Thursday, May 19, 2016 

The artist subsequently known as PJS.

It would take a heart of stone not to laugh at the continued failure of the tabloids, News UK in particular, to get the injunction preventing them from making public the identity of the person known only as PJS lifted.  They must have thought it was a sure thing; how could the supreme court possibly disagree that the identity of PJS had become so well known, thanks to the name being all across social media, published in the National Enquirer, the Sunday Mail, numerous blogs etc, that it would be an absurdity not to let the Sun on Sunday print all the juicy details on the threesome?

Never underestimate the potential for judges to go against accepted wisdom (judgement PDF), especially when they notice something that's passed everyone else by.  IPSO's code of practice, Lord Mance notes, states that an "exceptional public interest would need to be demonstrated to over-ride the normally paramount interests of children under 16".  You could of course argue that consenting adults should consider the potential consequences for their children of extra-marital activities, regardless of the agreement of both partners, not least because of the obvious potential for it to cause difficulties down the line.  This is not by any means though a justification for a story that all the justices agree has no public interest defence whatsoever to be published.

Indeed, I would argue that it's possible in this case to respect the arguments of both Lord Mance for the majority in over-turning the Court of Appeal ruling that the injunction should be set aside, and Lord Toulson in his lone dissension.  It's hard not to respect a judge who risks incurring the wrath of Paul Dacre by directly referencing the paper claiming the law to be an ass due to the publication of PJS's identity elsewhere; if that is the price of applying the law, Mance writes, it is one which must be paid.  The court is well aware of the lesson which King Canute gave his courtiers, Mance goes on, in answer to the claims that injunctions in the age of the internet are defunct, with the Lord later quoting a previous ruling by Justice Eady "that wall-to-wall excoriation in national newspapers, whether tabloid or ‘broadsheet’, is likely to be significantly more intrusive and distressing for those concerned than the availability of information on the Internet or in foreign journals to those, however many, who take the trouble to look it up".  I would argue that distinction still holds up today, if barely: there is a huge difference between a story appearing on multiple newspaper front pages, available for anyone to see at petrol stations, supermarkets, newsagents etc, whereas online it is still possible to avoid such stories altogether if you so wish.

Lord Toulson disagrees, writing that the "court must live in the world as it is and not as it would like it to be", and also that "in this case I have reached a clear view that the story’s confidentiality has become so porous that the idea of it still remaining secret in a meaningful sense is illusory".  Toulson does not "underestimate the acute unpleasantness for PJS of the story being splashed, but I doubt very much in the long run whether it will be more enduring than the unpleasantness of what has been happening and will inevitably continue to
happen.  The story is not going away".

It most certainly isn't.  The only reason that the papers have been full of stories for the last couple of weeks about a certain Downton Abbey actor are due to a certain injunction still being in place from years ago.  One way or the other, the British media will get a story they want to be out in the open out in the open.  They might not make any money out of it, quite the contrary in the case of the Sun, with its legal fees likely to be astronomical, but for those who want to know they'll probably be able to find out.  If the case going to trial, with PJS and YMA likely to win, gives them satisfaction and protects their children, then great.  More likely however is that Carter-Fuck will go on getting richer while the kiddiwinks will find out one of their parents is partial to threesomes regardless.

All the same, coming in the same week as the IPSO decision that the Sun blatantly breached the editors' code of practice over the QUEEN BACK BREXIT bullshit, with the paper throwing its toys out of the pram in response, saying yes, the headline was a complete lie, but the one underneath "qualified" it, and the Queen isn't above politics anyway because she called the Chinese rude, for those of us whom enjoy schadenfreude, it's been a fine time.  Long may it continue.

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5/19/2016 09:27:00 pm | |

Tuesday, April 26, 2016 

The bitterest of ironies.

The findings at the Hillsborough inquest are a landmark in many respects.  The 9 members of the jury who attended the hearings for that period of time deserve some kind of special recognition for their service, not least when so many aspects of the events of the 15th of April 1989 in one corner of Sheffield were and remain so harrowing.  That the crush both outside the ground and then in the Leppings Lane end of Hillsborough were captured by cameras that didn't stop rolling, providing a vital document of the events, helped to ensure that after 27 years, justice is at last in reach for the 96 who died that day.

It still isn't guaranteed, however.  Yes, today's verdict of unlawful killing for every single one of the 96, and the further finding that Liverpool fans' behaviour did not in any way contribute to the disaster is a further vindication of the at times lonely campaign fought by the Hillsborough Family Support Group and others.  It does not automatically follow though that charges will be brought against organisations, or especially individuals, despite the Crown Prosecution Service's statement that prosecutions will be considered once Operation Resolve and the Independent Police Complaints Commission's renewed inquiry are completed.  Even if prosecutions are given the go ahead, it's extraordinarily rare for juries to find against the police in criminal cases, where beyond reasonable doubt is the standard as opposed to on the balance of probabilities.  It's one thing for a jury to state someone was unlawful killed; to find an individual or group responsible for manslaughter is something else entirely.

That it has taken 27 years, multiple inquiries and a second two-year long inquest to reach the point where all blame has finally been lifted from the victims in itself needs to be quantified.  Some will say today should not be the day for recriminations, and instead be purely about justice finally being in sight, but that is to ignore why it has taken this long in the first place.  As stated above, this was a tragedy that was captured from multiple angles, that was broadcast live on TV and radio, that was reviewed that night in depth on Match of the Day.  Photographers expecting to record an FA Cup semi-final instead turned their cameras on the crowd, many of the shots of the death throes and agony of those caught in the crush far too distressing to ever be published.  If there had been behaviour like that subsequently claimed by South Yorkshire police, the local Tory MP and most notably, the Sun, then it would have been captured.  That it wasn't didn't stop the myth of "tanked up mobs" being responsible from becoming accepted.

For why you have to look at how football was regarded and fans treated in the late 80s.  Hooliganism might have already been in decline, but that didn't prevent the Thatcher government from wanting to introduce an ID card scheme for supporters, such was the contempt they were subject to.  It's not an exaggeration to say fans were seen as another part of the "enemy within", and SYP had shown how they were to be dealt with at Orgreave.  The ban from Europe that followed the Heysel disaster was a national embarrassment, the blame for which could only be laid on Liverpool.  That it was the same club involved again couldn't possibly be a coincidence.

When SYP then set out to lay the blame squarely on the fans and on Liverpool, a process that began within minutes of the unfolding disaster with chief superintendent David Duckenfield telling FA chief executive Graham Kelly that fans had forced the gate he had ordered be opened, they knew what they were doing.  The media (and the public, too) tend to believe the word of the police over other eyewitnesses at the best of times; combined with all these other factors, it was hardly surprising the tabloids reprinted the most reprehensible, despicable of lies as supplied to them by the Whites agency, sourced from Conservative MP Irvine Patnick, who was in the police Niagara club the night of the disaster, and heard "the truth" from senior officers including Inspector Gordon Sykes.

Not surprising, but still a fundamental betrayal of their duty as journalists.  The same editors who reprinted the claims of fans urinating on and beating police officers trying to save lives, as well as robbing the dead were the ones who reviewed the thousands of photographs sent in of the disaster.  They would have watched the reports of the disaster, perhaps seen that night's Match of the Day, which showed extended footage of events as they played out, where Des Lynam, who had at Hillsborough that afternoon repeatedly said there had been no violence involved, where Jimmy Hill said there was no hooliganism involved whatsoever.  They would have carried the reports of the fans on what happened, none of whom made such claims, who in the main were already blaming the gate being opened and everyone rushing in as a result, although at that point it was unclear if all who had done so had tickets.  The other papers that published the claims quickly retracted them, not least because of the anger and incomprehension in Liverpool at what was being said.

