Rebekah Brooks has now laid down several hundred jobs to save her own. She has also made way for the brand new super soaraway Sunday Sun. News International have evidently decided to gamble on the idea that there is no end to the gullibility of the British mass public.
But let us stop and consider. A great part of British newspaper history, a paper that supported imprisoned Chartists , has just been lost. With it have gone hundreds of jobs. It has been lost because the management of News International at the News of the World was either criminally involved or culpably negligent – there are no other choices. By their destruction of the News of the World, News Corp have proven beyond any doubt that they are not fit and proper persons to run media in this country. Ofcom must now act on this to use its powers to disbar unfit persons, and force News Corp to sell all its media interests in the UK.
Absolutely! Concise summary of the key issue
Good Question Time last night. The articulate Hugh Grant was impressive. He has been hacked by Murdoch but was able to expose them when he secretly recorded a conversation with Paul McMullen their ex reporter.
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The two politicians Chris Grayling and Wee Duggie were both pathetic in attempting to criticize each other and their parties, both knowing full well that their parties had been and are in bed with Murdoch. There was a complete collapse of Wee Duggie when Grant asked him to confirm that he had been at the Murdoch party Craig wrote about earlier. Also on the panel were Shirley Williams and the racist idiot Jon Gaunt, an ex Murdoch employee I believe.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006t1q9
This artice is getting read at the rate of one person every three seconds at the minute. I hope the server holds up!
Absolutely dead-on, Craig. A shockingly transparent sacrifice of a ‘brand’ as we hate to say these days to save some very nasty people’s skins. And the overwhelming majority of the British public do not give a damn, quite evidently, if you tracked how popular thisvstoryvwas during the week on the BBC news site. How very depressing.
Indeed. Murdoch has allowed (or forced) a long-standing British institution to rot from the inside and then chopped it down. Not a fit and proper person to own any British company, let alone a media one.
I seem to have hit a nerve. It is just over an hour since I posted this, and so far 2,116 people have read it.
That’s 2,257 three minutes later. We are on more than one a second now.
Well done Craig. And there are some new names in the comments which is good to see. People are seeking the truth. They are seeing through the downpouring of BS and want no more of it.
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Miliband has just been pontificating and droning on at a press conference at Reuters and Cameron follows with one at 9.30. There is nothing either can say that will redeem them in the public’s opinion on this matter.
Good stuff this. Shall follow you immediately sir. Though the NOTW wa hardly a standard bearer for a more civilised and enjoyable country to live in. But the mirror’s not much better these days either
“and force News Corp to sell all its media interests in the UK”
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You’ll be lucky if they’re not successful in getting BSkyB.
However, Tom Watson on Channel4 News last night said he believes there is more to come out — about hacking of computers and using “tracking” devices (?).
[I had a look at http://www.foxnews.com/ last night. Not one word of this scandal, that I could see.
There is now one small link, way down that page.]
Cameron can hardly be dancing jigs right now. Terrible judgement on his part to take Coulson into the heart of No.10. Could he possibly have been pressured into it?
In terms of newspaper coverage, it matters little. Since Murdoch got hold of it, The Times has become more and more like the News of the World anyway. Slightly different subject matter, but the level of analysis is about the same.
I am delighted but completely baffled. Many thousands of people are coming to the site, but 80% of them with “no referring link” – they have not clicked on a weblink from another site or gone through a search engine. Only about 15% are coming through twitter. I really don’t understand what has happened. Has Hugh Grant just asked people on air to go to craigmurray.org.uk?
No, Graham Linehan and a few others posted the link on Twitter
Great article by the way 🙂
Craig, for people following a link from within a Twitter client, you won’t see a referrer.
Thank you Chris. The large majority of people aren’t shown as coming through twitter – do people copy urls from their mobile phones and type them in to their browser bar? That would explain it, but only if that is how most people browse from twitter links, which seems unlikely. Aha – just seen Gareth’s explanation about Twitter clients. Mystery solved, then (say I, pretending to know what a twitter client is).
Anyway, I shall stop being mystified and be happy that if you hit the mark on the net, people turn up, however magically. 90% of them are shown as first time visitors – yet this is a website which regularly has 100,000 unique visitors a month! Good to be reaching a new audience.
