Be Excellent To Each Other

I have genuinely no idea what is going to happen in the end of this mess...

The public, being so disgusted at the antics of tabloid newspapers, keep on buying them.

The possibility that Rupert Murdoch would choose to close a 168-year-old newspaper, a profitable one at that, are nil. It’s just that the man at the top, who once called all the shots himself, isn’t alone anymore.

News Corp is a family-run company—and, more and more, a family imbroglio.

Some of the intrigue:

Rupert has ceded substantial power to his son James, who made the decision to close the News of the World. While James’ power is part of a calculated succession plan, he also has his own leverage: he’s his father’s closest family ally in accommodating Wendi—the patriarch’s divisive third wife. His father needs his support. James has an often tense relationship with his sister, Elisabeth, who has a tense relationship with Wendi. Elisabeth has built her own media company, which her father bought this year—giving her great say within News Corp. James and Elisabeth’s relationships, indeed many of the family relationships, are facilitated by Elisabeth’s husband Matthew Freud, the most famous, and most famously slippery, PR man in London. One of Freud’s closest friends is Rebekah Brooks, the CEO of News International, who almost everybody believes needs to be fired. Rebekah, counseled by Matthew, has become James’ most dedicated lieutenant. James and Matthew are determined not to fire her (indeed, she is an important instrument in Matthew’s business). As it happens, Wendi doesn’t like Rebekah. Rupert, who has described Rebekah as a social climber in his family, can’t press for her ouster for fear of siding with Wendi against his children. Rupert’s oldest son Lachlan, once the presumed heir and now a sullen presence in Australia, fights with his brother and is most closely aligned with his sister Elisabeth. Their older half sister, Prudence, is aligned with James. Ultimately, they will have four votes between them when it comes to running the company—with no tie breaking mechanism.

It is really kicking off in Parliament at the moment. Also, Gordon Brown was hacked too? And by The Times?

Journalists from across News International repeatedly targeted the former prime minister Gordon Brown, attempting to access his voicemail and obtaining information from his bank account, his legal file as well as his family's medical records.

There is also evidence that a private investigator used a serving police officer to trawl the police national computer for information about him.

That investigator also targeted another Labour MP who was the subject of hostile inquiries by the News of the World, but it has not confirmed whether News International was specifically involved in trawling police computers for information on Brown.

Separately, Brown's tax paperwork was taken from his accountant's office apparently by hacking into the firm's computer. This was passed to another newspaper.

Brown was targeted during a period of more than 10 years, both as chancellor of the exchequer and as prime minister. Some of the activity clearly was illegal. Other incidents breached his privacy but not the law. An investigation by the Guardian has found that:

• Scotland Yard has discovered references to both Brown and his wife, Sarah, in paperwork seized from Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator who specialised in phone hacking for the News of the World;

• Abbey National bank found evidence suggesting that a "blagger" acting for the Sunday Times on six occasions posed as Brown and gained details from his account;

• Brown's London lawyers, Allen & Overy, were tricked into handing over details from his file by a conman working for the Sunday Times;

• Details from his infant son's medical records were obtained by the Sun, who published a story about the child's serious illness.

Brown joins a long list of Labour politicians who are known to have been targeted by private investigators working for News International, including the former prime minister Tony Blair and his media adviser Alastair Campbell, the former deputy prime minister John Prescott and his political adviser Joan Hammell, Peter Mandelson as trade secretary, Jack Straw and David Blunkett as home secretaries, Tessa Jowell as media secretary and her special adviser Bill Bush, and Chris Bryant as minister for Europe.

The sheer scale of the data assault on Brown is unusual, with evidence of attempts to obtain his legal, financial, tax, medical and police records as well as to listen to his voicemail. All of these incidents are linked to media organisations. In many cases, there is evidence of a link to News International.

Scotland Yard recently wrote separately to Brown and to his wife to tell them that their details had been found in evidence collected by Operation Weeting, the special inquiry into phone hacking at the News of the World. It is believed that this refers to handwritten notes kept by Mulcaire, which were seized by police in August 2006 and never previously investigated. Brown last year asked Scotland Yard if there was evidence that he had been targeted by the private investigator and was told there was none.

Journalists who have worked at News International say they believe that Brown's personal bank account was accessed on several occasions when he was chancellor of the exchequer. An internal inquiry by Abbey National's fraud department found that during January 2000, somebody acting on behalf of the Sunday Times contacted their Bradford call centre six times, posing as Brown, and succeeded in extracting details from his account.

Abbey National's senior lawyer sent a summary of their findings to the editor of the Sunday Times, John Witherow, concluding: "On the basis of these facts and inquiries, I am drawn to the conclusion that someone from the Sunday Times or acting on its behalf has masqueraded as Mr Brown for the purpose of obtaining information from Abbey National by deception."