The Sun was the exception.  It doubled down.  Editor Kelvin MacKenzie never apologised unless forced to by the courts or Murdoch.  The day after it splashed with "THE TRUTH", it led with "THE TRUTH HURTS", a front page editorial defending its report, not backing down for a second.  For all these years later for not just MacKenzie, but Trevor Kavanagh to still not be taking any responsibility, putting all the blame on what they were told, rather than doing the absolute minimum expected of journalists which is to be sceptical, to check sources again and again, speaks of how they still don't accept they did anything wrong.  The media as a whole helped spread the lies, helped the SYP to carry on blaming the fans, laid the ground that allowed the first coroner Dr Stefan Popper to turn the first inquests into a charade where the SYP disputed the interim findings of Lord Justice Taylor's report, which had exonerated Liverpool.

It comes back fundamentally, as Flying Rodent writes, to where football and its supporters still were in 1989.  In the eyes of many, both inside and outside of the game, they were fit only to be caged.  Not only did the players have to be protected from them, but so did the general public also.  Not all big grounds had such fences penning in supporters preventing them from easily escaping if such a crush developed, but the one chosen for a showcase event, an FA Cup semi-final, did.  Had those fences not been there, had there been more gates which could have been opened, if the cages had been easier to break down, then fewer if any of the 96 would have died as a result of the other catastrophic mistakes made by the SYP.

It comes back to contempt.  Contempt from the government, contempt from the media, contempt from a public that puts its trust in authority when asked to chose between those depicted as among the lowest in society.  It was only coincidence that it was Liverpool, which made it even easier, when it could have been any club in that semi-final.  It could have been Nottingham Forest's fans in the Leppings Lane end had the decision over which side of the ground to allocate to whom gone differently.

There is of course a coda to all this, and not just that finally, a form justice looks like it will be done.  We all know what happened partially as a result of Hillsborough, partially as a result of England's performance the following summer in Italy, partially to where the game was already beginning to head.  The Premier League.  Sky.  Enormous amounts of money, massive amounts of hype, ambition never really properly fulfilled.  The obscene irony that it was football that saved Rupert Murdoch after he had pumped so much of his money into satellite, when it had been his flagship paper that had so cruelly and unforgivably slandered a club and its mourning, traumatised fans, by extension a whole city, by extension an entire game.  That it took that paper until 2004 to make a proper apology, that today it refuses to comment, that it has never and will never make amends for its reporting on a disaster and yet still prospers, as its owner prospers, is the bitterest of ironies.

A disaster on the scale of Hillsborough might never happen again, but is the contempt still there, is the potential for blaming the victims still there, is the ability of those in power to try their hardest to prevent justice being done still there?  It's never gone away.

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4/26/2016 10:46:00 pm | |

Wednesday, March 09, 2016 

Leave for the Queen.

In the annals of tabloid stories that are complete bollocks, the Sun's QUEEN BACKS BREXIT is set to be a future classic.  All the tropes are present and correct: headline that isn't backed up by the story itself?  Check.  Story based on anonymous sources?  Check.  Story denied immediately by those who are named, while the others that we now know were present refuse to comment?  Check.  Story reflects the editorial line of the newspaper?  Check.  Story refers not to a recent event but to in fact something that supposedly took place years ago, which is now being used to portray those named as supporting a campaign that wasn't even a twinkling in Nigel Farage's eye then?  Check.  Complaint made to the press regulator about inaccuracy?  Check.  Paper running obviously untrue story for reasons known only to itself?  Check.

Quite how the Sun thought it would get away with it boggles the mind to such an extent that it makes you wonder if that wasn't the point in itself.  Only yesterday the Sun was whinging about our glorious future King William going off on holiday with the People's Kate and his two devil spawn, as though the entire point of being second in line to the throne isn't to get out of this dive of a country as often as possible.  The Sun's beef is not of course that Wills 'n' K8 are hitting the slopes as and when they can, it's that they're being stingy with the number of snaps of the sprogs they're handing over to the nation's finest.  It's a bit of leap from there to splashing on a story they know full well will piss Brenda and the palace off, thinking that it will in turn make Madge urge her grandson to loosen up a little with the hacks, but then the Sun's relationship with the royals has always made no sense.

Because the Sun truly is reaching with its reporting.  Even if you accept that she apparently said Europe was "heading in the wrong direction" to Nick Clegg at a privy council lunch, and told another group of MPs at some shindig when asked that she "didn't understand Europe", neither suggests for so much as moment that she favours leaving the EU.  The second claim especially seems laughably out of character, given how careful the Queen is about anything vaguely political.  She knows full well it's part of the reason why there's such forelock tugging crap as Clean for the Queen; her standing aloof while her husband acts the twat and Charles involves himself in every cause going only enhances her reputation.

More pertinent is just how odd the idea that Liz favouring one side or the other somehow helps the cause overall is.  Did anyone voting in the Scottish independence referendum really think twice about going Yes or No after Lilibet urged everyone to "think very carefully" about it?  There might have been one wavering royalist/Sturgeon fancier living on the edge of a loch in a tumbledown cottage who was persuaded not to go Yes after her social better asked her to consider things again, but come on.  It only works as part of a general campaigning theme: if you have a cross-section of businesses, academics, politicos and other assorted figures all saying the same thing, then it might just become a nagging doubt in the back of the mind to the undecided.

Otherwise, it's a boost only to the credulous and those with an absurdly high opinion of Queenie's interest in such things.  Jacob Rees-Mogg, fresh from telling Bank of England chairman Mark Carney he was an EU stooge for doing his job, comes across as this close to rubbing himself as he exclaims he always felt the monarchy was our last line of defence against European domination.  Well yes, apart from every other institution, but you get the point.  The Queen is always going to be important to those who still regard Britain as this light in the darkness, a bastion of freedom, a symbol of defiance in a world going to hell in a handcart, where campaigning for Leave is comparable to the struggle for the vote itself.  This projecting of a fairy world helps explain why Leave is floundering so; it doesn't why the Sun would think giving such refugees from reality the slightest encouragement is going to help in any shape or form.

 Which leads to the only possible conclusion for why it would run such nonsense, horrifying as it is: the Sun is negging the Queen.  Stay classy, Tony Gallagher.

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3/09/2016 08:40:00 pm | |

Thursday, December 31, 2015 

New old proverbs.



"You live by the Sun, you die by the Sun."

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12/31/2015 01:23:00 pm | |

Saturday, July 18, 2015 

If the Sun had been around in the 30s...

...it would have been hurrahing for the Blackshirts along with the Queen Mother and the Mail.

And I probably would have been a Trotskyist.  Or maybe even an outright Stalinist.  Who knows.  Not that it's exactly been a secret the royals before Brenda were fairly right-wing, all told.  When even Madonna did her best (i.e. produced one of the worst films ever made) to apologise for them, they ought to have known things could only get worse.

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7/18/2015 12:50:00 pm | |

Saturday, June 27, 2015 

AL-SUN PLOT TO BOMB UK TODAY

A plot by the Sun newspaper to bomb an Armed Forces Day parade in Britain has been foiled by the Islamic State, the Raqqa Guardian can reveal.

