Power, wealth, judges, rights, Giggs, misogyny, Murdoch and Goodwin

The media and lawyers specialising in media law are showing great ingenuity in trying to present their reporting of sex gossip stories as issues of high principle. First there was ‘freedom of speech’ and ‘freedom of the press’, now a lawyer writing in the Sunday Herald claims it’s a feminist fight against misogynist judges.

You may think that women being raped and murdered at the rate of one a day in Honduras, while the police refuse to do anything about it, is a more serious issue and that the papers should campaign against that instead. You might have thought that 420,000 women a year being raped in the Democratic Republic of Congo in a civil war that the big powers allow to continue because big firms based in their countries profit from it would be bigger news, if women’s rights were the issue. Unarmed women, men and children are all being shot down by tanks and snipers in Syria and Yemen (over 1,100 killed in Syria so far and over 150 in Yemen, thousands wounded).

The real outrage though, the most terrible oppression of all, is apparently that oppressive misogynist judges in the UK have tried to prevent newspapers and TV stations reporting on who a bank manager who is unpopular for completely unconnected reasons slept with. Even worse, these monsters went on to try to prevent them reporting a second earth shattering atrocity – footballer Ryan Giggs had consensual sex with reality TV star Imogen Thomas. Worst of all, as lawyer Paul March points out, is that Thomas was initially prevented from ‘commoditising’ the affair.

This is an interesting word to use though because it gets down to the real issue. These evil, evil judges were trying to stop newspapers, television stations and lawyers from making money by revealing the details of other peoples’ private lives –and that’s what it’s all about – money, profits, not principles. Rupert Murdoch and other newspaper owners having the right to spy on other peoples’ private lives (e.g by phone hacking and paying people ridiculous amounts of money for sordid details) in order to make himself wealthier and more politically influential is not freedom of speech. It’s not standing up to the powerful and wealthy either – it’s them throwing their weight around to send the message that no courts, laws or legal systems are going to stand in the way of them getting even richer by any means they feel like.

Now to be fair the Sunday Herald is way above the Murdoch press. In fact the Sunday Herald is mostly an excellent paper that doesn’t get involved in the fear and hate mongering, but it and the rest of the broadsheets and TV news stations seem to be moving towards the tabloids reporting priorities because they want a share of the sex gossip market.

The Sunday Herald even ‘commoditised’ the thing further (in a very minor way) by selling limited edition t-shirts of their ground breaking front cover that broke the startling news that some people have affairs with celebrities and sell their stories to newspapers.

Look at the damage it does to peoples’ families when they have affairs, most of the media say, as if plastering it all over the headlines of every newspaper and TV news bulletin for a week will make it so much better for them. Ryan Giggs’ wife has asked the reporters to f*** right off and doesn’t want the media to cover it, but the papers’ attitude seems to be - never mind her, there are bigger principles involved.

There is no public interest involved in publishing gossip about sex – only money grubbing and distracting from real issues

Whatever Fred Goodwin's faults, the whole world does not have a right to hear every detail of his private life, or anyone else's

I'm not an admirer of the job Fred Goodwin did as head of the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), but who he had an affair with is none of anyone's business except maybe his wife.

There's a ludicrous idea in Britain, promoted by tabloid hacks who profit from it, that if someone is famous, a politician, or was in a high paid job the entire world has the moral right to know about every detail of their private lives. They don't. There's no public interest involved, because 'public interest' does not mean 'anything some of the public are interested in knowing - including gossip about peoples' private lives', it means something that affects the public's interests - i.e which would harm them if they don't know it and/or benefit them if they did.

All this coverage of peoples' sex lives is just a distraction from the real issues - and anyone who thinks the banking crisis was just down to who was running the banks at the time and their personal failings simply doesn't understand the problem.

The problem is deregulation, which results in any executive of a company that doesn't only look to how they can maximise profits this quarter (whatever the long term risks or losses) being replaced by someone who will - or being put out of business, or being taken over by a company that will.

Unless the banks and other firms are regulated properly – which will also require closing down the tax havens that allow enough secrecy to make regulation impossible - this will happen again and again and again.

The money grubbers like Rupert Murdoch, former Sun editor Kelvin Mackenzie and the bin raking ‘private detectives’ the Murdoch empire hire, like Glenn Mulcaire, pretend that they are upholding moral values, serving the public interest and exposing hypocrisy. No-one could be greater hypocrites than they are, as they peddle gossip to make money, distracting attention from real issues such as how much tax (if any) billionaires, newspaper editors like Kelvin Mackenzie and big firms like News International pay in the UK.