Abbey National were not able to identify the bogus caller who tricked their staff. It is a matter of public record that a Sunday Times reporter frequently used the services of a former actor, John Ford, who specialised in "blagging" confidential data from banks, phone companies and the Inland Revenue (now HM Revenue & Customs).

Also in January 2000, one of the paper's reporters used a conman named Barry Beardall, who was subsequently jailed for fraud, to trick staff at Brown's solicitors, Allen & Overy, into handing over details from his personal file. A tape made by Beardall at the time reveals that he claimed to be an accountant from the "Dealson group of companies" and that they were interested in buying Brown's flat. Beardall also practised trickery in an attempt to provide Sunday Times stories about Blair, the then prime minister, and Labour's candidate for the mayor of London, Frank Dobson.

Confidential health records for Brown's family have reached the media on two different occasions. In October 2006, the then editor of the Sun, Rebekah Brooks, contacted the Browns to tell them that they had obtained details from the medical file of their four-month-old son, Fraser, which revealed that the boy was suffering from cystic fibrosis. This appears to have been a clear breach of the Data Protection Act, which would allow such a disclosure only if it was in the public interest. Friends of the Browns say the call caused them immense distress, since they were only coming to terms with the diagnosis, which had not been confirmed. The Sun published the story.

Five years earlier, when their first child, Jennifer, was born on 28 December 2001, a small group of specialist doctors and nurses was aware that she had suffered a brain haemorrhage and was dying. By some means which has not been discovered, this highly sensitive information was obtained by news organisations, who published it over the weekend before Jennifer died, on Monday 6 January 2002.

In 2003, Devon and Cornwall police discovered that one of their junior officers was providing information from the police national computer to a network of private investigators. The Guardian has established that one of these investigators, Glen Lawson of Abbey Investigations in Newcastle upon Tyne, used this contact to commission a search of police records for information about Brown on 16 November 2000. Lawson also commissioned searches related to two other Labour MPs – Nick Brown and Martin Salter.

Lawson made these searches on behalf of journalists, a previously unreported court hearing was told. Transcripts obtained by the Guardian show that the search on Martin Salter was made at a time when the News of the World, then edited by Brooks, was attacking him for refusing to support the paper's notorious "Sarah's law" campaign to name paedophiles. Lawson currently refuses to name the journalists who commissioned him.

An attempt to prosecute this network was blocked by a West Country judge, Paul Darlow, who shocked police by ruling that it would be a misuse of public money to pursue the case. However, Devon and Cornwall police contacted the office of the then chancellor to warn him that he had been a victim, as they also did with his two Labour colleagues.

Brown's tax paperwork was obtained from the offices of his accountants, Auerbach Hope, in late 1998. The first sign that the records had been taken came when a journalist from the now defunct Sunday Business called the accountants to say that they had been passed a copy of the records, including a schedule of Brown's income for the most recent year.

The journalist acknowledged that the paperwork showed no sign of any kind of wrongdoing on Brown's part but wanted to do a story about the fact that it had been stolen.

Police came and found no sign of any break-in. The originals of the documents were still in Brown's file, which ruled out the possibility that they had been taken from the firm's dustbins. Auerbach Hope discounted theft by an insider on the grounds that they would have stolen paperwork which showed wrongdoing and thus had greater media value. They concluded that the most likely explanation was that somebody had hacked into their computer systems, specifically targeting Gordon Brown.

Senior Labour figures also strongly suspect that a news organisation broke the law to obtain the emails that led to the resignation in April 2009 of Brown's close aide Damian McBride. The emails, which disclosed a scheme to smear Tory MPs, had been exchanged between McBride and a Labour party activist, Derek Draper. The Labour figures believe that the emails were hacked from Draper's computer and that their contents were then sent to the political blogger Guido Fawkes, whose stories were then followed by Fleet Street.

It is really kicking off in Parliament at the moment.

Confidential health records for Brown's family have reached the media on two different occasions. In October 2006, the then editor of the Sun, Rebekah Brooks, contacted the Browns to tell them that they had obtained details from the medical file of their four-month-old son, Fraser, which revealed that the boy was suffering from cystic fibrosis. This appears to have been a clear breach of the Data Protection Act, which would allow such a disclosure only if it was in the public interest. Friends of the Browns say the call caused them immense distress, since they were only coming to terms with the diagnosis, which had not been confirmed. The Sun published the story.

Our PM really does have some fucking lovely friends.

Interesting point made on The Bugle podcast (as both Andy and John squirmed to avoid the issue that the podcast is sponsored by The Times, but being who they are, they couldn't avoid the issue, so couldn't go for the throat, which is somewhat disappointing).

