Plainly Not Fit and Proper Persons 165

 in Uncategorized by

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.

Allowed HTML - you can use: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>

165 thoughts on “Plainly Not Fit and Proper Persons”

1 … 3 4 5 6
  • Conjunction

    I finally got around to watching Question Time. I was impressed with Shirley Williams, in fact thought her comments represent the best reason for voting Liberal since Kennedy went on the anti-war demo.

    –

    However when Williams said she was amazed ‘as we all were’ about the ‘industrial scale’ of the revelations, I wasn’t. Nor am I surprised that all the tabloid media are at it. Even the politicians seem to switch their brains off half the time.

    –

    I was curious why Alexander made such a big thing about police corruption back in 2006, about how the police investigation stopped after two hours. Perhaps I’m cynical, but I had assumed it was inconceivable that could have happened without the sayso of his government.

  • Anon

    I think some in very high places wanted rid of Murdoch or wanted his wings clipped, otherwise all this would not have happened. Always remember…
    .
    “In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way.”
    .
    Franklin D. Roosevelt.

  • Azra

    Anon,

    That was when politicians had more power than the press.. from what we have seen for the past 30 years , it is now the Press who call the shots…

  • Anon

    Azra, they are all one of the same!, one big club, you and I are not in it. The above is just worth a thought, Murdoch may just have been getting too big/powerful for some.

  • Paul Johnston

    Re: New Car
    Get a Ford not a Renault Craig!
    They were the first to boycott NOTW before it became a bandwagon.
    Seriously I don’t drive so don’t take any advice from me but Ford were at the forefront of droppping adverts 🙂

  • Iain Orr

    Shortly before “Any Questions”started [on 8 July] “The Now Show” had a wonderful extended riff on Rebekah Brooks telling her employees it was “inconceivable” she knew the “News of the World” hacked into Milly Dowler’s mobile phone. That is, of course, daft. Any competent editor is expected to know whether the evidence supporting a story is reliable. It is thus easily conceivable that an editor is complicit, incompetent; or both.

    Less easily conceivable is that Murdoch initially asked Brooks to lead News International’s internal inquiry. But that is what happened. So, the editor has no instinct for accuracy; and the proprietor no instinct for propriety. Is it conceivable anyone might judge these as right and proper people to run a dominant media company in the UK? Of course it is – but not all that is conceivable is desirable. Let’s hope for the following conceivable outcomes – their nightmares, our dreams: Brooks concentrates on being a school governor; Murdoch stripped of any UK media ownership.

  • Parky

    The Key Players So far…
    Rubert Murdoch = Dr Evil
    James Murdoch = Scot Evil
    Andy Coulson = Number Two
    Rebekah Brooks = Frau Farbissina
    .
    David Cameron = Austin Powers
    Adam Boulton = Fat B
    .
    Yeah Baby !

  • Phil

    My reading of it is that Cameron did not have much choice over the Coulson appointment. It was the price of Murdoch support in the election. Or maybe Murdoch’s hold is even stronger than that.

    Wasn’t Coulson’s replacement also a Murdoch placeman?

  • mary

    The 63 year old man arrested yesterday is said to be a private investigator.
    .
    Rupert (what a silly name for this malign person) is crossing from the US today. Obviously he is getting the wind up about the bid for BSkyB not panning out quite as arranged with the ConDems.

  • DRE

    Brooks will be gone soon enough – she looks like someone who is waiting for the snipers bullet. Dissolving NOTW was the just the first act.

  • Suhayl Saadi

    “I think some in very high places wanted rid of Murdoch or wanted his wings clipped, otherwise all this would not have happened.”
    Anon.
    Indeed, Anon, this is precisely what Ruth and I were discussing on another thread. Perhaps the security and intelligence services thought News International was encroaching on its territory. Who knows. I’m sure that in due course, there will be articles in the non-mainstream media on this aspect of the affair. I gave the comparison of Nixon, Woodward and Hoover vis a vis the start if the Watergate investigations.

  • Suhayl Saadi

    Nonetheless, breaking-up the Murdoch empire, in relation to its malign influence on/control of not merely the media in the UK but also as we’ve seen its direct corrupting effect on the legislature and forces of law and order, is not a bad thing. That the entire system is rotten and chancrous need not detain the immolation of one particularly overt neoplasia. The downfall of Richard Nixon was a good thing, even if it was engineered, at the start and in part, by an equally imperialist, heinous and murderous political power-structure, namely, the FBI and even if it left the US Empire intact. As you correctly state, Anon, we are plebs, they are patricians. Unless there is systemic and sustained political action on the streets and in the work-places (and at this juncture, that remains some way off), the underlying rubric will remain unchanged. In the interim, the aim would be (to paraphrase a particularly stupid piece of govt propaganda) to resist and survive and, as far as is possible, to initiate guerilla attacks in the information plexus on the underbellies of empire. Murdoch’s cartel is one of those stinking underbellies; his swollen teats, it seems, have been demand-feeding the body politic and the cops for many years. I would support any moves to drive Murdoch and his rancid udders from these shores, forever. To the abattoir!

