Journalists from across News International repeatedly targeted the former prime minister Gordon Brown, attempting to access his voicemail and obtaining information from his bank account, his legal file as well as his family’s medical records.
There is also evidence that a private investigator used a serving police officer to trawl the police national computer for information about him.
That investigator also targeted another Labour MP who was the subject of hostile inquiries by the News of the World, but it has not confirmed whether News International was specifically involved in trawling police computers for information on Brown.
Separately, Brown’s tax paperwork was taken from his accountant’s office apparently by hacking into the firm’s computer. This was passed to another newspaper.
Brown was targeted during a period of more than 10 years, both as chancellor of the exchequer and as prime minister. Some of the activity clearly was illegal.
Tony Blair urged Gordon Brown to persuade the Labour MP who led the campaign to expose News of the World phone-hacking to back off, friends of Mr Brown said last night.
Well-placed sources said Mr Blair, who has close links with the paper’s owner Rupert Murdoch, wanted Mr Brown to get his ally Tom Watson to lay off the News International (NI) title, but Mr Brown refused.
Mr Watson’s two-year crusade played a major part in Mr Murdoch’s shock decision to close the paper after today’s edition.
For more than 30 years now there have been two truths about Rupert Murdoch’s increasingly infrequent visitations to the British outpost of his media empire.
The first: anyone who is anyone in the world of politics and business angles for (and is delighted by) any kind of audience with the great man.
The second is the chill his visit engenders amongst his senior editors and executives in Wapping [News International’s London headquarters].
Yesterday as Mr Murdoch’s corporate Boeing 737 jet, complete with a boardroom and double bed, touched down at Luton Airport, it was clear how much has changed in the last week. The chill in Wapping is still there – worse than ever – but the audiences for Mr Murdoch have dried up.
He and his company – feted by David Cameron and Ed Miliband just two weeks ago at the News International Summer Party – have become a political liability. To paraphrase the famous quote: “It was News of the World wot lost it”. Yesterday Downing Street made it very clear that Mr Cameron would be neither meeting nor speaking to Mr Murdoch on this visit.
Privately Government sources are blunter. They are incandescent at the political damage done by the phone-hacking scandal and angry that News Corp has not voluntarily suspended its attempted takeover of BSkyB in the wake of the allegations.
They feel they are getting unfairly blamed for not stopping the takeover and the impression is growing that they are still in the pocket of the company. “We always knew we were going to have to eat a shit sandwich over the BSkyB deal,” said one. “We didn’t know it would turn into a three course dinner.”
[H]ow did we find out that a British tabloid was hacking thousands of voice mails of private citizens? Not from the British government, with its wan, inconclusive investigations, but from other newspapers.
Think of it. There was Mr. Murdoch, tying on a napkin and ready to dine on the other 60 percent of BSkyB that he did not already have. But just as he was about to swallow yet another tasty morsel, the hands at his throat belonged to, yes, newspaper journalists.
Newspapers, it turns out, are still powerful things, and not just in the way that Mr. Murdoch has historically deployed them.
The Guardian stayed on the phone-hacking story like a dog on a meat bone, acting very much in the British tradition of a crusading press, and goosing the story back to life after years of dormancy. Other papers, including The New York Times, reported executive and police complicity that gave the lie to the company’s “few bad apples” explanation. As recently as last week, Vanity Fair broke stories about police complicity.
Mr. Murdoch, ever the populist, prefers his crusades to be built on chronic ridicule and bombast. But as The Guardian has shown, the steady accretion of fact — an exercise Mr. Murdoch has historically regarded as bland and elitist — can have a profound effect.
His corporation may be able to pick governments, but holding them accountable is also in the realm of newspaper journalism, an earnest concept of public service that has rarely been of much interest to him.
The coverage last week, on a suddenly fast-moving story that had been moving only in increments, destabilized the ledge that the News Corporation had been standing on. James Murdoch regretted everything and took responsibility for almost nothing. What looked like an opportunity for him to prove his mettle as a manager of crisis might yet engulf him.
Andy Coulson, the former editor of News of the World who became the chief spokesman for Mr. Cameron, has been arrested. And Rebekah Brooks, chief executive of News International and previous editor of The News of the World, responded by saying that it was “inconceivable” that she knew of the hacking.
I’d suggest it was inconceivable she did not know, given the number of hacking targets. What editor doesn’t know where her stories come from, especially stories chock full of highly private, delicious conversations. Did Ms. Brooks think they were borne in through the window by magic fairies?
