Motley Moose – Archive

For anyone following the #hackgate FOTHOM diaries, you’ll know that that the slow motion crash of Murdoch’s UK Empire is still developing. But it wasn’t until Rush Limbaugh’s  recent implosion that I began to think this isn’t just about News Corp, even though it is the world’s 3rd biggest media group and run as a one-man-band. It was in Meteor Blade’s Nopology diary early this week, that this thought came to me:

I think there’s a connection… (40+ / 0-)

between the slow rejection in the UK of the tabloid style of reasoning (basically trollery and personal insult) and the sudden turning on Rush L.

The British Tabloids and the American Shock Jocks basically thrived on the backlash against the civil liberties victories of the 60s: legislation against racial discrimination, homophobia, the rise of women in the work place and reproductive rights. For 40 years they thrived on right wing white male resentment. They had nothing to offer but trollery because they sought to to interfere with communication about race, gender and sexuality, but without an alternative agenda or real ideology, except that of opposition, reduction ad absurdum (looney left fictions about banning nursery rhymes etc) and the shock value of mockery.

This was never anything but a reactionary tribute to all the victories of the 60s. The candidacy of Sarah Palin was the ne plus ultra of this political style. Rebarbative, provocative, posited on antagonism alone, it never could offer much more than a macho guffaw and muttering of unfocused dissent.  

Forty years on, the people who find this stuff amusing are diminishing. Shock Jocks have run out of positions. They can only flame out or die down.  

The other connection is the rise of social media and blogs like DKos. They can organise dissent. Avaaz and 38degrees focused on the advertisers during the News of the World scandal, and when the public summoned enough outrage through twitter and email, the advertisers withdrew from the paper. That’s what killed News of the World.

Thanks to new media, we really aren’t passive consumers anymore, but can communicate directly with those to attempt to appease us. I guess this is what has happened to Limbaugh.

Actually this Kos comment was just a combination of two comments I’d made on the Moose in Strummerson’s Diary – so that just shows where my real thinking happens.  

I know I’m not going to be popular burning this particular bridge (at least on Dkos where this diary was first published), but as news comes out about Assange both claiming intellectual copyright on wikileaks, and enabling the persecution (or worse) of dissidents in one of the few remaining Stalinist states in Europe, let me say: Julian, J’Accuse.

I’ve often written about the bad side of journalism, and especially that of the Murdoch owned press, but just breaking is some shocking new of the noble sacrifices many journalists make in their attempts to report reality. A civil war which is rapidly becoming one of the bloodiest conflicts has claimed the life of the great Sunday Times journalist Marie Colvin. She was killed along with a photographer Remi Ochlik when the building she was staying in was shelled by Syrian government forces. The people who tried to escape were then targeted by rockets. Two other journalist were severely injured in the attack.

American born Colvin was the only journalist from a British paper in Syria, and has been described as the Martha Gellhorn of her generation. Witty, acerbic and fearless, only yesterday she filed reports for the BBC and CNN on the carnage in Homs.

“I watched a little baby die today,” she said. “Absolutely horrific.

“There is just shells, rockets and tank fire pouring into civilian areas of this city and it is just unrelenting.”

In a report published in the Sunday Times over the weekend, Colvin spoke of the citizens of Homs “waiting for a massacre”.

“The scale of human tragedy in the city is immense. The inhabitants are living in terror. Almost every family seems to have suffered the death or injury of a loved one,” she wrote.

Whew! This has been an exhausting weekend of revelations and arrests as the Hackgate scandal at News of the World has spread, via an email hacking scandal at The Times, to the arrest of ten journalists, many of them senior, at Britain’s most popular paper, The Sun.

Without doubt, from the multiple angry responses from NI journalists, the British arm of Newscorp is now at war with its corporate masters in the News Corp headquarters in New York. The latter are in charge of the 100 plus lawyers at the Management and Services Committee which is directly co-operating with 161 officers in the Met Operations Weeting, Tuleta and Elveden engaged in investigating phone, email hacking and bribery of state officials. It’s the latter which are behind the recent spate of arrests, and directly threatens the News Corp base with the threat of prosecution under FCPA violations.

I haven’t got long because all these developments have to be incorporated in my book with Eric Lewis, Bad Press: Fall of the House of Murdoch. But in short the DOJ, the FBI and the SEC have all been investigating News Corp since the summer. Mark Lewis, the sterling lawyer for the hacking victims is heading to New York this week to launch civil claims on this basis. In the meantime it’s the FCPA violations which could land senior News Corp Executives in the dock.

