Zzzz

Weather forecast:

Be aware that there is a shower coming in from Brazil tomorrow…;o)

At the moment – Tangled (the recent Disney adaptation of Repunzel) for what must be close to the fiftieth time.
Before that Frozen; I did make a note of how many times that had been on my TV, but gave up/lost interest/meh apparently at 67 viewings.

My youngest daughter loves both of them with a passion – did you think either was my choice?

Yep, can’t disagree with that.

Shall we chat with a mod or just charge round there, with burning torches and freshly sharpened pitchforks?

Maybe he was born again…?

Is this a cesarian, by any chance?

You not gentleman enough to hold it open, then?

Honestly, we have a bunch of arrogant impolites on this forum…

Well, thats the whole, entire forum scrubbed then – we weren’t there, we have no reason to talk about it.

Charlie, stop talking utter rubbish.

THIS MORNING presenters Phillip Schofield and Holly Willoughby today challenged a former News of the World journalist after he described phone-hacking as a “victimless crime”.

Paul McMullan, who was a features writer at the now-defunct paper, defended phone-hacking as an acceptable tool on the ITV show.

He said: “This is a victimless crime. There are no victims of phone-hacking.”

He was part of a discussion on the programme in the wake of ex-NotW editor Andy Coulson’s conviction for plotting to hack phones yesterday.

Author Christine Hamilton and journalist Nick Ferrari also appeared on the show.

Questioned by Schofield about the hacking of model Abi Titmuss’ phone, Mr McMullan said: “How was she a victim? It’s like someone taking your picture, it doesn’t exactly hurt. Someone punching you hurts.”

He continued: “Listening to a few messages? Millions of people around the country have done it regularly and do it all the time to their brothers and sisters.

“It’s just putting in a few numbers.”…

…Mr McMullan also defended the hacking of Milly Dowler’s phone and said: “The intentions were honourable”.

He added: “You’re talking about hacking and it is a crime now, but it never used to be. It was a kid’s trick to listen to their parents’ voicemails.

“It wasn’t a serious offence but they made it a crime, people like [David] Blunkett, so they could send journalists to jail.

“Pretty soon there will be more British journalists in jail than in Egypt.

“I believe in a free press and a free society. At the moment freedom of speech is going down the pan, newspapers are losing their teeth.

“You are going to miss the News of the World in five or six years when we can no longer expose corrupt politicians.”

Mr Ferrari launched a tirade in response to the former tabloid journalist’s claims.

He told him: “Your views repulse me.

“I am ashamed to share a sofa with you if you think that represents British journalism.

“You are reprehensible if you think you represent the views, you are revolting and repulsing a nation to say it’s alright to do it.

“You are so out of step to say it is a victimless crime.

“If the Dowler family are watching, on behalf of journalism I apologise.

“You are beyond wrong.”…

http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/484769/Holly-Willoughby-phone-hacking-News-of-the-World-journalist

Ignoring Charlie and his bizarre attempts at censorship, it’s obvious this guy was on a mission to paint his former paper in a good light. If the NotW was so forthright why was it so keen on hiding its ‘work’ in this field? If celebrities were ‘fair game’ what does that say about the 7/7 bombing victims whose phones were also hacked? And the royals, MPs, sports personalities, even editors? And the family of Milly Dowler, with their hopes raised by the unexpected actions on her phone, are they not victims of this crass interference?

Maybe there soon will be more journalists in prison here than in Egypt, but at least they would be there for proper crimes, not trumped up political charges.
Wonder if the other newspapers will actually report all the details when the sentences are handed out?

Phone hacking: newspapers fail to report the real story about the trial

Next week six men will be sentenced for their involvement in the interception of voicemail messages on mobile phones. Between them, they were either responsible for hacking into the phones or knowing about such activity.

During an eight-month trial, jurors were told of hacking on “an industrial scale” at the now-defunct News of the World. Many thousands of messages on the phones of up to 5,500 people were illegally accessed.

The six are former editor Andy Coulson, three senior executives Greg Miskiw, James Weatherup and Neville Thurlbeck, plus reporter Dan Evans and private investigator Glenn Mulcaire.

These men committed a crime to which five pleaded guilty while one, Coulson, having denied it, was found guilty by his peers.

It is a remarkable story, unprecedented in the history of the British media, and arguably, a first anywhere in the world.

There has, sadly, been too little real attention paid to this reality by newspapers and broadcasters. The facts have been reported – just about in some cases – but the outcome of the trial, and its implications, have not been appropriately headlined.

They have failed to report the story properly. For example, one persistent claim emerged in today’s papers and in TV reports, that an (alleged) £110m trial has resulted in “just” one conviction. This entirely ignores the other five guilty men.

Let’s deal with the money first. The total includes the massive defence fund provided by Rupert Murdoch. It is estimated that the cost to taxpayers will be £35m.

Anyway, the police and the prosecuting authorities were taking on a powerful international company that had, for years, deliberately denied the existence of hacking and later defied attempts by the police to investigate it.