The plot, intended to target the unit of murdered soldier Lee Rigby, was disrupted after Islamic State informed the British police and security services of how the newspaper's journalists had made contact with them.

"They told us they were willing to do the work for Allah," said Abu Oo Ee Oo Ah Ah Ting Tang Walla Walla Bing Bang al-Farqu, "which tipped us off immediately.  None of our recruits talk like that, as they aren't complete imbeciles.  We realised from the start they were either a journalist, or an especially stupid spy, and so played them at their own game.  We first asked if they had access to firearms, then gave them a bunch of fake ingredients and instructions on how to make a pressure cooker bomb.  We even told them to film a martyrdom video, just to make it seem authentic.  They even believed the crap we told them about spraying the shrapnel with rat poison, for goodness sake."

A Scotland Yard spokesman said: "It is always helpful when journalists invent terrorist plots, as the Sun did in this case, as we clearly don't have enough to do already.  It also makes the public more likely to jump at their own shadow and pick on brown people with backpacks, which is exactly the kind of behaviour we think should be encouraged."

Abu Rupert al-Murdoch could not be reached for comment.

Inside:
Page 3 - Today's martyrdom lovely
Page 94 - Actual Brits killed in real terrorist attack

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6/27/2015 10:22:00 am | |

Friday, May 01, 2015 

The Sun Says: Vote SNP, get Tories.

If I was running Scottish Labour's campaign, and let's face it, I could hardly do a worse job, I'd spend the next 6 days doing one thing and one thing only: ensuring that absolutely every voter has seen the juxtaposed front pages of yesterday's Sun and Scottish Sun.  There, encapsulated, is the lie of the SNP's progressive ideals.  The same voters who have decided that now is the time to reject Labour over its shift to the right can reflect on the knowledge that just as the Sun backed the New Labour project, so today it deems the SNP to pose so little threat to the paper's values, Scottish edition or otherwise, that it can back the party without fear.

Murdoch in truth has long flirted with the SNP and especially Alex Salmond.  Salmond for instance went as far as to lobby the UK government over News Corp's attempt to swallow Sky whole, as the Leveson inquiry heard.  As this week's Private Eye also noted, prior to the Sun's endorsement hitting the streets, the SNP's manifesto had nothing to say about levels of media ownership, while the party's support for a splitting up of the BBC into its constituent regional parts is exactly the kind of thing Keith yearns for.  The Indie's report that while in town Rupe demanded more attacks on Labour for daring to suggest they might now do something about his stranglehold on the media meanwhile tells its own story.  Murdoch and the Sun are not so much coming out for Cameron, utterly bizarre and really creepy IT'S A TORY front page or not, as trying their darnedest to keep Labour out.

Supporting the SNP in Scotland therefore makes perfect, cynical but not contradictory sense.  The English edition can rage and moan about Nicola Sturgeon giving her sister's doll a savage haircut, proof if any were needed of her ruthlessness and dedication to shafting everyone south of the border, while the Scottish one can declare the same person A NEW HOPE, despite this new hope having been in power for just the past 7 years at Holyrood.  So long as it works against Ed Miliband, seen as the real threat to business as usual for Murdoch, what does a little thing like consistency matter?

That Sturgeon has backed herself into a corner over locking out the Tories does seem to have finally dawned on a few of the less boneheaded SNPers.  Ed Miliband's remarks last night on Question Time were nothing more than a repeat of what, err, both Sturgeon and Salmond have been saying about doing a deal with Labour.  A coalition isn't on offer, nor is confidence and supply, leaving only a vote-by-vote basis relationship.  If Sturgeon means what she says, then she has little option other than to support a Labour Queen's speech and budget regardless of how little there is in either designed to mollify the nationalists.  All the talk about Scotland never forgiving Labour if they let in the Tories by refusing a deal is equal parts guff and bluff: the onus is on the SNP to support Labour, not the other way around.

Besides, at this point Labour has absolutely nothing to lose in Scotland precisely because, err, the polling suggests it's going to lose everything.  It can't get any worse; Labour could spend the next week saying everyone intending to vote SNP is a traitor and still not end up doing worse than many now expect.  More likely is the party will manage to hang on to between 5 and 10 seats, still an utter disaster, but considering the total landslide the polls imply will be regarded as akin to a miracle.  In such circumstances, putting the prospect of another referendum centre stage is just about all Labour can do.

In his interview with Russell Brand, Ed agreed this time people didn't want euphoria but rather a party that means what it says.  Voters in Scotland might one day think back on that, just as many of those who voted Lib Dem last time ended up doing.

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5/01/2015 02:36:00 pm | |

Tuesday, April 07, 2015 

An election campaign broadside on behalf of all lazy Brits.

If you're me (and if you are, why is it you haven't killed yourself yet?), then on an almost weekly basis events will occur that make you declare you don't want to live on this planet anymore.  Kardashian hair colour changes treated like the second coming of Christ, Wayne Rooney goals celebrated in the same way as parents do a child taking its first solid dump, newspapers still focusing on the way politicians eat, as we just can't forget how Ed Miliband failed to take sustenance from a bacon sandwich in the approved fashion, all result in the survival instinct dithering just that little bit more.

And then something like yesterday's Sun front page comes along.  There are times when every single piece of information on a front page can be wrong, and yet it can still be completely unobjectionable, or you just roll your eyes and look away.  There are times when every single piece of information on a front page can be wrong, and it's so objectionable that more than 25 years later those affected by it complain if the editor responsible is given any sort of platform.  Then there are times when a front page has apparently been put together by someone who has been home-schooled by parents who have only ever communicated with their child through the nexus that is Google Translate.  The process of translating English to Albanian and then back again results in the child learning something vaguely resembling English, so they pick up the rudiments, but not much more.  To everyone else their work is completely indecipherable, and yet despite all the obstacles in their way they managed to get a job working for the country's leading tabloid newspaper.

At some point in the future, most likely in thousands of millennia, when Earth is discovered by an incredibly advanced race of creatures that have managed to overcome all the barriers in the way of intergalactic space travel, only then is it likely will there exist life on this planet that can explain just what was going through the minds of the Sun journalists behind yesterday's the REEM TICKET splash.  Every single thing about it is wrong.  The paper that objected so strongly to Emily Thornberry "sneering" at white van man declares that two reality TV stars speak for "hard-working Brits".  The headline, that no one, not even the people who claim to know what "reem" means, will be able to say makes sense.  The introduction to the article, that declares Joey and Amy to be TOWIE stars, except both left the show a while ago.  The photographs, that show two individuals not so much wearing make-up as the make-up wearing them.  And, of course, their "broadside" itself, which amounts to Joey, who just so happens to be making a programme on the election and so has been going behind the story to get to the real heart of our democracy (he's already met Nick Clegg) declaring that MPs need to like, grow up, and Amy, who thinks benefit scroungers need to have their mansions bombed.

It was though a long weekend that went from the ridiculous to the ridiculous.  On Saturday the Telegraph reported the contents of a "Foreign Office" memo that detailed how Nicola Sturgeon had supposedly told the French ambassador she'd "rather see Cameron remain as PM".  Immediately Sturgeon responded she had done nothing of the sort, and demanded an inquiry into how this forgery had escaped into the wild.  We've since learned it likely came from the Scotland Office, leaked by a civil servant, but not before various people claimed with all seriousness this was a conspiracy by the security services to damage the SNP.

