Up until now, News International and the government have sought, and to some extent succeeded, in making the phone-hacking story one that is largely about celebrities.
Even for popular celebrities, there is little automatic public sympathy for the idea that a journalist or a private detective might listen in to their voicemail messages. ‘They use the media when it suits them, so they can hardly complain when they turn on them,’ is one fairly oft heard view. ‘If they’re daft enough to leave sensitive messages, serves them right,’ is another.
The Murdoch Empire strategy has been to lower the political temperature so that the takeover of BSkyB could go ahead (Andy Coulson’s departure from Downing Street was an important part of that) and to lower the legal temperature via a settlement fund, through which they hope to avoid the full extent of illegal phone-hacking coming out in open court.
The latest revelations concerning Milly Dowler have the capacity to change all of the above. I was out and about this afternoon, not plugged in to the media, and first realised something was going on via twitter. I asked what the fuss was about, and was pretty shocked when I got the answer. I passed it on at a charity event this evening, to people who had not heard the news, and the shock and disgust was palpable in a way that it had not been for Sienna Miller, Andy Gray, John Prescott et al.
The central issue – illegal activity by the media – has not changed. But the public and political reaction almost certainly has. I have argued for some time that this is an issue that just won’t go away. Never was that clearer than tonight.
totally right Alistair and can you promote this Facebook group encouraging boycott of the NOTW
http://www.facebook.com/home.php?sk=group_246481098711235
But who is going to change the behaviour of the newspapers? The editors? No way. PCC? No way. Government? No way.
The only way that journalists will start to act appropriately is if the public stops buying those newspapers. I think NOTW sales will dip for a while, but do you really think the public’s appetite for this is so strong that they will vote with their feet?
It really shows the Mail’s agenda when the front page is filled with lies about the Dillnot report rather than any mention of this. Given the paper’s obsession with crime stories it does make you wonder what the Mail has to hide?
I already wrote to my MP, never done it before. So angry that they made the parents think she was alive by deleting the voicemails to free up space for new ones
Mr Cameron? Hello? Anybody home? When are you going to do something about this? And meanwhile I should like to point out that each and every one of this filthy rag’s readers should be considered as people who condone, approve even, of this behaviour. Maybe ask the newsagent for a brown paper bag next time you buy it.
As some of you will know, I’ve been campaigning on this and related issues for some time – mainly through DemocracyFail on Twitter. Never before have I seen such fury and revulsion at the actions of the News of the World.
As I write, it’s hard to imagine how Rebekah Brooks can survive. There’s also a planned boycott of the News of the World this Sunday, 10th July. Roy Greenslade is one of those leading the call, so this is serious stuff!
But the most pressing issue is the News Corp bid for BSkyB, which Hunt still claims has nothing to do with the phone-hacking. Apparently Ofcom can investigate whether News Corp is a fit and proper company, but this would have to be after the police investigation.
If Hunt continues to push the deal through, it will be a flagrant breach of democratic principles . And if the Labour front bench continue to be so lame on the issue, they will be seriously out of step with public thinking. Hope you agree, Alastair. And hope you will tell them.
I agree with you entirely, the influence in the Dowler case is disgusting.
Please will you confirm Al, that New Labour’s best pal Mr Murdoch and his henchmen were doing all these things without any knowledge of either the security services or the Government of the day, who certainly had access to the same technology as any private detective employed by NOW.
Your confirmation or otherwise would be important to us all: your silence on the subject would be deafening.
Disturbing subject, from start to finish. My heart is breaking for Milly and what happened to her. Torture the family more will you??? Bloody vultures.
Very, very disturbing. There is no need to say what her father would like to do to that bloke – and I know I shouldn’t say this, as a father of a daughter, I’d help him, maybe….. (Maybe put in for personal legal reasons…)
I’m trying very hard to convince myself that he really hadn’t anticipated that Milly’s parents would be calling in and finding the facility full/not full, very very hard. It needs me to think he must be that thick but I’m failing.
As I understand it the police had Milly Dowler’s mobile phone in their possession to monitor any calls she may have recieved? So far so good.
