The Guardians exposé of widespread phone hacking within certain newspapers will have come as no surpise to readers of Nick Davies' book "Flat Earth News", in which, the front cover tells us, "An award-winning reporter exposes falsehood, distortion and propaganda in the global media".

Of special interest, in respect of the Guardian's report, is the chapter on a guy called Steve Whittamore.

Whittamore was arrested in 2003 on charges relation to "procuring of information from police computer systems".

In fact the investigation found that "305 different journalists had asked (him) for a total of 13,343 different items of information".

The "overwhelming majority" of requests came from "eight national dailies and ten national Sundays" which included The Observer and - 995 requests - the Daily Mail.

Nick Davies devotes a whole chapter to the Daily Mail which is, on its own, worth the price of the book. But I digress.

Astounding as it might seem, Steve Whittamore and his three co-defendants got off, and a further trial collapsed, largely on the grounds of cost.

If you wish to be both appalled, and to fall-about with the unintended hilarity of it all, Nick Davies chapter "The Dark Arts" is for you.

For those wishing to see a more democratic - a more grown up - Britain, it's clear that until corporate dominance of the media is high on the political agenda, "a new politics" is not going to happen.

And if you wish to know the reason, one man stands in the way of reform, a man to whom all politicians who wish to win elections will defer: Rupert Murdoch who - thanks to Margaret 'monopolist' Thatcher - has become the dominant force in the British media.

Even those not technically owned by him - including the BBC - have become embroiled in his successful efforts to drive down standards.

Phone hacking is all of a piece with Murdoch's commodified media, in which celebrities and politicians take centre stage as figures to be envied, lampooned and reviled.

For behind the furore is a larger canvas: in the absence of accountability, Murdoch's character-assassination squads have filled the breach.

Rupert Murdoch

Dickipedia

Newscrap

I'm proud to be green

We need a rebellion against a press that's damaging our national psyche

Rupert Murdoch's News Group News­papers has paid out more than £1m to settle legal cases that threatened to reveal evidence of his journalists' repeated involvement in the use of criminal methods to get stories.

The payments secured secrecy over out-of-court settlements in three cases that threatened to expose evidence of Murdoch journalists using private investigators who illegally hacked into the mobile phone messages of numerous public ­figures to gain unlawful access to confidential personal data, including tax records, social security files, bank statements and itemised phone bills. Cabinet ministers, MPs, actors and sports stars were all targets of the private investigators.

Today, the Guardian reveals details of the suppressed evidence, which may open the door to hundreds more legal actions by victims of News Group, the Murdoch company that publishes the News of the World and the Sun, as well as provoking police inquiries into reporters who were involved and the senior executives responsible for them. The evidence also poses difficult questions for:

• Conservative leader David Cameron's director of communications, Andy Coulson, who was deputy editor and then editor of the News of the World when, the suppressed evidence shows, journalists for whom he was responsible were engaging in hundreds of apparently illegal acts.

• Murdoch executives who, albeit in good faith, misled a parliamentary select committee, the Press Complaints Commission and the public.

• The Metropolitan police, which did not alert all those whose phones were targeted, and the Crown Prosecution Service, which did not pursue all possible charges against News Group personnel.

• The Press Complaints Commission, which claimed to have conducted an investigation, but failed to uncover any evidence of illegal activity ...

Guardian 09 July 2009

Secret damages paid to second NoW victim

When the high court last summer ordered the News of the World to pay damages to Max Mosley for secretly filming him with prostitutes, the paper was furious. In an angry leader column, it insisted that public figures must maintain standards. "It is not for the powerful and the influential to run to the courts to gag newspapers from publishing stories that are TRUE," it said. "This is all about the public's right to know."

Even as those words were being published, lawyers and senior executives from News International's subsidiary News Group were preparing to run to court to gag Gordon Taylor, the chief executive of the Professional Footballers' Association, who was suing the News of the World for its undisclosed involvement in the illegal interception of messages left on his mobile phone.

