DEM not gonna CON dis NATION: Rolling UK politics in the short-lived Cleggeron era

We cannot imagine circumstances in which we would be satisfied with any outcome that does not hold senior executives to account at News Corporation for the gross failures of management at the News of the World.

While the EIAG welcomes the decision to close the News of the World, this action is not a sufficient response to the revelations of malpractice at the paper. Nor does it address the failure of News International and News Corporation executives to undertake a proper investigation and take decisive remedial action as soon as the police uncovered illegal phone hacking in 2006.

phone hacking, no matter how widespread, isn't ever going to be the 'biggest crime story' in britain imo- nobody got hit with a brick or had a window broken by youths, if it weren't for the forces/murder victims being a part of it i doubt it would even have been enough for the advertisiers to pull out

― VIRGIN ROO (darraghmac), Saturday, July 9, 2011 1:37 AM (11 hours ago) Bookmark

to return to this in the sober light of day, it's not just about phone hacking anymore. it's about corrupt payments to police and assisting murder suspects in obstructing justice, all carried out by one of the countries' largest and most high profile businesses, with links to the prime minister. gas bills are important, but boring in comparison.

i think the industry meta-fixation point stands anyway.

no. the specific case of phone hacking, which in itself immediately raised questions about the PM and the met, has brought out into the open a really pretty big, no-going-back fight within the political and media elite, and that is #agoodstory.

granted, but milly & the forces were nonetheless the driving public forces while it was gathering steam, rather than the corporate malpractice angle?

xp

absolutely, but this has more fuel to drive it on than public outrage over that, otherwise the cynical and depraved murdochs would be right that closing the notw would end the matter.

#agoodstory but not, imo, as all-encompassing a media event as has been seen. Hard to speak for 'the public' obviously, but prob the bigger watercooler or w/e story is the immediate NOTW drama rather than the background political/legal machinations.

xp remains to be seen whether they're right on that or not!

deems i know you think a gentle troll on a warm morning is good for the constitution but yr really going nowhere here

ha not it at all, i'm just interested, more ill-informed than challopy tbh

it's not just about the press though is it, like mdc said it's about a whole bunch of narratives, most of which have defined britain in some way for the past decade, suddenly blowing up together. press, politics, celebrity, crime, conspiracy...

― lex pretend, Saturday, July 9, 2011 9:30 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

this is otm

Hard to speak for 'the public' obviously, but prob the bigger watercooler or w/e story is the immediate NOTW drama rather than the background political/legal machinations.

you can chalk this up to me being a pessimistic jerk-wad, but y'know: not everyone in the country is politically engaged. probably a lot of people are pretty much oblivious. the reason this story matters is that -- while one would never use terms like 'sheeple', of course, of course -- the murdoch media is very influential among people who aren't overly interested in the background political/legal machinations that affect their lives. so you win the point: not everyone even knows who r. b. rebekah brooks is. but it still matters.

ha not it at all, i'm just interested, more ill-informed than challopy tbh

― VIRGIN ROO (darraghmac), Saturday, July 9, 2011 1:34 PM

yah, i don't think you really get the extent of the political debility engendered by fealty towards new corp over the last decades

from overseas they probably seem like just another lot of snipes from the gutter press, yet their influence has been significantly greater than that would suggest

matt dc calling this britain's season finale was hilarious, i dunno if its otm but i hope it is

yeah that was perfect.

alan rusbridger and andreas whittam smith both ~astonished~ by the closure of the notw (though i suspect the former was being drolly hyperbolic)

it's almost as if they haven't been reading my posts itt

almost!

So have the Murdochs succeeded in halting the doomsday machine before it reaches into their boardroom under Section 79 of the The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000? Section 79 is entitled the "Criminal liability of directors etc.", which I think gives a sufficient indication of what could be involved. The short answer is No – No, even though I assume they will avoid the mistake of re-starting the News of the World as the Sun on Sunday or some such title. If they did this, they would have been seen as having perpetrated a fraud on the public, for their contrition would have been shown to be false. No, because the police inquiries cannot be stopped and the doomsday machine will continue to do its work. Imagine what each new suspect will do under questioning – attempt to throw the blame on others. If you run an organisation, as the Murdochs have done, where all is hardball, where it is each person for him or herself, where there is no love lost between bosses and subordinates, then the consequence is that the police will have to spend a lot of time sorting out accusation and counter-accusation. I believe myself that Rebekah Brooks, James Murdoch, and even Rupert Murdoch himself – if he can be extradited from the United States – will find themselves in court answering charges under Section 79 of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act.

