This is an abbreviated post-festum version of My DKos diary which – because the sessions overran for two hours – I had to abandon before it Rebakah Brooks’ testimony. Much played out as I expected it – as you will see in the diary below.
Because testimony wasn’t under oath, because MPs aren’t trained investigators (like the forthcoming Commissions of Enquiry), and because Rupert, James and Rebekah could hide under the cloak of ‘ongoing investigations, it was always bound to be a damp squib investigatively.
However it was full of drama – and even pie!
An annoying and distracting moment, like most pie fights I’ve seen. Fun in some way – but completely counterproductive. The real drama came from the Wizard of Oz moment.
Whether it was calculated or not (I really doubt it was calculated) the curtain was pulled on the wizard, and what we saw was a rather bumbling, angry, pompous old man used to being powerful, but when it comes to the question “Do you bear any responsibility” the answer was “Nope.”
But this is important. Merely tearing the veil on the secret unaccountable power of the Murdochs is a revelation in itself. Murdoch never governed by being loved, by being charming, or by being intellectually respected: he swayed his secret powers by fear: fear of being exposed by him, salaciously, financially, politically, personally.
Now that fear has gone, the emperor has no clothes.
Full diary beyond the flip – I think, in the main, I predicted well. But Moosers, tell me what you think
It’s only fitting, since the Guardian were one of the few major papers involved in disseminating the Wikileaks emails and breaking the Phone Hacking scandal, that they should be the first to report a Lulzsec hack of News International:
The LulzSec collective hacked the Sun’s website and redirected it to another hacked page falsely reporting that Rupert Murdoch had been found dead.
LulzSec also claimed to be “sitting on their [the Sun’s] emails” and that they would release the emails on Tuesday. They tweeted what they claimed was Rebekah Brooks’s email address at the Sun, and said they knew her password combination.
RT @jamesrbuk: Okay, www.thetimes.co.uk, thetimes.co.uk, www.thesun.co.uk and thesun.co.uk all down for me now #lulzsec
Ouch. That’s gotta hurt. It’s coming at them from all angles now.
Update: Sean Hoare’s Death
I go out to gym for a couple of hours, and what happens? More incredible twists and turns
The whistleblower who connected the Prime Minister’s Press officer to the Hacking Scandal in an NYT investigation has been found dead in his home in Watford (just up the road). Police are saying the death of the former NOTW journalist is ‘not suspicious’, though obviously suspicions will be high. As a friend of mine tweets
Sean Hoare’s death like Pincipal Skinner’s line from the Simpsons “There’s nothing sinister here, groundsman Willie has simply disappeared.”
A former show-business reporter for The News of the World, Sean Hoare, who was fired in 2005, said that when he worked there, pinging cost the paper nearly $500 on each occasion. He first found out how the practice worked, he said, when he was scrambling to find someone and was told that one of the news desk editors, Greg Miskiw, could help. Mr. Miskiw asked for the person’s cellphone number, and returned later with information showing the person’s precise location in Scotland, Mr. Hoare said. Mr. Miskiw, who faces questioning by police on a separate matter, did not return calls for comment.
My guess is that he was driven to suicide by events, but of course all kinds of speculations are going to take root given the billions of dollars involved, political and business careers: what a horrible mess for him and his family.
Sean Hoare was a key figure in this scandal actually reaching the public and causing the outcry we see now: a brave man. May he Rest in Peace.
When Senator Barack Obama was elected president, his victory was widely taken as a momentous event. In racial terms, Mr. Obama constitutes the first minority president of the United States. This is quite an impressive feat – something that many Americans did not think could be done as late as 2007.
From another perspective, however, Mr. Obama’s election looks less impressive. This perspective is that of class. Mr. Obama was raised by an upper-middle class family: his mother was an anthropologist who had a PhD degree, and Mr. Obama went to a fairly prestigious private school in Hawaii during his early years.
The last president, Mr. George W. Bush, was also born to a wealthy family – in this case far higher up the social ladder than Mr. Obama’s family.
All this raises the question of whether one must be born with parents of a certain income to become president of the United States.