The investigation proved to be complex, involving many, many hours of painstaking research into computer files. It was bound to cost money. Can anyone imagine how the rest of the press would have howled if the police had simply thrown up their hands and said it was too expensive to carry on?

The historic failure by the Metropolitan police to investigate previously meant there was a huge reservoir of evidence and allegations to deal with. It proved to be a big legal headache to access journalistic material, which had special protection, and this was compounded by technological problems in trying to retrieve 300m emails that had been deleted from News International’s servers.

Therefore, the police were forced to invest considerable time and resources in ensuring that they carried out a proper job in order to obtain sufficient evidence to warrant a trial.

It is true that Rebekah Brooks, her husband and colleagues were found not guilty. But that does not negate the value of the wider exercise.

To read most of the coverage, however, is to wonder at whether newspapers really care about what happened, despite their knee-jerk mentions of hacking being an awful crime.

Indeed, the conclusion of the trial has emboldened some papers to renew attacks on the Leveson inquiry, which was the direct result of the hacking scandal.

These have been accompanied by thinly veiled claims that Leveson, prime minister David Cameron and The Guardian are collectively responsible for an assault on press freedom.

But the hacking six cannot be compared to the Al-Jazeera three, who have been jailed for seven years in Egypt.

Nor should these six be seen as some kind of isolated cabal. That is not to accuse the rest of the News of the World staff of doing what they did; it is to underline what the court was told of the “pervasive” culture at the paper.

In others words, the pressures on the journalists to get stories by any means allied to a lack of corporate oversight were major factors.

I would go further. Although the NoW was undoubtedly a rogue newspaper, as I wrote several times and way before the hacking scandal broke, its journalistic agenda and the methodology some of its reporters employed, was not confined to its Wapping newsroom.

The knowledge of how to hack into mobile phones was known to other journalists on other newspapers. And these reporters were under similar pressures to obtain stories. Newspapers that belittle the significance of hacking have reason to avert their gaze from such truths.

Meanwhile, several editors have sought to divert attention from the main issue by perpetuating a myth about the revelation that transformed the hacking scandal into an international story.

This was The Guardian’s report in July 2011 that the News of the World had intercepted voicemail messages left on the mobile phone of Milly Dowler, the 13-year-old girl who was abducted in 2002.

The paper’s report, based on multiple sources, also stated that some messages had been deleted by the journalists in order to free up space so that more could be left.

“As a result,” said the article, “friends and relatives of Milly concluded wrongly that she might still be alive.” In other words, Milly’s family had been given false hope.

Amid the resulting furore after publication, David Cameron instituted the Leveson inquiry into press standards, not just at the News of the World but in all newspapers.

Most national newspaper publishers and editors were bitterly opposed to that inquiry from the outset. Then, in December 2011, the Metropolitan police issued a statement – first reported in The Guardian – which stated that although the News of the World had hacked Milly’s phone the newspaper’s staff were unlikely to have been responsible for the deletions.

It was possible that the deletions had happened automatically but the police could not be certain how they occurred, and it is widely acknowledged that we may never know.

From that moment on, publishers and editors – including those within Rupert Murdoch’s organisation – have claimed that the Leveson inquiry and the closure of the News of the World were entirely due to The Guardian’s inaccurate July 2011 report.

That is the myth, one that has gained widespread credibility throughout the media ever since. It features in newspaper editorials and commentaries. Broadcasters have taken it up as some kind of gospel. It was repeated on the Radio 4’s Today programme by John Humphrys this morning.

Repetition of a lie does not make the lie correct, but the nature of myths is that they are difficult to counter, not least because the devil, as so often, is in the detail.

And detail is hard to deal with in a three-minute TV or radio interview, especially when newspapers antagonistic to The Guardian, and to the Leveson inquiry, continue to publish the falsehood. But the details require attention and have been spelled out in this article by Nick Davies.

There is not a scintilla of proof that the prime minister’s decision to set up the Leveson inquiry rested solely on the voicemail deletions. The fact that the News of the World had been responsible for hacking into the murdered girl’s phone was itself shocking enough to warrant an inquiry.

Even if the Dowler case had not proved to be the trigger for political action to curb press misbehaviour, the subsequent revelations about the interception of voicemail messages of people bereaved by the 7/7 tube bombings or the deaths of soldiers in Afghanistan would surely have done so.

As Lord Justice Leveson wrote in his report, the hacking of Milly’s phone “rightly shocked the public conscience in a way that other stories of phone-hacking may not have” and “in that context” whether or not News of the World journalists had deleted messages was “almost irrelevant.”

It is also important to grasp that the News of the World’s closure had been discussed by Murdoch’s executives prior to the Dowler story.

Moreover, on the day that Brooks told News of the World staff the paper was to close she claimed to have “some visibility” of revelations to come. There would have been “another two years of trouble” ahead, she said, if the paper had not been closed. That gives a lie to the idea that closure was the result of a single story.

