Topic: The Leveson Enquiry

[GM]

It's been revelatory so far, some very telling moments in the evidence which just make you stop and realise how public perceptions of people and events have been subject to corruption and manipulation on a grand scale possibly for decades. So much stuff which is so despicable. Charlotte Church's and Chris Jeffries' evidence in particular shows how the tabloid press have been behaving in a way which is bordering on perverting the course of justice in some instances.

[Stu]

It's been revelatory so far, some very telling moments in the evidence which just make you stop and realise how public perceptions of people and events have been subject to corruption and manipulation on a grand scale possibly for decades. So much stuff which is so despicable. Charlotte Church's and Chris Jeffries' evidence in particular shows how the tabloid press have been behaving in a way which is bordering on perverting the course of justice in some instances.

Obviously took a keen interest in the Chris Jeffries account (http://www.newcastle-online.org/nufcforum/index.php/topic,73345.msg2699135.html#msg2699135) but some of the other evidence has been just as compelling.

Hope we get some sort of reform i.e. journalists given strict guidance about justifying a story is in the public interest and not just of interest to the public.

[GM]

It's been revelatory so far, some very telling moments in the evidence which just make you stop and realise how public perceptions of people and events have been subject to corruption and manipulation on a grand scale possibly for decades. So much stuff which is so despicable. Charlotte Church's and Chris Jeffries' evidence in particular shows how the tabloid press have been behaving in a way which is bordering on perverting the course of justice in some instances.

Obviously took a keen interest in the Chris Jeffries account (http://www.newcastle-online.org/nufcforum/index.php/topic,73345.msg2699135.html#msg2699135) but some of the other evidence has been just as compelling.

Hope we get some sort of reform i.e. journalists given strict guidance about justifying a story is in the public interest and not just of interest to the public.

I bet you did! It's unbearable thinking how justice could have been perverted in that case if they'd made mud stick and Jefferies had been tried for Jo's murder. Terrifying.

[Dave]

Decent summary here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/nov/30/leveson-inquiry-learned-so-far

[Aphrodite]

Piers Morgan getting pummelled. Barrister just played a great trick on him to get him to admit listening to McCartney's voicemails Wonderful

[Super Duper Branko Strupar]

Last July Rebekah Brooks told her assembled staff that "worse revelations are yet to come and you will understand in a year why we closed News Of The World". We haven't had to wait a year and the evidence from the Surrey Police published today by our House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee lays bare the scandal of phone hacking at the paper during the Milly Dowler case.

This chilling document details that the News Of The World hacked Milly's phone by getting her "mobile phone number and PIN from school children" and that the police received complaints from potential witnesses that News Of The World reporters were 'harassing' them.

The Surrey Police also clarify that the News Of The World ran a story including messages hacked from Milly Dowler's phone without their consent and only changed the content when they were asked to do so. Given these events took place in 2002, it is yet more evidence to suggest that phone hacking was widespread at the paper and involved more than a single rogue journalist.

Of all of the documents and evidence that have been produced by our phone hacking inquiry, this is the most sickening and exposes the black hearts of those involved in perpetrating and covering up this scandal.

When Rebekah Brooks gave evidence to our committee in July 2011 I asked her whether she was aware that the News Of The World had passed messages hacked from Milly Dowler's phone to the Surrey Police. She said that she had only become aware of the allegation that Milly's phone had been hacked two weeks previously, and had no knowledge of information having passed on to the Surrey Police in 2002.

As I said to Rebekah Brooks at the time, I think it is incredible that that could have happened without the knowledge of senior people on the paper. It is one thing for someone to obtain illegally sourced information for a story and conceal that fact from the editor, but surely another to decide to pass that information to the police without telling anyone. It is also clear that there was a dialogue between the police and the News Of The World on the night of Saturday 13 April 2002 about changing the story that first ran, which led to them removing quotations of messages hacked from Milly's phone from the later editions of the paper.

When the former News International Head of Legal Affairs, Tom Crone gave evidence to the committee in September 2011, he suggested that the quotations from Milly Dowler's voice mails that appeared in an article in the News Of The World in 2002, could have been supplied by the police; we know now that they were hacked by the newspaper and used without the consent of the police. Tom Crone also confirmed when I asked whether, if illegally obtained messages hacked from someone's phone had been obtained by the paper, rather than from the police, they would routinely have been run past the in house legal team before publication. He confirmed that: "that would be right. That is why I assume that it came from the police."