This initially was a lighthearted intermission diary, supposing this would be a quiet Sunday as News International tried to manage the chaos engulfing them. But I was wrong.
UPDATE: Sir Paul Stephenson, the Met Commissioner, Britain’s senior police officer, has resigned because of his connections with the scandal. More news as this comes in. But this is affecting all levels of the British establishment. I hear now that the Serious Fraud Office is making forays into the News International books: this means that the payment to police officers is at a deeper and more complicated than first appeared. In company law, such payments would be “a gross misuse of shareholders money”.
In Sir Paul Stephenson’s resignation statement there’s a concealed timebomb; a comparison between his employee (Wallis a former News of the World deputy editor) now arrested in the Hackergate probe, and the Prime Minister’s chief press officer, David Coulson (a former editor of the same newspaper).
Now let me turn to the reported displeasure of the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary of the relationship with Mr Wallis.
The reasons for not having told them are two fold. Firstly, I repeat my earlier comments of having at the time no reason for considering the contractual relationship to be a matter of concern. Unlike Mr Coulson, Mr Wallis had not resigned from News of the World or, to the best of my knowledge been in any way associated with the original phone hacking investigation.
That’s a barb and a half. As Robert Peston says
Stephenson statement implies that Met’s employment of Wallis was less controversial than David Cameron’s employment of Coulson
It is striking that Sir Paul has taken responsibility and answered questions about the appointment of the Deputy Editor of the News of the World whereas the Prime Minister still refuses to recognise his misjudgement and answer questions on the appointment of the Editor of the News of the World at the time of the initial phone hacking investigation.
People will wonder at why different rules apply for the Prime Minister and the Met, especially when as Sir Paul said himself, unlike Andy Coulson, Neil Wallis had not been forced to resign from the News of the World.
It is also a very serious concern that the Met Commissioner felt unable to tell the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary about this operational issue with Neil Wallis because of the Prime Minister’s relationship with Andy Coulson.
Amazing times. This could go all the way up to the Prime Minister – a close friend of Rebekah Brooks. Even Iain Dale, a famous Conservative Blogger agrees; Could Cameron Be Next
I can’t believe I am even writing this, but it is no longer an impossibility to imagine this scandal bringing down the Prime Minister or even the government. OK, some of you reading this may think that last sentence is a deranged ranting, and you may be right. Indeed, I hope you are. But Sir Paul Stephenson launched a thinly veiled attack on David Cameron in his resignation statement and the Prime Minister is already on the ropes about the propriety of his relationship with Andy Coulson.
They have arrested her on suspicion of both phone hacking (under the Phone Intercept Law) and corruption allegations.
This is key development, and puts James Murdoch next in the frame as per my previous diary – FALL OF THE HOUSE OF MURDOCH VI. Indeed, so dramatic was it that the best go to source for inside information on New International, Murdoch’s biographer Michael Wolff, could only emit the tweet “Jesus” at first. Now he adds this…
In 2008, during a two hour interview I did with Rebekah Brooks, she took seven phone calls from James Murdoch–that’s how often they spoke.
A Guardian Video from just seven days ago shows how close Brooks was to both James and Rupert who (rather than the hacked victims or 200 staff redundancies) said Rebekah was his ‘priority’
Why? Why? Why are the howling negators on the Right so violently opposed to doing anything, anything at all that President Obama favors doing? Why will they gnaw off an arm rather than sign onto anything that PBO says he’s for, even when they were screeching for it before he said “Okay, let’s give it a whirl”?
Why is there a small, shrill army on the Left equally furious in their savaging of everything the President does — not good enough, sold us out, threw us under the bus, Republican tool — you know the sad, sorry drill.
Why? * Waves hand vigorously * I know! I know! Call on me, I know!
Our good friends at Free Republic have compiled a super serious list of twenty-six reasons why Sarah Palin is a shoo-in in 2012, and why Obama is shaking in his boots to face her.
Since I don’t like to drive traffic to Free Republic, allow me to post the list for your enjoyment. If you have any to add, please feel free in the discussion below.