But surely this begs the question, why didn’t they change the pin number of the phone so it couldn’t be hacked? Or, am I missing something here?
I now realise this is rubbish, so please ignore.
The media: the most powerful entity on earth. Power, it is said, to make ‘the innocent guilty and the guilty innocent’. Tomorrow, none of the tabloids we buy will lead on this story, no political leaders we elect will condemn this newspaper, and the process of making innocent will begin…
also interested to keep on seeing the split between the Guardian and Newscorp being pushed further with this story…
If the press would stop being all cosy so as to preserve their sad gravy train antics and the top papers be much more openly critical of bad journalism we would have a new fourth estate worth fighting for…
as it stands I have zero faith in the press complaints commission, note that even the Guardian behaves like a sheep towards bad journo behaviour sometimes and have very little trust in any of them….
Please ignore my previous post on this subject. I was writing whilst under a false assumption/belief.
Superfluous comment. Please delete/ignore.
This is not about illegal activity by the media – that can easily be justified by the public interest argument. Watergate anyone?
But this Milly Dowler stuff … it makes me sick. I’m a journalist and I went into my local pub tonight, and people were angry.. Quite rightly. And for the first time ever, I couldn’t defend my trade.
Ultimately, Murdoch has to take responsibility. As does Rebekka wade (or however she spells her stupid name, with her stupid hair)
It’s basically her UK company, she’s the chief executive, and also the former editor. If a British Government Minister had said something as appalling as this, without consulting the family, he would be toast.
So I think RW, your time is up. Your branding is collapsing underneath your red curls
GO GO GO!
We know that professionals in our police force who would be expected to analyse gruesome evidence will have received extensive training and will have trauma counselling available as backup.
The reporters listening to Milly Dowler’s messages will have had none of that support behind them if they had truly gone rogue.
Either these guys are in desperate need of counselling or they are cold, emotionless and incapable of any sense of shame, guilt, remorse or empathy.
I can’t get the song “Hello this is Joanie” out of my head at the moment.
Perhaps a few choruses of “Hello this is Milly, I’m sorry but I’m not home” might penetrate their skulls?
Repulsive and morally bankrupt in every way. With so much power and surrounded by such sychophancy from politicans, the media does seem untouchable. The Sun was boycotted after Hillsborough. I would love to think that such action would prove effective here too. As for root and branch reform, I can not envisage that happening. Such a change in their modus operandi would need a total change of heart. What could more heartless than the actions of the News of the World? Heartless, callous and beyond redemption.
News Corp´s new strategy consists of limited admission of guilt. It has also tried to spread the blame to other newspapers.
News Corp is using “noise tactics” well-known in the PR business.
The central idea is to use additional information in order to distract the attention from the original story.
My guess is that these days the papers are hacking to people´s computers.
News Corp´s takeover of BSkyB will have dire consequences for the British media.
But Rupert Murdoch commands also almost 40% of the UK newspaper market. This fact should invoke an inquiry.
News Corp´s dealings with politicians are not healthy for democracy. As Lance Price has said, Mr Murdoch is considered to be a member of the cabinet. No big decision is taken without thinking about his reaction.
And for years Mr Murdoch has dictated Britain´s stance on Europe.
Mr Murdoch will soon be able to bundle his papers and TV holdings.
Henry Porter asked in the Observer whether Mr Murdoch is above law. He wrote that Murdoch´s influence is so strong that even in parliament the phone-hacking scandal has barely been talked about.
And now Britain is ready to give him even more power by allowing him to buy the rest of BSkyB.
Hardly a recipe for a well-functioning democracy..?
Alistair – you and the Blair government are partly responsbile for this for kow towing to Rupert Murdoch when you had the chance to reign him in – just so he’d back you in the papers.
We’re heading for a totalitarian state with Murdoch effectively governing – and New Labour are as complicit as Cameron and the Tories.
I would appreciate your own guesstimate of what Andy Coulson might have been up to during the lengthy period before and after the last election while employed by the head of this ConDemnation.
