Murdoch's Scum Credentials All In Order I See

[zigackly]

not that I'm saying courting the media is wrong

 

Why not? I would say it.

[ChrisM]

Why not? I would say it.

 

I mean in the context of trying to get your message to as many people as possible. Obviously there are limits, such as spreading your arse cheeks for Murdoch.

[zigackly]

I mean in the context of trying to get your message to as many people as possible. Obviously there are limits, such as spreading your arse cheeks for Murdoch.

 

Where do you draw the line though; inviting them for drinks, lending them your holiday home, letting them get away with murder? I think any private lobbying between the media and politicians should be banned myself. Sounds extreme, but it's the only way to be sure.

[PestiRed]

If journo's & politicians don't hang around together then the rest of us will have to start putting up with them

[Whelan]

The Chris Mulligan attack was desperate and pathetic, and, as is the case with a lot of Cameron's actions, not thought out.

 

'Innocent until proved guilty' to 'look at the guy working for you what about his background'!

 

It will all fade into the background sadly, as most of the press want it to go away, and most of the population are sheep! It stinks quite frankly, particularly the BskyB deal, and therefore put in context all the changes, and demands made of the BBC from the Tories.

[ChrisM]

Where do you draw the line though; inviting them for drinks, lending them your holiday home, letting them get away with murder? I think any private lobbying between the media and politicians should be banned myself. Sounds extreme, but it's the only way to be sure.

 

I say we take off and nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

[TheResonator]

sorry if anyone else has expressed a similar view, but I haven't the time today to read 45+ pages.

 

Anyhoo... Whilst I'm finding the Murdoch empire crumbling around him absolutely hilarious, i surely can't be the only one who doesn't really give that much of a shit about the whole "scandal" that started this in the first place?

 

Yes, yes, i know it's "deplorable" and "unforgiveable" and "beyond the pale" that they hacked the phones and emails of murder victims and all that, and I can't say I feel any differently from a moral viewpoint.

 

I completely agree, and I think the greatest vitriol is coming from collective guilt rather than any actual moral objection.

 

There is a certain unavoidable sickness in thinking that a desire for gossip, and an appetite for the morbid, have become so great that they are funding the interception of a dead girl's voicemails. Since this has come out everybody has roundly condemned it, but the fact is that the motivation for hacking the voicemail came from the same root as the motivation for buying the paper. Deaths like Milly Dowlers and Maddie's are not tragedies any more -- not in any tangible or realistic way -- they are just narratives. They are published in serial in a manner of old, and have become more detective novel than news report.

 

I can only speak for myself, but I'm not particularly appalled by the 'revelations' just because I'm not surprised. Does anybody nowadays -- anybody -- ultimately expect journalists, politicians, or businessmen (bar a few) to conduct themselves with any degree of integrity? I'm genuinely interested, because to any remotely intelligent person looking in from the outside they're just cunts from top to bottom.

 

The people who fixate themselves on soap stories like Milly Dowlers are like market dogs deciding which restaurant to go to for scraps. Whoever has the most meat attracts the most dogs. It's that basic, but if you're a dog living by that principle and you eat first and ask questions later then you can't complain about where the meat came from.

 

I hate people like Brooks, Murdoch, and Cameron, but the real protagonists of this story are the British public. The tabloid readers are trying to wash their hands of this moreso than the politicians. In the manner written by Rene Girard in 'the Scapegoat', there will be a few sacrifices and then social unity will recommence.

 

It is a pity, because it's a good chance to look at how voyeuristic and masturbatory our culture has become, and on how wide a scale. Salacious tabloid culture is poisonous and it has played a massive part in reducing a huge amount of people to nothing more than, vain, shallow, voyeuristic and thoughtless fantasists. It would be a good time for a paradigm shift but I just don't see that happening.

[zigackly]

I say we take off and nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

 

At least it's possible that cockroaches may develop a moral conscience, unlike politicians.

[Whelan]

The people who fixate themselves on soap stories like Milly Dowlers are like market dogs deciding which restaurant to go to for scraps. Whoever has the most meat attracts the most dogs. It's that basic, but if you're a dog living by that principle and you eat first and ask questions later then you can't complain about where the meat came from.