As Gareth said, a Twitter client wont show a referrer, you’ll just get lots of hits
As someone wrote on a previous thread, it goes much deeper than News International (big as that is). This may be an opportunity for a complete change wrt the media in this country – the momentum of the past few days must not be lost! I think that all large commercial media cartels should be broken-up and none should be allowed to own more than a small percentage of UK broadcasting. Smash the monopolies! It also has exposed to the general public discourse the depth and the systemic nature of corruption within the ruling political classes and their servility in relation to monopoly media cartels. This is not about a couple of rotten apples, nor is it merely about Rupert Murdoch – now the entire barrel must burn.
I agree wholeheartedly; Murdoch and co should be forced out, they cannot be trusted. A man like that should never be allowed so much power and influence. I am amazed that NotW had such a high circulation anyway, it was a rag, despite the ‘good things’ papers like the Times are claiming it did. What does it say about the British public that NotW was the top selling Sunday paper? Oh, by the way, yes i came via Graham Linehan’s link on Twitter.
“What does Ofcom’s ‘fit and proper’ test mean?”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/law/2011/jul/07/bskyb-bid-ofcom-fit-and-proper
‘thesunonsunday.com’ domain name was registered only three days ago. Hmmm…..
http://www.checkdomain.com/cgi-bin/checkdomain.pl?domain=thesunonsunday
Cameron (a shallow and empty vessel) keeps banging on about having given Coulson a ‘second chance’. Can we have a second chance and boot him and Clegg out of Downing Street?
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Students of body language. Why does he tense his upper lip so as to make his mouth appear mean and tight? Also why does he drink so much water? Does he suffer from permanent and severe dehydration?
It will be good to be rid of the corrupting influence of Murdoch empire, but there are plenty of other unsavory media barons waiting in the wings to fill the void not least the Pornographer and Nu labour Donor Dirty Desmond or Lebedev or the Barclay brothers.
I’d only question one point you made, Craig, that Rebekah Brooks is calling the shots. Seems to me that she’s being held as a firewall to protect the Murdoch family, but all the big decisions are being taken over her head.
What Tom Watson alleged under parliamentiary privilege about Brooks is surely the most explosive allegation so far made, libel laws prevent the reporting of it, but the full debate is online and it’s worth a read.
Murdoch certainly has no problems with a sense of history when it comes to British institutions including a 168 year old newspaper, he only cares about profit and if the NOTW has to be trashed and burnt quickly to gain some sense of a moral high-ground, especially given his bid for the rest of BSkyB, then so be it! I would guess most of the journos who have “lost their jobs” will soon be back at their desks writing for Murdoch under a different cover. I doubt if any Politico has the guts to break up the cosy media cartels, they probably have more juicy and damming stories on the politicians than the chief whips or even MI5 could muster if it was even suggested.
Thanks for another great article Craig. Hugh Grant was astoundingly well informed and those politicians could not touch him last night.
Still no arrests of confiscations of computers. Ms Wade Brooks and A. Coulson have bother been their own worst enemy, his perjury in front of court and hers in front of the select comittee. I agree Eddie, she knows something that sdhould not become public and thats her future ticket within the Murdoch empire. If this ‘something’ would have to do with young James, one could easily spin reasons for excuse, but if this something is connected to Rupert himeslf, it would be another matter alltogether.
My guess is the latter.
Craig, it occurred to me: Was your phone hacked (or bugged, or otherwise intercepted), either by the media or by some state organisation? I would have some suspicions on that count.
*Adjusts tinfoil hat* Anyone else think this is just too pat? If we assume that only a fraction of the full picture regarding phone hacking at the NotW has been made public as yet, it’s the fraction guaranteed to elicit a strong emotional response in the British public: female murder victims, child murder victims, Iraq and Afghanistan servicemen, etc. Cameron MUST have known something about the whole thing, given that Rebekah Brooks is his great mate and Andy Coulson was his top media bod. Murdoch, also a great mate of Cameron and probably a bigger influence on the running of UK PLC, suddenly opts to close down the NotW, supposedly because the scandal has become too big to manage. Entirely unsurprisingly, all the big fish remain in post while the current NotW journalists, who had nowt to do with any of this, get the chop. Until the super, soaraway, Sunday Sun gets the nod anyway. In the meantime, on Today this morning, we hear that the PCC will almost undoubtedly get the chop and statutory regulation of the UK press is on the cards. Perhaps the plan is to tighten even further media control in this country? Would dovetail nicely with the push to control the Internet.
You’ve been living in a Berlusconi-land, too, only most Britains didn’t know it till now.