I would appreciate your own guesstimate of what Andy Coulson might have been up to during the lengthy period before and after the last election while employed by the head of this ConDemnation.
I knew this snoop’s name was familiar, he has been implicated in a local case – the murder of a man found with an axe in his head.
For those that don’t ‘do’ links (but the source can be found just by googling with …………….. By Paul Bond 22 April 2011 …………………
By Paul Bond 22 April 2011
The arrest of senior
journalists, a limited admission of liability by News International, the
pressing of civil test cases for damages, and the possibility of a
further police investigation into illegal payments to officers, have
deepened the crisis surrounding the News of the World (NoW) phone hacking scandal.
The
case continues to reveal the close relations of the media, police and
politicians. Last week, Prime Minister David Cameron rejected calls for a
public inquiry into phone hacking. He did so in an interview with the
News Corporation channel Sky News. Pre-empting further investigations he
said, “I’m not sure anyone fully knew how widespread it was”.
The
matter first came to light in 2006, when the NoW published stories
concerning members of the royal family. The NoW’s royal editor Clive
Goodman and a private investigator he employed, Glen Mulcaire, were
jailed for four and six months respectively in 2007 for illegally
accessing mobile phone messages.
The line taken by the paper was
that Goodman was a rogue reporter, and Mulcaire an out of control
investigator. The NoW’s then editor, Andy Coulson, resigned, denying any
wider knowledge of phone hacking. He later became Cameron’s director of
communications.
When Metropolitan Police officers searched
Mulcaire’s home, they found 4,332 names, 2,978 mobile phone numbers, and
91 PIN codes to access voicemails. But they interviewed only one
journalist, Goodman, and a senior officer later told MPs that they had
only identified “8 to 12” possible victims. Andy Hayman, who led the
original police inquiry, resigned shortly afterwards and started writing
a column for the Times, another News International paper.
A
number of public figures questioned whether their messages had been
hacked, and suggestions mounted that many politicians had been targeted.
Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown asked the police to investigate
whether his phones had been hacked in 2005-2007 when he was chancellor.
From 2009 the Guardian published further revelations of the scale of hacking. News International invited the Guardian
to submit any evidence of wrongdoing to the police and the Metropolitan
Police obligingly decided that “no additional evidence has come to
light” and refused to open a new inquiry.
It then emerged that
News International (NI, the UK subsidiary of News Corporation) had paid
out more than £1 million in damages and costs to settle claims of
phone-hacking against three people involved in football. These were not
disclosed during the earlier trial because of gagging clauses.
The
Press Complaints Commission (PCC) conducted an investigation that
accepted the News International line at face value. A second
Parliamentary Select Committee said it was quite clear that many
voicemails had been hacked, and that News International showed a marked
“unwillingness to provide detailed information”. One police officer
suggested up to 6,000 people had been intercepted. The Select Committee
found no direct evidence that Coulson had known about the hacking.
In
subsequent evidence to the High Court, Mulcaire admitted that
executives at the NoW were aware of the practice. He confirmed that Ian
Edmondson, the NoW’s assistant editor (news), had asked him to hack
voicemails. Edmondson was sacked. This made the position of Coulson,
Edmondson’s editor at the time, unsustainable, and he resigned as
Cameron’s director of communications. Cameron defended Coulson, saying
he had been “punished twice for the same offence”.
A public
dispute arose between the Metropolitan Police’s acting deputy
commissioner, John Yates, and Director of Public Prosecutions Keir
Starmer QC. Yates had told MPs that the original investigation was
limited by legal advice on the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act
2000. Starmer contradicted this flatly. MP Chris Bryant has suggested
Yates should reconsider his position.
Faced with a rising wave of
civil litigation against the NoW for matters the Metropolitan Police
did not investigate in 2006—and demands for a judicial review of that
investigation from former Scotland Yard commander Brian Paddick—the
force began a new investigation into the hacking, Operation Weeting.
Paddick, who suspects his own voicemail may have been hacked, has called
for another force to conduct the investigation: “Otherwise, certainly
some of the victims of phone-hacking will not be satisfied that the
thing has been investigated thoroughly”.