 

I hate people like Brooks, Murdoch, and Cameron, but the real protagonists of this story are the British public. The tabloid readers are trying to wash their hands of this moreso than the politicians. In the manner written by Rene Girard in 'the Scapegoat', there will be a few sacrifices and then social unity will recommence.

 

I think you are spot on with regards to the reasons for this 'scandal' to have hit, I think a lot of the outpouring of anger is also, absolution of any responsibility! The facts are that when celebrities where getting their phones hacked, nobody gave a fuck! It was still an illegal practice, it still served no purpose, it was still an invasion of their privacy, but we found out who Hugh Grant was shagging so it was okay.

 

Well that aquiesence to celebrity phone hacking is aquiesence to Milly Dowler since the principles underlying the reasoning behing it (from the Journalists point of view) are just a continuum. I think the anger is in reponse to the question 'well you thought it was okay when it was Hugh Grant'! Essentially people are saying 'I didn't mean like that'!

 

But, although we all know, and probably accepted the fact that the BskyB deal, and the BBC baiting where part of some Faustian pact between NI and the Tories, these events have simply highlighted them, and you can't claim ignorance of something that is so obvious. I think that is the driving force as well, that people simply cannot choose to ignore this. It was about Milly Dowler but it became more about the relationships and the nature of the relationships. Lets fact it Vince Cable was hung out to dry at the first opportunity.

 

Tittle tattle, and cultural swill are opium for the masses, it has always been the case and sadly will always be the case.

[Skidfingers McGonical]

What's this about Cable being hung out to dry?

 

I'll be honest, I have missed what has happened there, but I am guessing it's going back to Cable's comments about Murdoch in Dec.

[Whelan]

What's this about Cable being hung out to dry?

 

I'll be honest, I have missed what has happened there, but I am guessing it's going back to Cable's comments about Murdoch in Dec.

 

That really. He was naive but the responsibility to vet the takeover was taken off his hands pretty quickly, and Cameron's evasiveness yesterday, particularly 'appropriate conversations' was pathetic. He clearly spoke about the takeover, and the decision to remove Cable was clearly influenced by NI.

[Skidfingers McGonical]

Ah right, nice one.

[Dougie Do'ins]

I wonder what fate now awaits The Times given Murdocks hold or control of the media is now surely lessened. Will he still think it worth while in propping up a publication that loses £40m a year.

[Mr. Beast]

some good stuff in here

 

All Journalists are Scum - Blog - visionOntv

 

So News International began its promised revenge on New Labour. “You have made it personal about Rebekah, so we'll make it personal about you" an aide to Ed Miliband was told, and immediately afterwards the Sun accused Miliband’s own spin/lie doctor, a former Times journalist, of a long-term coke habit. It seems that all the rest of us can do is sit back and put the verbal boot in.

 

 

“Journalists” said someone yesterday, with real loathing, “they’re all scum”. He could have been in an office, or on a bus, or at an alternative media gathering, and wherever, he was not alone. The Guardian may be trumpeting its achievement in breaking the phone hacking story, but it’s a tune that’s noticeably failing to impress most of the population. Journalism has long been among the most distrusted of professions; coming third only to bankers and politicians in a UK survey last year: the behaviour of the News of the World may be a shock to the abused families of the victims, but to everyone else it’s just what you’d expect from a bunch of – “tossers” said the man on the street, venomously.

 

In fact, providing the public with new reasons to hate journalists may be one of Rupert Murdoch’s greatest achievements. In the current climate it’s pointless to repeat that journalism’s purpose is to “afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted”. It’s useless to point out that journalism, as the line goes, is “anything that the rich and powerful don’t want you to know about”, irrelevant to cite Watergate, My Lai, Abu Ghraib, PFI and ‘extraordinary rendition’ as scoops. To argue that the News of the World – along with the Sun, the Mail, the Express et al – are rarely journalists, but are largely obeying orders to act as renegade spies, snoops, voyeurs and hatemongers, gets you nowhere. The public, who do not read the Guardian, have had their prejudice confirmed, again.