Predictably, the reality is almost certainly far more prosaic.  It's highly unlikely Sturgeon was so loose-lipped, as indeed the full memo itself says.  The memo records what the French Consul-General says he was told by the ambassador, so it's the account based on what someone said to someone else to someone else about a conversation conducted via interpreters.  Something almost certainly was lost in translation.  Sturgeon may well have said she didn't think Miliband was prime ministerial, and probably said she expected David Cameron to remain as PM; as for whether she expressed a preference, probably not.  When you then take into consideration that the Telegraph has, as Private Eye has reported, thrown its lot in fully with the Tories for the duration, it makes even less sense for it to have reported something so helpful to Labour and damaging to both the SNP and the Tories, unless this was a leak not from the Tories but a civil servant with other sympathies.

We'll have to wait for the inquiry to report to see if it does shed any night, but it has nonetheless shown both the credulousness of some who've recently aligned with the SNP and the cynicism of the older warriors.  Of course Sturgeon and most within the SNP would prefer David Cameron to remain as PM, as they've prospered like never before under his tenure.  For a party that has been in power in Scotland for 8 years to still be presenting itself as the outsiders and managing to pull it off is frankly alchemical.  Sturgeon and Salmond's new line is about breaking up "the Westminster old boys' network", as if they're somehow new brooms rather than seasoned campaigners, while the rhetoric about "locking out the Tories" is calculated to the nth degree, designed to appeal to those still zooming while scaring the likes of the Mail.  The last thing they want is any kind of arrangement with Labour, with all the unquantifiables that would entail, no longer able to claim to be protecting Scotland when cuts are inevitable.  What's truly hysterical and must delight the SNP leadership are useful idiots like Adam Ramsay, who claims it'll be all the fault of the "selfish" behaviour of Jim Murphy and Scottish Labour when the Mail and Telegraph "rewrite the constitution" and install Cameron in Number 10 regardless of the election result.

Finally then to Tony Blair's flying visit to Airstrip One to declaim on how leaving the EU would be terrible for all those who don't have boltholes in one of the Middle Eastern kleptocracies.  Two things made apparent from his intervention: first, that despite everything the media still absolutely loves Blair, and as proved by his donning of a high-vis jacket, the de rigueur uniform for anyone wanting to rule, he still deeply wishes he was PM.  Quite whom he was meant to be appealing to though remains a mystery: regardless of the strength of his argument, and on the EU and quite possibly the EU alone he remains convincing, the Blair fan club is now so tiny as to be made up almost entirely of said journalists and fellow politicians.  We might have the poor man's Blair as our current PM, but most seem to have agreed to strike that fact from the record.  As for Blair himself, lovely as it would be to conclude that it's down to how he's haunted by his actions that he's slowly melting, you instead suspect his conscience remains clear.  As must those who can still be found to applaud and frot a man with absolutely no shame.

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4/07/2015 11:18:00 pm | |

Thursday, November 13, 2014 

The downfall.


Ah, Mazher Mahmood.  Time was all we had to identify him were a couple of grainy photos filched from an Albanian newspaper website, obtained by them from who knows where and which also soon disappeared down the memory hole thanks to "Maz's" ever busy legal beavers.  It took a long damn time, but the collapse of the Tulisa Constovalos drug trial finally prompted a media organisation to challenge Mahmood's claims his life would be put in danger should his true countenance be widely publicised.  The last time Maz tried and failed to prevent the media publishing his fizzog, winning a temporary injunction against among others, this blog, only the Graun went ahead and did so anyway.

Panorama and John Sweeney are thankfully more indefatigable beasts.  Twice Mahmood's lawyers forced the BBC to postpone the broadcast, first with the renewed claim he couldn't possibly be unmasked lest those he exposed come after him, always a risible argument considering his victims know his face all too well, and then after that failed with a challenge over the evidence involving John Bryan's procuring, or rather non-procurement of prostitutes.  With this last desperate attempt rejected, BBC1 was at last able to show the documentary last night.

And while for those of us who've followed Mahmood's activities down the years there was little we didn't already know included, the exception being the claims of Mahmood's links to corrupt Met officers, you can more than understand why he and News UK tried everything to stop it from airing.  Apart from identifying Mahmood, his methods were laid bare, vignettes taken from the secret recordings made by his team which he and the News of the World never wanted you to see.  John Alford declaring himself teetotal, with Mahmood then urging him to drink anyway, page 3 model Emma Morgan given cocaine by the person she was then entrapped into "buying" it from to supply to Mahmood, Constovalos made to believe she was being considered for a role in a Hollywood film alongside Leonardo DiCaprio as she was the obvious choice to play a "bad girl"; whoever the source was for the material, and the guess would have to be it came from within News UK, it showed Mahmood in just about the worst possible light.

As contemptible as Mahmood is, this was never about just him.  Mahmood could only work as he did for so long with the support of first the News of the Screws, and then following its sad demise, the Sun on Sunday.  It should be stressed that on occasion, Mahmood's entrapment tactics produced important, genuinely in the public interest stories, such as the corruption he uncovered involving the Pakistani cricket team.  Those kind of targets didn't satisfy either him or his editors though, nor one could say did they NotW readers.  No, instead they had to stitch up foolish but otherwise decent people somewhat in the public eye, such as Emma Morgan, Johnnie Walker or the Earl of Hardwicke.  At his very worst, he and his team concocted entire fictional plots, whether it be the one to kidnap Victoria Beckham, with the trial of those accused collapsing when it become public Mahmood had paid the man who "informed" him of the nefarious deal, or the "red mercury" plot, with those entrapped thankfully found not guilty.

Yet despite these failures, both the police and the Crown Prosecution Service continued to work with him, going ahead with cases such as the one involving Constolvalos when it was an obvious example of entrapment.  They carried on doing so even after the Screws was put out of its misery, and as we now know, 3 further cases have been dropped as Mahmood was to be the key witness.  It's possible other previous cases could now be the subject of appeal, especially if Mahmood is charged with perjury and attempting to pervert the course of justice over the collapse of the Constolvalos trial as many expect.

Indeed, as Roy Greenslade writes, this level of protection seems to be continuing, as the attorney general asked the BBC not to screen the docu.  Presumably on the basis it could make it more difficult for Mahmood to get a fair trial should he be charged, the real objection is more likely "Maz" and his editors still have friends in high places.  Why else would News UK still be providing Mahmood with their largesse for vexatious litigation when he is supposedly on suspension, unless they still have a glimmer of hope that he could still return?

Regardless of that wishful thinking, Mahmood is finished.  The real motivation behind his attempts to stop Panorama was not over his safety, but his ability to carry on as before.  His methods detailed, his visage shown, few will now make the mistake of being drawn in by the image and boasts of a serial offender.  And with him, hopefully, also ends another disgraceful period in British journalism.

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11/13/2014 10:59:00 pm | |

Tuesday, July 29, 2014 

Boy, 4, has the mark of Murdoch.

The parents of a boy, 4, were horrified when a "mark of Rupert Murdoch" appeared on his forehead.

Tracy Gardner and Nobby Torchwood spotted the dollar symbol as they got their son, Keith, out of bed one morning.

The sinister sign of the evil one is proving a devil to explain.  The imprint has baffled his parents, teachers and even the family's GP, all of whom are apparently as thick as pig shit.  Or we might be making this background detail up.

Shocked Tracy, born yesterday, of Salem, West Norwood Cassette Library, said: “It’s a nightmare. Some people have said it’s the symbol of Mammon — the sign of the worship of money above everything else — which has been very upsetting.