There are so many sources on this, from Reuters, the NYT, even the WSJ, I’m just going to link to the most recent: Ed Pilkington on the US Guardian site:

News Corp executives at risk of US prosecution for ‘willful blindness’

The perils to News Corp of an FCPA prosecution in the US against the company and its executives was underlined by the revelation that a grand jury has been convened in the case of Avon Products. The Wall Street Journal reported that US authorities are probing an internal audit report compiled in 2005 that found that Avon employees had bribed officials in China, yet the company only launched an official inquiry into possible violations three years later.

In the Avon case, the grand jury is likely to be asked to consider whether executives were culpable under the “willful blindness” provision of the FCPA.

Professor John Coffee, a specialist in white-collar crime at Columbia law school in New York, said that executives were at risk of prosecution in cases where they failed to ask relevant questions about a suspicious persistent pattern of payments. He gave the metaphorical example of a driver used by a Mexican drugs cartel to transport cocaine across the border who was aware that the vehicle contained a secret storage panel but made no attempt to find out what packages had been placed inside.

As part of its response to the billowing phone hacking scandal, News Corp has amassed the most formidable team of FCPA lawyers ever assembled. “They have appointed not just one of the best lawyers in this field, they have appointed most of the best lawyers,” Coffee said.

“That’s not normal defensive strategy,” he added.

And in other ‘news’ (I use the term lightly in the Fox news sense), there are rumours that the government scientist David Kelly, who committed suicide after the Iraq invasion over allegations of sexing up WMD threat, could have been a hacking victim. Michael Wolff, Murdoch’s official biographer speculates that James could be arrested this week. And dozens of tabloid journalists, more than happy to see others arrested in dawn raids or suffer trial by media, are whining loudly, in a liberal way, about human rights, due process, and innocent before being proven guilty.

Sweet is it in this dawn to be alive.  

It’s ironic, given that US corporate interests (including one R Murdoch) are complaining about SOPA and how tomorrow/today’s internet blackout is an ‘abuse of power’, that it’s just emerged through the ongoing Leveson Enquiry, that the world’s third largest media conglomerate, News Corp, through one of its prestigious titles, The Times of London, hacked the identity of a prize winning blogger and – apparently without revealing this to the courts – fought a privacy case against him to out his real identity and silence his blog.

The blogger in question was Nightjack, a police officer who blogged so brilliantly about the realities of police work that he won the prestigious Orwell Prize in 2009. A few months later, the anonymous blogger was outed by the Times as Richard Horton. As a result he was reprimanded by his police employers, and his blog was deleted. (The copy above has been retrieved by someone else).

The case caused an outcry in 2009, not only because a valuable voice was lost, by it caused a landmark ruling in the British High Court that a blogger had no “reasonable expectation” to anonymity because “blogging is essentially a public rather than a private activity”.

At the time the Times had argued it had deduced Horton’s identity from the material.  But in his written statement today at the Leveson inquiry, the Times Editor James Harding admitted.

“There was an incident where the newsroom was concerned that a reporter had gained unauthorised access to an email account. When it was brought to my attention, the journalist faced disciplinary action. The reporter believed he was seeking to gain information in the public interest but we took the view he had fallen short of what was expected of a Times journalist. He was issued with a formal written warning for professional misconduct.”

However, he failed to mention that the article – written by media correspondent Patrick Foster – was still published, and Horton’s privacy case fought successfully by the Times through the courts.

Not only does this connect the hacking scandal beyond the now closed News of the World and The Sun to Murdoch’s broadsheet titles, it is also yet another example of egregious corporate double standards. While in the witness box today Harding  had the temerity to complain that any kind or regulation would chill ‘free speech’.

“We don’t want a country in which the government, the state, regulates the papers … we don’t want to be in a position where the prime minister decides what goes in newspapers,” he said.

He added that if the outcome of the inquiry was a “Leveson act”, even one just offering a statutory backstop to an independent press regulator, it would be unworkable.

“The concern is that a Leveson act would give a mechanism to politicians to loom over future coverage,” of politics, Harding said, and start introducing amendments to this legislation “and that would have a chilling effect on the press”.

This from an editor who was responsible outing a celebrated blogger through hacking and then hounding him to the point of silence

This is a timely reminder that the threats to free speech don’t just come from governments but from corporations too, something I’ve begun to explore in  the first chapter of my book (illustrated by Kossack Eric Lewis) Bad Press: Fall of the House of Murdoch (warning – long quote below the fold but I’m only abusing my own copyright)

Let me share with you a brief moment. I don’t know how many Mooq have followed the story of Stephen Lawrence, the 19 year old student who was randomly and viciously murdered by a  gang 19 years ago, in a famously racist part of South London, waiting at a bus stop, not far from where I used to live, and also close to the fascist  BNP headquarters in Eltham.