By persuading the high court to seal the file and by paying Taylor more than £400,000 damages in exchange for his silence, News Group prevented the public from knowing anything about the hundreds of pages of evidence which had been disclosed in Taylor's case, revealing potentially criminal behaviour by journalists on its payroll. It also protected some powerful and influential people from the implications of that evidence.

David Cameron's chief press adviser, Andy Coulson, is not named in any of the suppressed evidence. However, the paperwork shows that during the time when he was editor of the News of the World, and contrary to News Group's earlier denials, editorial staff for whom he was responsible were involved with private investigators who engaged in illegal phone-hacking; and that when Coulson was deputy editor, reporters and executives were commissioning multiple purchases of confidential information, which is illegal unless it is proved to be in the public interest. These purchases were not secret within the News of the World office: they were openly paid for by the accounts department with invoices which itemised illegal acts ...

Guardian 09 July 2009

PCC response to phone hacking controversy 'weakened its credibility'

Press Complaints Commission's actions also 'revealed major failings in its ways of operating', claims independent report ...

lorenzo1
1 Mar 2010, 7:06PM

it is "in need of urgent reform to enhance the reputation of British journalism"

I think that is generous in the extreme. The PCC has time and again showed that it is incapable of doing the job and is "not fit for purpose". Reform would be merely rearranging the furniture without addressing the fundamental issues as to why it and the notion of self-regulation fail.

The sheer scale of entrenched bias among those informing the body mean it is under intense pressure to sweep most complaints away as an annoyance. The papers want it as a fig-leaf for increasingly piss-poor practice, shoddy journalism and a bet that any high court costs are worth the risk against potential sales and ad revenues.

And so what if it finds against you? There are no teeth to the rulings, no financial penalty, no three-strikes rule just an annoying apology for a story that could dominate days or weeks fed only by speculation and imagination.

The papers cry foul about any attempt to regulate but in the last few years of supposed harder more critical self-regulation appear keen to inflict as much self-damage as possible, spurred by the very pointlessness of any PCC complaint, investigation or adjudication.

Let's put it and the media out of their misery. Stop the pretence of self-regulation and have a body capable of imposing serious financial penalties, suspension of printing for days or a week; referral to criminal courts; an end to stupid and piss-poor practices (including making up quotes) and a like-for-like apology in size and position.

The board should be completely independent and separate from any vested media interest but staffed by those who know so know more of that pathetic and shameful "can't remember act" favoured by Andy Coulson and crew.

A more robust independent body with actual power to penalise would strengthen journalism, make editors think twice about the poor and dodgy practices and also for a withering of the current gossip as news agenda.

In addition it might help strengthen the select committees who oversee media issues by allowing a truly independent body to advice on relevant questioning and insight into poor practice that allowed the likes of the News of the World to lie to all and sundry under their collective amnesia under the inept gaze of many who populate these committees.

Put simply. Reform is not needed, required nor desirable. Total change is what is needed.

Guardian  01 March 2010    Manufacturing Consent

The IFJ: Phone hacking and the PCC

Unanimous backing for real freedom of the press

Over the past 18 months, there has been an unprecedented groundswell for reform, as scientists, academics, NGOs, the media and pressure groups have lobbied for action.

The committee's recommendations echo many of those proposed by Index on Censorship and English PEN in a report published last November – tackling libel tourism, making it harder for corporations to sue, developing a public interest defence, reducing costs, a one-year limitation on internet publication.

There has rarely been such a convergence of engagement by pressure groups and politicians on an issue.

"There's an opportunity for a thoroughgoing reform of our libel law," said Paul Farrelly MP, an influential member of the committee ...

Independent  24 Feb 2010

Today is a good day for free expression

Index of Censorship

English PEN

"If the government does decide to permit product placement, it will be warmly welcomed by the commercial broadcasting industry and advertisers alike.

"Reforming the UK prohibition would also be a welcome acknowledgement of the pressures currently faced by an industry in transition. New sources of revenue means better-funded content - which can only be good news for viewers."