“Just looking at it made me shake thinking the soul of that terrible man had visited my boy.  Something or someone had made the sign on him but we just can't explain how, as neither Nobby or I have the power of independent thought, believing instead everything we see on Channel 5.”

Wondering if it might be a skin infection or rash, they took Keith to their GP, Dr. Nick Riveria.

"He too was baffled.  He recommended we take him for an MRI scan, privately, as the NHS is very pushed at the moment.  We didn't however have the £5,000 to spare."

Worried Tracy put a picture of Keith on Facebook, where it soon received 5 likes, and attracted a comment from among others, Tom Watson MP.  "Clearly this boy has been touched by a presence not unlike the one that made me start believing the claims of ludicrous Tory MPs of the 1980s.  We need a public inquiry into this right now."

Other MPs have also since raised their concerns, as parliament is in recess and they have to keep tweeting in order to give the impression they're doing something.  "What possible justification can there be for calling the Sun a newspaper," Abraham Shelley didn't ask, "when it publishes trash not even the cheaper knock-offs of Take a Break would touch with a ten foot pole?  That's the real issue, especially when the parents of the boy obviously sold the story and don't care about their or his privacy in the first place."

THE SUN SAYS

Our story is totally justified on two grounds.  First, it's the silly season, and the rest of the press are filling their pages with similar guff.  It's not as though there's civil war in Libya, massacre after massacre in Gaza or conflict in Ukraine we could be reporting on.  That costs money.

Second, every time there's OUTRAGE about something we just get more attention, clicks and subscribers.  Last time we checked Mail Online has 190m unique visitors a month, despite Twitter and the chattering classes hating the paper with a passion.  You're feeding us, you gullible, keyboard slamming morons.

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7/29/2014 05:52:00 pm | |

Monday, July 21, 2014 

Complicit in the lies of a serial offender.


Regular readers will know it takes a lot to stagger me.  Cynicism comes easily, because it is so easy.  Think the worst, and then you won't be let down come the inevitable.  There are no heroes only humans, and we are flawed flesh and bone, all with our own prejudices, failings and traits.

Sometimes though you still can't help but be blown away by just how unbelievably stupid supposedly intelligent people are.  In fact, in this instance stupid doesn't cover it.  The only word that even comes close to accurately describing the Crown Prosecution Service's original decision to prosecute Tulisa Contostavlos is fuckwitted.  A lawyer earning no doubt good money looked at the "investigation" carried out by this blog's favourite journalist, hopefully soon to be ex-journalist Mazher Mahmood, and felt, yeah, this isn't the most obvious example I've ever seen of entrapment, and told the CPS there was a realistic chance of conviction.  The CPS then reviewed his decision, and went along with it.  Then the judge, despite the defence making what has to be one of the most compelling applications for the case to be thrown out on the grounds Mahmood is a lying sack of shit, allowed it to proceed.

Only for Alistair McCreath to days later discharge the jury and find Contostavlos and her friend, Michael Coombs, who had already admitted supplying the cocaine after Mahmood asked Contostavlos to get some for him, not guilty.  Why?  Because Mahmood it seems put pressure on his driver, Alan Smith, to change his statement, having first told the police Contostavlos had spoken of her opposition to drugs as a family member was an addict as the pair talked in his car.  At the legal arguments pre-trial Mahmood denied he spoke to the Smith at all, only for Contostavlos's QC, Jeremy Dein, to winkle the truth out of Mahmood under cross-examination last week.  He had indeed discussed the statement with Smith, he just didn't have anything to do with him altering it.

Even now I can't begin to get my head round how Mahmood's latest and clearly for him most disastrous entrapping of a celebrity got to the point of being put before a jury.  Back in June last year the People, whether through speaking to Contostavlos and/or her management or a disgruntled source at the Sun wrote up an almost completely accurate blow-by-blow account of how the former X-Factor judge was enticed by Mahmood, although it didn't explicitly state her arrest and the "hoax" were connected.  They flew her to Las Vegas (either in first class or by private jet, according to whether you believe Mahmood or the People), telling her she was going to star in a Slumdog Millionaire-type film as a "bad girl" making the journey from London to India, possibly alongside Leonardo DiCaprio.  As in previous stings, Contostavlos was plied with alcohol, her defence going so far as to say her drink was spiked on one occasion, before Mahmood then sprang the trap.  Desperate to get the part, having been told Keira Knightley was also being considered for the role, she arranged for Coombs to supply Mahmood with his requested "white sweets".

Regardless of what you think about subterfuge by journalists, and the PCC code makes clear it can only be justified in the public interest, the person in this instance commissioning a crime is the hack, not the celebrity.  Not only that, unlike in other instances where those involved step back at the last minute, the evidence their target is willing to go along with their request acquired, Mahmood's drug stings have nearly always involved the actual supply of the banned substance.  By accepting such a level of skulduggery was permissible, despite the relatively slight nature of the offences committed, both the police and the CPS became complicit in Mahmood's abuse of power, not to forget lies.  Nor is this anything like the first time they've been embarrassed by Mahmood's mendacity and the Murdoch tabloid stable's hyperbolics: the Victoria Beckham "kidnap plot" trial collapsed after it emerged the key witness had been paid, while the "red mercury" case ended with all the defendants acquitted.

Indeed, yet again the court system gave in to Mahmood's bullshit, the myth of the man as tabloid investigator extraordinaire.  He gave his evidence from behind a screen, to both protect him from enemies and so as not to give away his identity to those he might yet seek to stitch up.  No matter that his visage has been available online for years now, or that, err, his victims know all too well what he looks like.  Also irrelevant is just how petty and cliche the drug dealer expose is; it's one thing to try and show corruption in sport, although Mahmood failed to do even that with John Higgins, it's another to get a pop star to show they know someone who can get drugs.  I mean, who knew they got up to such things?  It's not as though most of us have acquaintances whom dabble in illicit substances, and if tempted in the same way as Contostavlos was could just as easily find ourselves helping out a new VIP friend, clearly we're meant to regard this as a terrible indictment of the morals of our heroes.  What will the kids who look up to her think?  Nor do certain sections of the media encourage ambition and aspiration whatever the cost, oh no.

As well as being suspended by the Sun, Mahmood now faces the possibility of a perjury charge, another former News of the Screws hack accused of lying under oath.  This entire affair also gives the lie to the idea Leveson changed anything: still a Murdoch paper was prepared to do whatever it took just to catch out a jumped-up celeb.  How delicious then that someone like Tulisa (and admittedly her legal team) should be the one to finally pin the fake sheikh down.  This time, surely, there can be no way back for Mazher Mahmood.

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7/21/2014 04:54:00 pm | |

Wednesday, May 07, 2014 

It gets better, despite the scaremongering.

The case of Hannah Smith is as desperately tragic as they come. The 14-year-old killed herself in August last year, writing a note found by her father asking whether her life was ever going to get any better. Her family say she had been bullied for up to three years, her personality changing markedly after going to a party where she was assaulted, her head twice hit against a wall. She became more insular and introverted, and as the inquest into her death heard, told friends on Facebook she was thinking of ending her life.

As terrible as every teenage suicide is, with the taboos around depression and mental illness still making it an exceptionally difficult topic to broach, in spite of the increased recognition of how many young people do struggle during what is already a difficult period of their lives, Smith's death wouldn't have become national news had it not been blamed in part on cyber-bullying. Coming just after the storm of media interest in the abuse meted out on Twitter to Caroline Criado-Perez and others involved in the Jane Austen banknote campaign, it looked another example of the dark side of the internet and the misuse of online anonymity by those without a care for others and no sense of responsibility.