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/andreas-whittam-smith/andreas-whittam-smith-bullies-and-cowards-who-have-killed-a-newspaper-ndash-for-nothing-2309532.html

just a ~little~ tendentious by the end

granted, but milly & the forces were nonetheless the driving public forces while it was gathering steam, rather than the corporate malpractice angle?

milly dowler and the war widows are not separate to this, is the thing - the reason it's so big is because it includes those stories, folded into this massive one

not everyone in the country is politically engaged. probably a lot of people are pretty much oblivious. the reason this story matters is that -- while one would never use terms like 'sheeple', of course, of course -- the murdoch media is very influential among people who aren't overly interested in the background political/legal machinations that affect their lives. so you win the point: not everyone even knows who r. b. rebekah brooks is.

a lot of those oblivious people are not oblivious any more - that's another mark of how big it's become

tomorrow i'll be visiting my news of the world-buying family who are very much not "overly interested in the background political/legal machinations that affect their lives", i'm very interested to see what they think about all this.

In my local this afternoon, which is either working class, unemployed or servicemen (ok, the drunks of those groups, but we don't vary that much from the sober) everyone was talking about this, as they were yesterday. It's a good rule not to underestimate the inteligence or political literacy of the working class.

http://yfrog.com/klypnrj

Sun_Politics
NotW - RIP. A loss to 1st class journalism. Ed Miliband, Guardian and BBC; how proud you must be of your work this week.

I'm sorry but what kind of a thick, poisonous bastard do you have to be?

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-cb-NuBnTLb0/Thi-bhDGmxI/AAAAAAAACFc/ZrnQ8aQH9AU/s1600/Sun%2527s%2Btweet%2Bdeleting%2Bearlier%2Btweet.jpg

Yeah, right. Wankers.

kind of a result for ed milliband there though

Was noticing that Cameron's mea cupla incl spread the blame/guilt to all pols--note the bit in here, near the end, re Blair aking Brown to cool it with the inquiries (apparently a fairly "conservative" paper, re can now reveal Max Mosley "bankrolling" suits re hacking and visions "police being dragged through courts by civil claimants"; nevertheless, a also copper sez "industrial" degree of hacking)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/phone-hacking/8628052/John-Yates-I-failed-victims-of-News-of-the-World-phone-hacking.html

prescott zings back <3

So @Sun_Politics deleted that NOTW tweet. News International seem to like deleting things

Some confusion over at NI - The Sun Says it was Miliband (if only!) and the Guardian, but The Times have another, far more deadly, foe.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=weUkz6x5k6Q

It was him, then?

http://i.imgur.com/TUo6T.jpg

see now i don't want to walk past a newsstand to find out that isn't really the cover

would really like something unpleasant and painful to happen to roger alton after watching that youtube. what a vile, entitled fuck.

I'm gonna assume that he knows Mrs Mumsnet from working fairly closely with her husband on G2 for years, so what is the real - and, perhaps, petty - beef being aired here?

i don't think it's so much about mumsnet. nick davies's book has a chapter which is a brutal takedown of alton's observer, in particular his decision to appoint kamal ahmed as political editor, despite him having no experience. (the result was he ended up being alistair campbell's stenographer.) so he's got reasons for wanting to dismiss the substantive issue.

imo it was foolish to shut down the notw from plenty of povs. the gamble is that it will be a fire-break which will enable the bskyb deal to go through. but i don't think he's anywhere near out of the woods, and he's slaughtered a cash cow to do it. obviously they must be planning to plug the gap in the market, but i doubt it would be able to pick up all those readers again and the sheer bad faith of it would be difficult even for the tories to stomach.

Is it a cash cow? The whole News Group stable brings in around less than a tenth of the Sky platform, i think. If they can rebrand as Sun On Sunday and keep the bulk of their readers, i'm not sure it'll make much difference. It would be interesting to see whether this has had any effect on The Sun's sales in the last week, though.

NOTW is a rounding error on bskyb revenue

closing it seems worth a shot from their pov tbh

apart from the money it was a big source of political power for murdoch, it's a big thing to give up. i doubt notw would have lost many readers had it been kept going. live in a world where people don't have sky though. i guess there are people with large disposable incomes and shitty taste in entertainment.

e.g. boardwalk empire

ross kemp on gangs is good though

only get it for Glee tbh

don't think notw + the sun is that more influential than just the sun. notw's main politics usp is tougher sentences for nonces etc., which is presumably not murdoch's end game. otherwise he can do it all with the sun.

oh cmon there's always a grand designs on somewhere tbf

wow just saw that roger alton thing. always had him pegged as a cunt.

anyway, rumour has it that will hutton ages ago wanted to write at length in the observer about how the banks were all screwed and therefore all of us were too. roger alton, obs editor, mulls it over and says: "it's a bit... chewy, isn't it? can't you write about cake or something?"

― joe, Monday, February 23, 2009 11:30 AM (2 years ago) Bookmark

never forget.

http://heady.co.uk/ou1/sun_on_sunday.jpg