Phone hacking scandal deepens

[Jan Klimkowski]

Whilst I don't fully agree with all of Oborne's arguments, I do agree about the pernicious influence of "lobby journalism" (which is precisely the lying farce he describes) and his criticism of the New Labour Spin Operation.

Oborne's anecdote about Cameron being coached before meeting Rupert Murdoch for the first time, and then fucking up, is fascinating.

Leveson inquiry: make political lying a criminal offence, says Peter Oborne

Severe sanctions could restore politicians' and journalists' integrity, Daily Telegraph columnist tells hearing

Lisa O'Carroll

guardian.co.uk, Thursday 17 May 2012 15.54 BST


Peter Oborne, the Daily Telegraph columnist, has told the Leveson inquiry that "political lying" should be made a criminal offence for both politicians and journalists reporting on Westminster.

Oborne, the Daily Telegraph's chief political commentator, said during his witness appearance at the inquiry on Thursday that it had become far too easy for politicians to lie or make misleading statements to parliament and a severe sanction might restore some integrity in Westminster.

He said directors of publicly listed companies could go to jail if they make false or misleading statements on shares and assets. "Whereas politicians I have noticed, freely make entirely false statements about how they are conducting themselves and why one should vote for them," Oborne added.

He said it would very healthy if such a criminal sanction could be applied to politicians and journalists.

Lord Justice Leveson put it to him that such a draconian penalty would have "a chilling effect upon journalism".

Oborne said it could be a workable system if the standard of proof was high enough. "A lie, is a deliberate untruth, something you write or something which is not true, which you say or right down in the full knowledge that it is not true."


Earlier, Oborne told Leveson that journalism was a "noble profession", but many in the lobby system in Westminster did not seek out the truth but merely "suck up to powerful people".

He decried the cosiness between successive governments and News International, which he said was regularly brought into the "inner sanctum" with privileged seats at Labour and Tory party conferences.

The News International annual party in the conference season had an "extraordinary power", attended by the "entire cabinet" and "influence brokers and the senior members of the media class", he said.

"Our democracy was starting to become a private conversation between elite groups," Oborne added. "Political reporting, as I observed it, had become a matter of private deals, arrangements invisible to voters."

He blamed new Labour for creating this system where favours would be traded with pet journalists, while those who remained fastidiously outside the system, such as the Daily Telegraph's former political editor George Jones, would be "frozen out".

He said Labour had created a "narrative … that there was a hostile press" when, "on the contrary", they had "manipulated a particular kind of acceptable public truth".

In a sustained attack on Labour and its policy of spin, he said "they were interested in truth if it served their political purpose".

He called for a new "apartheid" to be introduced which would put some distance between politicians and journalists.

"[We are at] a moment in British history where a political system is coming to an end, based on media dominance. Parliament has an opportunity to re-assert its traditional function," Oborne said.

He added he was pleasantly surprised when he heard from a "relevant" figure that when David Cameron first became Conservative leader he decided to keep some distance from Rupert Murdoch.

Oborne said a News International source had told him that they had coached Cameron on what to say when he first met Murdoch, but he had not played ball and the meeting went "badly".

The inquiry has heard that Cameron became close to the former News International chief executive Rebekah Brooks, attending her wedding in June 2009 and signing off texts "LOL".

Oborne was also critical of the Sun's coverage of the Iraq and Afghan wars. He claimed the Sun's one dimensional coverage of "our boys" had failed to engage on the serious questions of Britain's complicity in rendition, illegal killings, use of drones and human rights abuses.

He added that there was an unethical silence on this across Fleet Street with some notable exceptions, such as the reporting by the Guardian's Ian Cobain.

Oborne said the press had also operated an "omerta" when it came to phone hacking but urged Leveson not to conclude that this was because any alleged illegal activities were going on at rival papers.

He put it to Leveson that there should not be more press regulation because of the phone-hacking scandal because this was a failure of the police to enforce the law.

Leveson said this would be like a motorist caught speeding protesting that the police had not enforced the law.

[Jan Klimkowski]

This sordid tale of Don Rupert Murdoch and political deference from "Left" and "Right" has the ring of truth about it:

Exclusive extract: How Cameron tried to evade Murdoch's embrace


In 2005, the Tories' new leader was determined to keep the media mogul at arm's length, but by 2007 the game was up, and Andy Coulson was on board. In their new book, Francis Elliott and James Hanning chart the dramatic change of plan

The Independent on Sunday
Francis Elliott , James Hanning


Sunday 20 May 2012


For the first 15 months after Cameron won the leadership election, his media team, led by George Eustice and with the support of Steve Hilton and Oliver Letwin, had adopted a strategy of arms' length engagement with the press. Hilton was among those who believed that no longer was the printed word a major leader of public opinion. People were now less deferential to thunderous editorials from on high. They made up their own minds, thank you.


