Gringo

Politicians have been putting the boot in to the police and the press (and of course each other) but no resignations yet.

Actions speak louder than words

Excellent signing, welcome to the home of league football Shay.

Bojo was on the radio this morning and seems to have changed his tune - a while back he said the hacking was a non-event, trivial and he wouldn't be bothered suing newscorp as it happened all the time (a similar attitude to the newly retired paul stephenson who saw it all as a waste of police resources) - but now Bojo thinks this is quite serious - maybe because it's harming call me dave and boosting bojo's own chances of stepping into his shoes.

He also dropped a bollock by revealing that Yates 'couldn't find my arse with both hands' of the Yard is going to be questioned by the Metropolitan Police Authority Professional Standards committee.

Of course they don't mean what they say - they're politicians.

Otherwise he wouldn't have been allowed to buy channel5 or obtain a broadcasting license.

It's about time someone stood up for the flame haired medusa

heil"]Yesterday, Jeremy Clarkson defended Mrs Brooks in his column in The Sun: 'Rebekah is one of my closest friends and I'm sorry but I cannot accept that she sanctioned the hacking of Milly Dowler's phone, knowing that it would cause the girl's poor parents to believe their beloved daughter was still alive… I'd sooner believe that my mother spends her evenings working as a rent boy.'

So is he saying it's unbelievable that she would sanction hacking - or just she wouldn't sanction hacking that caused the family grief?

And then he goes on to compare hackgate with watergate

He argued that the celebrated US journalists Woodward and Bernstein, who brought down US President Richard Nixon in the Watergate scandal in 1974, would have hacked phones if it had been technically possible.

'Did they hack into Nixon's phone? No. Would they have done so if it had been possible? You betcha. And would that have been justified? I think so.'

lazy lazy comparison jezza.

Further on in the same article

Intriguingly, former Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell – a victim of phone-hacking herself – turned up with her estranged husband, lawyer David Mills. Five years ago, the pair announced they had separated when Mr Mills was accused of corruption in an Italian court, a charge later thrown out. Some observers claimed the split was a ploy to distance herself from his problems, something that Ms Jowell denies.

Poor tessa, butter wouldn't melt in her mouth, tricked by that nasty duplicitous husband but treated so kindly by the british press. And despite being on the losing side at the election nice dave kept her job on the board of the olympics. And now it's reported she was a go between for wade/murdoch and brown.

Of course, her relationship with rupert goes back a long way

torygraph 2001"]

Currently, a rule stating that major newspaper owners cannot own free-to-air channels bars Mr Murdoch from buying either ITV or Channel 5. He owns papers such as The Times and The Sun and has to restrict his television operations to satellite broadcaster BSkyB.

Yesterday, Mrs Jowell said she was reviewing that rule, opening up the possibility of a bid from BSkyB for either Granada or Channel 5. BSkyB shares leapt 38 to 850p on the news, but a spokesman for the company said it would not comment. A well-informed source said that Mr Murdoch was most interested in Channel 5.

However, any change is bound to be seen in some quarters as a reward to Mr Murdoch for his support of Tony Blair. Mr Murdoch said recently that his newspapers could switch their support from New Labour if something was not done to loosen media red tape.

Of course this review took place just a few months after Tessa's stepdaughter had secured a nice role as news review editor on the sunday times. How cosy.

No to vigilante justice!

rupert won't be happy at being forced into this - I can see her as the chief exec of sky news before a year has passed.

And that is what some have been saying is required for a long time.

BIAD

News Corp withdraws bid for BSkyB for now.

fixed

Next few years will be used securing the bskyb's position in order to relaunch the takeover bid sometime after the next general election.

Its the same defence the lying MPs used - it was just the culture of the place, the way things were done, what we were entitled to.

If it's corrupt, if it's bent, if it's damgaing the greater good, then burn it down.

From what I gathered from Newsnight yesterday, the 'fit and proper' test was removed from the competition commission legislation in 2002 so they can only decide it on the grounds of competition.