Kelvin Mackenzie

In fact we know Murdoch’s News International used (legal) tax avoidance to avoid paying any net tax whatsoever in the UK between 1989 and 1999.

We also know that in addition to being involved in buying information obtained by illegal illegal phone hacking, Murdoch’s papers have also paid police for information on peoples’ private lives. Rebekah Wade (now Brooks) slipped up in 2003 by admitting as (then) editor of the Sun that the paper paid police for information on celebrities which it then published. Brooks is now Chief Executive of News International (the UK subsidiary of Murdoch's News Corp).

We also know MacKenzie and the Sun have often printed outright lies based on rumours, such as their stories about Elton John having had sex with underage rent boys and removing the voice boxes of his guard dogs. John Pilger wrote of one headline in The Sun under Mackenzie referring to Australian aborigines as ‘The Abos – brutal and dangerous’.

In fact MacKenzie has sunk so low so many times in his hate-mongering, lies and gossip about others that he really has no moral high ground from which to criticise other people.

There are some real private investigators who investigate the serious issues by looking at the business and political frauds committed by some of the most powerful people, political parties, governments, criminals and companies. These are people who risk vilification and sometimes death to give people the truth – people like John Pilger, Greg Palast, Robert Fisk, Peter Maass, the late Veronica Guerin and Shane Bauer (currently being held as a highly unlikely ‘US spy’ by Iran’s government.) Kelvin Mackenzie and his associates are a joke compared to them, a sad travesty of what real investigative journalists and editors should be.

Some of the other things you will never see raised in most tabloids are the vast rip-off of taxpayers and the NHS through PFI and PPP contracts, which make taxpayers pay more for cut services; the double subsidy they’re paying to privatised rail companies (above inflation fare rises plus government subsidy), the subsidy to the nuclear industry and the subsidies to arms manufacturer British Aerospace; and tax havens used to avoid paying income and corporation tax, pushing up taxes for the majority.

These are all cases of the majority subsidising the very richest on a scale that makes the expenses scandal look like a baby pissing into the Atlantic. Instead the tabloids will tell you that your money is being “stolen” by the unemployed, even though there have never been enough jobs for everyone in booms or recessions, that “immigrants” are “stealing” it (even though many are fleeing death by starvation, lack of medical care or being tortured or shot – and benefits paid to them are well below the amount paid to citizens) , or that trade unions are. Then they’ll tell you who shagged who (or who some false rumour says shagged who) – and sadly many people are taken for mugs, while Murdoch and friends play them for every penny they’ve got.

I remember as a teenager in 1986 seeing a Sun front page with the headline ‘Freddie Starr ate my hamster’. Not long afterwards Reagan bombed Tripoli in Libya, with Prime Minister Thatcher giving the planes permission to refuel in Britain without even informing parliament never mind having a vote on it. The raid killed a small girl among others. There was a tiny column on this in The Sun that day with a picture of a plane on one side of the page covering this story in two sentences. That sums up the methods of Kelvin Mackenzie and those like him – blind people with bullshit to distract them from the real issues.

Sun editor's admission that she paid police for stories may show why police are covering up for the News of the World - and determined to get Sheridan

Police took money from the Murdoch press for information – which may be why they’re covering up phone hacking - and so determined to get Sheridan, whose phone they knew had been hacked, convicted of perjury

It turns out that in 2003 Rebekah Wade, then editor of the Sun, admitted to a parliamentary select committee that the Sun had paid police officers for information on people for newspaper stories (1). If that happens at the Sun, what are the chances of it not happening at the News of the World – another brand in the Murdoch cupboard of scratchy toilet paper? What are the chances that it didn’t continue until at least the current phone hacking scandal?

This puts a new light on the police’s unwillingness to investigate phone hacking at the News of the World much;  and their refusal to tell people they and their numbers were listed in the notebook of private investigator Glenn Mulcaire ( a convicted phone hacker, paid by the News of the World). If police officers have taken money for information from the Murdoch press, they won’t shop them for fear of losing their own jobs, possibly being convicted themselves – and at the least losing their additional income from feeding the tabloids in future (2).

It also put’s a new light on their determination to convict Tommy Sheridan, one of the victims of News of the World phone hacking.