The hacking scandal currently shaking Rupert Murdoch’s empire will surprise only those who have willfully blinded themselves to that empire’s pernicious influence on journalism in the English-speaking world. Too many of us have winked in amusement at the salaciousness without considering the larger corruption of journalism and politics promulgated by Murdoch Culture on both sides of the Atlantic.
The facts of the case are astonishing in their scope. Thousands of private phone messages hacked, presumably by people affiliated with the Murdoch-owned News of the World newspaper, with the violated parties ranging from Prince William and actor Hugh Grant to murder victims and families of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. The arrest of Andy Coulson, former press chief to Prime Minister David Cameron, for his role in the scandal during his tenure as the paper’s editor. The arrest (for the second time) of Clive Goodman, the paper’s former royals editor. The shocking July 7 announcement that the paper would cease publication three days later, putting hundreds of employees out of work. Murdoch’s bid to acquire full control of cable-news company BSkyB placed in jeopardy. Allegations of bribery, wiretapping, and other forms of lawbreaking—not to mention the charge that emails were deleted by the millions in order to thwart Scotland Yard’s investigation.
All of this surrounding a man and a media empire with no serious rivals for political influence in Britain—especially, but not exclusively, among the conservative Tories who currently run the country. Almost every prime minister since the Harold Wilson era of the 1960s and ’70s has paid obeisance to Murdoch and his unmatched power. When Murdoch threw his annual London summer party for the United Kingdom’s political, journalistic, and social elite at the Orangery in Kensington Gardens on June 16, Prime Minister Cameron and his wife, Sam, were there, as were Labour leader Ed Miliband and assorted other cabinet ministers.
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.
Alan Rusbridger, editor of The Guardian, on the phone-hacking scandal
Say what you like, this does finally give meaning to David Cameron’s “we’re all in this together” catchphrase. Whether the members of Britain’s necrotic establishment are wading in it, or are up to their necks in it, will be a matter for you to call. But what an irony that Murdoch tabloids, infrequently righteous in their crusades, have finally been shown what major corruption looks like. It’s not a couple of swingers daring to live an unconventional lifestyle in a Wilmslow terrace – it was in the mirror all along.
Yet the solemn announcement that the News of the World is dead (long live the Sun on Sunday!) does not indicate the Murdoch-controlled culture that has debased this septic isle for decades has been dismantled. This week, people have beheld MPs saying what they actually think about Britain’s most obscenely powerful unelected foreign tax exile, and marvelled as if they had seen unicorns. That gives you some idea of the scale of the clean-up, and unless all manner of establishment drones get brave and stay brave, revulsion over the corruption of public life by Murdoch and his soldiers will go the same way as that pertaining to bankers or MPs’ expenses.
People are right to be revolted. It is revolting. Indeed, there are so many threads that we should don rubber gloves and follow merely one of them for a flavour of the whole. So, do open your textbooks at “war”.
Rupert Murdoch was the only figure powerful enough to be able to state explicitly, without consequence, that he was backing war on Iraq to bring down the price of oil. So his “free press” all cheer-led for said war, and began commodifying their version of it, even confecting their own military award ceremonies as though the medal system were inadequate.
The whitewashing report into the death of a scientist who questioned the basis for that war was mysteriously leaked to Murdoch’s papers – another WORLD EXCLUSIVE – while others in his pay hacked the phones and emails of those casualties of war being repatriated in bodybags, to be monetised as stories all over again. Any complaint about this must be taken before an industry court presided over not by the kangaroo of Rupert’s native Australia, but an even less engaged selection of backscratching editors, including his own.
David Cameron’s press conference was nearly a masterclass in damage limitation. How firm he sounded with his three-point actions, announcing two inquiries and the demise of the “failed” Press Complaints Commission. Yes, he would have accepted Rebekah Brooks’s resignation. How shocked he was. It was “simply disgusting”. Here was a wake-up call on the “culture, practice and ethics of the press” and, for now, the crucial BSkyB deal would be delayed. He strove with every sinew to show he gets it, he really does get the public outrage at the hacked phones of a murdered child and dead soldiers. But as the questions rained down, you could see the crisis slipping from his control. This was too little, too late, not quite grasping the changed rules of the old politico-media game.
He said “frankly” once too often, a word that rings alarm bells from politicians on the ropes. “We’ve all been in this together,” he confessed. All the parties, “yes, including me”, had cosied up to Murdoch, turning a blind eye to court political support. But paddling hard to stay afloat, he could not say the Murdoch bid should be stopped. He could not apologise for hiring a man who had already resigned over phone hacking. Every time he said he gave Andy Coulson “a second chance”, that soundbite sounded weaker. What may some day do for him was his denial that he ever received private warnings, one from the Guardian, not to take Coulson into Downing Street, as further revelations were imminent. “I wasn’t given any specific information … I don’t recall being given any information.” Denials about who knew what often turn embarrassments into serious political danger.