BBC NEWS  12 September 2009 BBC NEWS 

Denis O'Brien, the rebel shareholder in Independent News & Media whose two-year campaign led to the retirement of Sir Anthony O'Reilly as the media group's boss, has called for a shareholder meeting to order the immediate sale or closure of its loss-making UK newspapers the Independent and Independent on Sunday ...

socialistMike
02 Sep 09, 9:54am

'Just an observation, but no one ever frets about maintaining an 'informed debate' or plurality of opinion when it's right-wing newspapers that are threatened.'

We pretty much only have a right-wing press and the Independent is by no means 'left'. It is a capitalist enterprise and is failing because it has less capital backing than the bigger groups and has been left more exposed as its advertising revenue has fallen.

There is only one left wing daily paper in the UK - the Morning Star - and that is deliberately excluded from all discussions as if it doesn't exist at all. It doesn't get mentioned in the paper reviews, it's stories are never taken up by the BBC; the distribution chains historically haven't handled it and the newsagent chains frequently refuse to sell it; Royal Mail refuse to deliver it to Scotland and the north on the day of publication (which other newspaper could survive arriving a day late?).

We don't have plurality in media, we never have had it and we never will either. The last decade has seen the market deliver fewer and fewer titles and a much more restricted range of views - the growth of right-wing dominance of the media, already in a monopolistic position, has followed the concentration of media power into fewer and fewer hands.

So the reason there is no 'fretting' might be because there are any number of right-wing papers, buttressed by being part of a larger group and cross-subsidised by more profitable businessses (think of the pornographer's titles). And this will carry on because the propaganda produced by these papers helps support free market capitalism and the profits of corporations - for us the downside is being a constantly misinformed public and at he mercy of self-interested lies - so it is a worthwhile investment for big capital.

... Last week, Gavin O'Reilly pledged that the two titles will break even within the next two years adding that it is not an easy issue to sell or dispose of them because there are a number of contractual relationships – not least with their new landlord the Daily Mail & General Trust – that are not easily broken.

There has, however, been persistent speculation about the future of the loss-making newspapers ...

Guardian  02 September 2009

Gavin O'Reilly

We seem to have decided to let independence and plurality wither – to let the BBC throttle the news market, and get bigger to compensate.

For hundreds of years people have fought for the right to publish what they think. Yet today the threat to independent news provision is serious and imminent.

We have a system in which state-sponsored media – the BBC in particular – grow ever more dominant. If we are to have that state sponsorship at all, then it is fundamental to the health of the creative industries, independent production, and professional journalism that it exists on a far, far smaller scale.

Above all, we must have genuine independence in news media. Independence is characterised by the absence of the apparatus of supervision and dependency. Independence of faction, industrial or political. Independence of subsidy, gift or patronage.

Independence is sustained by true accountability to customers. People who buy the newspapers, open the application, decide to take out the TV subscription – people who choose a service they value. And people value honest, fearless, and independent news coverage that challenges the consensus.

There is an inescapable conclusion. The only reliable, durable, and perpetual guarantor of independence is profit.

Guardian  28 August 2009

James Murdoch hits out at BBC

The evolution of a feud

Murdoch attack on 'dominant' BBC

... the media act as intellectual filters, reinforcing the consensus view and ignoring or attacking challenges to it.

If it turns out that parliament is in thrall to elite interests offering a Tweedledum/Twiddledee no-choice, then the media will promote, rather than expose, this empty shell of a democracy. And this, of course, is exactly the situation we are in: politics and media work together to insulate power from rational thought and public interference.

The corporate media got away with its role in this closed-loop oppression for so long by simple virtue of its monopoly power to suppress dissent. But the world has changed. The internet allows non-corporate journalists and commentators to bypass the corporate gatekeepers and communicate to a global audience, instantly, at almost zero cost. These analysts generally do not charge for their work - almost all radical material is freely available on the internet.