Only as has now been confirmed at the inquest and was claimed by Ask.fm's owners within days of the story becoming front page news, the messages left on her page were not from bullies, but written by Hannah herself.  Giving evidence, investigating officer Wayne Simmons said the messages had originated from the same IP address as Hannah's, and also ruled out that the could have been spoofed.  On the balance of probabilities, she had resorted to a relatively new form of self-harm - attacking herself via different accounts, whether in an attempt to garner sympathy from friends and get them to defend her, or as just another representation of the self-loathing she felt.

The tabloids, and indeed, the prime minister, were not to know this had been the case.  Nonetheless, putting all of the blame onto Ask.fm and by turn social networking as they did, with calls for the site to be shut down and David Cameron supporting a boycott, was precisely the kind of response that hinders rather than helps with understanding how the way teenagers live has changed so radically in a little over a decade.  Cyber-bullying is certainly a problem - I for one am beyond thankful I left school behind just before the inexorable rise of social media, when the main hangout was MSN Messenger rather than sites like Ask.  Anonymous trolling or bullying by those not personally known to the victim is however very much a rarity, compared to the online continuation of torment by schoolmates, something that can make it seem as though there is absolutely no escape from your own personal hell.

This emphasis on the medium rather than message and on one specific factor as the overriding cause is to ignore most of what we know about depression and mental illness.  At times there can be one underlying reason - be it bullying, general unhappiness with life, the end of a relationship, the death of a relative or friend, but often it's a culmination of a number of things.  There are also usually warning signs, in Hannah's case both physical and mental self-harm, as well as talking about suicide.  Even if it were possible, shutting down somewhere like Ask would only result in another such site popping up in its place.  Understandable as it is to want to try and control these new apparent threats, it's just as undesirable and overbearing as doing the equivalent of wrapping children in cotton wool.

The danger is in overreaction, curtailing something that has given traditional outsiders or those being bullied precisely because they are "different" a refuge, a place where they can be reassured their interests or sexuality are not weird or character flaws.  For every teenager whose death has been blamed in some way on the internet, whether rightly or wrongly, there are hundreds of thousands, almost certainly millions whose lives have been transformed or made worth continuing with thanks to making new friends through social media or otherwise.  Without wanting to turn this into old versus new media, that's something the newspapers, always searching for the next passing frenzy, have to be forced if necessary to recognise.

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5/07/2014 11:59:00 pm | |

Tuesday, March 18, 2014 

No sympathy for the devil.

There's only one question editors should ask themselves when offered photographs of a famous figure who has just been told the most shattering news: how would I like to be splashed across the next morning's papers, grief etched across my face, in what ought to be regardless of it happening in a public place, an intensely private moment?

If they would truly answer that reporting the level of grief outweighs the considerations of not intruding into it, something that the PCC code makes clear should always be approached sensitively, then they should make that case themselves. More likely is as is so often the case, should any paper even dream of reporting on the private life of a fellow editor, there would soon be phone calls a plenty and threats flying, with both sides usually backing down. Hence why the tabloids didn't report on Rebekah Wade (as was) splitting up with Ross Kemp, let alone the employment tribunal finding that Andy Coulson bullied and unfairly dismissed Matt Driscoll from the News of the World.

However Paul Dacre and the editors at the Mirror and Star defended it to themselves, they must have seen just how distasteful it was to fill all but their entire front pages with the image of Mick Jagger in such obvious distress. The Sun, perhaps stung by the criticism it received following the death of Reeva Steenkamp, having decided an image of the model appearing to undo her bikini top was the best way to illustrate the news, opted for a far smaller inset of the image used by the others, still obviously objectionable but not on the same scale as using it to fill the page.

It does of course raises questions about what now is beyond the pale. The extremely long lens shots of the People's Kate sunbathing topless were, but the Sun decided Harry buck-ass naked in a hotel wasn't.  The tabloids had an attack of the vapours when an Italian documentary used the images of Princess Diana lying mortally injured in the back of the Mercedes, despite having arguably contributed to the crash, yet don't think an ashed faced rock star learning of a personal tragedy deserves the same protection. This isn't about Leveson, as you shouldn't need a judge to tell you to feel the most basic compassion and human empathy. It's about a tabloid press that has never set itself a boundary it hasn't subsequently broken.

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3/18/2014 09:25:00 pm | |

Thursday, January 23, 2014 

Collymore and Ulrika.

I think I've made my views on trolling and Twitter pretty much clear, and don't really feel the need to repeat them again now in light of Stan Collymore's complaints about the abuse he's received for a while and which ratcheted up again at the weekend.  It should surely be noted though that unlike Caroline Criado-Perez, Collymore is in the business of making controversial comment on football and is no doubt well remunerated for doing so.  He's also pretty good at it, being the best thing on Talksport by a very long way.

Credit must nonetheless be given to both the Sun and Ulrika Jonsson for deciding this would be the perfect moment to bring up how back in 1998 Collymore attacked her and according, to Jonsson, said he "would fucking kill her".  No doubt he did.  One is also reminded however of how Jonsson's chosen way of promoting her autobiography was to focus on the allegation she made in it that she had been sexually assaulted earlier in her career, without naming the person responsible.  This, inevitably, led to speculation as to who it was, with Matthew Wright inadvertently naming John Leslie.  Jonsson chose not to cooperate with the subsequent police investigation into Leslie, with the CPS later dropping a prosecution against him at the last minute.

If we're going to bring hypocrisy into it, perhaps we should also consider the consequences of being deliberately vague and then not being prepared to pursue a case once the name of the person has become public.  As Ian Hislop said at the time, his general understanding was that you made complaints about sexual assault to the police, not the media (obviously, if the police ignore or don't act on complaints, then it certainly is legitimate to go to the media, although whether our press will treat ordinary members of the public's complaints with the same level of concern as they did someone like Jonsson, unless the individual being accused is also a celebrity, remains to be seen).  11 years on from that, and Jonsson is complaining about another incident that also resulted in no charges being brought, which Collymore apologised profusely for at the time.

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1/23/2014 10:01:00 pm | |

Thursday, August 08, 2013 

Save us from the trolls Dave!

There is growing pressure on social networking sites to do something about something tonight, as politicians and newspapers alike blame them for every single problem in the world today.

The prime minister David Cameron led the way, urging everyone to boycott ask.fm until it stopped working as any sort of service.  Speaking to Sky News, Cameron said: "These people have got to step up to the chicken basket and show some responsibility.  Simply allowing users of the site to block anonymous messages isn't good enough.  If someone makes nuisance phone calls, we obviously don't hold the caller responsible; we blame BT for allowing the call through in the first place, even if they have so-called call blocking available.  The same goes for the postal service.  If a mail bomb slips through the net and it kills someone, then obviously the postman who delivered it should be held accountable.  It's just common sense."

Expanding on his theme, Cameron continued: "Now while it's true that I hadn't heard of this ask.fm website until yesterday, that shouldn't stop me from talking about something I know absolutely nothing about.  I really do encourage a boycott, as I've also been told that the one organised by the delightful Caitlin Moran on Twitter was such a huge success last Sunday, at least until the new Doctor Who was announced.  If we stop using these sites, there's absolutely no chance whatsoever that people will simply move elsewhere, or that bullies will strike offline rather than online.  We must drain this eco-system of hate."