James Murdoch and News Corp could face corporate legal battles on both sides of the Atlantic that involve criminal charges, fines and forfeiture of assets as the escalating phone-hacking scandal risks damaging his chances of taking control of Rupert Murdoch’s US-based media empire.
As deputy chief operating officer of News Corp – the US-listed company that is the ultimate owner of News International (NI), which in turn owns the News of the World, the Times, the Sunday Times and the Sun – the younger Murdoch has admitted he misled parliament over phone hacking, although he has stated he did not have the complete picture at the time. There have also been reports that employees routinely made payments to police officers, believed to total more than £100,000, in return for information.
The payments could leave News Corp – and possibly James Murdoch himself – facing the possibility of prosecution in the US under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) – legislation designed to stamp out bad corporate behaviour that carries severe penalties for anyone found guilty of breaching it – and in the UK under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 which outlaws the interception of communications.
Tony Woodcock, a partner at the City law firm Stephenson Harwood, said section 79 of the 2000 Act enabled criminal proceedings to be brought against not only a company, but also a director or similar officer where the offence was committed with their “consent or connivance” or was “attributable to any neglect on their part”. Woodcock said: “This could embrace a wide number of people at the highest level within an organisation, such as a chief executive – not just the individual who ‘pushed the button’ allowing the intercept to take place or someone (perhaps less senior) who encouraged or was otherwise an accessory to the offence, such as an editor.”
While the UK phone-hacking scandal has been met with outrage in the US, the hacking itself is unlikely to prompt Washington officials into action. But because NI is a subsidiary of the US company, any payments to UK police officers could trigger a justice department inquiry under the FCPA.
The 1977 Act generally prohibits American companies and citizens from corruptly paying – or offering to pay – foreign officials to obtain or retain business.
The Butler University law professor Mike Koehler, an FCPA expert, said: “I would be very surprised if the US authorities don’t become involved in this [NI] conduct.”
Police are investigating evidence that a News International executive may have deleted millions of emails from an internal archive in an apparent attempt to obstruct Scotland Yard’s inquiry into the phone-hacking scandal.
The archive is believed to have reached back to January 2005, revealing daily contact between News of the World editors, reporters and outsiders, including private investigators. The messages are potentially highly valuable both for the police and for the numerous public figures who are suing News International (NI).
According to legal sources close to the police inquiry, a senior executive is believed to have deleted “massive quantities” of the archive on two separate occasions, leaving only a fraction to be disclosed. One of the alleged deletions is said to have been made at the end of January, just as Scotland Yard was launching Operation Weeting, its new inquiry into the affair. The allegation directly contradicts NI claims that it is co-operating fully with police in order to expose its history of illegal newsgathering.
The alleged deletion of emails will be of particular interest to the media regulator Ofcom, which said it had asked to be “kept abreast” of developments in the Met’s hacking investigation, so it can assess whether News Corp would pass the “fit and proper” test that all owners of UK television channels have to meet.
Investors in companies controlled by Rupert Murdoch have been dumping the shares amid fears on both sides of the Atlantic over the fallout from the phone-hacking scandal at the News of the World.
Shares in broadcaster BSkyB are down 5% in the last week, wiping some £666m off the value of the business, while News Corp had lost 2.6% – slicing some $400m off the value of the News of the World’s ultimate parent company. Many hedge funds which had bought into BSkyB in the hope of making a quick profit from the bid have been selling the shares on fears that the deal now faces substantial delay.
The British prime minister’s former communications director and former editor of News of the World, Andy Coulson, is now under arrest.
To get a sense of the political impact these events are having on David Cameron’s leadership, a scathing commentary in the Tory-friendly Daily Telegraph by Peter Oborne sums up the situation:
In the careers of all prime ministers there comes a turning point. He or she makes a fatal mistake from which there is no ultimate recovery. With Tony Blair it was the Iraq war and the failure to find weapons of mass destruction. With John Major it was Black Wednesday and sterling’s eviction from the Exchange Rate Mechanism. With Harold Wilson, the pound’s devaluation in 1967 wrecked his reputation.
Each time the pattern is strikingly similar. Before, there is a new leader with dynamism, integrity and carrying the faith of the nation. Afterwards, the prime minister can stagger on for years, but as increasingly damaged goods: never is it glad, confident morning again.
David Cameron, who has returned from Afghanistan as a profoundly damaged figure, now faces exactly such a crisis. The series of disgusting revelations concerning his friends and associates from Rupert Murdoch’s News International has permanently and irrevocably damaged his reputation.