Time magazine reports that in 2003 she (Rebekah) told the parliamentary media and culture committee that “We have paid the police for information in the past.”  (3) Rebekah (now Brooks) is now Chief Executive of News International, a subsidiary of Murdoch’s News Corporation. News International owns both the Sun and the News of the World.

MPs apparently backed off from demanding Wade (now Brooks after a divorce) be called before a parliamentary select committee again more recently, for fear the Murdoch press would target their own personal lives (4).

Since Wade’s earlier admission shows the police are hiding corruption in their own ranks and collusion with illegal acts by tabloid newspapers, it’s time MPs got some balls and stopped caving in to Murdoch.

The Guardian also reported in 2010 that 'the officer in charge of the inquiry [into phone hacking], assistant commissioner Andy Hayman, subsequently left the police to work for News International as a columnist.' , which could very easily be the paper rewarding him for being so lax in his investigation of it.(5)

(1) = Guardian 12 Mar 2001 ‘Sun editor admits paying police officers for stories’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2003/mar/12/sun.pressandpublishing

(2) = See sources linked for this previous post, http://inplaceoffear.blogspot.com/2011/01/glaring-contrast-between-police.html

(3) = Time magazine 27 Jan 2011 ‘Did Police Ignore Evidence in Britain's Phone-Hacking Scandal?’, http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2044608-2,00.html

(4) = guardian.co.uk 10 sep 2010 ‘MPs backed down from calling Rebekah Brooks to Commons’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/sep/10/mps-backed-down-rebekah-brooks

(5) guardian.co.uk 04 Apr 2010 'Police 'ignored News of the World phone hacking evidence', http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/apr/04/police-ignored-news-world-evidence

The glaring contrast between police investigations of Sheridan for perjury and the Murdoch press for phone hacking

The three year jail sentence given to Tommy Sheridan for perjury is considerably longer than many offenders get for serious violent assaults. Irrespective of whether you believe Sheridan is guilty or not, this underlines the fact that this trial has a large political element, with the establishment parties, the police and the Murdoch media empire closing ranks to punish those who resist them.

When police suspected Sheridan of perjury in a case against the News of the World they made a surpise raid on his house with thirty officers, interrogated his wife and accused her of theft of airline miniature drinks (her employer British Airways later exonerating here) and of using “terrorist techniques” when she said her lawyer had advised her not to answer their questions (1) – (2).

When the News of the World is suspected of illegally hacking thousands of peoples’ phones, including Tommy Sheridan’s, the police write the newspaper polite letters asking them if they have any evidence they would like to provide them with, hide evidence of whose phones were hacked from victims and from the Crown Prosecution Service; and say they’ve no legal obligation to investigate or charge all those involved (3) – (10).

They politely interview Andy Coulson, the former News of the World editor (and until recently chief spin doctor to Prime Minister David Cameron) – and decide he has no charges to answer, despite former News of the World journalists saying he must have been aware of the systematic phone hacking carried out routinely by the paper’s journalists (3) – (10).

The News of the World says it has “impounded” the computer of one of their staff who is being investigated by police in order supposedly as part of an “internal inquiry” to look for any evidence he was breaking the law – in fact giving them the opportunity to delete emails and other evidence if they want to (11). Would Tommy Sheridan have been allowed to investigate his own computer, rather than the police doing it? Why is the News of the World trusted to investigate itself? The obvious answer is that it has political friends in high places - and the votes of those stupid or gullible enough to read and believe it for sale.

Rupert Murdoch’s papers have helped the winning parties into power in every election since 1979. It was Sky News and the Sun newspaper who set up Gordon Brown in the Mrs Duffy affair for example – though Duffy turned down the Sun’s attempt to bribe her to say she would vote Conservative. Sky and the Sun, like the News of the World, are owned by Rupert Murdoch’s companies (12) – (13).

This episode tells you all you need to know about how impartial the UK’s police and legal system are; little justice here – and lots of protecting those with power and influence.