In both these cases the evidence published from the Surrey Police today poses serious questions about who knew what at the News Of The World; and whilst the names of individuals involved have not been disclosed to us that will form part of the ongoing police investigation. I hope that sooner rather than later, justice will be done.

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/damian-collins/milly-dowler-phone-hacked_b_1223076.html?ref=uk

I vote we hung them all now. No need for any more investigating. We all know what kind of people Brooks and Coulson are and the levels they would have gone to. This is just outrageous.

[Dave]

f***ing hell.

[Neil]

Running out of words to describe the people behind this.

[Dave]

Said on the news just now that they also rang recruitment agencies pretending to be her mum to try and get information.

[Super Duper Branko Strupar]

Why British Journalists are Taught to be Dishonest

The first thing I learned in journalism school was not to say anything bad about the police. If I did, even if I'd seen abuses of power with my own eyes, I could face a suit for damages that would ruin me, my editors and whatever paper had been unfortunate enough to publish my work.

Nick Cohen's new treatise on censorship, You Can't Read This Book, airs one of the more painful secrets of the British press - the slide, especially over the last 15 years, towards a culture where archaic libel laws give the wealthy and privileged "the power to enforce a censorship that the naive supposed had vanished with the repressions of the old establishment."

I recently spent some time in the United States, where the cultural attitude to freedom of the press is rather different. A country that produced Fox News and allows presidential attack ads to run on television can hardly be held up as a gold standard for fair and unbiased reporting, but if American journalism lacks deference, British journalism is crippled by a surfeit of it.

Where writers in the United States are used to having their articles cross-referenced by fact-checkers for accuracy, journalists in Britain have our work picked over by lawyers. I found myself blushing when I explained to fellow writers covering police brutality at Occupy Wall Street that where I come from, it does not matter whether or not what you write is true so much as whether or not it is actionable.

Actionability, moreover, is relative. It's about money as well as legality. The decisions writers and editors make about what to publish inevitably depend on whether the potentially aggrieved party is wealthy enough to sue. This means, in practical terms, that journalists can and do say pretty much anything we like about, for example, single parents, immigrants, the unemployed, or benefit claimants. Last year, however, when a group of chronically ill and disabled benefit claimants set up a small website campaigning against Atos Origin, the private company running the controversial new welfare tests, the French company lost no time sending out intimidating legal letters.

The real problem here is not just censorship, but self-censorship. Cohen points out that British journalists, campaigners and others learn to modify our speech before it ever reaches the point of contention. I will never forget being quietly reminded by other activists, on a demonstration against corporate tax avoidance last year, to chant "tax avoider!" not "tax dodger!". The imprecision of "dodger" might have given grounds for a suit, and we'd already spent all our money on the placards.

These were young people quite prepared to be arrested in the course of a peaceful protest. The risks of a defamation action, however, were much too high. Under British civil law, the burden of proof in cases of libel or slander is on the defendant, not the claimant - if you're sued, you have to prove that what you said isn't libellous, and defendants must pay some court costs whatever the verdict. The price of losing a libel case often runs into millions, so editors, activists and journalists are forced to take steps to avoid them at any cost.

In the British media, the cost of courage is prohibitively high - so young journalists are taught to be duplicitous from day one. We are taught, or we learn on the job from decent editors shackled by the threat of libel costs, to withhold or obscure what we know in case it inconveniences the rich and spiteful.

What could be more dishonest? Without a change in the law, journalists will continue to learn deference and duplicity in the very profession many of us entered to expose such things.

http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/laurie-penny/2012/01/libel-laws-british-journalists

[Dave]

BREAKING NEWS:

Rupert Murdoch: News International to launch a new national Sunday newspaper 'very soon' - Sky News

Mint.

[Incognito]

News of the World Mk.2. Hope the public remember why mk 1 was pulled and refuse to buy it. It's as if Murdoch is saying " they'll have forgotten by now" and then produce a similar arse end of market rag.

[Heneage]

It's entitled "The Sun on Sunday" I think. To be fair the majority of people covering this thing said once he closed the NOTW down, he'd just rebrand and start up again.

I'd argue they need to look at how one man was able to come close to a owning a media monopoly. It seems incredibly dense to just let him accrue more newspapers, media companies etc without raising any general concern because there was still competition.