Two weeks ago Edmondson
was arrested and released on police bail along with chief reporter
Neville Thurlbeck. Among the matters not investigated by the 2006
inquiry was an email “for Neville” containing details of more than 30
messages hacked from the phones of Gordon Taylor, head of the
Professional Footballers’ Association. Thurlbeck denies receiving or
viewing this email.
Three days later News International sought to
alleviate pressure by admitting limited liability for the period
2004-2006. A third senior reporter, James Weatherup, who was news editor
during that period, was subsequently arrested.
The company
offered an unreserved apology and compensation to eight victims of
hacking, although it said it would continue to contest other
allegations. (There were then 24 cases pending.) Among the eight were
Tessa Jowell, culture secretary for the Labour government at the time,
and Joan Hammell, aide to then Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott. The
actress Sienna Miller has indicated her unwillingness to accept the
settlement. A High Court judge has recommended that four test cases,
including hers, should be heard before February 2012.
George
Galloway, who says he has been shown evidence his phone was hacked, said
the apology was a “cynical attempt to protect the company’s chief
executive Rebekah [Brooks née] Wade”. Brooks, who announced the apology,
was editor of the NoW between 2000 and 2003. Labour MP Chris Bryant
told the House of Commons he believed hacking had been conducted at the
NoW from 2002.
Bryant said “members and former members of this
House have said they were warned off pushing this issue in the House and
in select committees. When I raised the question of parliamentary
privilege last September, my friends were told by a senior figure allied
to Rupert Murdoch and a former executive of News International to warn
me that this would not be forgotten”.
When Brooks refused to give
evidence to a Select Committee, MPs decided against issuing a subpoena
to force her to attend. According to former Plaid Cymru MP Adam Price,
this was “to some extent because of what I was told at the time by a
senior Conservative member of the committee, who I know was in direct
contact with NI execs, that if we went for her…they would go for
us—which meant effectively that they would delve into our personal lives
in order to punish [us]”.
An ex-minister in Gordon Brown’s government recently told the Observer
that Murdoch had sent messages to Brown, via a third party, urging him
to take the political heat out of the phone-hacking scandal, which was
in danger of damaging his company. News International dismisses the
claim as “rubbish”.
Both Labour and the Conservatives have close
links with Murdoch’s corporation, and depend on the multibillionaire’s
backing. Cameron has dined with Brooks and Murdoch’s son, James. Former
Labour cabinet minister David Blunkett resigned after disclosure in the
NoW and the Sun of details of his affair with Kimberly Quinn.
Blunkett suspects his phone was hacked, but is pursuing no legal case.
The day after his resignation, he dined with Brooks and has written a
column for the Sun since 2005. The Liberal Democrats challenged
Coulson’s claims to be ignorant of the hacking, but have defended him
in parliament.
There are also close links with the police.
Metropolitan Police Commissioner Paul Stephenson had seven dinners at
the NoW between 2006 and 2010, when his force turned down requests to
reopen the hacking investigation. Three weeks ago the force revealed a
further 20 hospitality meetings with News International. This included a
lunch Andy Hayman had at the Times in February 2006, while he
was conducting the original NoW investigation. Only later were another
five engagements Hayman had at the NoW disclosed.
In 2003 Brooks
told MPs, “We have paid the police for information in the past”. News
International issued a denial, and Brooks said she was speaking
generally rather than specifically about her own paper. Former NoW
journalist Paul McMullan alleges that a fifth of Metropolitan Police
officers have taken money from tabloid journalists for information.
The
Metropolitan Police are now conducting a “scoping exercise” to see if
there are grounds for a criminal investigation. Following the recent
collapse of a murder trial amid allegations of police corruption, the
closer connections between such activity and the political establishment
have begun to emerge.
Jonathan Rees was facing trial for the
murder of Daniel Morgan in a London pub in 1987. The fifth trial brought
in connection with this case collapsed when the Metropolitan Police
discovered four boxes of undisclosed documentation, which the Crown
Prosecution Service decided rendered the proceedings unsustainable. A
senior police officer has admitted that “police corruption was a
debilitating factor” in the failure to investigate.
