21 Jan 2011 | Index Index, minipost
Afghan police are searching for the men who threw acid on a prominent Afghan TV reporter and author. Tuesday’s attack on Razaq Mamoon has left his face disfigured. Mamoon is the author of The Footprint of Pharaoh, which criticises Iranian interference in Afghanistan, he has allegedly claimed that his attackers were Iranian agents.
21 Jan 2011 | Uncategorized
Why has Andy Coulson resigned now, after clinging on so long, and just days after David Cameron backed him? If his position has suddenly become untenable it is hardly just because, as he put it, the spokesman needs a spokesman. They could afford a line of 20 of those.
One of the reasons must be the simple one that the “one rogue” defence of his time at the News of the World has collapsed. The suspension of senior news executive Ian Edmondson and the naming of one other former news editor in court documents related to alleged phone hacking have left News International struggling for a form of words to shore up its position. And all the time the lawsuits from angry celebrities continue to pile up.
But you don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to ask whether the future of BSkyB is as important in the balance of factors here as the question of how many people still believe Coulson could have failed to know members of his staff were hacking phones.
James and Rupert Murdoch are determined to buy the shares in BSkyB that they don’t already own. It is the springboard for their UK business strategy over the next ten years and compared to this the fates of Andy Coulson and a bunch of News of the World hacks probably doesn’t add up to much.
The Murdochs don’t usually care much about public opinion either, but they need political blessing for the BSkyB deal to go through. In this context the embarrassment of constant stories about hacking (even though most of the press has shabbily ignored them) is most unwelcome, and there is no doubt that Coulson’s presence at the heart of government has made that worse.
Now he’s gone, will the TV deal be easier to pull off? Only if we’re all suckers.
So bad has the phone hacking scandal become that the whole News International hierarchy has questions to answer, and that includes not only Rebekah Brooks but James Murdoch himself — for one thing, he personally approved the six-figure settlement payment to Gordon Taylor which was prompted by the discovery of that infamous bunch of hacked transcripts marked “for Neville”.
If James Murdoch wants to convince us that his company should be able to own BSkyB outright, with all the monopolistic opportunities that affords, then he needs to convince us that the company he already runs is a clean one. And before that can happen we need to see what happens to Sienna Miller, Chris Tarrant, Andy Gray, Steve Coogan and the host of others who are in the courts claiming that Murdoch’s paper breached their privacy.
Read more Brian Cathcart on Metgate here, here, here, here, here and here
Brian Cathcart teaches journalism at Kingston University London and tweets at @BrianCathcart
20 Jan 2011 | News and features
Tony Blair’s appearance at the Iraq inquiry is a test of the competing principles of free expression and confidentiality. John Kampfner asks who should decide what the public hears?
Tony Blair would not appreciate being likened to Julian Assange. The feeling would, I am sure, be entirely mutual. Yet there is a link of sorts between these two figures, so controversial in their very different ways. It revolves around the notion of confidentiality.
The lead-up to the former prime minister’s second appearance before the Iraq enquiry has been dominated by the issue of private correspondence. The refusal by the cabinet secretary, Sir Gus O’Donnell, to accede to the request of the committee chairman, Sir John Chilcot, to release the full musings of Blair and ex-president George Bush is based around a question similar to the one relating to the industrial dumping of US State Department documents. When are the musings of individual officials or politicians public documents and when are they private?
In both cases the competing principles of free expression and confidence stumble on each other, head to head. Assange and his allies argue their case mainly around public interest. The world, he insists, should know all the dirty deeds of dastardly diplomats. A more convincing argument in his favour might be that no serious organisation could remotely hope to keep a single email secret if circulated to 2.5m people, as was apparently the case with the US diplomatic service.
As for the Blair/Bush love-in, the case for secrecy is undermined by Blair’s own decision to publish some of the discussions in his memoirs. Furthermore, written memos between world leaders could surely not qualify as “private”. Telephone calls, presumably yes, but not the written word.
As the Daily Telegraph commented in a leader article this week:
The public deserves to get the fullest possible account of why this country went to war on the basis of what turned out to be misleading intelligence. For many, this remains the rawest of issues; if we are ever to put it behind us, the inquiry must be seen to be as thorough and open as possible. Reaching sensible conclusions almost eight years after the invasion began will be difficult enough without the inquiry being fettered in this way.
In the spirit, we are sure, of free expression, a furious Chilcot decided to publish his exchange of letters with O’Donnell. The committee chairman suggests, in quintessential mandarin style, that he would be “disappointed” if Blair proved less forthcoming in his evidence than in his book.
Otherwise, the Telegraph concludes, “it will appear that Mr Blair is happy to breach the confidentiality of office for a lucrative book deal, but not to inform the British public of the process that led him to send our troops to war”.
John Kampfner is the chief executive of Index on Censorship
20 Jan 2011 | Index Index, minipost, News and features
Nyambe Muyumbana of Radio Lyambai and Mwala Kalaluka of the Post newspaper have been charged with sedition. The charges relate to coverage of the protests for greater autonomy in the Western Province of Zambia. The office of Radio Lyambai has also been shut due to confiscation of office equipment.