Until now it has been easy to argue that Mr Cameron was properly grounded with a decent set of values. Unfortunately, it is impossible to make that assertion any longer. He has made not one, but a long succession of chronic personal misjudgments.
He should never have employed Andy Coulson, the News of the World editor, as his director of communications. He should never have cultivated Rupert Murdoch. And – the worst mistake of all – he should never have allowed himself to become a close friend of Rebekah Brooks, the chief executive of the media giant News International, whose departure from that company in shame and disgrace can only be a matter of time.
We are talking about a pattern of behaviour here. Indeed, it might be better described as a course of action. Mr Cameron allowed himself to be drawn into a social coterie in which no respectable person, let alone a British prime minister, should be seen dead.
It was called the Chipping Norton set, an incestuous collection of louche, affluent, power-hungry and amoral Londoners, located in and around the Prime Minister’s Oxfordshire constituency. Brooks and her husband, the former racing trainer Charlie Brooks, live in a house scarcely a mile from David and Samantha Cameron’s constituency home. The two couples meet frequently, and have continued to do so long after the phone hacking scandal became well known.
PR fixer Matthew Freud, married to Mr Murdoch’s daughter Elisabeth, is another member of this Chipping Norton set. When Mr Cameron bumped into Freud at Rebekah Brooks’s wedding two years ago, he and Mr Freud greeted each other with exuberant high-fives to signal their exclusive friendship.
The Prime Minister cannot claim in defence that he was naively drawn in to this lethal circle. He was warned – many times. Shortly before the last election he was explicitly told about the company he was keeping. Alan Rusbridger – editor of The Guardian newspaper, which has performed such a wonderful service to public decency by bringing to light the shattering depravity of Mr Murdoch’s newspaper empire – went to meet one of Mr Cameron’s closest advisers shortly before the last election. He briefed this adviser very carefully about Mr Coulson, telling him many troubling pieces of information that could not then be put into the public domain.
Mr Rusbridger then went to see Nick Clegg, now the deputy prime minister. So Mr Cameron and Mr Clegg – the Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister – knew all about Mr Coulson before last May’s coalition negotiations. And yet they both paid no attention and went on to make him the Downing Street director of communications, an indiscretion that beggars belief.
So the Prime Minister is in a mess. To put the matter rather more graphically, he is in a sewer. The question is this: how does he crawl out and salvage at least some of his reputation for decency and good judgment?
Rupert Murdoch’s effort to save his own skin has been bold (even if predictably cynical). To get a sense of what shutting down News of the World means, keep in mind that its circulation of 2.7 million is more than twice the size of America’s largest circulation Sunday newspaper, the New York Times (1.3 million).
Rupert Murdoch’s decision to close the 168-year-old News of the World certainly takes one’s breath away. For a moment one is tempted to marvel at the media tycoon’s decisiveness. Despite inexorably losing sales over the past couple of decades, the title is still Britain’s highest selling newspaper, and profitable. To shut such an operation seems a very big deal indeed.
But it actually isn’t – except for those who will lose their jobs. The paper’s closure after next Sunday is a piece of corporate window dressing designed to persuade us that News International is at long last taking the phone hacking scandal seriously, and that Murdoch should be allowed to proceed with the acquisition of the whole of BSkyB. We would do better to ask ourselves: what exactly has changed?
It is a fair bet that in a matter of weeks, News International will launch a paper called The Sun on Sunday, appealing to readers of the News of the World. The internet domain name for such a title was registered by persons unknown only two days ago.
What looks like an act of commercial self-sacrifice may turn out to be no more than an inconvenience to the company. News International’s decision to give all the revenues of next Sunday’s final issue to “good causes” is piece of calculated piety intended to make it appear caring.
My scepticism goes deeper. In his announcement to staff yesterday, the company’s British head, James Murdoch, spoke as though the News of the World were a separate entity from News International. He rightly said the paper had behaved abominably, and had “made statements to Parliament without it being in the full possession of the facts” – ie it lied.
But the News of the World is part of News International, and all its rampant illegal practices, and the subsequent cover-up, are ultimately the responsibility of Rupert and James Murdoch, and Rebekah Brooks, its chief executive.
With the professionalisation of journalism in the early 20th century came a more detached style of reporting. In effect, a deal was struck between advertisers, publishers and journalists, says New York University’s Jay Rosen. Journalists agreed not to alienate anyone so that advertisers could aim their messages at everyone. That way the publishers got a broader market and the journalists got steady jobs but gave up their voices. Objectivity is “a grand bargain between all the different players”, says Mr Rosen. When radio and television emerged, America’s private broadcasters embraced impartiality in their news reporting to maximise their appeal to audiences and advertisers and avoid trouble with regulators.