Rees was a
private investigator who obtained illegal information from a network of
contacts among corrupt police officers, bank workers, and phone company
employees. According to a police intelligence report he was “for a
number of years…involved in the long-term penetration of police
intelligence sources”. Between 1993 and 2000 he was employed by the NoW.
That
year he was convicted of perverting the course of justice, after
planting cocaine to discredit a woman fighting a custody battle. On his
release in 2005 he was re-employed by the NoW, now under Coulson’s
editorship. Rees’s name had not been made public up until now because of
the ongoing court case, but the Guardian reported last month
that it had written about him to Coulson before he took up the Downing
Street post. The paper said that Cameron had been made aware of Rees’s
record and employment before he gave Coulson the job.
I knew this snoop’s name was familiar, he has been implicated in a local case – the murder of a man found with an axe in his head.
For those that don’t ‘do’ links (but the source can be found just by googling with …………….. By Paul Bond 22 April 2011 …………………
By Paul Bond 22 April 2011
The arrest of senior
journalists, a limited admission of liability by News International, the
pressing of civil test cases for damages, and the possibility of a
further police investigation into illegal payments to officers, have
deepened the crisis surrounding the News of the World (NoW) phone hacking scandal.
The
case continues to reveal the close relations of the media, police and
politicians. Last week, Prime Minister David Cameron rejected calls for a
public inquiry into phone hacking. He did so in an interview with the
News Corporation channel Sky News. Pre-empting further investigations he
said, “I’m not sure anyone fully knew how widespread it was”.
The
matter first came to light in 2006, when the NoW published stories
concerning members of the royal family. The NoW’s royal editor Clive
Goodman and a private investigator he employed, Glen Mulcaire, were
jailed for four and six months respectively in 2007 for illegally
accessing mobile phone messages.
The line taken by the paper was
that Goodman was a rogue reporter, and Mulcaire an out of control
investigator. The NoW’s then editor, Andy Coulson, resigned, denying any
wider knowledge of phone hacking. He later became Cameron’s director of
communications.
When Metropolitan Police officers searched
Mulcaire’s home, they found 4,332 names, 2,978 mobile phone numbers, and
91 PIN codes to access voicemails. But they interviewed only one
journalist, Goodman, and a senior officer later told MPs that they had
only identified “8 to 12” possible victims. Andy Hayman, who led the
original police inquiry, resigned shortly afterwards and started writing
a column for the Times, another News International paper.
A
number of public figures questioned whether their messages had been
hacked, and suggestions mounted that many politicians had been targeted.
Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown asked the police to investigate
whether his phones had been hacked in 2005-2007 when he was chancellor.
From 2009 the Guardian published further revelations of the scale of hacking. News International invited the Guardian
to submit any evidence of wrongdoing to the police and the Metropolitan
Police obligingly decided that “no additional evidence has come to
light” and refused to open a new inquiry.
It then emerged that
News International (NI, the UK subsidiary of News Corporation) had paid
out more than £1 million in damages and costs to settle claims of
phone-hacking against three people involved in football. These were not
disclosed during the earlier trial because of gagging clauses.
The
Press Complaints Commission (PCC) conducted an investigation that
accepted the News International line at face value. A second
Parliamentary Select Committee said it was quite clear that many
voicemails had been hacked, and that News International showed a marked
“unwillingness to provide detailed information”. One police officer
suggested up to 6,000 people had been intercepted. The Select Committee
found no direct evidence that Coulson had known about the hacking.
In
subsequent evidence to the High Court, Mulcaire admitted that
executives at the NoW were aware of the practice. He confirmed that Ian
Edmondson, the NoW’s assistant editor (news), had asked him to hack
voicemails. Edmondson was sacked. This made the position of Coulson,
Edmondson’s editor at the time, unsustainable, and he resigned as
Cameron’s director of communications. Cameron defended Coulson, saying
he had been “punished twice for the same offence”.