And here is the rub for the mainstream: this non-corporate journalism is unconstrained by the distorting influence of wealthy owners and parent companies with busy fingers in any number of economic and political pies.

It is unconstrained by the reliance of corporate journalists on corporate advertising, with all that that implies. It is uncompromised by the insidious dependence on government and other official sources for cheap news; by thoughts of career progression in the revolving door between journalism, public relations and government.

The result is really beyond argument: dissident reporting and commentary is rational, honest and, therefore, interesting, in a way that corporate journalism can never be ...

Media Lens  23 July 2009

... last Monday, David Cameron made a surprise speech about quangos. His team asked the rightwing thinktank Reform to set up the event at just a few days' notice. It looked like the standard speech made by all oppositions promising cuts in "the quango state".

But one astonishing new commitment stuck out, even though it was barely noticed in most reports: "Ofcom as we know it will cease to exist. Its remit will be restricted to narrow technical and enforcement roles. It will no longer play a role in making policy." It would be knocked back to "regulating lightly". Had there been a great popular outcry calling for the demolition of Ofcom? Hardly, since this is obscure, techie stuff. So what was this all about?

Within hours of Cameron's speech, leading market analysts UBS Investment Research assessed the potential impact: "This bodes well for Sky … We believe that a lighter-touch approach would result in a far better and fairer outcome for Sky, the consumer and the pay market. This could result in a valuation of over 750p versus circa 650p under Ofcom's current proposals."

In plain English, if the Conservatives come to power and abolish Ofcom, expect a £1 share price rise for Sky – worth some £1.7bn ...

Cameron's office says there was "no contact with News International" about Ofcom but history should not be ignored.

The Murdoch press has a long record of winning pay-back from the political leaders it backs – and it has recently swung behind Cameron.

In fact, it is so ordinary that too few political commentators bother to keep remarking on the malign influence this man has had on our politics for the past 30 years ...

Guardian 11 July 2009

The Times ... thinks there should not be an inquiry at all. In a first leader last week the paper grumbled that there had already been two of them, and it doubted that a third could tell us anything we don’t already know.

I disagree. There are many aspects of this affair that remain unexamined. One of them is the attitude of some newspapers, in particular the Murdoch-owned Times and Sun, in uncritically promoting the Government’s flawed case for war, and defending, or even omitting to report, its mistakes ...

The BBC’s Andrew Gilligan was almost entirely right about the “sexed up” 2002 dossier. During the row between the Government and the BBC in July 2003, both papers took the Government’s side. After No 10 had revealed the identity of the weapons inspector Dr David Kelly, subsequently found dead near his home, they attacked the Corporation.

The Times’s Tom Baldwin, a friend of Alastair Campbell, shamelessly wrote that, “some BBC journalists seemed to have abandoned objectivity”.

The Sun was even more aerated, suggesting that, “this is the time for root-and-branch reorganisation of the news department at the BBC.” This from a newspaper which in February 2004 did not even report Tony Blair’s amazing confession that when Britain went to war he did not know that so-called WMD ( had they existed) were considered by the western military to be battlefield weapons which could only be fired a relatively short distance.

The Times complains that every aspect of the Iraq war has already been discussed. No. Rupert Murdoch’s role as chief cheerleader for the war has hardly even been considered ...

The Independent 22 June 2009

One word you will never hear mentioned by the mainstream media is the 'P' word. Even quite sane people - like Vince Cable MP - regard it as much morfe deplorable than the misspelling of French Connection UK's logo.

Yet the debate is perfectly valid if the impact of globalisation on its losers is to be confronted.

... there is evidence to prove that free trade has not served well the richest economy in the world.

The US showed remarkable growth together with a rise in real wages for a majority of its population up until the late 1960s.

This was a period when the US manufacturing industries were in good health and were still protected from foreign competition by tariffs (taxes on foreign imports). Since 1973, however, when it turned to quasi free trade, the country has seen declining levels of real wage for around 80 percent of its workforceas high wage manufacturing sector jobs have been replaced by low wage service sector jobs.