For many people, his murder, and the failure to prosecute his killers, was a seminal moment in race relations in the UK – and an acceptance of the double standard Black Britons face when it comes to receiving justice.

But above all, his parents campaigned for justice for their murdered son.

Well, this week, after three abortive trials and the Macpherson Report that concluded that Stephen’s killers were never brought to justice in the UK because of ‘institutional racism’ in the Metropolitan Police, a cold case investigation found conclusive evidence that linked two of the gang to the murder, and they were sentenced to the maximum sentence (still under review) for juveniles – as they were at the time.

But this is not why I am writing this diary. Our poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, who is not only the first woman poet officially appointed by the Queen to talk to the nation, and the first Scot, but also the first openly gay poet in that role, has just written this beautiful and moving tribute. I’ve always wondered how on earth any poet worth their salt could be paid to celebrate official birthdays and jubilees. But Carol Ann Duffy has restored in this brief lyric, the whole idea of the engaged public poet.

I’ve leaving a respectful place below the squiggle for you to enjoy. And grieve. And weep.  

The death of Christopher Hitchens is a loss to the world of letters for, as the many eulogies over the last week have proven, he was clearly a stylish writer, a fantastic orator, and from the accounts of those who knew him, a voluble, generous and compassionate friend.

But as the last line of Some Like It Hot makes clear: “No-one is perfect.” Given that Hitchens never stood on ceremony, and was a great slayer of sacred cows, it wouldn’t be fitting to note his passing without decrying one of his more otiose and unfortunate legacies: as the inventor and populariser of the term Islamofascism.  

As my colonial cousins recover from an overdose of turkey and tryptophan, let me prod you into consciousness with the Frank Miller problem – which also allows me to post some awesome pics.

No, the Frank Miller problem isn’t as simple as you think. From his slapdash rant about the OWS movement on his website, it seems to quite clear where Frank’s political sympathies lie:

“Occupy” is nothing short of a clumsy, poorly-expressed attempt at anarchy, to the extent that the “movement” – HAH! Some “movement”, except if the word “bowel” is attached – is anything more than an ugly fashion statement by a bunch of iPhone, iPad wielding spoiled brats who should stop getting in the way of working people and find jobs for themselves.

This is no popular uprising. This is garbage. And goodness knows they’re spewing their garbage – both politically and physically – every which way they can find.

Wake up, pond scum. America is at war against a ruthless enemy.

Maybe, between bouts of self-pity and all the other tasty tidbits of narcissism you’ve been served up in your sheltered, comfy little worlds, you’ve heard terms like al-Qaeda and Islamicism.

And this enemy of mine – not of yours, apparently – must be getting a dark chuckle, if not an outright horselaugh – out of your vain, childish, self-destructive spectacle.

In the name of decency, go home to your parents, you losers. Go back to your mommas’ basements and play with your Lords Of Warcraft (sic).

I said it seems to be quite clear where Miller’s political thinking lies: except nothing is clear in this inchoate melange of addled testosterone,  islamophobia, and shock jock cliche.

Surprise, surprise. Frank Miller writes dark, paranoid cartoon books. His political thinking is dark, paranoid and cartoonish.

This is not the real Frank Miller problem – except for him – and anyone who expected anything else.  

A brief but potentially vital heads up…..

It’s been several weeks since I predicted the dynastic succession was over at Newscorp, mainly because of the independent shareholder rebellion last month, and although James did a worthy stonewalling job at the DCMS select committee this Thursday, that does nothing to stop the three ongoing police investigations here (plus suggestions of a secret ‘Operation Millipede’ in SOCA – our equivalent of the FBI).

But this morning, a very reliable reporter on the Daily Mail suggested that James’ testimony could be blown out of the water thanks to find among the millions of supposed deleted News International emails found on a server in India:

Today in Parliament

As expected, the appearance of James Murdoch, the Chief Executive of News International (and related to some other famous people) before the DCMS Committee today failed to produce any huge bombshells. Let’s remind ourselves that the Parliamentary Committee has no real powers of subpoena, witnesses are not obliged to testify on oath, is not run by trained lawyers, and is not allowed to investigate anything that could prejudice the three ongoing police investigations.  

C-Span has the whole proceedings here

James is smart, lawyered up, and left no hostages to fortune in terms of his evidence. Tom Watson had some stellar moments, challenging James over various contradictory testimonies, naming three or four other private investigators working for News International (adding some cryptic reference to Operation Millipede), and at least landing a rhetorical blow by calling James

‘the first mafia boss in history who didn’t know he was running a criminal enterprise.’.