A public
dispute arose between the Metropolitan Police’s acting deputy
commissioner, John Yates, and Director of Public Prosecutions Keir
Starmer QC. Yates had told MPs that the original investigation was
limited by legal advice on the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act
2000. Starmer contradicted this flatly. MP Chris Bryant has suggested
Yates should reconsider his position.
Faced with a rising wave of
civil litigation against the NoW for matters the Metropolitan Police
did not investigate in 2006—and demands for a judicial review of that
investigation from former Scotland Yard commander Brian Paddick—the
force began a new investigation into the hacking, Operation Weeting.
Paddick, who suspects his own voicemail may have been hacked, has called
for another force to conduct the investigation: “Otherwise, certainly
some of the victims of phone-hacking will not be satisfied that the
thing has been investigated thoroughly”.
Two weeks ago Edmondson
was arrested and released on police bail along with chief reporter
Neville Thurlbeck. Among the matters not investigated by the 2006
inquiry was an email “for Neville” containing details of more than 30
messages hacked from the phones of Gordon Taylor, head of the
Professional Footballers’ Association. Thurlbeck denies receiving or
viewing this email.
Three days later News International sought to
alleviate pressure by admitting limited liability for the period
2004-2006. A third senior reporter, James Weatherup, who was news editor
during that period, was subsequently arrested.
The company
offered an unreserved apology and compensation to eight victims of
hacking, although it said it would continue to contest other
allegations. (There were then 24 cases pending.) Among the eight were
Tessa Jowell, culture secretary for the Labour government at the time,
and Joan Hammell, aide to then Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott. The
actress Sienna Miller has indicated her unwillingness to accept the
settlement. A High Court judge has recommended that four test cases,
including hers, should be heard before February 2012.
George
Galloway, who says he has been shown evidence his phone was hacked, said
the apology was a “cynical attempt to protect the company’s chief
executive Rebekah [Brooks née] Wade”. Brooks, who announced the apology,
was editor of the NoW between 2000 and 2003. Labour MP Chris Bryant
told the House of Commons he believed hacking had been conducted at the
NoW from 2002.
Bryant said “members and former members of this
House have said they were warned off pushing this issue in the House and
in select committees. When I raised the question of parliamentary
privilege last September, my friends were told by a senior figure allied
to Rupert Murdoch and a former executive of News International to warn
me that this would not be forgotten”.
When Brooks refused to give
evidence to a Select Committee, MPs decided against issuing a subpoena
to force her to attend. According to former Plaid Cymru MP Adam Price,
this was “to some extent because of what I was told at the time by a
senior Conservative member of the committee, who I know was in direct
contact with NI execs, that if we went for her…they would go for
us—which meant effectively that they would delve into our personal lives
in order to punish [us]”.
An ex-minister in Gordon Brown’s government recently told the Observer
that Murdoch had sent messages to Brown, via a third party, urging him
to take the political heat out of the phone-hacking scandal, which was
in danger of damaging his company. News International dismisses the
claim as “rubbish”.
Both Labour and the Conservatives have close
links with Murdoch’s corporation, and depend on the multibillionaire’s
backing. Cameron has dined with Brooks and Murdoch’s son, James. Former
Labour cabinet minister David Blunkett resigned after disclosure in the
NoW and the Sun of details of his affair with Kimberly Quinn.
Blunkett suspects his phone was hacked, but is pursuing no legal case.
The day after his resignation, he dined with Brooks and has written a
column for the Sun since 2005. The Liberal Democrats challenged
Coulson’s claims to be ignorant of the hacking, but have defended him
in parliament.
There are also close links with the police.
Metropolitan Police Commissioner Paul Stephenson had seven dinners at
the NoW between 2006 and 2010, when his force turned down requests to
reopen the hacking investigation. Three weeks ago the force revealed a
further 20 hospitality meetings with News International. This included a
lunch Andy Hayman had at the Times in February 2006, while he
was conducting the original NoW investigation. Only later were another
five engagements Hayman had at the NoW disclosed.