Hilton and Eustice had sold the idea of a new arrangement with the press barons, whereby a greater, healthier distance was kept and the democratic process would be all the better for it. Television was to be the new battleground. There was to be "no more sucking up to Murdoch". It was a defiant and refreshing departure from the Tony Blair textbook.

There were to be other, tougher aspects of this new approach, and they had largely been vindicated, not least when a well-prepared Cameron outfoxed Jeremy Paxman during the leadership campaign. Cameron and his team had taken a muscularly non-committal approach to mounting calls to "come clean" on whether the leader had ever taken Class A drugs. Editors in supportive papers who offered to "do the drugs story sympathetically" were politely told that Cameron was allowed to have a past, before he became a politician, that was free of scrutiny.

In other words, Cameron's people expressed a novel "no thanks, we'll play this game our way" attitude. And it seemed to be working. In August 2006, the Tories had established a good lead in the polls. Such insolence was not appreciated by the Murdoch-owned Sun, which asserted in its leader column that Cameron did not deserve his lead. Murdoch's critics took this to mean "we have not endorsed him yet".

But the plan was to turn out to be no more than an experiment. By early 2007, the sunny hopes for a new politics were already fading. Cameron was struggling to convince a great many in his party that he was a Conservative at all, and with the Labour government anticipating a rise in their poll ratings with the expected accession of the comparatively untainted figure of Gordon Brown, the arms' length relationship with the Murdochs looked needlessly bold.

The previous summer he had made the notorious proclamation that became known as his "hug a hoodie" speech. The press reception had been hostile, but for Eustice and Hilton this was no more than was to be expected. "Yes, yes, we'll carry on," said Cameron, evidently less convinced than his aides. At their encouragement, "to show we wouldn't be bullied", as one confidant put it, he followed up with a speech of comparable tone and surprise value. Cameron was the object of yet more consternation from his natural supporters and their mouthpieces in the press. When his closest media advisers proposed a third such speech, Cameron, in a typically Cameronian way, said: "I'm sure you're right... but how much more of this do we have to do?"

To emphasise his declining faith in the new approach, he invited comparison with the never-say-die "invincible knight" from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, whose bravado led him to having all his limbs cut off but who insisted on shouting fatuously at his triumphant adversary: "Tis but a flesh wound!"

This was Cameron's lighthearted way of saying enough was enough. In fact, he felt things were getting very serious. With the austere but principled Gordon Brown waiting to sweep away the perception of Labour as polished but shallow, Cameron needed to be at the top of his game. Indeed, what would happen if Brown were to call an early election?

Cameron knew Brown had good relations with both Rupert Murdoch and Paul Dacre, editor-in-chief of the Daily Mail. Why should either newspaper group go against the personal preference of its most senior executive and endorse Cameron? Charlie Brooks, who at that point was at the start of his relationship with Rebekah Wade, told a friend that Rupert Murdoch whose pedigree in picking winners was second to none believed there would never be another Etonian in No 10 again. The thought occurred to Cameron that he could be out of his job by the end of the year.

"David got very tetchy at around that time," says Cameron's friend. "His apparent breezy confidence often hides a lack of exactly that, and David had a really major wobble that spring."

"We tested the new strategy to destruction," remembers George Eustice. "But the knowledge that Gordon Brown, the ultimate licker-of-the-boots of the Murdoch regime, was coming in meant that Cameron was likely to be portrayed as loftily out of touch rather than right, so we had to abandon the experiment. David stuck with my strategy as long as he could," remembers Eustice, "but having reluctantly abandoned the 'keep your distance' approach, he then embraced the 'OK, let's do what everyone else does', and let's do it properly stance."

Someone else close to Cameron's thinking added: "George Osborne in particular, and to a lesser extent Michael Gove, thought it was part of the New Labour playbook to get Murdoch on side. Keen on the traditional idea of wooing the media. We might not like it, it's just the way of the world. However unpleasant these people may be, however much you may not like them, you have to play their game and go to their parties."

So, notwithstanding Cameron's previous coolness to Murdoch, a legacy of Carlton TV's defeats at the Australian's hands, it was all systems go to get Murdoch on side. The brave talk ("We don't need bloody Murdoch!", as one of Cameron's strategists had put it privately) was set to one side, and every opportunity to impress News International was to be grasped with alacrity.

As luck (if that is the word) would have it, there seemed an admirable way of killing two birds with one stone close at hand, the appointment of Andy Coulson, who had recently resigned from the editorship of the News of the World.