The benefits of free trade have only accrued to the owners and CEOs of large multinational corporations which have been able to outsource production to low wage countries. Of course there has been overall GDP growth but that says nothing about how the benefits of this growth were distributed. Besides, the current financial crisis bares for all to see how consumer demand during the recent years was built upon the foundations of unsustainable debt.

Many free trade economists argue that the consumers benefit the most from free trade since it lowers the costs of goods and services. These economists forget that the same consumers are also workers and wage earners. If they lose jobs due to decline in manufacturing and increased outsourcing or are forced into low wage sectors of the economy due to free trade, their purchasing power is reduced. For one who suffers wage loss in tandem with falling prices there are hardly any benefits from free trade to brag about ...

openDemocracy 13 April 2009

This recession will hasten the shift to a new economic world order

Goldman Sachs predicts Indian incomes to become world-class by 2030

Free trade – or fair trade?

Six Million Marginalised

Reporting of both piracy in Somalia, and kidnappings in Nigeria, turn huge 'Category B' stories into branches of the 'war on terror': simplistic reporting of selected aspects of the stories, skewed to avoid revealing the behaviours of Western government and corporations in third world countries.

Nigeria's Kidnappings

HRW - Nigeria

M.E.N.D.

Somalia's Two Piracies

Life in the world’s largest refugee settlement

HRW - Somalia

The Somali Pirates and the European Union

Shipping and Fishing Piracy

Somalia’s Real Pirates Are Foreign Fishing Ships

On February 29 last year the BBC's website reported deputy defense minister Matan Vilnai threatening a 'holocaust' on Gaza. Headlined "Israel warns of Gaza 'holocaust'" the story would undergo nine revisions in the next twelve hours.

Before the day was over, the headline would read "Gaza militants 'risking disaster'".

(The story has since been revised again with an exculpatory note added soft-pedalling Vilnai's comments). An Israeli threatening 'holocaust' may be unpalatable to those who routinely invoke its spectre to deflect criticism from the Jewish state's criminal behaviour.

With the 'holocaust' reference redacted, the new headline shifts culpability neatly into the hands of 'Gaza militants' instead.

One could argue that the BBC's radical alteration of the story reflects its susceptibility to the kind of inordinate pressure for which the Israel Lobby's well-oiled flak machine is notorious.

But, as will be demonstrated in subsequent examples, this story is exceptional only insofar as it reported accurately in the first place something that could bear negatively on Israel's image.

The norm is reflexive self-censorship ...

Spinwatch 07 January 2009

HM Revenue and Customs should more "robustly" pursue companies that avoid paying tax on their profits, a committee of MPs has urged.

The Commons public accounts select committee found that more than 25% of Britain's 700 largest businesses paid no corporation tax to HMRC in 2005-6.

BBC NEWS 21 October 2008

The news that "25 per cent of Britain's 700 largest businesses" are tax dodgers should come as no surprise as, under the terms of "Standorkonkurrenz", any "crackdown" would see them threatening to move to Ireland or some UK controlled tax haven.

Nor should it surprise us that the MPs findings have been reported in only three mainstream media organs: The BBC, The Independent, and - a day late - The Guardian.

Here's a classic Category A story of the sort which is meat-and-drink to the mainstream media.

We are invited to be both terrified and horrified, but we are not invited to look below the surface into the Category B implications: namely that the mentally ill are off the radar, and there will no procession of celebs appearing on GMTV to argue that "they" should spend more money on care and treatment.

In fact we are invited to treat the mentally ill as criminals who should simply be under lock and key.

Some of them should, of course. Including Darren Harkin.

Of equal concern is the question of what particular theory lies behind the idea that his, er, treatment should include the very media liable to worsen his condition.

It's more likely, of course, that constraints on funding - for whatever reason - imply that this is not treatment in any sense of the term, its purpose is simply to pass the time, to contain.