In 2003 Brooks
told MPs, “We have paid the police for information in the past”. News
International issued a denial, and Brooks said she was speaking
generally rather than specifically about her own paper. Former NoW
journalist Paul McMullan alleges that a fifth of Metropolitan Police
officers have taken money from tabloid journalists for information.
The
Metropolitan Police are now conducting a “scoping exercise” to see if
there are grounds for a criminal investigation. Following the recent
collapse of a murder trial amid allegations of police corruption, the
closer connections between such activity and the political establishment
have begun to emerge.
Jonathan Rees was facing trial for the
murder of Daniel Morgan in a London pub in 1987. The fifth trial brought
in connection with this case collapsed when the Metropolitan Police
discovered four boxes of undisclosed documentation, which the Crown
Prosecution Service decided rendered the proceedings unsustainable. A
senior police officer has admitted that “police corruption was a
debilitating factor” in the failure to investigate.
Rees was a
private investigator who obtained illegal information from a network of
contacts among corrupt police officers, bank workers, and phone company
employees. According to a police intelligence report he was “for a
number of years…involved in the long-term penetration of police
intelligence sources”. Between 1993 and 2000 he was employed by the NoW.
That
year he was convicted of perverting the course of justice, after
planting cocaine to discredit a woman fighting a custody battle. On his
release in 2005 he was re-employed by the NoW, now under Coulson’s
editorship. Rees’s name had not been made public up until now because of
the ongoing court case, but the Guardian reported last month
that it had written about him to Coulson before he took up the Downing
Street post. The paper said that Cameron had been made aware of Rees’s
record and employment before he gave Coulson the job.
Will the condom head Flashman try to defend his friend Rebekah Brooks and still still socialise with her?
Actually Eastender the story IS on the front of the Mail, but well done for switching the focus away from NOTW.
I worked as a journo for almost a decade (locally not nationally) and am shocked and disgusted by these latest allegations re: NOTW and Milly Dowler’s phone. It is becoming more obvious with each revelation how widespread the practice was, and perhaps still is. Surely it is time for a full, open public investigation into this issue? Of course I always wanted the scoop, the big story during my time as a reporter and thanks to my own initiative and investigative skills sometimes I got it but I would never, ever have stooped to such low levels, the idea would never have occurred to me or indeed to any of my colleagues. Our job as we saw it was to report the news truthfully in a fair accurate way. It was NOT create it and most definitely NOT to manipulate it for the sake of a story. These so called ‘journalists’ and their puppet masters at News Corp bring shame on the profession and should be weeded out and held accountable for their reprehensible actions. Thankfully, I am no longer working in the media and rightly the nation is in uproar about this, yet I remain doubtful we will ever get to the truth. Call me cynical but despite his outrage at these latest revelations, it would not be such fun for DC to share cosy lunches and champagne dinners with News Corp execs if they were taking place in Wormwood Scrubs!
I know I must be sounding as if I’m Pres of the Police’s fan club (if there is one) but I’m hacked off with hacks being taken seriously when they claim they have bought info from them.
It’s easy auto-pilot behaviour on both sides.
We’ve seen how some MPs have faked expenses claims, are we seriously unable to contemplate hacks having done the same for £s and allow everything and everyone to be undermined?
Huhne made a similar assertion and …… oh I can’t go on as I’m choking on my monkey nuts.
I just want to know how much New Labour in Government knew of all these dirty tricks. I believe they had full knowledge: the control freaks amongst them might have been very pleased with the results of such interceptions.
Coulson also must have known of what was going on. Cameron’s error of judgement in not getting rid of him earlier would be a great achilles if Labour had a front bench worth it’s salt, and a leader who could utter . ( Appointing such low life was also a major error. He was damaged goods.)
With luck many NOW and other hacks will end up in gaol after such digraceful criminal behaviour.
There are some people that only watch pap on TV, only listen to pap on radio and only buy papers to see nude pics or to get themselves wound up with hyperbole which by definition is whipped up.
My Grandparents would never have read a Guardian, would never have bought even a weekend edition of the broadsheets and would never want to hear anything good about the left.
People like them had to be reached no matter how distasteful the route.