For all his outward lack of concern, by 2008 David Cameron was becoming worried about the phone-hacking story. With the next election still a couple of years away, according to a friend of Cameron, the leader asked Coulson outright if he had known anything about the phone hacking, to which he replied: "Categorically not."

In a private context, he also asked people with extensive dealings in newspaper regulation, who he had good reason to believe would be familiar with the workings of the grubbier end of Fleet Street. In good faith, it is fair to assume, they too reassured him that he had little to worry about.

When, in August 2008, Cameron and his family were invited to visit Rupert Murdoch's yacht Rosehearty, the flights to Santorini were paid for by Matthew Freud (which concerned some of Cameron's advisers more than it did him). For Freud, this was the ultimate piece of political matchmaking. This was jet-setting of the old school.

But in a private one-on-one, Cameron asked Murdoch directly about the continued rumblings about his press chief. Murdoch replied that, as far as he was concerned, the police knew everything. There was no new evidence of wrongdoing. He blamed his political enemies in the British media for stirring up trouble.

The trouble was that the "stirring" didn't stop. The House of Commons Select Committee for Culture, Media and Sport spent a considerable amount of time investigating media standards, eventually concluding that it was "inconceivable" that none of the News of the World employees past and present had known about the phone hacking and accused senior executives of suffering from "collective amnesia".

Cameron was to seek assurances from Murdoch again before the 2010 election, and Murdoch's answer was the same. In that case, said Cameron, he would stand by Andy and make sure the "witch hunt" was unsuccessful. The Murdoch reassurance chimed with Cameron, whose cast of mind inclined him to believe that if the police had found nothing, there must be nothing there.

But a slight switch to how Cameron responded to questions about Coulson was introduced. As a close colleague says: "When there's a bit of doubt, the position shifts, the language changes." And so it did on this occasion. Previously, on the rare occasions he had been asked, he would offer a vague suggestion that he was led to believe Coulson knew nothing about the phone hacking. But now, on 10 July 2009, the words "I believe in giving people a second chance" received their first airing.

By 2009, the Tories began to show a new antipathy to the BBC, floating the freezing of the licence fee and urging the corporation to "do more with less". The Tories and the Murdochs shared a striking identity of interests. With the Tories looking good in the polls, what more could the media empire ask for?

Just a few weeks later, at the most damaging of moments for Labour (ie, during its conference), The Sun announced it was to support the Conservatives in the next election. But still the phone-hacking story wouldn't go away.

Representations were believed to have been made by senior courtiers at Buckingham Palace, which had always been unhappy at Coulson working by Cameron's side in opposition, but hitherto had been pacified by Coulson's intention to find another job after the election, according to an unimpeachable royal source. The Palace insists the Queen herself did not initiate an attempt to influence Downing Street staffing, but acknowledges the possibility that Cameron's circle was sent a message informally about the feelings of the Royal Household about the prospect of the former News of the World editor in Downing Street.

Expressions of concern were also made to Cameron's office, at least, by Nick Clegg, Lord Ashdown, Zac Goldsmith, Sir Max Hastings, Daily Mail editor-in-chief Paul Dacre and others. And a more surprising voice spoke to him to question whether Coulson should follow his master into Downing Street: that of Coulson himself, who worried that he was becoming an embarrassment to Cameron.

Cameron waved his concerns away he needed him, he was coming to Downing Street. It was a terrible mistake for both of them. Had Coulson left at the election, the interest in hacking might have largely died away. His presence at the heart of Britain's government, however, redoubled determination to expose the truth.

On 1 September 2010, The New York Times published a lengthy account of the extent of phone hacking at News International. Cameron was lobbied yet again by those who felt he was being overgenerous to Coulson, and told a friend at the time: "I can't go round sacking people on hearsay. There's no evidence against Andy." But he did also say to a close friend at the time: "If it does turn out he's been lying to me, he'll be out of here tomorrow."

But while Cameron toughed it out, there had been a change of attitude inside News International. Emails emerged that, it was reported, showed much wider knowledge of unlawful activity than had been previously admitted.

At around this time, with Murdoch furious at not having been told the full extent of what had been going on, it was made known to Cameron that he should no longer feel obliged to protect Coulson. In fact, Coulson had been telling an unheeding Cameron for some months that he felt he should stand down, and on 21 January he resigned as director of communications.


Extracted from 'Cameron: Practically a Conservative' by Francis Elliott and James Hanning, published by Fourth Estate, £10.99. Copyright Francis Elliott and James Hanning, 2012

[Jan Klimkowski]

Hmmmm...

Has Scotland Yard top cop Akers been knobbled?

Opened the wrong drawer and found Volkland Security's dirty linen?

