Obviously this is starting to quieten down a little now, given Parliament is on recess (so no more opportunity for juvenile behaviour or select committe hearings for a couple of months), etc, but stuff still keeps coming out.
For instance - from, naturally, The Guardian:
So, it would appear that James Murdoch wasn’t accurate on Tuesday and has every chance of being called back in front of a committee to explain what he actually said. I’m not saying he was lying - he very well may not have remembered - but this doesn’t look good. Interesting that his former employees have thrown him under the bus too. I guess if you take away their jobs by closing down the paper they work on, they’re probably going to be somewhat bitter.
ETA: Just for clarification - the “For Neville” email is an email sent by Glenn Mulcaire, one of the private investigators, to Neville Thurlbeck, a reporter for NotW, containing transcripts of hacked emails from Gordon Taylor (head of the Professional Footballers Association). In other words, Murdoch Junior should have been aware of the existence of an email in the NotW’s system that referenced actual evidence of phone hacking.
He sat there squirming as his father fumbled and fumferred his way through his answers. When it was his turn, his “polite tone and respect” was utter bullshit. Plain to see, plain to hear, body language amazingly easy to read.
He was enraged to be put in the position.
Asshole. He and his crew whored themselves at the expense of dead people. They’re not all under arrest… why ?
Yeah, you can definitely be forgiven for not reading through 10 pages of this thread to find out! The snapshot is that the corruption appears to be so endemic that members of the police were effectively on the payroll of NI to turn a blind eye to this - it’s obviously a bit more nuanced than this in actuality, but that’s the basic crux of the matter.
So they’re not in jail now, because they were not investigated properly earlier - or perhaps not even investigated at all.
There is a valid point to be made that there are other serious issues in the news that have been taken off of front pages in favor of the phone hacking scandal. **That **was not the way to make it.
OTOH, Mitch Benn sang one of his little songs on **The Now Show **on Friday making the same point, but without the “Oh my god, what the hell is wrong with these people” factor. Much better.
Not why these things were done, or by who, or even how they were covered up, but why they are being brought to light now.
My own feeling- all media outlets have their own skeletons in their closets, some may even be as bad as, or maybe even worse than the current NI scandal.
However, with BSkyB about to be taken over by Newscorp, it may well have been in somebody’s interest (financial or otherwise) to ensure that Murdoch and NI’s misdeeds came to light sooner rather than later. Certainly, that venture has collapsed.
Follow the money, follow the power, follow the winners from this or, possibly, I’m just being far too paranoid and cynical.
Way too cynical. This is happening because the Guardian took their role as journalists seriously, and because they’re owned and administered by a trust and not as part of some corporate conglomerate.
The Guardian has been trying to break this story for many years. The Police, The Judiciary and The Governments of the Day and News International have conspired to keep it under wraps.
It is only through the dogged tenacity of a handful of celebrities coupled with the crucial spark of the tampering with a murdered teenagers phone messages that has forced the Government and the Police to act.
Only one liberal newspaper, out of the entire constellation of UK power and influence from Govt, thru Law enforcement to the entirety of the rest of the media have pursued this story.
Then you had the likes of Boris Johnson who said this in 2010 when he was asked if he was completely satisfied with the way the Met handled the allegations of phone tapping:-
The answer is yes. I am completely satisfied…This is completely spurious and political…a song and dance about nothing… a load of codswallop…which is being whipped up by the Guardian and the Labour Party with a view to trying to embarrass the Prime Minister’s official spokesman
It seems this story just won’t die. Sarah Payne’s mother’s phone now appears to have been hacked. The kicker? The phone was a personal gift to her from Rebekah Brooks. The icing on the cake? Payne wrote a column in the final edition of the NotW about her upset at seeing her “friends” at the NotW now out of jobs. Friends indeed.
I may be accidentally conflating Payne and Dowling, but I seem to recall the last Private Eye suggested Payne coming in to support the NotW wasn’t her actively volunteering, but Brooks calling in a favour.
I am completely unsurprised that Sara Payne was on the list no doubt a revalation about the McCanns is just around the corner), but I had no idea that they had got her to write a piece for the last News of the world.
Even if Rebekah Brooks is completely innocent, and knew nothing at all about the hacking at the time (and there isn’t a font big enough for that ‘if’), she **must **have had some inkling of who was on the list by then, and **still **asked her to write it. She really is a completely evil, isn’t she?
Honestly, at this point, i’m expecting the families of the two girls in the Soham case and of Jamie Bulger to get phone calls from the police soon. There really doesn’t seem to be a low to which they will not stoop.