 

For someone who eschewed the mainstream after it failed to show any interest in the true nature of the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq, it’s not hard to see why this point of view is so entrenched. As government lies were recycled by just about all news outlets it was easy to believe that journalism had suffered a collective breakdown – attributable, variously, to lack of moral fibre, ignorance, incompetence, gullibility, and corporate power. It was certainly evidence of a cognitive dissonance which anyone who remembered the miners’ strike would have recognised. As the statue of Saddam Hussein was pulled down on the micro-managed stage of an otherwise devastated Baghdad, I was with a group of careworkers, their expressions redolent of extreme disbelief amounting to indifference. “They’re lying”, their shoulders shrugged. “They always have and they always will”.

 

Murdoch had, of course, supported the Iraq invasion because it would bring down the price of oil. The BBC, ITV and most of our national print media had, for reasons of their own, followed suit, while local papers, owned by Murdoch’s Newsquest, fell into line. The careworkers knew this, even though they did not “know” it: polls repeatedly showed that around 70 percent of the country shared this common sense. And yet, all around them, the front pages and the tv headlines were displaying an insanity. No wonder that the small triumphs of journalism – a protesting letter from ex-diplomats in the Guardian; Piers Morgan’s brief anti-war tenure at the Mirror - largely went unnoticed.

 

And if they were noticed by the rest of the press, the diplomats were reviled as ‘camel humpers’, while there was a stunning silence about the supposed scandal which cost Morgan his job at the Mirror. This was the leaked images of UK involvement in the torture of Iraqi detainees, whic were said to be faked, although the story itself was true. Morgan’s own biography makes no mention of the pressures which caused him to leave quietly, rather than fight his corner. But the Sun was after him. Looking at the white, sweating picture of Miliband’s aide which adorns the front page of that paper, one can only be surprised that Murdoch’s vested interests allowed Morgan to remain for so long.

 

Otherwise, the thought that blackmail, fear, spying and coercion keep our establishment figures in line is hardly news. Stories of potentially troublesome MP’s being called in by MI5 and shown their secret dossier are old. John Major’s possession of a ‘little black book’ full of MP’s secrets, with which he silenced unruly party members when a party whip (the language here is surely instructive) is well documented. “What do they have on Miliband?” everyone is now asking. “What do they have on Cameron? On Clegg? On Farage? On Murdoch? What do they have on me?”

 

And the last question is naturally the most pressing. The spying on celebrities failed to raise much more than a “well, they’re fair game”; the hacking of politicians ditto. But the spying on ‘normal’ people has understandably served to reinforce something which one could call public paranoia, if public paranoia were not so plainly justified. We are living in a country where local councils can now legally tap your phone. Employers search with impunity through staff facebooks. Children are fingerprinted and filmed. The public are turned into apparatchicks: signs on trains urge passengers to text in anonymously and report fare dodgers; announcements constantly insist that we must report anything ‘suspicious’, even though the last suspicious atrocity here happened six years ago.

 

And this is the shame, and Murdoch’s triumph, and that of others like him; that journalism is now publicly seen as just another part of this iniquitous surveillance state; not merely a provider of its propaganda. Still, tapping into Millie Dowler’s phone was criminal; failing to act as the voice of the voiceless is another sort of crime: a criminal dereliction of a duty.

 

It is easy to say that a populist tabloid culture has fostered this dereliction: the press savaging the workers who buy it, and who deserve nothing better. But journalism has a populist heritage which stretches back at least to 1817, and the Leeds Mercury’s revelation that the UK government were using agent provocateurs at marches. Ironically, it was the Mail which revealed that an undercover policeman was acting as an agent provocateur at the march against the last Bush visit - a writer had managed to sneak her report into the Femail section. That story has since vanished from the Mail’s website; but when Steve Coogan adds furious condemnation of the paper to Hugh Grant’s stance against the News of the World, he is speaking for journalists, not against them.