When Rebecca Brooks made her 'tearful' speech to the NotW team last week saying that the newspaper was closing, that speech was behind closed doors, but someone, against the orders of the paper, recorded it on their phone and passed it to the BBC. So, that evening, the BBC ran with playing the poor quality audio recording, obtained illegally outside the knowledge of the person speaking, on a phone, in response to the story regarding illegal phone eavesdropping

He's got a good point about the papers pushing the views of th eproprieters, which is, to my mind, the most pernicious aspect ofthe media today.

You supply the pictures, I'll supply the war

Brown ... was blinded by power...

Every proprietor in history has done it. William Hearst was so good at it he became the subject of the most overrated greatest film ever and is fondly remembered as a key cause of the Spanish-American war.



I think it was Asquith who described the power of the press as like that of the harlot: power without responsibility.

Define "journalist", though... LewieP would have to sign!

As would Gaywood, WTB and fair few others here.

the joke

Gah. As I've poitned out, it's really rather, well, simple minded, to look at it that way. Yes of course there are some poeple, as within any profession, that are unpleasant people. Yes there are ambitious wastes of air, yes there is corruption. But to paint the whole profession that way is, as I've said, just silly. Really, really silly, and very much beneath you. It’s either that or deliberately provocative hyperbole, but you seem to have made pretty clear that it’s a genuinely held belief.

I've given as one simple example the Paul Foot awards - look it up, and look at the people who've been awarded it. Those sort of journalists aren't completely rare, you know. Those are the run of the mill investigative journalists – people who actually care about exposing wrong doing, injustice and corruption.

Yes, some of that requires underhanded (but almost always legal) methods - but the fact you find that more worrying that the wrongdoing they expose with it is bonkers.

Investigative journalism is crucial in a democracy. It holds both the authorities and big business to account. The country would be a very different place if the regular incompetences, corruptions, nepotisms and so on weren’t exposed. Is that preferable to the, yes, occasionally flawed media we have now?

I’ve also pointed out about local papers – they do, despite a lot of them being owned by the hated Mail Group, do a lot of good locally, campaigning on local matters like maternity unit closures, dodgy goings on at grammar school governors and cheap to fix road safety issues that the council couldn’t be arsed with, to give but three examples form the last three years just form one of our local papers.

Of course most journalists, as I've already pointed out, just report on current affairs. Just telling us about stuff that happens, from the court reporter in the local paper to the foreign affairs team at The Times. Are they all scumbags? I hardly think we can call John Simpson and his ilk scumbags, can we? And would we prefer they didn’t all exist, and we didn’t know what was going on anywhere?

Seriously, stop being so silly.

Oh, and on the Guardian thing – is it possible that the Guardian didn’t spell out the stuff to the Select Committee at the time because its lawyers told it not to? Perhaps due to insufficiently robust evidence. The fact they didn’t publish at the time does rather suggest that may have been relevant. And the fact that you’re using that far from clear cut example of the Guardian not being whiter than white as an example why even they’re scumbags, being happy to discount the good they‘ve done in this case, and numerous others, is risible.

But then there’s absolutely no point in arguing this with you, because you’re not going to change your mind or accept the remotest possibility that your perception of the world may be slightly off-base.

I’ve got a lot of work to do today, but I’ll doubtless be back on here continuing to bang my head against the wall, as, despite the fact you’re impervious to counter arguments, I do enjoy it. You’re like crack, Cavey.

As would Gaywood, WTB and fair few others here.

I have not claimed we should abolish the Press, merely that I think many of them are scumbags and specifically not just restricted to NI?

Sorry mate, I was out all of yesterday and am tied up for much of today also, so this is a quick holding post just to let you know that I'll get back to you on this.

Some misunderstandings there, to say the least and I've already quoted an ex-Deputy Prime Minister (and victim of phone hacking) who has explicitly claimed that 'all the papers and hundreds of journalists are involved', or somesuch.

Plus, numerous examples where the so-called quality press have fallen well short of the high ideals that they routinely espouse and use as criteria to judge others.

I have specifically excluded the BBC from my criticisms, from the start, and I have not claimed we should abolish the Press, merely that I think many of them are scumbags. (Which, given the revelations that continue to flow from the media, I don't think is too unreasonable a position?)

Also, I am not as inflexible as you make out; I am sufficiently flexible to have change my voting allegance during the last General Election, for example. I do admit when I am wrong, which is frequently, but this is, after all, only a personal opinion, not claimed objective fact.

I think it would be appropriate for me to sign it, and I would do so happily.

