Wednesday, July 06, 2011

The Worst, gets worse

Apparently in Britain those newspapers that don't have Murdochian "Page 3 Girls" have the temerity to practice journalism. In addition to hacking the phones of celebrities for years, now extended to missing children, the Murdoch owned News of the World (NOTW) went even further.

* It is suspected that NOTW hacked into the phones of many of the victims of the July 7, 2005 terrorist bombings of the London subway that killed 52 people.

* It is suspected that several families of missing or murdered children over the last several years had their phones hacked by NOTW.

* NOTW placed a police investigator under surveillance as the latter was investigating the murder of a private eye linked to NOTW. Which doesn't sound at all ominous or the plot of a bad Hollywood thriller (based on a Bill O'Reilly novel).

* The Cameron government, rife with high level officials who worked for Murdoch, is on the verge of approving NewsCorp's multi-billion dollar takeover of yet another major television network (must be using on all that money Rupert made on Myspace) -- the groundswell of opposition is rising, or maybe just for once being listened to. NOTW is losing advertising revenue from major companies.

* The Guardian's Steve Bell perfectly summarizes Murdoch and his British version of Roger Ailes, Rebekah Brooks, claim it is "inconceivable" she knew of all this phone hacking.



Meanwhile, in this country, the matter is still just a blip as the media dictates our outrages at other things -- I mean Nancy Grace had built a gibbet for a hanging and everything!

Nobody watches big media's back in this country better than big media. A policy that has kept Howard Kurtz pay well into the six figures for many a year.

[cross-posted at Firedoglake]

4 comments:

Montag said...

Oh, hell, it's probably much simpler than just big media stars worrying that Murdoch might give them a job one day--they're terrified that he's been spying on them, too....

sukabi said...

perhaps it's not 'fear' of being spied on, perhaps it is the knowledge that they have been spied on, and Rupert's got 'the goods' to keep them quiet...

a little picture here, a phone conversation there, a little inconvenient 'scandal' that could blow up into Weiner sized proportions would go a LONG way to keeping these $$$ and fame crazed folks 'reporting on the right things'....

pansypoo said...

shame these people can't be executed.

Anonymous said...

The Brits don't do public flogging anymore? Do they?