Sue Akers, phone-hacking inquiry head, to retire from Met

Senior police officer will leave after London 2012 Olympics, Scotland Yard has announced

Press Association

guardian.co.uk, Sunday 20 May 2012 06.09 BST


Sue Akers, who has been leading Scotland's Yard investigation into phone hacking, is to retire after the Olympics, the Metropolitan police has confirmed.

The Met deputy assistant commissioner has been on the force for 36 years. She is in charge of the three linked inquiries into phone hacking, illicit payments and computer hacking, and has been leading inquiries into the potential involvement of intelligence services in relation to detainees held abroad.

Deputy commissioner Craig Mackey said Akers's extensive detective experience would be missed but her decision to step down would not be allowed to affect the progress of the investigations.

Akers, who joined the Met in 1976, took control of Operation Weeting the force's second inquiry into the phone-hacking scandal in January 2011. Operations Elveden, which is focusing on inappropriate payments to police, and Tuleta, which is looking at allegations of computer hacking, run alongside.

The fresh investigation came after detectives were handed a new dossier of evidence hinting that suspicious activities at the News of the World went beyond "rogue reporter" Clive Goodman.

The now-defunct tabloid's royal editor was jailed along with private investigator Glenn Mulcaire in 2007 after they admitted intercepting messages.

Mackey said: "Considerable resources have been dedicated to investigating phone-hacking and related offences, and the officers on these operations will continue to follow all evidence of suspected criminality.

"The importance of the continuity of leadership will of course be taken into account when the future command structure for Operations Weeting, Elveden and Tuleta is considered."

Akers told the former Met commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson she had planned to retire after the Olympics even before the new phone-hacking investigation was launched, according to the Independent on Sunday. She is believed to be the longest-serving woman in the Met.

A Scotland Yard spokesman said: "Deputy Assistant Commissioner [DAC] Sue Akers is due to retire later this year after 36 years' service with the MPS.

"The DAC signalled her intention to retire this autumn when she took charge of investigations into phone-hacking and related corruption and computer crime."

Akers, the former borough commander of Barnet, was awarded the Queen's Police Medal in 2007.

[Jan Klimkowski]

For those who don't know, Mazher Mahmoud is the Murdoch empire's most notorious investigative journalist. He often dressed up as a sheikh for his "undercover" journalistic scoops, hence the nickname "Fake Sheikh".

There's investigative journalism.

Then there's intimidation, blackmail and corruption posing as investigative journalism.

The Murdoch crime family debases the Fourth Estate.

Again.

And again.

And again.

News of the World's 'fake sheikh' had Tom Watson followed, emails show

Mazher Mahmood, who now works for Sunday Times, appears to have commissioned surveillance of phone-hacking critic

David Leigh and Nick Davies

guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 22 May 2012 10.14 BST

The News of the World journalist Mazher Mahmood commissioned surveillance on its chief phone-hacking critic, the Labour politician Tom Watson, in the hope of finding him having an affair, according to email evidence Watson has obtained.

News International's internal investigating group, the management and standards committee, belatedly turned over the emails to a parliamentary committee of which Watson was a member. They implicate Mahmood and two former NoW executives, the assistant editor Ian Edmondson and news editor James Mellor.

This latest revelation of methods at the now-closed NoW will present difficulties for John Witherow, the editor of the Sunday Times. Mahmood, the so-called "fake sheikh" who specialised in controversial undercover investigations, was rehired by the Sunday Times after its sister paper was closed down by Rupert Murdoch, and is still working there.

Witherow has not so far commented on the disclosures.

The attempt by NoW journalists to gain evidence of sexual indiscretions by its arch-critic was launched on the morning of Saturday 26 September 2009, at the start of the Labour party conference. Mahmood claimed in an email to Mellor, copied to Edmondson, that he had received a tip that married Watson was "shagging" a fellow activist, and that he was "creeping into her hotel" at Brighton. The information, from a so-far unknown purported informant, appears to have been completely false.

Mahmood described the MP as a "close lackey" of the then prime minister, Gordon Brown, and noted he was "anti-Blair". It was agreed that a private detective, the former police officer Derek Webb, known as "Silent Shadow", would be hired to stalk Watson through the conference, from 28 September to 2 October, in what proved to be a vain hope of getting confirmation. Had the story been substantiated and published, it would have destroyed his reputation.

According to the emails in Watson's possession, Edmondson described the prospect as a "great story" and added: "You might want to check his recent cutts [cuttings], v interesting!"

Watson at the time believed he was on News International's "enemies list". He was pursuing a libel suit against the Sun for falsely accusing him of involvement in organising online smears against the Conservatives. He was also vigorously pursuing News International on the culture, media and sport committee, where a series of Murdoch executives were mounting an ultimately unsuccessful cover-up of phone-hacking.