These days different countries have different preferences. In Europe overt partisanship in newspapers is widespread and state-run television channels often have partisan allegiances: Italy’s three state channels are each aligned with specific parties, for example. The political independence of the BBC in Britain is unusual, and is in any case contested by critics who complain that it is too left-leaning. In India 81 of the 500 satellite-TV channels that have sprung up in the past 20 years are news channels, most of them catering to specific political, religious, regional, linguistic or ethnic groups. Only a few take an objective, pan-Indian approach, says Daya Thussu of the University of Westminster.
If impartiality is already the exception rather than the rule, the internet is now eroding it further. In America it undermines local news monopolies by reducing advertising revenue and providing access to a wide range of alternative sources, thus undoing Mr Rosen’s grand bargain. In Britain and other countries where news broadcasters are required to be impartial, at least in theory, the convergence of television and the web makes such rules seem outdated. Mark Thompson, the director-general of the BBC, said at a seminar last December that he thought the case for polemical, opinionated news channels was “persuasive”, though the BBC’s own news coverage would remain impartial. The internet has also compressed the news cycle, with headlines delivered instantly by smartphone or Twitter, creating a demand for immediate analysis and opinion.
Moreover, the internet makes it easier than ever to find and synthesise different views, says Krishna Bharat, the creator of Google News. The idea for the site occurred to him in the months after the attacks of September 11th 2001, when he became frustrated by the inefficiency of visiting lots of different websites to get a broader picture of the news. When news comes from multiple sources, a mix of strong opinions becomes more desirable. “It’s time to embrace the fact that certain news sources have a point of view, and that’s why they have the following they do,” says Mr Bharat. “I think there’s a place for all of them.” By undermining many of the traditional arguments for objectivity, the internet may thus cause a wider “Foxification” of news and a return to the more opinionated and partisan media landscape of the 18th and early 19th centuries. “Almost every country that has an open society is going to have some kind of opinion television programming,” says Mr Shine.
This does not mean that all news organisations should take overtly political positions. Mr Rosen is just one of many media watchers who think it is time to release journalists from the straitjacket of pretending that they do not have opinions—what he calls the “view from nowhere”. Journalists signal their impartiality by quoting people on opposing sides of an argument and avoid drawing conclusions, even when the facts are clear. “There have been times in the past when CNN has been criticised for being neutral—not only non-partisan, but not really having positions,” says Mr Whitaker. But lately, he says, “we have been stronger in taking a point of view when we think it is supported by our reporting and by facts.”
One way forward, suggests Mr Rosen, is to abandon the ideology of viewlessness and accept that journalists have a range of views; to be open about them while holding the reporters to a basic standard of accuracy, fairness and intellectual honesty; and to use transparency, rather than objectivity, as the new foundation on which to build trust with the audience. He cites the memorable phrase coined by David Weinberger, a technology commentator, that “transparency is the new objectivity”. In part, this involves journalists providing information about themselves. For example, on AllThingsD, a technology-news site owned by Dow Jones, all the journalists provide an “ethics statement” with information about their shareholdings, financial relationships and, in some cases, their personal life (two journalists are married to employees at large technology companies). “People are more likely to trust you if they know where you are coming from,” says Mr Rosen.
Transparency also means linking to sources and data, something the web makes easy. Bloggers have long used the technique to back up their views. Ezra Klein, a blogger at the Washington Post, has suggested that news organisations should publish full transcripts of interviews online. WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange, a fan of radical transparency if ever there was one, makes a similar argument. “You can’t publish a paper on physics without the full experimental data and results. That should be the standard in journalism,” he said last year. Mr Weinberger has observed on his blog that transparency prospers in a linked medium: “Objectivity is a trust mechanism you rely on when your medium can’t do links. Now our medium can.”
If there was any doubt that Rupert Murdoch realizes his media empire is under threat, his latest move at damage control is unprecedented: the News of the World is about to be shut down.
The News of the World, a British tabloid with which most Americans will be unfamiliar, is not as powerful as Fox News, but it is just as representative of Murdoch’s ruthless approach to media sensationalism and journalism as cut-throat commerce.
The latest phone hacking story that The Guardian broke on Monday revealed that there seem to be no ethical boundaries that News Corp is unwilling to cross.
After schoolgirl Milly Dowler went missing in March 2002, “News of the World journalists reacted by engaging in what was standard practice in their newsroom: they hired private investigators to get them a story.”
Scotland Yard is now investigating evidence that the paper hacked directly into the voicemail of the missing girl’s own phone. As her friends and parents called and left messages imploring Milly to get in touch with them, the News of the World was listening and recording their every private word.