  • Suhayl Saadi

    Interesting, thanks, Dreoilin. Yet neither of those articles – in the Independent or Counterpunch – posits a more complex dynamic of the type posited wrt Watergate. The Watergate/FBI/Hoover, etc. thing is not a secret matter – it was even mentioned in the TV biopic of Hoover made in the 1980s. I’m not saying that such a dynamic exists, but is it not worth considering…? This is from Bob Woodward, himself an ex-Intel officer:

    “At the time, pre-Watergate, there was little or no public knowledge of the acrimony between the Nixon White House and Hoover’s FBI. The Watergate investigations later revealed that in 1970, a young White House aide, Tom Charles Huston, had come up with a plan to authorise the CIA, the FBI and military intelligence units to intensify electronic surveillance of “domestic security threats”, authorise illegal opening of mail and lift the restrictions on surreptitious entries or break-ins to gather intelligence.

    Huston warned in a top-secret memo that the plan was “clearly illegal”. Nixon initially approved the plan anyway. Hoover strenuously objected, because eavesdropping, opening mail and breaking into the homes and offices of domestic security threats were basically the FBI bailiwick and the bureau didn’t want competition. Four days later, Nixon rescinded the Huston plan.”

    Now, eavesdropping is is very GCHQ’s/NSA’s bailiwick…

    Turf wars, in other words. Think of Northern Ireland, b/w Special Branch and MI5. Different context, of course, but might there not be a similar principle?
    http://www.sharedtroubles.net/storydetail.php?story_id=1010

  • dreoilin

    I see your point about turf wars, Suhayl. But I’m not clear what it has to do with Murdoch and Co. If anything?
    (I should read that ‘Stakeknife’ book, it looks interesting.)

  • technicolour

    Glancing at the Sun, I see the threats made by NI people to make this ‘personal’ against New Labour are already coming through. Ed Miliband’s spin doctor (why don’t they just call them lie doctors?) has been accused of having a long term coke habit by Lord Ashcroft! Headline in which almost every word should be in the inverted commas of irony: RED ED IN QUIZ OVER SPIN DOCTOR’S ‘DRUG USE’.

  • mark_golding

    So Murdoch has abandoned his golf match to fly into the UK. Meanwhile we witness the lights were burning very late at WappingGate, deleting the evidence by writing 0’s and 1’s on swaths of platters to boot. That is the real reason for killing the power and bolting the doors of the NOTW headquarters on Sunday while Agent Cameron dithers on selecting the right judge to head-up a public inquiry and… waiting to speak face to face with big cheese chairman Rupert Murdoch.
    .
    We note all the tory trolls are silent cooling their heels for further instructions. Do we accept the BSkyB merger as promised? Maybe not this time, the heat is too fierce.
    .
    Brooks, Murdoch, Cameron, Coulson, Brown, Blair, Yates, Hayman – atonement is real guys-through the collective power of intention…

  • angrysoba

    Alexander Cockburn, son of Claud (“Never believe anything until it is denied”)
    .
    Claud Cockburn actually wrote “Never believe anything until it is OFFICIALLY denied.”
    .
    But then wasn’t Claud Cockburn the writer who went under the penname of “Frank Sinclair” and worked for Stalin during the Spanish Civil War. This is, at least, what Orwell tells us.

  • angrysoba

    johnm, your arguments from popularity and authority are meaningless. Who cares how many Germans think X or that some crazy military people think X or Judy Wood believes space beams knocked down the Twin Towers?

  • Suhayl Saadi

    Angrysoba:

    “His watchword remains, ‘Never believe anything until it’s officially denied,’ a favourite expression of reporter Claud Cockburn, father of Independent journalist Patrick Cockburn.”

    http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/tv-radio/pilgers-law-if-its-been-officially-denied-then-itrsquos-probably-true-959206.html

    But perhaps this was a mistaken attribution? Newspapers do make mistakes (!) I don’t know for sure, actually; if you know where the phrase originated, please share. Thanks.

1 … 3 4 5 6

Comments are closed.