When you say ‘I believe’ are you saying that about some trustworthy evidence that nobody else has seen or heard of or do you mean you are guessing (and if the latter is there just a smidgen of cynicism)?
Do you believe the security services did not know how phone hacking could be done, and did not do it? If so you are naive.
Do you remember when journalists hacked Prince Charles telecons with Camilla? circa 2006. Labour Government in office at the time. Why was there not a public enquiry at that stage? …..Because TB GB et al were half way up Murdoch’s bottom that is why, as is the new crop of Con Dems.
It is one thing to know how to do something, it’s quite another to do it.
Don’t call me naive when you show yourself to be faithless. You cannot paint everyone with the same filth just because you feel like it.
Yes I do remember the Charles/Camilla hacking; I never listened to or read any of it (even though I can hear and read, as even you can see).
It was mid 90s by the way, NOT during a Labour Govt (although your attempted smear about whoever was in power was spurious anyway)..
Wedding was 2005, you are confused.
Badabing50
We do have a totalitarian state. Murdoch is big, no doubt about it. But not nearly as big as some of the others involved.
I certainly agree with what you say about New Labour and the Tories being equally complicit and that’s why I say we do have a totalitarian state now! e.g. If we had a General Election anytime soon we’d have a Labour or a Tory Government (obviously) but everything would still go on in the same old way as before. Minor skirmishes here and there about the detail but no real difference in outcome. Democracy in this country is now just an illusion.
The three main corners of this triangle that it seems to be, draws concern – News International, the Met, and well, and this can be argued, those out of power in Westminster at the time this was going on. The appointent of Coulson by Cameron is a pointer to the third corner. But I am happy that it can be disputed – it is just a personal view.
But a big question mark can be put on mobile phone companies ethics, in not producing products with enough security advice on page one of their instruction manuals – well, not just on page one, every other page more like. And I am not suggesting they made it easy for all this to be done, nor gave advice for this carry on….
I can understand the revulsion here, but has anyone actually noticed these are actually just allegations? Nothing has been proved yet. I’m no fan of the NOTW but really, please remember, innocent until proven guilty.
She has been shown tonight to have authorised Coulson paying for info, 000s in cash, purportedly to the Police.
I would say that that last bit is also just an allegation; it’s likely to have some truth (though less widespread than is being insinuated).
As said before it’s highly likely she authorised claims made in a double-bluff kind of way; she knew a disreputable ex-convict snoop was still being used but couldn’t be seen to be okaying that whereas kidding each other along about ‘Police insider’ is a different kind of seedy.
I can believe she was lied to about who the real recipients of the wads were, whether they were really people like Mulcaire (or even the in-betweeners, the ‘buyers’ themselves).
She might even come out of all this smelling of roses, having been exposed as very trusting!
There have been suggestions tonight that Police Officers’ bank accounts should be investigated, I think so should be Coulson’s and Mulcaire’s.
After all, it was their paranoid, sadistic tabloid agenda which perverted the minds of creatures like Levi Bellfield, and which drives thousands of other teenage girls into depression and worse. The fact that people everywhere should take such instant and furious offence on her behalf is a blazing testimony to something real and deep and shared. There is that to be grateful to Rupert Murdoch for, indirectly, even though it contradicts everything he represents.
Murdoch rose by peddling a debased version of humanity, and by debasing humanity as much as possible to increase the market. But producing this muck week after week so desensitised his operatives that they saw nothing wrong with tapping the phone of Milly Dowler. Murdoch’s influence is broken by his own product. At last the shit comes home to roost. Which must surely be a lesson to all other kinds of consumerist pornographers and drug dealers.
It seems like most of accepted, received ‘history’ is also going to have to be re-evaluated. If the myth of Murdoch is punctured, as now seems the case, so are the myths he created, like ‘The Loony Left’, ‘Political Correctness’, ‘Chavs’, ‘Scroungers’ and the entire cast-list of grotesque scapegoats in his fantasy world. This is another tipping point in a very important year.has offended a core part of the British identity, ironically enough for a brand parading in the Union Jack whenever profitable. And so the junk press will always now be under suspicion.