Peter Mandelson told the Leveson inquiry on Monday how Rebekah Brooks would "come on to me and complain" that Watson and his colleagues were "hounding" them, and demand: "Couldn't they be pulled away, pulled off?" Brooks, editor of the Sun at the time of the libel, had taken over as chief executive of NI at the beginning of September, in control of both Murdoch tabloids.

On the evening of 29 September, while Derek Webb was still shadowing Watson at his conference hotel, the Sun revealed it was switching political sides, and published a dramatic anti-Brown front page. From then on, it embarked on a ferocious campaign against Gordon Brown and his supporters. Watson is due to give evidence to Leveson on Tuesday..

[Magda Hassan]

May 23, 2012

A Private Conversation - The Leveson Inquiry, Corporate Journalism And Elite Collusion

Advertising revenue is almost the life-blood of the press. Although the figure has fallen in recent years, today it constitutes around 60 per cent of newspapers' total income, including 'quality' titles like the Guardian and the Independent.
This obviously has profound implications for media performance, as even the corporate media are sometimes willing to accept. Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson notes in the Financial Times:
Behind their journalistic missions, most news organisations have always been commercial operations that sell audiences to advertisers.' (News industry can survive in the digital age', Financial Times, March 21, 2012)
Media corporations are also typically owned by wealthy individuals or giant conglomerates, and are legally obliged to subordinate human and environmental welfare to maximised revenues for shareholders. (See Joel Bakan, The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power', Constable, 2004.)
The consequences for democracy are normally ignored. But again, the truth sometimes pops up. After giving evidence to the Leveson inquiry in April 2012, the owner of the Independent, Evgeny Lebedev, tweeted:
Forgot to tell #Leveson that it's unreasonable to expect individuals to spend £millions on newspapers and not have access to politicians.'
Even a Guardian report had to note:
It was a funny and refreshingly honest message after all the recent humbug and hypocrisy from media magnates about not wanting to influence the political class.'
A less refreshingly honest morsel was served up by Brian Leveson himself when he said:
The majority of journalism is people doing their job honourably with dedication, fearlessly and entirely in the public interest.' (our emphasis)
Imagine if Leveson had noted that the majority of journalism is fearlessly doing its job in the corporate interest'. It would have elicited mayhem among the politico-media classes.
Perhaps we're being a tad unfair to Leveson, given that he appeared to let slip that he supports media activism. He said that internet-based scrutiny is leading to greater accountability for journalists. People will study them, and I think there's no reporter - no decent reporter - in the land who would not welcome this extra scrutiny.'
Or so one would like to think. Alas, it is not quite our experience over the last eleven years of being blanked, blocked, abused and dumped beyond the pale of media respectability'; even by people who very much like what we're doing but who would rather not be tarred with the same brush.

