{"id":93321,"date":"2011-07-19T17:37:58","date_gmt":"2011-07-19T17:37:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.indexoncensorship.org\/?p=5754"},"modified":"2011-07-19T17:37:58","modified_gmt":"2011-07-19T17:37:58","slug":"murdoch-fool-rushes-in","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/?p=93321","title":{"rendered":"Murdoch: Fool rushes in"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>You wait years to see Rupert Murdoch called to account over phone hacking and then <a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/#!\/jonniemarbles\">some fool<\/a> slaps foam in his face and MPs are congratualting the old man on his on his &#8220;immense courage&#8221;. This is not a foam-in-the-face matter. Ask the hacking victims. Ask all the people who have been fired or sacked. Ask people who care about improper influence.<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>The questioning &#8212; though we&#8217;ll see precious little about it in the headlines &#8212; was slow and it could hardly be called methodical, but there will be plenty in the transcript that sheds new light on this affair, not least in James Murdoch&#8217;s unimpressive answers about the Harbottle and Lewis email haul and the \u00a3700,000 payout of Gordon Taylor.<\/p>\n<p>On the latter, which was <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.indexoncensorship.org\/2011\/07\/17\/did-murdoc-pay-700000-for-silence\">discussed here<\/a> he was astonishingly vague and uninformed, but it was clear he had no serious or plausible answer to the question of why he should have made a huge payout if it was not to silence Mr Taylor. Instead, we saw what appeared to be some new fallings-out, between the Murdochs and former employees such as Tom Crone (former legal adviser) and Colin Myler (former NoW editor). And also with lawyers and ex-lawyers, of which more, one hopes, at the public inquiry.<\/p>\n<p>You might expect me to write this, but if we wanted proof of the need for a systematic public inquiry staffed by informed and forensically-minded barristers, this was it. What we have here, my guess is, is a small army of hostages to fortune.<\/p>\n<p><em>Brian Cathcart teaches journalism at Kingston University and a founder of the <a href=\"http:\/\/hackinginquiry.org\/index.php\">Hacked Off Campaign<\/a>. He tweets at\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/briancathcart\">@BrianCathcart<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Murdoch: Fool rushes in<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":52,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[14201,14224,14225,1722,14226,3576],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93321"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/52"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=93321"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93321\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=93321"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=93321"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=93321"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}