The tabloids meanwhile have called for more meaningful action.  Both the Sun and Daily Mail have demanded that ask.fm be banned, once again demonstrating their profound understanding of how the internet works.  Neither paper has any truck with bullies, as the comments section on the Mail website regularly demonstrates, regarded universally as a haven of informed, reasonable debate.  Likewise, columnists Richard Littlejohn and Jan Moir would never dream of writing about minorities in a prejudiced or inflammatory style.  As for the Sun, only those with extremely long memories can recall that during its campaign for Baby Peter the social workers involved with his case were urged to kill themselves by those commenting online, something that might cause a few regrets considering that two of the paper's journalists charged in connection with Operation Elveden have since had their own mental health problems.

We asked a random nerd slamming away at a keyboard for his take on these events.  "It's all a bit knee jerk, isn't it?  For a start, we don't know exactly why these four young people took their own lives.  Were they just being bullied on ask.fm, or were they being bullied offline as well?  Did they have other relationship problems, or had any relatives or friends recently been ill or died?  I've had depression myself, and I find it difficult to believe that it was just bullying online that led them to take such a drastic step.  It could have been the trigger, or the last straw certainly, but we can't just blame a website without knowing the full facts, and you would have thought anti-bullying and children's campaigners would know that."

"Besides, why is it that parental responsibility seems such a foreign concept when it comes to the internet?  Yes, it's difficult if you don't understand the technology and the slang, and when you can't have complete control due to almost every device now having net access, but clearly you have to talk with your kids about the sites they use and let them know they can always come to you if they don't feel safe.  It's no use blaming a service if you don't use the privacy settings it has available.  Those truly responsible here are the pathetic little shits who think it's hilarious to tell 14-year-old girls they're fat and ugly and should die. How about we go after the messengers rather than the message provider?"

"As for the tabloids, could you possibly tell it's the silly season? Any passing frenzy will do, even if it's likely that the internet as a whole helps those who feel excluded in real life far more than it harms those already vulnerable (just look at the It Gets Better campaign). They're also looking for anything to distract from their own far from honourable record when it comes to treating those who come to their attention with respect, especially as argument continues over the royal charter to establish the new press regulator."

A reward (a wine gum and a can of cream soda) is being offered for any information that leads to the tracking down of a Labour shadow minister.

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8/08/2013 07:18:00 pm | |

Wednesday, July 31, 2013 

This is our last gasp.


There's been a lot of snarky comment on the Sun's deeply odd wrap-around front page, and for good reason: it makes those splashes the Independent used to run look subtle.  THIS IS OUR BRITAIN it screams, and it might mean something if it wasn't just a promotional exercise to inform the paper's readers that, err, they're now going to be charged to access the paper's website and apps.  To be fair, as a commenter points out over at the New Statesman, it's difficult to draw pictures of non-material things, so what we get instead is an amalgamation of the centrepiece of Danny Boyle's (deeply overrated) Olympic opening ceremony and a lot of err, stuff pasted on the top of it.  There's the Shard, that famously British eyesore, a Routemaster, naturally, a power station, Mr Bean, the Queen's head peaking over an S, and well, every other cliche and landmark you can think of.

Taken altogether, it comes across as being spectacularly insincere. Is this an idealised Britain, or is it the Sun's Britain? It is of course lovely to think of a field that is forever England, or Britain, but when the vast majority of us live in urban areas rather than out in that green and pleasant land, planking everything down in something resembling Elysium is just a trifle odd. The Sun is nothing if not an embodiment of national stereotypes, despite having been born in the 60s, but even if this it's meant to say we might be changing but our values aren't, it just seems lazy and hackneyed. Obviously that's never bothered the paper in the past, yet you might have thought that under a new editor and to encourage readers to pay extra for what they used to get for free they would have gone that extra mile.

More pertinently, the Scottish edition, while keeping much of the editorial, goes for a cleaner and sharper look. The less said about A NEW DAWN the better, but it doesn't make your brain hurt from just looking at it. As Stuart Campbell also notes, the Scottish edition drops some of the harsher language from the statements on politics, in particular on welfare. The paper's stance on benefits and immigration can be summed up in that they're in favour of both for those they deem deserving and are against for everyone else.  Labour also gets it in the neck repeatedly despite the paper saying they're not slavish supporters of any party: who knew that a "culture of entitlement exploded" under the last government which destroyed entire communities, or that they papered over the cracks in education while standards fell measured against the rest of the world.

The problem the Sun faces is that it simply isn't as influential as it once was.  Whether down to the defenestration of Rebekah Brooks as chief executive of what was News International and the whole phone hacking scandal, or changes in the way politicians now attempt to engage the public, the Sun almost certainly comes behind the Mail as the first port of call for the Tory side of the coalition.  Rather than attempt to fight back, the paper has instead gone down the paywall route.  Paywalls can be viable if you provide content that isn't available anywhere else, as the FT has demonstrated; even with the new "not quite Sky Sports" programming promised for subscribers, it's difficult to see exactly what the Sun will have that other free sites won't.

One positive is that regardless of its execution, it's at least a change to see the Sun provide a picture of the country that has some sort of relationship with reality.  A bit of a difference with the paper under the aforementioned Brooks:

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7/31/2013 10:49:00 pm | |

Thursday, July 04, 2013 

The Murdoch tape: weak, weak, weak.

It remains surprising just how often stories that first appeared in Private Eye aren't followed up until rival organisations then suddenly decide to claim them as their own.  A case in point is the Murdoch tape: Private Eye published extracts from it 2 issues ago.  3 weeks later and Exaro News along with Channel 4 claim the tape as their own scoop.  True, they've made available the full tape, apparently recorded by embittered Sun journalists who didn't trust Keith meant what he said at their meeting, but without giving the Eye any credit for having obtained it first.

What's more, for the most part both Keith and the Sun's hacks have good reason to be embittered.  Murdoch's comment that "news tips from cops" in exchange for money have been going for over 100 years is right, nor is it just the Sun or the late Screws guilty of such payments.  That only the Sun has been turned over by the Met does give more than a hint of how this is in some way vengeance for how the Met were themselves caught in the phone hacking fallout.  The handing over of the archive by News Corporation's Management and Standards Committee helped immensely, but don't underestimate the desire of the police to get even, for which see the continuing revelations about how they attempted to smear the family of Stephen Lawrence.

Nor should anyone underestimate the desire of Murdoch to strike back.  That he promises they will "hit back" when they can is a wonderful insight into how his papers have always worked.  They might not wreak revenge immediately, but they will.  Just look at how the Sun last week almost unbelievably highlighted how the police smeared Liverpool fans after Hillsborough without mentioning its own abhorrent role.  The message was clear: the police, who used to be able to rely on the Sun to back them come what may, have at least temporarily lost one of their closest media allies.

The other insight provided is just how loyal Keith remains to Rebekah Brooks, which understandably continues to anger the rest of the staff on his papers.  He whinges not just about how the police came into her office, despite being told they wouldn't find anything, but also about how she was arrested on a Monday morning by about "15 or 16 officers", which is "ridiculous, quite openly".  Considering the number of times Sun hacks have been in tow when the police have raided celebrity targets, or how the Scum recently entrapped Tulisa Contostavlos and then rejoiced when she was picked up, excuse me if I don't empathise with Brooks' sad predicament.

