PCC I think you mean, unless PPC stands for “Prurient Pornographers Club” in which case yes, I’m astonished Desmond isn’t a member.
(of course, in every sense of the word Desmond is indeed a “member”)
Hunter S. Thompson does similar (not the same, but ethically speaking VERY SIMILAR) shit and he’s a genius. the point is that it isnt waht they did that makes them scum bags, its the fact that they are british. ok, i kid, i kid. as a journalist I have to say that there is very little that makes me sick, but NoW managed to do it
Apparently the final front page:
No mention of, you know, the current news.
I wouldn’t shed a tear if everyone involved in that abomination died in a particularly fiery fire.
“The World’s Greatest Newspaper”? I feel ill…
I don’t know what you say he did that was similar, but I think his saving grace for all the dumb shit he did was that he wrote frankly. He was openly something of an asshole, at times (and I say that as a fan). The British tabloids manage to maintain an air of breathless shocked sanctimonious outrage about the behaviour of the subject of their stories while being far worse themselves.
Turns out that Yates of the Yard, who was supposedly investigating it all, was having an affair with Brooks/Wade. She was also arrested once for beating her husband, the actor Ross Kemp (Grant from Eastenders).
Hayman, the other cop who was running one of these inquiries and was involved in the murder of de Menezes and the bugging of an MP, was at the same time having an affair with a woman who worked at the Independent Police Complaints Commission. Rumour has it that this affair was kept secret by the NotW in a quid-pro-quo with the cop. He later went to work for The Times, another NI paper.
Where did you read that?
Don’t talk shite. Almost 300 people worked on that newspaper who wouldn’t know one end of a phone hack from another. Designers, sub-editors, picture researchers, advertising sellers. All out of a job because a couple of idiots in the newsroom took it upon themselves to use illegal methods to try and get a scoop.
Blame the people responsible, don’t blame the hard working people trying to earn an honest living who have suffered from the fallout.
I see what you’re saying, but phone hacking was only one of thte bad things about the paper. Even the (presumably) legal stuff was hideous. As Coogan said on Newsnight, it was a misogynistic, asylum seeker hating, single mother hating, xenophobic, hate filled rag.
There’s a lot of anger towards anyone working for anything owned by Murdoch. But the two Times papers are still great papers, and Sky News has had the staff doing proper journalism recently. Actually, thinking of it Sky have had more journos in Libya, Syria and Yemen than the BBC or Channel 4. Hmmm, babies and bath water
I do wonder whether Murdoch might decide newspapers are more hassle than they’re worth, at least in the UK. Of his four British titles, only two made a profit; now one of those has closed, and the backlash may well affect the other. Clearly his priorities are with Sky TV, so it wouldn’t surprise me to see him get rid of the print media altogether.
Tomorrow’s front page headline in the Daily Mirror is saying Murdoch staff tried to access the voicemail of grieving 9/11 families.
I think it says “tried”…they may have done it.
Shouldn’t be a surprise, totally true to form.
Don’t worry, I’m sure the Mirror’s wrongdoings will see the light of day in due course. I’ll be amazed if there is a tabloid in the land (or broadsheet, come to that), that hasn’t run stories based on phone hacking in the past 10 years. These “private investigators” have no brand loyalty - they’ll sell their services to whoever has the cash. It wasn’t Murdoch employees doing the dirty work, it was freelances like Glenn Mulcaire. There’s plenty more like him.
The point is Murdoch paid people to access the voicemail of grieving 9/11 victims i.e. non-UK. Another juristiction. Another society. Another firestorm
Around the time of Murdoch’s purchase of Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal, I believe, I read an extensive profile of Murdoch that said that all he really cared about was publishing traditional newspapers. He got into the TV and other businesses only so that he could have a source of revenue that allowed him to continue publishing his newspapers, even if they ended up being 100 percent subsidized by the other businesses. If that’s true, I don’t see any way that he would ever decide that publishing newspapers are more hassle than they’re worth.
Seriously? Haven’t seen the Mirror. How can Murdoch not be arrested?
As a general rule one is not criminally responsible for what one doesn’t personally do or know about. There are of course any number of statutory exceptions but unless anyone can chip in to say there are some specific strict or absolute criminal liability provisions that apply here, I’d assume the general rule applies. I doubt Murdoch knew much if anything. I suspect it is provable that he knew even less than that.
It’s fun when engaging in RO to assume that the guys at the top “all know about” whatever criminal activity is engaged in by their underlings but it doesn’t accord with my experience. My experience is that juniors often keep anything nefarious about what they do as quiet as possible. They are never sure what the reaction may be from the boss, and the boss doesn’t want to know.
Here’s the Mirror article. And Keith Olbermann tweeted it a couple of hours ago. Oh pleaseohpleaseohplease let there be a sponsor backlash like there was in the UK…
Hmmm. Doesn’t reflect too prettily on the UK general public that such a paper was the most profitable printed publication in the world, does it?
The Mail and the Evening Standard were reporting it and speculating that Hayman and Yates were being blackmailed by the NotW.