As noted in yesterday’s open thread, the British News Ltd tabloid News of the World is reported to have arranged the hacking of thousands of phones, including those belonging to politicians. I’m not sure if that’s what John Hartigan, the Australian, and Christian Kerr had i mind when they talked about how journalists break stories while bloggers don’t. This seems to be getting pretty broad media attention now, although police are reportedly not pursuing it. It’ll be interesting to see whether anything emerges about who at the paper knew and authorised such activity.
ELSEWHERE: More commentary on this by Gary Sauer-Thompson and Darryl Mason.
14 Comments
“although police are reportedly not pursuing it”
They will be, the govt will lean on them considering the editor who resigned over this affair is now employed by David Cameron. It seems the cops did a shoddy job last time, John Prescott is spewing, wants to know why the police haven’t told people that their phones were tapped by ‘journalists’.
I would have thought that supermassive legal cases would ensue from this. If it’s as widespread in the UK as it seems, it must surely have filtered through to the News Ltd. operation elsewhere, especially in the US. I can see disgruntled celebrities hacking billions out of Rupert’s coal-seam.
i’ve seen this story reported in Fairfax, but has it been reported in the AUstralian or other news ltd papers? If not then I guess what hartigan was saying about “accurrate and reliable” reporting doesn’t apply when it comes to reporting on the stuff-ups of your newspaper stablemates.
confessions: no sign of it on news.com.au front page. A google search of the site doesn’t show any record of “mobile phones britain/england”, and “news of the world” has only one related result in The Australian’s… business section…
Surprised? Nope. >.<
Read all about it in the Guardian… I’m very surprised that News aren’t running with the story
Actually it was fleetingly in the “World” section on yesterday’s News site….but it didn’t last long. I saw it at about 2 pm.
Here it is, disguised to direct attention away from News Ltd.
Surely the hacking of phones isn’t new though — didn’t a similar thing happen with that infamous (and rather disturbing), conversation between Charles and Camilla all those years ago ?
I could be wrong but I don’t recall any legal fall-out for anyone over that.
“Surely the hacking of phones isn’t new though — didn’t a similar thing happen with that infamous (and rather disturbing), conversation between Charles and Camilla all those years ago ? ”
It’s completeley illegal, but yeah, this is nothing new for the Scum News tabloid press (Publish and be damned!). I would suggest in the case of Charles and Camilla they wouldn’t have wanted to go to court and put even more focus on Charles’s desire to be Camilla’s tampon. LOL
“I could be wrong but I don’t recall any legal fall-out for anyone over that.”
It’s going to be different this time because they’ve tapped phones of the rich and famous, News has been on a massive fishing expedition, some of these rich people probably have nothing to hide so I’m picking this will be a massive issue for the Murdoch empire.
It’s also a problem for David cameron, fact is he hired the editor who presided over the original debacle.
This may be a watershed, Murdoch might realise that publish and be damned is getting expensive, I reckon that the Sun made more money out of it’s invasion of Mosley’s privacy than they had to pay out. Hopefully things may now change.
monkeywrench, that link at “7″ doesn’t work. Can you redo it?
There were hundreds of comments at the Guardian site on the original story and the tone generally was not very pro-murdoch. No legs here in Australia, nobody cares what Murdoch does, apparently.
These people are dangerous to democracy and should be brought to account.
Nick Davies writes critically today about the police assistant commissioner’s decision. Yesterday on PM he suggested that there is a less than healthy relationship between the cops and the Murdoch press. Sound familiar?
MeganY
Try this one, failing that, go to the “World” section at news.com.au and under the subsection “SkyNews” you should find it.
John Quiggin reckons Terry McCrann has dumbed himself down in order to appeal to the largely economically illiterate Hun readers:
More “accurrate”, “professional editing” from news ltd, or just another way in which newspapers can be distinguished from bloggers?
‘Ere we go,’ere we go,’ere we go!
Sir Alex Ferguson may want to get his own back. Could this be the end of News of the Screws, the dreadful British Sunday tabloid rag? We can only pray….
“I reckon that the Sun made more money out of it’s invasion of Mosley’s privacy than they had to pay out. Hopefully things may now change.”
I hope so too Rob, the press have been getting away with this sort of dodgy behaviour for far too long, they seem to think they’re untouchable.