We may only be a humble little blog, but TUAW runs an ethically tight ship. We're not allowed to keep any review samples, for example -- we always give them away to readers. We've never taken any editorial direction from anyone higher up and if we had legitimate beef with HuffPo or AOL we could voice it (TechCrunch, a sister site, does so regularly). We have nothing to do with the adverts on the site (which is a completely different side to the company), so ad spend cannot influence our editorial. We always attempt to reach out to companies we write about for their side of a story, although we rarely receive responses.

Yeah, I'd probably happily sign anything that committed me to basic ethics, as long as all it held me to was publicly apologising when I got it wrong, rather than a massive fine or something (which could be for repeat offenders).

Dude, if you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear.

On reflection over past 30 years amstrad biz ,football,apprentice N.O.W not been too bad to me. They were balanced compared to D.Mail scum

Interesting article by George Monbiot at the Guardian, who is quite anti journliast, as it turns out.

Monbiot is, however, also anti fact. If a same Journalist wrote the same article I'd more likely believe it, even if the exact same rules were used.

I only came across his name as a result of an article he wrote on tax earlier in the year. It is hard to say how incorrect, hysterical, badly researched and downright dangerous it was in the 'facts' presented, and the initial reception they received. Can't find the article, but a response (from a Lib Dem, of all people) is here

Some MPs have called for News Corporation’s purchase of the 61% of BSkyB it does not already own to be delayed, while Britain’s media regulator investigates whether the firm is a “fit and proper” owner of the satellite-TV company. That is a stretch. The acquisition, which this newspaper thought was fair, is a matter of competition law. The regulator can find a broadcaster to be unfit, and yank its licence, at any time.

It also misses the point. Mr Murdoch is a ferocious businessman who has helped steer media through a treacherous digital transition. But if it is proven that News Corporation’s managers condoned lawbreaking, they should not be running any newspaper or television firm. They should be in prison.

Given the uselessness of the Press Complaints Commission throughout, this affair will only encourage demands for regulatory oversight of the press. This would probably do more harm than good. Britain already has the toughest libel laws in the world, which have been misused repeatedly to protect the rich and the powerful; and giving the state power to regulate the press is a dangerous temptation to governments.

Gaywood's too short to be a journalist.

Yeah, I was going to use WTB as the joke, but I thought he'd stopped, as he was doing a law conversion course.

Guido Fawkes says that there is info incoming that implicates Piers Morgan in the hacking stuff.

Guido Fawkes says that there is info incoming that implicates Piers Morgan in the hacking stuff.

Guido Fawkes says that there is info incoming that implicates Piers Morgan in the hacking stuff.

Oh how wonderful. He's one scumbag I'd love to see hanged.

Now I'm interested

Yeah, and? No one has said that it's limited to people at NI.

I don't like to wish death on people... but fortunately Piers Morgan isn't people.

I'm not seeing many people defending tabloid scumbags in this thread, guy.

I prefer quoting Mark Twain. "I have never wished death on anybody, but I have read certain obituaries with great pleasure."

Any excuse.

A series of staff appointments followed. In 1963 he was in Nassau when he was ordered to investigate a party of Cuban exiles that had infiltrated Andros Island, part of the Bahamas. His seaplane landed in thick mud and Pine-Coffin decided that his only chance of reaching dry land was to strip off.

On coming ashore, plastered in mud and wearing only a red beret and a pair of flippers, he was confronted by a party of armed Cubans. Mustering as much authority as he could in the circumstances, he informed the group that they were trespassing on British sovereign territory and were surrounded.

The following morning, when the Royal Marines arrived to rescue him they were astonished to find him and his radio operator in a clearing standing guard over the Cubans and a pile of surrendered weapons. He was appointed OBE.

*IF* it is eventually revealed that most national tabloid newspapers routinely did stuff like this (as was AFAIK/IIRC stated during Friday's edition of Newsnight anyway, with actual stats etc., NOTW only being 5th on the 'list' with the DM top I think?), you don't think this undermines yours and others' vehement opposition to the 'many journalists are scumbags and their profession reprehensible' viewpoint?

They'd all sell their grannies as and when required, by any means necessary - that's my take on it.

Needless to say I agree with you Chinny, 'scum the lot of them' pretty well sums things up nicely.

Personally, I think this amply demonstrates that the likes of The Guardian have feet of fucking clay in this specific matter, just as the rest of their lousy, stinking, disreputable 'profession' in my view

Pardon me if I'm sceptical about the professional integrity and whistle-blowing capabilities of journalists against their own, as largely employed by vastly powerful media companies etc. and an insatiable appetite for the next (usually salacious and highly profitable) 'story', not to mention the (self) interests of the post-Blair, No.10 media machine itself.