There is an ongoing 'fit and proper' test for broadcasting licenses. Currently the license is held by bskyb which would be hard to challenge with rupert owning only 38%, but if newscorp were sole owners then the test could be applied to them directly.

Blimey, these rozzers sound as dodgy as hell.

So yates of the yard, who was charged with determining if there was any evidence that the enquiry should be re-opened, asked a few mates in the plod and they said it was all kushtie, so he decided that there was no point in proceeding.

Red Ken (the one before red ed) was on the radio this morning saying how scrupulous yates was and how meticulous he was as he never managed to find any evidence of cash for peerages even though the evidence was all printed in the national press.

The executive, the enforcers and the media all nicely in bed together telling lies to the public.

The referral of the bskyb deal means it is unlikely to proceed before february next year. Hopefully this kerfuffle will all have blown over by then, the deal will go through and rupert can carry on running the country as before.

NOTW have been hacking everyone, the times is accused of hacking bank details and now the sunday times accused of all sorts:

grauniad again"]Gordon Brown is said to be "shocked" after it was alleged the Sunday Times targeted his personal information when he was Chancellor.

Documents and a phone recording suggest "blagging" was used to obtain private financial and property details.

The Browns also fear medical records relating to their son Fraser, whom the Sun revealed in 2006 had cystic fibrosis, may have been obtained.

News International said it would investigate the claims.

So News Intl is widey infected, but no link to the wider news corp.

Today rupert basically asked for the bskyb bid to be referred to OFCOM, and removed the offer of selling sky news. So either he thinks closing notw removes any threat to media (not news) plurality or he's willing to sell the papers and remove idea of competition consequences. Either way, the plan seems to be to direct the argument to focus on the competition issues instead of the 'fit and proper' dillema. Because if rupert isn't fit and proper, what about dirty desmond or the sullivan enshamble - or the two mad brothers acting as dictators on one of the channel islands.

In the saturday grauniad they had an example of a couple in the states jailed under the USA corruption laws and all their assets being seized.

This is becoming dispiritingly predictable. Guess who else they hacked? Can't hotlink so just click.

http://twitpic.com/5o9wj1

The Fox Killer? Has hackgate just gone big stateside.

Unfortunately I doubt the mirror journalists have **** all evidence which will end up damaging the case against rupert. This could be rupe's break.

We of course can’t forget former Labour politician and press baron; Capt Bob...

In part we can actually blame murdoch's presence on Cap'n Bob.

wiki"]

The newspaper passed into the hands of Rupert Murdoch's News Ltd. in 1969, snatching the paper from Robert Maxwell's Pergamon Press after an acrimonious year-long struggle. Maxwell's foreign origin, combined with his political opinions, provoked a hostile response to his bid from the Carrs and from the editor of the News of the World, Stafford Somerfield, who declared that the paper was—and should remain—as British as roast beef and Yorkshire pudding.

News Ltd. arranged to swap shares in some of its minor ventures with the Carrs and by December it controlled 40 percent of the NOTW stock. Maxwell had been supported by the Jackson family (25% shareholders), but Murdoch had gained the support of the Carr family (30%) and then-chairman William Carr.

In January 1969, Maxwell's bid was rejected at a shareholders' meeting where half of those present were company staff, temporarily given voting shares. It was Murdoch's first Fleet Street acquisition. Maxwell accused Murdoch of employing "the laws of the jungle" to acquire the paper and said he had "made a fair and bona fide offer... which has been frustrated and defeated after three months of [cynical] manoeuvring." Murdoch denied this, arguing the shareholders of the News of the World Group had "judged [his] record in Australia."

Illness removed Sir William Carr from the chairmanship in June 1969, and Murdoch succeeded him.

The lovely rupert like a knight on a white horse to save this great old newspaper from some grasping foreigner.

The only question is how/why was this not fully investigated before? The logical conclusion is that (like our political class) the police, CPS and judiciary don't all work for us.