But the journalists at the News of the World then encountered a problem. Milly’s voicemail box filled up and would accept no more messages. Apparently thirsty for more information from more voicemails, the paper intervened – and deleted the messages that had been left in the first few days after her disappearance. According to one source, this had a devastating effect: when her friends and family called again and discovered that her voicemail had been cleared, they concluded that this must have been done by Milly herself and, therefore, that she must still be alive. But she was not. The interference created false hope and extra agony for those who were misled by it.
The Dowler family then granted an exclusive interview to the News of the World in which they talked about their hope, quite unaware that it had been falsely kindled by the newspaper’s own intervention. Sally Dowler told the paper: “If Milly walked through the door, I don’t think we’d be able to speak. We’d just weep tears of joy and give her a great big hug.”
The deletion of the messages also caused difficulties for the police by confusing the picture when they had few leads to pursue. It also potentially destroyed valuable evidence.
The senior detective leading the phone hacking inquiry said on Thursday that there were 4,000 possible victims of phone hacking listed in the pages of private eye Glenn Muclaire’s notebooks and they were being contacted “as quickly as possible”.
Deputy assistant commissioner Sue Akers, who is running Operation Weeting, broke her silence to give more details on her operation as the number of victims being publicly identified continued to grow.
Her words are the first official confirmation of what the Guardian reported two years ago – that thousands of people were listed as possible victims in the notebooks of Mulcaire, who was hired by the News of the World. These individuals were not contacted by detectives investigating phone hacking in the first inquiry, known as the Goodman inquiry. The Guardian’s original story in 2009 suggested that between 2,000 and 3,000 individuals might have been the victims of phone hacking.
Investigators inside Scotland Yard are trying to identify up to five officers who were paid between them a total of at least £100,000 in cash from the News of the World, the Guardian understands.
Documents sent to the police by News International did not name those involved but contained pseudonyms which investigators within the Yard are trying to match with individual officers.
The revelation comes a day after Sir Paul Stephenson, commissioner of the Metropolitan police, said that the amounts involved had been paid to a small number of officers.
News that officers were allegedly paid so much in bribes has caused shock and concern within Scotland Yard, where the directorate of professional standards is now investigating the matter. There have been calls for an external force to be brought in to investigate the scandal – Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, has said someone else should wash the Met’s dirty linen in public.
James Risen, the award-winning national security reporter for the New York Times who has been subpoenaed by federal prosecutors to testify in a case against a CIA whistleblower, accused the government of attempting to intimidate him and his sources in an affidavit he filed to quash the subpoena.
“I take very seriously my obligations as a journalist when reporting about matters that may be classified or may implicate national security concerns,” Risen wrote. “I do not always publish all information that I have, even if it is newsworthy and true. If I believe that the publication of the information would cause real harm to our national security, I will not publish a piece.”
Risen has been called to testify against Jeffrey Sterling, who the government says gave Risen classified information that he used in his book “State of War.” The government has argued that Risen could testify about his previous relationship with Sterling without violating any confidentiality agreement with the former CIA agent.
But he wrote that he had found that the government “all too frequently” claims disclosure of certain information would harm national security, “when in reality, the government’s real concern is about covering up its own wrongdoing or avoiding embarrassment.”
Five days after he published an account of abduction and torture by suspected Pakistani intelligence agents, a journalist working for the Guardian has been badly beaten by uniformed men who said they wished to “make an example” of him.
The assault revived concerns about media freedom in Pakistan, one of the world’s most dangerous countries for journalists. Three weeks ago, another reporter, Saleem Shahzad, was beaten to death after disappearing from the capital.
Men wearing police uniforms stopped Waqar Kiani, a 32-year-old local journalist who has worked for the Guardian, as he drove through Islamabad on Saturday night, and ordered him to get out of his car. As he stepped out, four men landed a flurry of blows with fists, wooden batons and a rubber whip. Two others watched from inside the jeep. “They said ‘You want to be a hero? We’ll make you a hero’,” said Kiani, who was recovering from his injuries . “Then they said: ‘We’re going to make an example of you’.”
It was the second time Kiani had been targeted. Last Monday the Guardian revealed he had been abducted from central Islamabad in July 2008, blindfolded and taken to a safe house where interrogators beat him viciously and burned him with cigarettes.
The ordeal ended 15 hours later when his abductors dumped him 120 miles from Islamabad, warning they would rape his wife “and post the video on YouTube” if he told anyone.
Kiani had been working on a story about the illegal detention and torture of Islamist militants by Pakistani intelligence in collaboration with MI5. His research led him to an office of the Intelligence Bureau, the main civilian spy agency.