(1) = Herald 22 Mar 2008 ‘'No charges' for Gail Sheridan over drink miniatures’, http://www.heraldscotland.com/no-charges-for-gail-sheridan-over-drink-miniatures-1.877085

(2) = Herald 03 Dec 2010 ‘Crown drops more Sheridan perjury charges’, http://www.heraldscotland.com/mobile/news/crime-courts/crown-drops-more-sheridan-perjury-charges-1.1072224 ; (scroll down to sub-heading near bottom of article)

(3) = guardian.co.uk 7 Jan 2011 ‘Met asks News of the World for new phone hacking evidence’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jan/07/met-news-of-the-world-phone-hacking

(4) = Independent 13 Jan 2011 ‘Scotland Yard fights to keep phone-hacking targets a secret’,http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/scotland-yard-fights-to-keep-phonehacking-targets-a-secret-2183196.html

(5) = guardian.co.uk 6 Jan 2011 ‘Tommy Sheridan to sue NoW and Met over phone hacking’,http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/jan/06/tommy-sheridan-sues-phone-hacking

(6) = guardian.co.uk 07 Sep 2010 ‘John Prescott to sue Met over phone hacking details’,http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/sep/17/john-prescott-sues-met-mulcaire

(7) = guardian.co.uk 02 Sep 2010 ‘MP demands judicial inquiry into News of the World phone-hacking claims’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/sep/02/mp-news-of-the-world-inquiry ; ‘According the New York Times: "The officials didn't discuss certain evidence with senior prosecutors, including the notes suggesting the involvement of other reporters, according to a senior prosecutor on the case. The prosecutor was stunned to discover later that the police had not shared everything. 'I would have said we need to see how far this goes' and 'whether we have a serious problem of criminality on this news desk,' said the former prosecutor."....Referring to this allegation in his letter to No 10, Watson wrote: "The testimony given to the NYT is that the police did not share all the relevant information with the CPS. And that if they had done, the CPS would have reached different conclusions. These are clear grounds for a judicial inquiry. Please can you confirm your intention to recommend one."’

(8) = guardian.co.uk 05 Sep 2011 ‘MPs seek fresh investigation into News of the World phone hacking’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/sep/05/mps-seek-phone-hacking-investigation

‘A note of a case conference between police and the CPS records that detectives recommended that "the appropriate strategy is to ringfence the case to minimise the risk of extraneous matters being included".

In a briefing note for ministers produced earlier this year, Dean Haydon, Yates's staff officer acknowledged: "Minimal work was done on the vast personal data where no criminal offences were apparent."…

The specific allegation that No 10 communications director Andy Coulson had known about phone hacking when he was editor of the News of the World were "recycled", a senior cabinet minister, Michael Gove, said.

He said the police decided "there was no case to answer" over claims public figures had their phones tapped while Coulson was editor.’

(9)  = New York Times 01 Sep 2010 ‘Tabloid Hack Attack on Royals, and Beyond’, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/05/magazine/05hacking-t.html

‘The litigation is beginning to expose just how far the hacking went, something that Scotland Yard did not do. In fact, an examination based on police records, court documents and interviews with investigators and reporters shows that Britain’s revered police agency failed to pursue leads suggesting that one of the country’s most powerful newspapers was routinely listening in on its citizens.

The police had seized files from Mulcaire’s home in 2006 that contained several thousand mobile phone numbers of potential hacking victims and 91 mobile phone PIN codes. Scotland Yard even had a recording of Mulcaire walking one journalist — who may have worked at yet another tabloid — step by step through the hacking of a soccer official’s voice mail, according to a copy of the tape. But Scotland Yard focused almost exclusively on the royals case, which culminated with the imprisonment of Mulcaire and Goodman. When police officials presented evidence to prosecutors, they didn’t discuss crucial clues that the two men may not have been alone in hacking the voice mail messages of story targets.

“There was simply no enthusiasm among Scotland Yard to go beyond the cases involving Mulcaire and Goodman,” said John Whittingdale, the chairman of a parliamentary committee that has twice investigated the phone hacking. “To start exposing widespread tawdry practices in that newsroom was a heavy stone that they didn’t want to try to lift.” Several investigators said in interviews that Scotland Yard was reluctant to conduct a wider inquiry in part because of its close relationship with News of the World.’

(10) = guardian.co.uk 01 Sep 2010 ‘Andy Coulson discussed phone hacking at News of the World, report claims’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/sep/01/andy-coulson-phone-hacking-allegations

(11) = guardian.co.uk 03 jan 2011 ‘Internal inquiry launched into News of the World phone hacking’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jan/13/internal-inquiry-phone-hacking

(12) = BBC News 28 Apr 2010 ‘Gordon Brown 'bigoted woman' comment caught on tape’,http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/election_2010/8649012.stm

(13) = Independent 30 Apr 2010 ‘How Mrs Duffy refused to dance to anti-Brown tune played by ‘The Sun’’, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/how-mrs-duffy-refused-to-dance-to-antibrown-tune-played-by-lsquothe-sunrsquo-1958667.html