Something is rotten... excellent Murdoch broadside by ex-BBC Robin Lustig

[Tony Gosling]

<http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/robin-lustig/http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/robin-lustig>Robin 
Lustig

Journalist and broadcaster
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/robin-lustig/hacking-trial_b_5536021.html?utm_hp_ref=tw


Something Is Rotten...

<http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/robin-lustig/http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/robin-lustig/hacking-trial_b_5536021.html?view=print&comm_ref=false>Posted: 
27/06/2014 15:50
http://www.911forum.org.uk/board/viewtopic.php?p=167490#167490


What do you call an organisation, originally 
based in Sicily, that uses bribes and threats to buy influence and power?

Here's a clue: it begins with the letter M.

Here's another question: Whom did the Labour MP 
<http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/robin-lustig/http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201012/cmselect/cmcumeds/903/111110.htm>Tom 
Watson, at a parliamentary select committee 
hearing in November 2011, call "the first mafia 
boss in history who didn't know he was running a criminal enterprise"?

Again, the answer begins with the letter M. 
That's M for Murdoch. In this case, James 
Murdoch, the hapless son hung out to dry.

Forget Andy Coulson. If you can, forget 
phone-hacking. The real scandal is how senior 
politicians - and police officers - allowed 
themselves to be used by a ruthless media tycoon 
for his own commercial ends. And if you think it's all over, it's not.

Why is Michael Gove still palsy-walsy with Rupert 
Murdoch, who used to employ him in his days as a 
journalist on The Times? Why did Ed Miliband pose 
for that idiotic photo holding a copy of The Sun? 
The answer is simplicity itself: because they 
fear the power of Murdoch, and the damage he 
could do to their political careers.

I do not claim that either Gove or Miliband, or 
any of the other politicians who have snuggled up 
to Mr Murdoch, are doing, or have done, anything 
illegal. But it is frankly a disgrace that even 
after everything we've learned about the 
poisonous impact that the Murdoch empire has had 
on British public life, men such as these cannot 
resist the lure of the Murdoch imprimatur.

Two Labour prime ministers, Blair and Brown, a 
Conservative prime minister and a Conservative 
chancellor of the exchequer, Cameron and Osborne, 
have all succumbed. Two years ago, even Mr 
Cameron had to admit, in the House of Commons: 
"We all did too much cosying up to Rupert 
Murdoch." (He meant politicians on all sides, and he was right.)

So when you ask how the industrial-scale 
phone-hacking at the News of the World could go 
on for so long, undetected and unpunished, here's 
your answer. Murdoch and his minions had bought 
immunity. They paid police officers for 
information, they hired former police officers as 
highly-paid columnists, and they gathered dirt on 
senior politicians with which they threatened to 
ruin careers. With cover like that, who needs to 
bother about the niceties of the law?

The Labour MP Tom Watson, who appears not to know 
the meaning of the word fear, defined the mafia 
during his questioning of James Murdoch in 2011 
as "a group of people who are bound together by 
secrecy, who together pursue their group's 
business objectives with no regard for the law, 
using intimidation, corruption and general criminality."

He asked Mr Murdoch to agree that it was also "an 
accurate description of News International in the 
UK." James Murdoch replied: "Absolutely not. 
Frankly, I think that that is offensive and it is not true."

The evidence, alas, is on Mr Watson's side, not 
Mr Murdoch's. What's more, even if Andy Coulson, 
former Murdoch editor and former Cameron media 
supremo, does end up in jail, the capo di tutti 
capi, the boss of bosses, is having the last laugh.

As the hacking scandal detonated beneath the 
Murdoch media empire, the boss was asked what his 
priority was. He turned to Rebekah Brooks and 
said: "This one." So when the jury acquitted her 
on all charges on Tuesday, he would have been 
entitled to gloat. Mission accomplished.

According to 
<http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/robin-lustig/http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/jun/25/-sp-phone-hacking-trial-rebekah-brooks-rupert-murdoch>Nick 
Davies of The Guardian, the indefatigable 
reporter who did more than anyone to blow this 
sordid scandal wide open, the millions that the 
Murdoch empire spent on defending both Brooks and 
Coulson bought so much lawyer power into the 
courtroom that "lawyers and court reporters who 
spend their working lives at the Old Bailey 
agreed they had never seen anything like it, this 
multimillion-pound Rolls-Royce engine purring through the proceedings."

More than two-thirds of the estimated 
£100million-plus cost of the legal proceedings 
were paid by the Murdoch machine to defend his 
former executives. And yet - get this - in the 
words of a 
<http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/robin-lustig/http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/85b4beae-ebc8-11e3-8cef-00144feabdc0.html>Financial 
Times headline on Wednesday: "Murdoch comes out on top despite lawyers' bills."

The FT reported that the share price of News Corp 
stock actually rose in New York after the Old 
Bailey verdicts were announced, and that, 
according to Forbes magazine, the Murdoch 
family's net wealth has risen from $7.5billion 
before the hacking crisis broke to $13.5billion 
this year. How depressing is that?

So where does this leave Sir Brian Leveson, his 
inquiry into press standards, and the regulation 
of the press? To me, the entire Leveson process 
was designed to provide the wrong answer to the 
wrong question. The hacking scandal wasn't 
primarily a failure of press regulation - it was, 
above all, a dismal failure of policing.

The police knew what the News of the World was 
doing, and turned a blind eye. It's hard not to 
conclude that the reason is that too many of them 
were far too close to the Murdoch papers. David 
Cameron himself was warned of the stench 
emanating from News International - and he 
ignored it. It cannot be said too often: it was 
journalists, specifically on The Guardian and the 
New York Times - who blew this thing wide open, 
not the police, not the judiciary, not our 
elected representatives at Westminster.

So if we want to ensure that future Murdochs have 
less power over future prime ministers and future 
police officers, we need to change the law on 
media ownership. Perhaps the dawning of the 
digital age will eventually destroy media moguls' 
power - yet for the time being, I fancy a 
headline in the Sun or the Daily Mail still has 
more potency than a 140-character tweet.

Yes, journalists on the News of the World (and 
almost certainly on other papers, too) behaved 
appallingly and unforgiveably in ripping open the 
private lives of people who had every right to 
expect their private lives to remain private.

So yes, by all means let us improve the way 
people who are badly treated by newspapers can 
obtain redress. But surely it can't be right, 
even at arm's length, to involve politicians, the 
very people who have again and again showed 
themselves so easily tempted by the goodies 
available in the press barons' troughs, anywhere near the process.

As 
<http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/robin-lustig/http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/25/rebekah-brooks-journalists-politicians-phone-hacking-trial>Suzanne 
Moore put it in yesterday's Guardian: "In a 
healthy democracy, the relationship between 
journalists and politicians should be one of 
mutual inquiry verging on disdain. You cannot 
legislate for that any more than you can vet 
people for integrity. We can, though, tell it like it is."

Oh, and if you think Mr Murdoch and his papers 
have finally learned the error of their ways, 
just pause for one moment to consider the Sun's 
triumphant headline the day after the acquittal 
of its titian-haired former editor.

"Great day for red tops." No change there, then.

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