I think in this instance you've to admire America, they saw him trying to buy up an empire and stopped him. His only major new outlet there (Fox News) is a bit of a laughing stock too.

[Incognito]

It's entitled "The Sun on Sunday" I think. To be fair the majority of people covering this thing said once he closed the NOTW down, he'd just rebrand and start up again.

I'd argue they need to look at how one man was able to come close to a owning a media monopoly. It seems incredibly dense to just let him accrue more newspapers, media companies etc without raising any general concern because there was still competition.

I think in this instance you've to admire America, they saw him trying to buy up an empire and stopped him. His only major new outlet there (Fox News) is a bit of a laughing stock too.

The News of the World was the Sunday Sun in all but name. By doing this whilst the enquiry is still going on is imho, sticking his middle finger up at it, such is the lack of respect being shown here. f***ing disgraceful.

[MW]

cos people can't change ey? if it was up to you anyone that went to prison would be in for life

[Incognito]

cos people can't change ey? if it was up to you anyone that went to prison would be in for life

What does that even mean???

[MW]

[Heneage]

It's entitled "The Sun on Sunday" I think. To be fair the majority of people covering this thing said once he closed the NOTW down, he'd just rebrand and start up again.

I'd argue they need to look at how one man was able to come close to a owning a media monopoly. It seems incredibly dense to just let him accrue more newspapers, media companies etc without raising any general concern because there was still competition.

I think in this instance you've to admire America, they saw him trying to buy up an empire and stopped him. His only major new outlet there (Fox News) is a bit of a laughing stock too.

The News of the World was the Sunday Sun in all but name. By doing this whilst the enquiry is still going on is imho, sticking his middle finger up at it, such is the lack of respect being shown here. f***ing disgraceful.

Yeah very good point mate. I think really you've to look at the testimony of Murdoch and his son James for how seriously they took this. Yes, Rupert was somewhat apologetic in between his bouts of amnesia/dementia, but James gave a very cold impersonal account of both of them which made you realise there was no remorse in these men. They wanted it over asap so they could reestablish themselves under a different guise, like Dick Turpin changing his mask.

I'm not sure what the rules are in terms of his validity to set up this new paper, but if they have any sense, they should block it on grounds of potential monopoly.

[SEMTEX]

His only major new outlet there (Fox News) is a bit of a laughing stock too.

Not sure it's quite the laughing stock it deserves to be tbh. It may be mocked on the East & West coast, but there's a whole mess of s*** in the middle that I'm sure doesn't see Fox News in the same light.

[Heneage]

His only major new outlet there (Fox News) is a bit of a laughing stock too.

Not sure it's quite the laughing stock it deserves to be tbh. It may be mocked on the East & West coast, but there's a whole mess of s*** in the middle that I'm sure doesn't see Fox News in the same light.

Yeah, but I'd argue outside of the US it's seen as borderline propaganda base station.

[ikri]

His only major new outlet there (Fox News) is a bit of a laughing stock too.

He owns the New York Post too

[Wullie]

And the Wall St Journal.

[SEMTEX]

And Caribbean Life

[Heneage]

Ok so the WSJ is obviously quite highly thought of. Perhaps I should of said 'one of the major outlets he is associated with'. I'd argue when you think of Murdoch you think of FOX news.

[Super Duper Branko Strupar]

The Met 'Loaned' Rebekah Brooks a horse

In a twist that even the brain of Chris Morris couldn't have dreamt up, the Met Police is revealed to have "loaned" Rebekah Brooks a police horse in 2008. The Evening Standard reports that Brooks "rode the retired horse for a year at her farm in Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire before it was put out to pasture."

In return, the horse may well have enjoyed the privilege of a day out with David Cameron. Here's what former News of the World hack Paul McMullan told Hugh Grant during the latter's undercover investigation for the New Statesman:

"Cameron went horse riding regularly with Rebekah. I know, because as well as doorstepping celebrities, I've also doorstepped my ex-boss by hiding in the bushes, waiting for her to come past with Cameron on a horse . . . before the election to show that - you know - Murdoch was backing Cameron."

A friend of Brooks told the ES that "Anybody can agree to do this with the Met if they have the land and facilities to pay for its upkeep." The Met's already battered credibility depends on the veracity of that claim.

http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/the-staggers/2012/02/brooks-horse-met-twist-cameron