The point is, neither do the hacks.  They don't believe Keith when he says that even if they're found guilty and imprisoned that News Corp will look after them, as he did Brooks when she walked away with an astonishing £10.8m in compensation for in effect screwing over his company.  If they did commit misconduct in public office, then surely so did their editors and those who signed off the payments.  Never before has Murdoch been anything other than trusted, and never before has he been so weak while still trying to give an image of strength.

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7/04/2013 05:34:00 pm | |

Wednesday, June 12, 2013 

The more things change.

Look who's back.

It's fair to say that I am not predisposed to like Tulisa Contostavlos.  If you want a handy summation of the musical apocalypse of the past decade, then listening to N-Dubz, Contostavlos's former group, will soon bring you up to speed. Naturally, once N-Dubz split up, Simon Cowell decided that Tulisa would the perfect addition to the X Factor judging panel, having previously given such duties to those other fountains of perpetual talent, Dannii Minogue and Sharon Osbourne.  Getting critiqued by Gary Barlow is one thing; being told that you need a bucket to carry a tune by Cowell and the others has always struck me as just a trifle rich.

Seeing as the X Factor has always been equal parts humiliating the gullible and hyperbolically praising fairly good karaoke singers only for them to be dropped from Cowell's record label a year later, some will have doubtless come to the conclusion that the entrapment of Contostavlos by the News of the World's, sorry, the Sun on Sunday's (®Roy Greenslade) Mazher Mahmood is something of a comeuppance.  This though would be the conclusion of a pretty heartless bastard, especially as it seems we now have something of an insight into just how far the Sun and Mahmood went to gain Contostavlos's trust before then performing the classic sting of asking if she could get some drugs for her new best friends.

Last Sunday's People (yes, I know) carried a report claiming that as well as being caught out in the drug sting, Contostavlos had also been fooled into believing that she was to play the leading role in a Bollywood film charting the journey of a young woman from England to India.  The hoax was so sophisticated that it had gone on for months, involving Contostavlos being flown by private jet to America, where she also met some of her supposed co-stars.  While the People doesn't explicitly say that the hoax and the sting are connected, it most certainly would explain just why it was that Contostavlos came to be so trusting of those who were secretly filming her, and also why she was so inclined to boast about her contacts.  And if it isn't connected, then either the story's horrendously inaccurate, or someone's got hell of a lot of money to burn on trolling a celebrity.

It would also fit in precisely with Mahmood's recent modus operandi.  Before the News of the Screws was sadly sacrificed so that Rebekah Brooks and Les Hinton could stay in their jobs for another couple of weeks, Mahmood and his team had carried out a similarly elaborate sting in an effort to prove the snooker player John Higgins was prepared to fix matches.  As revealed by the Sporting Intelligence website, the Screws set up a professional looking website designed to fool Higgins' manager Pat Mooney, who had already been plied with liberal amounts of alcohol, before flying both Higgins and Mooney to Ukraine, where they were swept through customs apparently thanks to the influence of their hosts.  The only problem was that Higgins felt something was wrong, imagining he could have got mixed up with the Russian mafia, and so despite the Screws' best efforts was non-committal to the proposed arrangement, as the independent tribunal later ruled.

Clearly, to fool Contostavlos required even greater extravagance and promises of riches.  Even then she didn't do what Mahmood obviously wanted her to, which was get the drugs and hand them over herself.  Instead she introduced the Sun to a friend who did the deal instead.  Naturally, for this truly heinous offence Contostavlos was promptly arrested by the Met's finest, who have always had a friendly relationship with the reporter who claims to have helped secure the convictions of hundreds of crims thanks to his good works.  If you're thinking there's a certainly irony to how the Sun predicted and then covered the arrest, both with front pages, while it devotes little in the way of space to the court appearances of its own reporters, then clearly you hate our great tradition of press freedom.

If anyone had been under the illusion that things would change after Leveson, then hopefully this will have fully shattered such notions. Subterfuge was only ever deemed permissible under the old PCC code if the material could not be obtained through other means, while fishing expeditions were expressly prohibited. There is no other way to describe Mahmood's methods than as entrapment.

And for what? To boost circulation ever so slightly? To put the jumped up Tulisa back in her place? To show that this "role model" is as hypocritical as all the rest? Pop star in knowing someone who deals drugs shock! It is truly pathetic gotcha journalism that interests the easily amused and bitter for a day, then it's gone. Contostavlos meanwhile is said to be devastated, as you might expect, and hasn't tweeted since the 31st of May. Last year she was praised for the way she responded to the release of a video which showed her performing a sex act on an ex-boyfriend. Despite it making clear that he has a grotty little nob, it was Contostavlos who was widely mocked, including by other celebrities. Last week the Sun headlined a follow-up piece "TULISA BLOWS IT AGAIN". It won't be much of a comfort to her, but it's undoubtedly the case that Mahmood too will mess up again, and hopefully this time he won't be able to carry on just as before.

(The Sun incidentally has denied most of the People's story and said it was false to say it "had spent as much as £100,000" on the investigation. £99,000 then, probably.)

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6/12/2013 10:10:00 pm | |

Thursday, May 02, 2013 

The Sun ain't gonna shine (anymore).

If you're ever in need of a good laugh, and happen to share my often bizarre sense of humour, you can't really go wrong with recalling the very first editorial published in the Sun following Murdoch's takeover. We will be politically independent it said, amongst other highly amusing statements of how it meant to go on ("the new Sun will be the paper that CARES ... about truth, beauty and justice", went the leader the Saturday before the new paper emerged).

To be fair, for the first few years of its existence and while Keith was still finding his feet as a proprietor in the UK, it was pretty much independent or at the least, undecided. 10 years on though, and the paper's shift was complete. It still didn't pledge allegiance to either Labour or the Tories; rather it supported whoever Murdoch decided was both likely to win and wouldn't threaten his business interests. This has been the case ever since, only with politicians ever more willing to do obeisance before him.

Well, at least it was up until the Graun uncovered a little local difficulty at the News of the Screws. Since then only Boris Johnson and Alex Salmond have impressed the Dirty Digger, both being willing to ignore things like mass law breaking while Murdoch temporarily smiles on them.

It's hardly surprising then that the Sun hasn't endorsed anyone for today's local elections. David Cameron might have been "our only hope" 3 years ago, but he's close to being a no hoper now, such has been Murdoch's ire at the prime minister's support for the agreement between the parties on the press charter. Ed Miliband burned his bridges at the outset of the phone hacking scandal, and as for the Lib Dems and Nick Clegg, well. It does however signify that we may well have reached the point when Keith's power or rather assumed power has finally begun to dim. And if that isn't something worth celebrating, there isn't a whole lot that is.

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5/02/2013 08:13:00 pm | |

Wednesday, March 13, 2013 

Every day is like Sunday. (Or, how tabloid journalism continues to work.)

Friday 8th March:
Former prison officer Richard Trunkfield pleads guilty to misconduct in public office, admitting that he sold information on a "high-profile" inmate to the Sun for £3,350.

Wednesday 13th March:
The Sun publishes front page article claiming a prison officer announced over the tannoy that the "right honourable member for Wandsworth North" was to come and get his breakfast.  It also claims that Chris Huhne asked to be moved to the vulnerable prisoners wing after he was "badgered by cons for cash".  The paper's sources for both claims are "prison visitors".

Addendum: Carina Trimingham denies Huhne was either ridiculed on his first day in Wandsworth or that he has asked to be moved to the isolation wing.

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3/13/2013 05:59:00 pm | |

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