The Thumb-Sucking 5-10 Per Cent Rule

The Leveson inquiry has exposed the profound influence of corporate owners on media reporting. The Guardian's Nick Davies, whose reporting of the Milly Dowler phone-hacking scandal has been justly praised, claimed in his book, Flat Earth News', that the cumulative effect of owners and advertising was no more than 5-10 per cent:
Journalists with whom I have discussed this [i.e. what Davies calls "the retreat from truth-telling journalism"] agree that if you could quantify it, you could attribute only 5% or 10% of the problem to the total impact of these two forms of interference.' (Flat Earth News', Chattus & Windus, 2008, p. 22)
As we have pointed out, these numbers are contradicted even by the fact that so many aspects of the modern newspaper have evolved in response to the demands of advertisers and corporate owners.
Jonathan Cook, a former Guardian journalist, has been keeping a beady eye on the Leveson inquiry evidence challenging Davies' 5-10 per cent claim. For example, Harold Evans, a former Rupert Murdoch editor at the Sunday Times, described to Leveson how, in 1981, Murdoch rebuked him for reporting gloomy economic news and not doing what he [Murdoch] wants, in political terms'. Evans says that Murdoch came to his home and the two almost ended up in fisticuffs over a piece on the economy.'
Evans added:
Murdoch would also haul in senior staff for meetings to tell them to alter their coverage, including the editorial line of the leader columns and telling the foreign editor to "attack the Russians more".'
No wonder former Sun editor David Yelland described how editors go on a journey where they end up agreeing with everything Murdoch says … "What would Rupert think about this?" is like a mantra inside your head'.
Cook also pointed out two articles that as good as admit the obvious: that Murdoch decided what parties his papers would back in return, of course, for political support for his business interests.'
The first described how, in 2009, James Murdoch, deputy chief operating officer of News Corp, had told David Cameron, then Tory leader of the Opposition, that the Sun would switch its support in the upcoming general election from Labour to the Conservatives. This announcement was made shortly after Jeremy Hunt, then the Tory's shadow culture secretary, had visited News Corp offices in the US.
A second article reported that Murdoch was attracted by the idea' of Scottish independence and thought that Alex Salmond, Scotland's First Minister, was a nice guy'. Murdoch cleared the way' for the Scottish edition of the Sun to endorse Salmond's Scottish National Party at the Scottish elections in spring 2011, just as [Salmond] was promising to lobby for News Corporation to take control of BSkyB.' The SNP won a landslide victory in the Scottish parliamentary elections on May 5. Salmond admitted that he had been happy' to make a direct call to culture secretary Jeremy Hunt to support Murdoch's controversial attempt to take complete control of the satellite broadcaster.
But this wasn't just a one-off; it was - and remains - a crucial part of the political process. As Cabinet Office minister Oliver Letwin told Leveson, News International bosses could be very demanding'. Referring to then Sun editor Rebekah Brooks, charged last week with conspiracy to pervert the cause of justice:
If you are on the same side as her, you have to see her every week. This was how it worked.'
Letwin added:
The realpolitik is that you have to get on with people who run newspapers. Labour did the same.'
Indeed, in 1995, opposition leader Tony Blair flew halfway round the world to curry favour with Rupert Murdoch at the luxury Hayman Island resort in Queensland, Australia. Addressing senior News Corporation executives, the Labour leader pledged an end to the rigid economic planning and state controls' of the Old Left' and declared that the battle between market and public sector is over.' Two years later, after 18 years of supporting the Tories, Murdoch used the Sun to officially endorse Blair and New Labour who then won a landslide victory at the 1997 general election. In 2011, Blair even became godfather to Murdoch's youngest child.
And Murdoch isn't alone in casting a shadow over the political process. Prime Minister David Cameron admitted that he and other politicians became too close to too many newspaper proprietors and executives.' So politicians have been bending to the will of media owners, and media owners have been influencing, and even directing, what their own editors and journalists do.
Jonathan Cook told us why he believes it's important to document examples of senior journalists revealing the extent of proprietorial interference:
Davies' book [Flat Earth News'] was so influential, especially with other journalists, because it propped up the lie journalists like to tell themselves and others that the problem of the "profession" is essentially a lack of funding and proper care from media owners. They prefer that assessment for two obvious reasons: first, journalists want more money invested in their papers because they hope it means promotions and wage rises; and second, it helps to avert their gaze from the reality that editorial independence is, and always was, a myth.' (Email, April 26, 2012)
Cook also told us:
It's really about time Davies retracted that bit of nonsense from his book. The problem is that, were he to do so, he could no longer justify his argument that media failure is the result chiefly of economic pressures rather than structural flaws.' (Email, April 25, 2012)

A Private Conversation Between Elite Groups

Peter Oborne, chief political commentator at the Daily Telegraph, is no raving leftie. But as a political conservative, he had some astute observations to make to Leveson on the corrupt state of politics and media in this country.
Oborne said that when he arrived on the political reporting scene' he was staggered' by the closeness of politicians and journalists:
It was ceasing to be a conversation between activists and politicians but between the media and the politicians. The News International annual party at the Tory and Labour conference was an extraordinary power event to which people were excluded. Unfortunately I never got in, but you got the entire cabinet and all the influence brokers and the senior members of the media class, and it was a very important statement I felt about how Britain was being governed.'
He continued:
And then you got the astonishing business of the senior News International people sitting just behind the Cabinet. They were the VIPs in the chamber, I believe really important media types were there as well, they were brought into the inner sanctum. I felt this was a perversion of our democracy, it was starting to become a private conversation between elite groups rather than a proper popular engagement.'
He described the politico-journalism collusion as a conspiracy against their [newspapers'] readers'. When challenged by Leveson to justify such a blunt assertion, Oborne responded:
That's exactly what was going on. [...] In order to report during that time you had to get close to the people who ran new Labour, there were very few of them. [...] People who tried to report objectively and fairly were bullied and victimised and not given access to information. People who were part of the circle were favoured and of course there was a price for that. Very hard to be an independent observer, to keep your integrity in those circumstances.'
Political reporting, he said, had become private deals, private arrangements, between media and politicians.' Collusion between politicians and the media helped to explain why the public was so grievously misinformed' about Iraq in the run-up to war. And we would add that it also helps explain why the public has been grievously misinformed about the post-invasion death toll in Iraq which likely exceeds one million, with four million refugees, in a country that has been utterly devastated.
http://www.medialens.org/index.php?optio...1&Itemid=8

[Jan Klimkowski]

Wankers - all of them.