After Bloody Friday, and the late but inevitable resignation of Rupert Murdoch’s two closest personal lieutenants – Rebekah Brooks and Les Hinton – News Corp are trying to run damage limitation: apologies in the British Press, denials of hacking 9/11 victims.
But despite the best attempts of their PR firm Edelman, this will not wash, and there’s already enough known and proven in the public domain to turn our attention to the Newscorp Executive who took over from Hinton as head of Newscorps European arm, and who supervised the payout of millions in hush-money to the victims of phone hacking two years ago: a certain man by the name of James Murdoch.
As Michael Wolff – the Vanity Fair writer and biographer who knows the ins-and-outs of the family court – tweets:
Wolff also corrects the rumours yesterday that Elisabeth Murdoch said “Rebekah fucked the company” at a book party last Sunday. No, she didn’t say precisely that. James’ sister said:
“James and Rebekah fucked the Company”
So here’s a little more about the crass libertarian ideology that has driven her brother – and potentially the company – over the cliff.
After Bloody Friday, and the late but inevitable resignation of Rupert Murdoch’s two closest personal lieutenants – Rebekah Brooks and Les Hinton – News Corp are trying to run damage limitation: apologies in the British Press, denials of hacking 9/11 victims.
But despite the best attempts of their PR firm Edelman, this will not wash, and there’s already enough known and proven in the public domain to turn our attention to the Newscorp Executive who took over from Hinton as head of Newscorps European arm, and who supervised the payout of millions in hush-money to the victims of phone hacking two years ago: a certain man by the name of James Murdoch.
As Michael Wolff – the Vanity Fair writer and biographer who knows the ins-and-outs of the family court – tweets:
Wolff also corrects the rumours yesterday that Elisabeth Murdoch said “Rebekah fucked the company” at a book party last Sunday. No, she didn’t say precisely that. James’ sister said:
“James and Rebekah fucked the Company”
So here’s a little more about the crass libertarian ideology that has driven her brother – and potentially the company – over the cliff.
This is the second part of a series of posts analyzing the swing state Colorado. It will focus on the Republican base in Colorado. The third part can be found here.
History
Once upon a time, Colorado was a loyally Democratic state. Influenced by prairie populism and anger against powerful Republican businessmen in the East Coast, the state usually voted further left than the country at large. The trend continued for seven straight presidential elections.
But it’s the US where Newscorp is based, and both Rupert and James are US citizens, and this is where the scandal will finally engulf him I believe. As Carl Bernstein said earlier this week, making the explicit comparison with Watergate these revelation “are the beginning, not the end, of the seismic event.” He also stresses how important this US is to Murdoch
Murdoch associates, present and former-and his biographers-have said that one of his greatest long-term ambitions has been to replicate that political and cultural power in the United States. For a long time his vehicle was the New York Post-not profitable, but useful for increasing his eminence and working a wholesale change not only in American journalism but in the broader culture as well.., Then came the unfair and imbalanced politicized “news” of the Fox News Channel-showing (again) Murdoch’s genius at building an empire on the basis of an ever-descending lowest journalistic denominator…. And finally, in 2007 The Wall Street Journal‘s squabbling family owners succumbed to his acumen, willpower, and money, fulfilling Murdoch’s dream of owning an American newspaper to match the influence and prestige of his U.K. holding, The Times of London-one that really mattered, at the topmost tier of journalism.
Between the Post, Fox News, and the Journal, it’s hard to think of any other individual who has had a greater impact on American political and media culture in the past half century.
If we live in an information economy, then Newscorp is the Standard Oil of the 21st Century. Murdoch built up both horizontal and vertical monopoly power in the UK and Australia, leading to vast inefficiencies, corruption and unaccountable political power.
That was his aim in the US also: so it’s crucial to strike at the pillars of his power while they are beginning to crumble.
But it’s the US where Newscorp is based, and both Rupert and James are US citizens, and this is where the scandal will finally engulf him I believe. As Carl Bernstein said earlier this week, making the explicit comparison with Watergate these revelation