BIAD

This +1

The politicians policeman has apologised for his incompetence

torygraph"]John Yates: I failed victims of News of the World phone hacking

The senior police officer who failed fully to investigate phone hacking has issued an unprecedented apology for letting down the victims.

For a policeman he seems quite unable to find wrongdoing when the evidence is all around him.

No.

We were playing Clark, Baker and Delph ahead of Warnock last season because of just how much Mr Houllier disliked Warnock.

Yet Warnock was continually playing for the first few months of Houllier's reign. Kind of strange that he would just suddenly drop him if he disliked him the whole time.

Not reallly. If you want to destroy an employee an often used tact is to try to give themselves the rope to hang themselves with. Warnock's performances got more random by the week. Obviously one message or other wasn't getting through.

Warnock is a good player. Obviously he had serious problems last year, both with the management and inside his own head.

Tame those demons, you''ve got a good player.

Rupert is in the UK to do something, he isn't here as a faciliator. So by the end of the visit we will see a new appointment at one of three important roles:

* Chief Exec NewsCorp (current holder James Murdoch)

* Chief Exec NewsIntl (current holder Rebekah Brooks)

* Chairman of Judicial Inquiry into Media Influence (current holder n/a)

Sorry Gringo but the last few pages gave examples of where labour had tried to make out they didn't cosy up to Murdoch or even that it stopped with Blair.. So asking in what capacity Brown attended the wedding is a fair question

Nah, the last few pages gave examples of posters rubbishing claims of where nulabour had tried to make out they didn't cosy up to Murdoch.

Yes both punch and judy parties have been sucking murdoch for a long time. I think that's been well established and haven't seen anyone argue different. It's only the punch and judy supporters that are keen to see this from a punch vs judy perspective.

What he doesn't address though is how these powers could work if they were non-statutory. How might a more powerful PCC compel Glenn Mulcaire or James Murdoch not only to attend, but to disclose information? And what sanctions could it have? In the end, only sanctions which cost the media very large amounts of money, backed by the threat of withdrawing their licence to operate, will work. Something like the GMC might work - independent of government, but backed by statute and with power to withdraw registration.

You can't use regulation against voldemort, he's too powerful.

A cross-party committee of MPs abandoned plans to force the News International chief executive, Rebekah Brooks, to testify last year after they were warned that their private lives would be investigated, a former member alleged last night.

Adam Price, a former Plaid Cymru MP, told Channel 4 News that a group of committee members shied away from the "nuclear option" of issuing a warrant for Brooks to attend after a senior Tory warned that News International would "go for us".

Adrian Sanders, a Liberal Democrat member of the committee, said that the Tory chairman of the committee, John Whittingdale, had issued the warning. "The chairman himself had made some sort of allusion towards what could happen were we to go down this route. But there was no surprise in that because it was sort of, 'Well, yeh, we knew that from that beginning'."

News corp needs to be dismembered, then regulation may stand a chance.

There may be a cross-party consensus that now is the right time to rein back the massively damaging power of the media. In that situation, there's protection for all in moving together, and being out of step with that popular mood, as Cameron so clearly has been, is actually more damaging.

22 years ago there was a similar cross-party consenus that the beast needed taming

Ali"]Back when I was a journalist, I can remember then Culture Secretary David Mellor warning the press they were ‘drinking in the last chance saloon.’ The Press Complaints Commission was born, a body of the press, by the press, for the press, and one of the reasons self-regulation has failed, and the press have been drinking away merrily in many saloons since.

self regulation for the media ==> corruption

self regulation for the MPs ==> corruption

self regulation for the police ==> corruption

self regulation for the bankers ==> corruption

You get the idea. 'Tis a story of unrequited love and probably brought a tear to that watery, crazed eye, but the people at the top of Labour protected Murdoch without qualification on their watch.

Can't be true as I heard jack straw this morning saying that news corp didn't decide labour policy. Oh and he said news corp editors had their own independent opinions. So instead of sticking the boot in, punch is busy defending it's own skin.