Piers Morgan told me how to hack a phone, says Jeremy Paxman

Presenter tells Leveson inquiry former Mirror editor teased Ulrika Jonsson about private conversations she had

Dan Sabbagh and Lisa O'Carroll

guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 23 May 2012 16.15 BST

Piers Morgan described to Jeremy Paxman how to hack into a mobile phone at a lunch held at the headquarters of the Daily Mirror publisher, the BBC presenter has told the Leveson inquiry.

Paxman said on Wednesday afternoon that at the same lunch he attended Morgan also teased TV presenter Ulrika Jonsson about the details of private conversations she had had with Sven-Göran Eriksson, at the time the England football manager.

The presenter of Newsnight told the Leveson inquiry how he went to a lunch hosted by Sir Victor Blank, the then chairman of Trinity Mirror, held on 20 September 2002, where the subject of phone hacking came up.

Paxman said he was seated beside Morgan now a New York-based CNN talkshow presenter with Jonsson, Blank and Sir Philip Green, the Top Shop billionaire sitting nearby.

The BBC journalist said: "And Morgan said, teasing Ulrika, that he knew what had happened in the conversations between her and Sven-Göran Eriksson and he went into this mock Swedish accent."

Earlier that year, the Mirror had revealed that Jonsson had an affair with the then England football coach.

Choosing his words carefully, Paxman continued: "Now, I don't know whether he was repeating a conversation that he had heard or he was imagining this conversation. In fact, to be fair to him, I think we should accept both possibilities, because he probably was imagining it. It was a rather bad parody.

"I was quite struck by it because I'm rather wet behind the ears in many of these things. I didn't know that that sort of thing went on."

Paxman said that Morgan also turned to him at the lunch and explained how phone hacking worked.

"He then turned to me and said 'Have you got a mobile phone?', I said 'Yes', and he said 'Have you got a security setting on the message bit of it'," he added. "I don't think it was called voicemail in those days, I didn't know what he was talking about. He then explained that the way to get access to people's message was to go to the factory default setting and press either 0000 or 1234 and that if you didn't put on your own code … his words: 'your're a fool'."

He added: "I don't know whether he was making this up, making up the conversation, but it was clearly something that he was familiar with and I wasn't ... I didn't know that this went on."

Morgan told the Leveson inquiry in December that he did not listen to any of Jonsson's voicemails in relation to Eriksson.

He was also asked specifically if he had invited her to lunch that day and had her advised her to change her voicemail settings but the former tabloid editor said he could not recall the episode.

Morgan later tweeted: "Right that's the last time I'm inviting Jeremy Paxman to lunch. Ungrateful little wretch."

[Magda Hassan]

Andy Coulson held in Tommy Sheridan trial perjury inquiry

Andy Coulson was editor of the News of the World
Prime Minister David Cameron's former director of communications Andy Coulson has been detained by police investigating allegations of perjury.Mr Coulson, 44, was detained at his home in the Dulwich area of London at 06:30 by seven officers from Strathclyde Police.He has been held on suspicion of committing perjury at the trial of former MSP Tommy Sheridan in 2010.Mr Coulson is being taken to Glasgow where he will be questioned.A police spokeswoman said: "Officers from Strathclyde Police's Operation Rubicon team detained a 44-year-old man in London this morning under section 14 of the Criminal Procedure Scotland Act 1995 on suspicion of committing perjury before the High Court in Glasgow."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-gl...t-18262740

[Jan Klimkowski]

PM "Dave" Cameron in July 2011:

Cameron also came close to an apology over his decision to appoint Andy Coulson as No 10's director of communications, admitting with hindsight he should not have offered him the job.

Making an exhaustive 139-minute emergency statement to MPs, he edged towards the much-demanded apology about Coulson: "Of course I regret, and I am extremely sorry, about the furore it has caused. With 20/20 hindsight, and all that has followed, I would not have offered him the job, and I expect he would not have taken it."

He added: "I have an old-fashioned view about innocent until proven guilty, but if it turns out that I have been lied to, that would be the moment for a profound apology. In that event, I can tell you that I will not fall short."

C'mon Dave.

We're all waiting.

[Magda Hassan]

Rupert Murdoch is a bad man. His son James is also bad. Rebekah Brooks is allegedly bad. The News of the World was very bad; it hacked phones and pilloried people. British prime ministers grovelled before this iniquity. David Cameron even sent text messages to Brooks signed "LoL", and they all had parties in the Cotswolds with Jeremy Clarkson. Nods and winks were duly exchanged on the BSkyB deal.

Shock, horror.

Offering glimpses of the power and petty gangsterism of the British tabloid press, the inquiry conducted by Lord Leveson has, I suspect, shocked few people. As the soap has rolled on, bemusement has given way to boredom; Tony Blair was allowed to whine about the Daily Mail's treatment of his wife until he and the inquiry's amoral smugness protecting him were exposed by a member of the public, David Lawley-Wakelin, who shouted, "Excuse me, this man should be arrested for war crimes." His Lordship duly apologised to the war criminal and the truth-teller was seen off.