England's director of mental health care today called for tougher standards for secure hospitals after it emerged that at least 116 mentally ill criminals escaped last year, more than 20 times the rate of escapes by offenders held in prison.

The information, which was only brought to light after a Freedom of Information request, has cast doubts over whether security is adequate at psychiatric units housing offenders who may pose a risk to the public.

Yesterday, mentally ill childkiller Darren Harkin was sentenced to be detained indefinitely at Broadmoor Hospital after he escaped from a secure private hospital near Bristol and raped a 14-year-old girl at knifepoint. The judge who sentenced him criticised the regime at Hayes Hospital, which had failed to pick up on the 21-year-old's increasingly disturbed behaviour. ...

Professor Louis Appleby, England's national director for mental health, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that in the wake of the Harkin case it was time for the government to consider intervening to set national standards for medium and low secure units. ...

After his escape, Harkin burgled a nearby house before crossing the Severn Bridge on foot and abducting a 14-year-old schoolgirl at knifepoint in Chepstow high street. He threatened to kill the girl before raping her twice. After his arrest it emerged that Gwent Police had not been alerted about his escape.

Leighton Hughes, for the prosecution, told the hearing at Reading Crown Court that Harkin's behaviour had got worse in the time before his escape and that he was supposed to be on 24-hour watch. ...

Mr Hughes said: “After that incident, the hospital management ordered that no one should be left alone with Harkin. On the run-up to his escape, Harkin had attacked staff members and smashed things.”

He added: “Staff observed he had a large collection of DVDs with porno films and horror movies. Some members of staff fuelled his interest in horror films by taking him to see them at a local cinema. It simply beggars belief.” ...

Sir David Ramsbotham, the former chief inspector of prisons, said that the high level of escapes were a wake-up call to the government to make sure that mentally ill offenders were more securely held.

"It is a horrifying figure of course, but not one that surprises me because the medium and low secure units in the NHS do not have same degree of security a prison does," he told Today.

The Times 09 September 2009

Tony Blair was dead right about the British media. It's a fleet of runaway JCB diggers without driver or brakes, beyond accountability or control even by those who nominally run them. ...

It's a shame Blair never said this before he came to power or in his first heady days. It's a shame he forfeited much right to complain about the tiger he rode with such glee. Remember his disgraceful genuflections to the Sun, especially on the eve of election.

But above all, it's a shame Blair's speech omitted the root of the problem - the ownership structure he did nothing to break. Had he been brave, he could have restored media ownership rules to pre-Thatcher days. She let Murdoch burn the rulebook to acquire over 40% of newspaper ownership. She arranged a unique get-out clause in EU media law to allow him to launch Sky. Now as he stalks the Wall Street Journal, shudders run down American spines at the possibility of the owner of the New York Post and the corrosive Fox News seizing this business bastion. ...

An eloquent protest against his Wall Street Journal bid came from the FT's economics writer, Martin Wolf:

"How many even of his admirers would argue that Mr Murdoch for all his successes has created even one serious, authoritative and truly independent newspaper... Downmarket is the direction Mr Murdoch knows... [He] can take substantial credit for the tide of vulgarity that now floods the UK."

...

The Guardian 15 June 2007

Amazon.co.uk

Amazon Reviewers

Australian newspaper tycoon Rupert Murdoch has agreed to buy The Times and Sunday Times newspapers.

But the deal will only go ahead if Mr Murdoch can reach a deal with the print unions over the introduction of new technology within the next three weeks.

He has also threatened to pull out of the sale if it is referred to the Monopolies and Mergers Commission ...

Rupert Murdoch was formally confirmed as the new owner of The Times and Sunday Times on 12 February 1981 after reaching agreement with the unions.

The deal led to 563 redundancies.

MPs had earlier agreed to let the deal go ahead without referring it to the Monopolies and Mergers Commission (MMC).

The then Trade Secretary John Biffen defended his decision not to refer the deal to the MMC on the grounds that the alternative could have meant the closure of the Times titles with 4,000 redundancies ...

BBC On This Day 22 January 1981