Although his abductors did not identify themselves they displayed detailed knowledge of Kiani’s bank account, movements and contacts with Guardian journalists, leading him to conclude they worked for the government.The Guardian withheld Kiani’s story for three years until last Monday. Kiani later gave a detailed interview about his experience to a local television channel. He believes the coverage triggered Saturday’s vicious assault, which occurred after he went out to buy milk. “There is zero tolerance among our government and military establishment,” he said. “They don’t want us to speak the truth.”
Adam Curtis‘ latest documentary, “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace,” is well worth watching — all three hours — even if by its conclusion he has not neatly tied together all its disparate threads and even if his style of production has a frenetic choppiness — “I kept thinking the dog was sitting on the remote,” a reviewer joked about one of his previous pieces.
Curtis is perhaps best known as the creator of the BBC documentary series, “ThePower of Nightmares,” which examined the politics of fear post-9/11.
His new documentary, just aired in the UK but presumably close to completion before the Arab uprisings began, nevertheless has relevance for every revolution across the region. The prospect of the end of dictatorial rule easily eclipses concern about what might follow — events of the present evoke a sense that the future can take care of itself. The leaderless movements currently reshaping the Arab world have organic features that sometimes seem to imply that social justice might just be a natural fruit.
But the history of self-organizing networks — a topic at the core of Curtis’ film — is that the egalitarian hopes these would-be post-political systems embody rest on an illusory foundation.
This is the story of how our modern scientific idea of nature, the self-regulating ecosystem, is actually a machine fantasy. It has little to do with the real complexity of nature. It is based on cybernetic ideas that were projected on to nature in the 1950s by ambitious scientists. A static machine theory of order that sees humans, and everything else on the planet, as components – cogs – in a system.
But in an age disillusioned with politics, the self-regulating ecosystem has become the model for utopian ideas of human ‘self-organizing networks’ – dreams of new ways of organising societies without leaders, as in the Facebook and Twitter revolutions, and in global visions of connectivity like the Gaia theory.
This powerful idea emerged out of the hippie communes in America in the 1960s, and from counterculture computer scientists who believed that global webs of computers could liberate the world.
But, at the very moment this was happening, the science of ecology discovered that the theory of the self-regulating ecosystem wasn’t true. Instead they found that nature was really dynamic and constantly changing in unpredictable ways. But the dream of the self-organizing network had by now captured our imaginations – because it offered an alternative to the dangerous and discredited ideas of politics. [Source: BBC]
At the Fox News holiday party the year the network overtook archrival CNN in the cable ratings, tipsy employees were herded down to the basement of a Midtown bar in New York. As they gathered around a television mounted high on the wall, an image flashed to life, glowing bright in the darkened tavern: the MSNBC logo. A chorus of boos erupted among the Fox faithful. The CNN logo followed, and the catcalls multiplied. Then a third slide appeared, with a telling twist. In place of the logo for Fox News was a beneficent visage: the face of the network’s founder. The man known to his fiercest loyalists simply as “the Chairman” – Roger Ailes.
“It was as though we were looking at Mao,” recalls Charlie Reina, a former Fox News producer. The Foxistas went wild. They let the dogs out. Woof! Woof! Woof! Even those who disliked the way Ailes runs his network joined in the display of fealty, given the culture of intimidation at Fox News. “It’s like the Soviet Union or China: People are always looking over their shoulders,” says a former executive with the network’s parent, News Corp. “There are people who turn people in.”
The key to decoding Fox News isn’t Bill O’Reilly or Sean Hannity. It isn’t even News Corp. chief Rupert Murdoch. To understand what drives Fox News, and what its true purpose is, you must first understand Chairman Ailes. “He is Fox News,” says Jane Hall, a decade-long Fox commentator who defected over Ailes’ embrace of the fear-mongering Glenn Beck. “It’s his vision. It’s a reflection of him.”
Ailes runs the most profitable – and therefore least accountable – head of the News Corp. hydra. Fox News reaped an estimated profit of $816 million last year – nearly a fifth of Murdoch’s global haul. The cable channel’s earnings rivaled those of News Corp.’s entire film division, which includes 20th Century Fox, and helped offset a slump at Murdoch’s beloved newspapers unit, which took a $3 billion write-down after acquiring The Wall Street Journal. With its bare-bones newsgathering operation – Fox News has one-third the staff and 30 fewer bureaus than CNN – Ailes generates profit margins above 50 percent. Nearly half comes from advertising, and the rest is dues from cable companies. Fox News now reaches 100 million households, attracting more viewers than all other cable-news outlets combined, and Ailes aims for his network to “throw off a billion in profits.”