The final irony, of course, is that this Fleet Street falsehood and distortion is the very stuff that concerned Leveson during his inquiry.

So the newspapers that attacked his report and continue to spread myths about hacking are the very ones that wish to go on regulating themselves.

http://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2014/jun/26/1

(Roy Greenslade has had editing roles at The Sun, The Sunday Times, Today, was editor of the Daily Mirror in the early 1990’s, and is professor of journalism at City University, London.)

Murdoch and his son will be interviewed by the police shortly since they were ultimately in charge of their rogue publications and, no matter how much they try to distance themselves from it, the buck stops at the top.

What he is saying (which is not utter rubbish) is that, as we were not at the trial (so did not hear all the testimonies) we have no right to challenge the verdict.

Who said anything about challenging the verdict? The impression I had (my view) from my three visits did not show her in a good light, and there have been one or two very quiet ‘mumbles’ about what could the jury have seen that was not made public (which was nothing, obviously, but there have been few – if any – stories in the press disagreeing with the finding because the press is watching over its own. Emails are not as public and have been winging around filling up inboxes like mad). Charlie’s view was that he couldn’t comment because he hadn’t attended the trial or served on the jury and that no one else could/should comment unless they had done so (post 13). Your view is…unknown because you decided to attack me instead – if it wasn’t for the nature of this forum one might wonder about certain members deliberately dragging threads off topic to make comments about the thread starter instead…

we’ve been told, ad nauseam, about your superior intellect

You can thank Mr Green for that. I would very much doubt anyone believes it, I know I don’t, but if it helps you to demonise the opposition then by all means carry on…

but to put yourself above all 12 jurors (who were there) takes arrogance to a new level.

Yep. Happens every time the verdict goes against your personal view. Have a look around – there must have been several similar threads so far this year.

We do though have a right to think that the Brooks woman must be fairly competent as a manager to have reached the exalted heights she did (I doubt she would have got there by horizontal jogging unless there were a lot of partially sighted people on the board of News International).

She claims to have studied at the Sorbonne (University of Paris, for the unknowing) in her entry in Who’s Who, something never mentioned in her Murdoch-issued biographies and a wonderful achievement for the daughter of a deckhand on a tugboat. But she started at the NotW as a secretary, so I’d guess she would have got some managerial skills en route from Paris.

The farce with the laptops in the underground basement was explained away with a pretty incredible story about Charlie’s porn watching habits. Though I can believe those were genuine – I mean you would, wouldn’t you?

Tell you what, you write a script along those lines and see if you could actually give it away, let alone sell it…;o)

“Greg McGill, a senior lawyer with the CPS, said the decision to mount such a massive operation was in part intended to “explore a culture of invading privacy”. He added: “This case was not about whether phone hacking took place or whether public officials were paid for information; there are a significant number of recent convictions which show that both did happen.”

If the CPS had stuck to what it is supposed to do – to establish that there is sufficient evidence to warrant a prosecution, rather than exploring cultures – perhaps Mrs Brooks might not have gone to court.

So there shouldn’t have been a case involving Brooks or Coulson? Remember, whilst one was found not guilty the other was and awaits sentencing so what – in your view, unless you believe he shouldn’t have been prosecuted either – would have differentiated between the two?
Yes – hacking has been found to have taken place (under the editorships of both of them). Privacy was invaded, what was not intended for publication was publicised.
Yes – officials have been found to have been paid by newspapers for information (under the editorships of both of them). Again, privacy was not maintained but became public.
Yes – it has been established that there was sufficient evidence to warrant a prosecution: QED Coulson. But since the Milly Dowler phone hacking case it has to be inconceivable that the editor of a newspaper would not know or understand how her own reporters came by such, for example, personal messages left by the girls parents – if you opened tomorrows newspaper to find personal text or answer phone messages splashed across the front page wouldn’t you wonder how they were obtained and wonder about their legality? You might but, according to Brooks and the jury, it doesn’t matter.
In addition Rebekah Brooks was questioned by the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee of the House of Commons in 2003, telling MP Chris Bryant that information had been paid for in the past when asked if newspapers had ever been involved in ‘improper acts’, admitting that police officers had been given money for stories. Coulson butted in and claimed that the payments had been made lawfully, even though it is completely unlawful to pay a police officer for any reason. Brooks was summoned to the committee three more times so that more questions could be asked, but failed to attend; the idea that a warrant be issued forcing her to attend was given some thought but, after Chris Bryant was repeatedly ridiculed by The Sun, including publishing a picture of him in his underwear from a gay dating website, the idea was dropped because it was believed that The Sun might decide to investigate the private lives of the committee members… One might wonder how that might be achieved without a little hacking? ;o)

And Charlie? I am not a know all, I would never claim to know everything – it would take the fun out of life. But there is a difference between a know all and a know nothing, especially on a discussion forum when (for example) the first reply is an assault on the threads starter more than a reply to the thread.