Why Murdoch should complain about the British establishment has always mystified me. His interrogation, if that is the word, by Robert Jay QC, was a series of verbal marshmallows that Murdoch promptly spat out. When he described one of his own rambling, self-satisfied questions as "subtle", Jay received this deft dismissal from Murdoch: "I'm afraid I don't have much subtlety in me."

As the theatre critic Michael Billington reminded us recently, it was in the Spectator in 1955 that Henry Fairlie coined the term "the establishment", defining it as "the matrix of official and social relations within which power in Britain is exercised". For most of my career as a journalist, Murdoch has been an influential and admired member of this club: even a mentor to many of those now casting him as a "bad apple". His deeply cynical mantra, "I'm only giving the public what they want", was echoed by journalists and broadcasters as they lined up to dumb down their work and embrace the propaganda of corporatism that followed Murdoch's bloody move to Wapping in 1986.

More than 5,000 men and women were sacked, and countless families destroyed and suicides committed; and Murdoch could not have got away with it had Margaret Thatcher and the Metropolitan Police not given him total, often secret support, and journalists not lain face down on the floors of buses that drove perilously through the picket lines of their former, principled colleagues.

Cheering him on, if discreetly, were those now running what Max Hastings has called the "new establishment": the media's managerial middle class, often liberal to a fault, that was later to fall at the feet of Murdoch's man Blair, the future war criminal, whose election as prime minister was celebrated in the Guardian with: "Few now sang England Arise, but England has risen all the same."

Leveson has asked nothing about how the respectable media complemented the Murdoch press in systematically promoting corrupt, mendacious, often violent political power whose crimes make phone-hacking barely a misdemeanour. The Leveson inquiry is a club matter, in which a member has caused such extraordinary public embarrassment he must be black-balled, so that nothing changes.

What jolly fun to hear Jeremy Paxman grass on Piers Morgan who, he gossiped, described to him how to hack phones. Paxman was asked nothing by Jay about the essential role of the BBC and its leading lights as state propagandists for illegal wars that have killed, maimed and dispossessed millions. How ironic that the lunch Paxman attended at the Daily Mirror appears to have been in 2002 when the Mirror, edited by Morgan, was the only Fleet Street newspaper uncompromisingly opposed to the coming invasion of Iraq: thus reflecting the wishes of the majority of the British public.

And what a wheeze it was to hear from the clubbable Andrew Marr, the BBC's ubiquitous voice: he of the super-injunction. Just as Murdoch's Sun declared in 1995 that it shared the rising Blair's "high moral values", so Marr, writing in the Observer in 1999, lauded the new prime minister's "substantial moral courage". What impressed Marr was Blair's "utter lack of cynicism", along with his bombing of Yugoslavia which would "save lives". By March 2003, Marr was the BBC's political editor. Standing in Downing Street on the night of the assault on Iraq, he rejoiced at the vindication of Blair who, he said, had promised "to take Baghdad without a bloodbath". The diametric opposite was true. In hawking his self-serving book in 2010, Blair selected Marr for his "exclusive TV interview". During their convivial encounter they discussed an attack on Iran, the country Hillary Clinton once said she was prepared to "obliterate".

In the text messages disclosed by Leveson between Murdoch lobbyist Frederic Michel and Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt, there is this one from Michel: "Very good on Marr as always". In a cable leaked to WikiLeaks, the US embassy in London urged Hillary Clinton to be interviewed by the "congenial" Marr because he often "sets the political agenda for the nation" and "will offer maximum impact for your investment of time". Inquisitor Jay showed no interest.

When Alastair Campbell "gave evidence", Jay waved a copy of Blair's A Journey and quoted Blair's view of his chief collaborator as "a genius".

"Sweet," responded Campbell.

"And with great clunking balls as well," continued Jay QC, awaiting the laughter. The silence of 780,000 Iraqi widows was a presence.

Not a single opponent of the institutional power of the media has been called by Leveson, though farce is welcomed. Richard Desmond, who owns the Daily Express and a section of the British porn industry, during his appearance damned the Daily Mail as "Britain's worst enemy" and said the Press Complaints Commission "hated our guts".

Shock, horror. Or just sweet.
http://togsplace.blogspot.com.au/2012/05...-into.html

[Jan Klimkowski]

Pilger nails the Leveson "inquiry" and its faux world.

Robert Jay QC's inability to nail any of the crooks he interviews at such mind numbingly tedious length is striking.

For ingenues, Jay's pathetic efforts might lead to an epiphany about what they are watching.

For deep political researchers, they are entirely to be expected from an establishment farce such as Leveson.