suggests Private Eye did what you suggested though.)
He'd get far too much enjoyment from that. Stand him on his head, fill his arse with petrol, set light to the blue toilet paper and stand well back.
Yes, and no.Asides from that, Margaret Thatcher was a wonderful prime minister.
Mary Dejevsky: Condemning Murdoch is too easy
It's convenient for some people that an impression is being created that these practices were unique to News International
Friday, 8 July 2011
It exploded like a thunderclap in every newsroom in the land. Rupert Murdoch's response to the vilification of his newspapers was to sacrifice the very first title he had bought in Britain. Phone-hacking had become a cipher for the depravity of journalism. It no longer targeted only celebrities ? about whom few evinced great concern ? but missing children, victims of atrocities and grieving families. Mass snooping on individuals at their most vulnerable in pursuit of a "story" had been traced back to Murdoch and his diabolical ways. The closure of the News of the World will only reinforce that impression. There was immediate dancing on its grave.
Of course, the pain and alarm caused to those who now have reason to believe that their very private conversations were overheard cannot be trivialised. The very idea that anyone thought that hacking their calls was an acceptable way to earn their daily bread beggars the belief of most people ? though not, I suspect, the belief of many journalists. There are sections of the profession (craft, industry, as you like), which cross the line of common decency. At times, as here, they also cross the line into illegality.
Yet the construction that has gained currency ? of a Murdoch press that routinely tramples ethical norms and in so doing contaminates the British media as a whole ? reflects a simplistic, and partial view. There is more going on with the phone-hacking scandal than a simple parable of right and wrong. Here are five reasons why.
First, Murdoch. It is easy to demonise Rupert Murdoch. Yet without his involvement in the British media, the newspapers he now owns might not exist at all. As someone who worked for The Times, I concede an interest here. His defeat of the print unions changed the economics of the British press and made new ventures, such as The Independent, feasible. With Sky, he transformed the television landscape, giving British viewers a breadth of choice that has only recently come to the rest of Europe.
With each expansion he made new enemies, with many seeing any Murdoch gain as a threat. It may or may not be coincidence that each twist of the phone-hacking scandal seemed to coincide with a stage in Murdoch's efforts to gain the majority stake in BSkyB. Each revelation has served as a convenient peg to hang an anti-Murdoch agenda on.
No less convenient for some is the impression being created that such practices were unique to the Murdoch organisation. It is just about possible to argue that the cut-throat competition that followed Murdoch's arrival on the British media scene meant that blind eyes were turned to borderline criminal methods, so long as the stories they produced helped to increase circulation. But it is disingenuous to believe that the News of the World was alone in crossing the line. Other names were mentioned during Wednesday's parliamentary debate, but passed over in the reporting. This is by no means an exclusively Murdoch phenomenon, and to identify it as such is wrong.
Second, the phone-hacking itself. There would appear to be no doubt whatever that Milly Dowler's phone was hacked after she went missing, but before her body was found, or that messages were deleted by a third party to make room for more, and that this was done at the behest of a journalist with a view to bagging an "exclusive". Whatever the purpose, it was reprehensible in the extreme, giving her family hope that she might be alive. But the fact that a name and numbers appear in the extensive records of a private investigator, does not of itself mean that the phone was hacked. Any journalist or investigator has an extensive contacts list, which includes personal and ex-directory numbers obtained quite legitimately. It will be scant comfort to all those informed by the police that their names were on the investigator's list. But their privacy may be intact.
Third, culpability. The obtaining of confidential information is a two-way process. So far, the blame has attached almost entirely to the investigator, Glenn Mulcaire, whose records are being combed by the police, and the News of the World. Yet those who held the information and divulged it are equally culpable. They were trusted with sensitive personal data ? police archives, car licence-plates, NHS records ? and they betrayed, or more likely sold, that trust. Hacking takes human, as well as technical, expertise.
One reason why attention has focused on the recipient rather than the supplier may be the difficulty of tracing the latter (or the reluctance of the police to pursue their own). But the opprobrium directed to the News of the World has tended to concentrate on morality, when criminality would be at least as appropriate. Phone-hacking is a crime. If it was evident, as on occasion it was, that a newspaper had relied on hacked information, the police could have pursued it.