The outsize success of Fox News gives Ailes a free hand to shape the network in his own image. “Murdoch has almost no involvement with it at all,” says Michael Wolff, who spent nine months embedded at News Corp. researching a biography of the Australian media giant. “People are afraid of Roger. Murdoch is, himself, afraid of Roger. He has amassed enormous power within the company – and within the country – from the success of Fox News.”
Fear, in fact, is precisely what Ailes is selling: His network has relentlessly hyped phantom menaces like the planned “terror mosque” near Ground Zero, inspiring Florida pastor Terry Jones to torch the Koran. Privately, Murdoch is as impressed by Ailes’ business savvy as he is dismissive of his extremist politics. “You know Roger is crazy,” Murdoch recently told a colleague, shaking his head in disbelief. “He really believes that stuff.”
CNN’s Ben Wedeman: “Mohammed Nabbous was one of the courageous voices from Benghazi broadcasting to the world from the beginning. Smart, selfless, brave.”
Andy Carvin: “One thing to take away from Mo’s death this morning. His final reporting made it clear to the world that Gaddafi’s ceasefire was bullshit.”
Mohammed Nabbous, founder of Libya AlHurra TV, killed this morning in Benghazi while reporting on Gaddafi forces attacks. Leaves behind wife and unborn baby.
Video reporter Mohammed Nabbous, the founder of Libya AlHurra TV, was killed in the morning of 19 March 2011 in Benghazi, while reporting on the civilian attacks by the pro-Gaddafi forces, announced Libya AlHurra TV.
“He touched the hearts of many with his bravery and indomnitable spirit. He will be dearly missed and leaves behind his young wife and unborn child”, said Sharon Lynch, TV station representative.
Mohammed Nabbous, better known as Mo, reflected the situation in Libya over the past weeks, providing exclusive video coverage of dangerous developments and situations. Mo was among the very few independent sources, which were able to provide alternative information on the ground.
“Mo’s objective in founding Libya AlHurra was to help his countrymen by getting the word out about what is happening in Libya”, said the AlHurra TV representative. Mo supplied on-the-ground videos and analysis of the situation in Libya over the past weeks and continued doing as so as Benghazi bombing and tank invasions began on 18 and 19 March.
Mo was shot by Gaddafi forces and for awhile was in a critical condition. At 3pm CET Mohamed reportedly passed away. His wife announced his tragic death in a video on Libya Al-Hurra TV.
This is one of Mohammed’s last reports where he went to a residential area in Benghazi which came under missile attack from Gaddafi’s forces last night.
Last June, when Rolling Stone published Michael Hastings’ article which ended the career of Obama’s Afghanistan commander, Gen. Stanley McChrystal — an article which was just awarded the prestigious Polk Award — the attacks on Hastings were led not by military officials but by some of Hastings’ most celebrated journalistic colleagues. The New York Times‘ John Burns fretted that the article “has impacted, and will impact so adversely, on what had been pretty good military/media relations” and accused Hastings of violating “a kind of trust” which war reporters “build up” with war Generals; Politico observed that a “beat reporter” — unlike the freelancing Hastings — “would not risk burning bridges by publishing many of McChrystal’s remarks”; and an obviously angry Lara Logan of CBS News strongly insinuated (with no evidence) that Hastings had lied about whether the comments were on-the-record and then infamously sneered: “Michael Hastings has never served his country the way McChrystal has.” Here’s Jon Stewart last year mocking the revealing media disdain for Rolling Stone and Hastings in the wake of their McChrystal story.
Hastings has now written another Rolling Stone article that reflects poorly on a U.S. General in Afghanistan. The new article details how Lt. Gen. William Caldwell “illegally ordered a team of soldiers specializing in ‘psychological operations’ to manipulate visiting American senators into providing more troops and funding for the war” and then railroaded the whistle-blowing officer who objected to the program. Now, the same type of smear campaign is being launched at Hastings as well as at his primary source, Lt. Col. Michael Holmes: from military officials and their dutiful media-servants. Ever since publication of this new article, military-subservient “reporters” have disseminated personal attacks on Hastings and his journalism as well as on Holmes and his claims, all while inexcusably granting anonymity to the military leaders launching those attacks and uncritically repeating them. As usual, anyone who makes powerful government or military leaders look bad — by reporting the truth — becomes the target of character assassination, and the weapon of choice are the loyal, vapid media stars who will uncritically repeat whatever powerful officials say all while shielding them from accountability through the use of anonymity.
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Mohammed Nabbous, founder of Libya AlHurra TV, killed this morning in Benghazi while reporting on Gaddafi forces attacks. Leaves behind wife and unborn baby.