 

There are basic rules for journalists. You don’t go after people for being human and having a private life. You don’t act as the mouthpiece for power. You don’t betray trust. You check facts. And, alongside people like Michelle Stanistreet, who took her own paper, the Express, to the PCC, and is now president of the NUJ; Nick Davies; the Independent’s Johann Hari and Simon Carr; documentary maker Adam Curtis, and some others, we now have the ‘alternative’ press; otherwise known as the digital media.

 

From Common Dreams to Open Democracy, Counterpunch to Corporate Watch, the Daily Mash to the Onion: either the pressure of unheard voices is becoming too intense to ignore, or the public genuinely want facts. It is, of course, tempting to point out that most of the public don’t read these internet sites, just as they don’t read the Guardian, or Private Eye. But their words and images, through twitter and email and facebook, are still spreading, just as they did when the ‘Poor Man’s Guardian’ (no relation) was sold illegally on the streets of nineteenth century Manchester. Visionontv currently has video journalists (they call themselves activists, possibly in self defence) operating in Liverpool, London and internationally; the tradition is being reinvented, as it must be, to keep it alive.

 

“Scum”, the man on the street was repeating, to general agreement. And, in a sense, he was right. All journalists are scum: the froth which floats to the top of a putrid stew, and signals its true nature. The Fourth Estate, originally designated as the protector of the people, should be proud of it.

[Skidfingers McGonical]

Just seen this on The Telegraph site

 

12.40 Daniel Knowles, our Assistant Comment Editor, reckons Cameron's fortunes may just have taken a turn for the better:

I wrote this morning that David Cameron faced a big test today. For two or three days, difficult gossip had been spreading between Tory MPs about the PM’s recent performance. There was even, particularly worryingly, talk of an early election. That will all stop now – Dave has just received a rapturous reception at the 1922, with close to a minute’s worth of desk-banging at each end, and waves of laughter in the middle.

I’m told no MPs asked questions about phone hacking, Andy Coulson or Neil Wallis. Instead, the PM was asked questions about the eurozone and three questions – two supportive – about international aid spending. After today’s Commons performance, Tories feel this scandal is spent – they’ve been hurt, and some questions remain unanswered, but Labour have now milked the last drop of success

 

News of the World phone hacking: live - Telegraph

[Whelan]

He is just over one year into a coalition government, he is about to embark on a major reduction in public spending, the NHS, Education, social care, the Economy and the Public Sector reform are all yet to be fully addressed.

 

And they feel he has 'succeeded'! He is fucking wounded and the battles haven't even started.

[DJLJ]

Has anyone seen those emails posted yet?

[zigackly]

Has anyone seen those emails posted yet?

 

LulzSec The Lulz Boat

We're currently working with certain media outlets who have been granted exclusive access to some of the News of the World emails we have.

1 hour ago Favorite Retweet Reply

[Skidfingers McGonical]

No, have you?

 

I believe they have held back in publishing the ones from the S*n, due to potentially damaging legal proceedings or some shit like that.

[BCM]

Has anyone seen those emails posted yet?

 

 

No , apparently they are letting certain news outlets have the once over of them first.

 

Oh and apparently they have hacked into NATO as well obtaining a number of sensitive files.

[ChrisM]

What a Menschalist.

 

[YOUTUBE]fsJwM1DnLu4[/YOUTUBE]

[PestiRed]

No , apparently they are letting certain news outlets have the once over of them first.

 

Oh and apparently they have hacked into NATO as well obtaining a number of sensitive files.

 

Probably sensible but slightly disappointed at not getting the immediate feeding frenzy over the S*n.

 

LulzSec are annoying me a bit. They did a fair bit of prick-teasing this morning before not releasing the emails & then sending out a "fuck you" to the FBI. The NATO business also seems little more than a pointless show of strength.

I get the feeling that self-indulgent rebellion might start to defeat the actual purpose of what they started out to be

[Guest Numero Veinticinco]

What a Menschalist.

 

[YOUTUBE]fsJwM1DnLu4[/YOUTUBE]

 

Talk about squirming. What a cunt.

[TheBitch]

Talk about squirming. What a cunt.

 

Yep.

 

I'd love to see her squirming with my jizz on her chin.

[torahboy]

Talk about squirming. What a cunt.

 

 

 

Untermensch? Cuntermensch!