But, fourth, not everything is so clear-cut. There is a get-out clause: the famous (in journalistic circles) public interest defence. This is how The Daily Telegraph was able to get away with the sordid reality that its string of exclusives about MPs' expenses relied on stolen data that it had bought. It is, to put it mildly, hard to fathom how hacking the phone of a 7/7 victim's relative could ever be in the public interest, but what if, say, it highlighted some criminal shortcoming in the emergency services?
The line that defines where the public interest lies can be slender in the extreme. Nor is there always agreement about where it runs. Remember the controversies stirred by many of the WikiLeaks revelations. There are times when one person's right to know is another person's violation of privacy. Even the sainted BBC had to admit ? after a Panorama programme in which it appeared to suggest it was above such things ? that it employed private detectives to help make its investigative programmes, insisting that their use had to comply with the Corporation's guidelines.
And, finally, fifth. If, as you must, you grant that dubious and even illegal journalistic techniques ? not just hacking phones, but disguise, subterfuge, secret recording and the like ? go beyond the News of the World, and if you also admit that the purpose of the investigations cannot always be defined as being in some high-flown public interest, then you must look beyond the Murdoch stable to the culture of the popular press in Britain. And from there it is not hard to conclude that market competition, the journalistic rat-race, and a neglect of basic training, have combined to bring the newspapers to the pretty pass they have reached today.
One consequence ? extroardinary, spectacular ? is the death of a great, but tarnished, newspaper. Another ? more prosaic, but highly damaging ? is the regrettable tendency for all newspapers to be tarred with the same brush of immorality and ruthless self-interest.
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinio...y-condemning-murdoch-is-too-easy-2308684.html
(podcast)After the shock closure of the News of the World, Dan Sabbagh hosts a discussion on the fallout from the phone-hacking scandal engulfing News International. He's joined by:
* Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, who discussed with Downing Street officials David Cameron's employment of former News of the World editor Andy Coulson at No 10;
* Nick Davies, the Guardian reporter who broke the phone-hacking story. He tells us how the story emerged, and considers what revelations might still lie in store;
Yeah, that's the thing. But I have to say, if Callaghan said 2+2 was 7, Thatcher said the answer to the question was 6. It's more accurate, but it's still wrong.I agree with much of what you have to say.
She was right for the times. Britain had became stupidly left-wing in the 30 years following the second world war.
The left had ultimately put Britain in a position whereby a conservative that far to the right was electable. Not just once, but three times...
It's true. But we need to do something about it.Sure some of you are taking the moral high ground, but if the general public didn't find sleazy things interesting, then NotW and other such red tops would not exist. You know I am right too, and no amount of arguing can dispute that point. Your fellow human beings are for the most part depraved and like to hear of bad things happening to other people. It makes them feel better about themselves, hence why reality TV is so popular.
Murdoch and others can and have successfully argued "I am giving what the readers want" and they would be 100% correct. How they got it is questionable, dubious and I agree fully reprehensible, but it is only now that the "moral majority" is making a stink over it?
To use Churchill's words, I'd like to see Brooks bound, laid on the street of Delhi, and trampled over by the Vice-Roy, in an elephant.One of the funniest things about this thing was that while the Guardian was the only paper reporting on the hacking last year, Rebekah Brooks was quoted saying that Alan Rusbridger (the Guardian's editor) would be "on the floor, begging for mercy" by the end of it.
How times change.
Sure some of you are taking the moral high ground, but if the general public didn't find sleazy things interesting, then NotW and other such red tops would not exist. You know I am right too, and no amount of arguing can dispute that point. Your fellow human beings are for the most part depraved and like to hear of bad things happening to other people. It makes them feel better about themselves, hence why reality TV is so popular.
Murdoch and others can and have successfully argued "I am giving what the readers want" and they would be 100% correct. How they got it is questionable, dubious and I agree fully reprehensible, but it is only now that the "moral majority" is making a stink over it?
At the same time, the Murdochs must have come to understand that a sort of doomsday machine is operating against them, a destructive process that cannot be stopped. One line of police enquiry leads to another, one revelation produces a fresh disclosure, the pace quickens, examples of bad practice multiply, and parliament becomes concerned.
https://twitter.com/#!/ExNOTWJournoin my possession:transcripts of 37 text messages sent by NEWSINTERNATIONAL executive to various staff over the years.Who could they be from?
Hard to have any sympathy for the dead rat scented muck-raking gargoyles from the NoW who openly acknowledge that their renegade modus operandi's aim is to destroy peoples lives.