6 Jun 2011 | Uncategorized
Now that the dust is settling after the injunctions affair, here are some things I learned:
1. Ryan Giggs never applied for, nor was he ever granted, a superinjunction.
2. There have been only two new superinjunctions in the past year — one lasted seven days and the other was overturned on appeal.
3. Newspapers which furiously inform their readers that injunctions are against the public interest are remarkably bad at making that case in court (where they have to present actual arguments).
4. The Fred Goodwin injunction never prevented regulators from investigating whether his alleged relationship breached bank rules, nor did it prevent anyone — including newspapers — from complaining to those regulators.
5. You don’t have to rely on the media for explanations of important court judgements; you can normally read them for yourself at a brilliant legal website called www.bailii.org. (Give it a try.)
6. There appear to be 75,000 British Twitter users who are ready, with the right tabloid encouragement, to participate in the “naming and shaming” (or pillorying) of adulterers.
7. When their commercial interest is threatened our tabloid papers forget their traditional enthusiasm for law and order and rail against judges and the legal system like serial lags in Wormwood Scrubs.
8. When it suits them, the tabloids also blithely set aside their usual view that online social networking is an evil invention that causes crime, suicide, binge drinking, obesity, terrorism and cancer.
9. When David Cameron is shouted at by the press he will feebly set up a committee, even when another committee reported on more or less the same thing only a week earlier. (He will also fail to declare an interest, which is that he is a close friend of the chief executive of Rupert Murdoch’s News International.)
10. For every time the law is an ass there is an occasion when the British tabloid press is a slavering pack of hyenas. But with the law you have a right of appeal.
Brian Cathcart teaches journalism at Kingston University London. Follow him on Twitter @BrianCathcart
8 Apr 2011 | Uncategorized
News International’s apology over phone hacking, welcome and overdue as it is, cannot “draw a line” under phone hacking.
This gesture, and the settlement of some of the private claims for breach of privacy by hacking victims, must not bring to a halt the process of exposing the facts, because so far we have only seen a small fraction of those facts. The litigants and their lawyers have transformed our understanding of what happened by their relentless demands for documents from the police and the company, but we need that process to continue.
As the former Tory Cabinet minister, Lord Fowler, has said, only a public inquiry will get to the bottom of this. That’s what it will take to address the full breadth of issues at stake, from the role of the police and the Crown Prosecution Service to the relationships between News International and government, and from the sinister silence of the rest of the tabloid press to the conduct of senior company executives right up to Rupert Murdoch himself. Who was doing this? Who knew? When? Was there a cover-up? What was the role of the phone companies? Who was implicated? We need an exhaustive investigation.
What we are dealing with here, after all, appears to have been a sustained assault on the privacy of dozens and possibly hundreds of people, from royalty to Cabinet ministers, and from film actors and sportsmen to journalists and ordinary private citizens. We still have no idea of its full extent — whether, for example, other newspapers were engaged in the same practices. All this has important national security implications and raises big questions about how Britain is governed. And as with Watergate, the crime may have been bad, but the sequel was worse.
So far as News International executives are concerned, they must not be allowed to escape appropriate public scrutiny. In admitting, by implication at least, that Clive Goodman and Glenn Mulcaire were not the only News of the World employees engaged in illegally accessing people’s voicemails, they formally put to rest the “single rogue reporter” defence they sustained from 2007 until this January. But they must now be forced to explain themselves properly, not just in a brief, slick corporate statement, but one by one in an inquiry witness box, under cross-examination from leading barristers.
How, for example, do they now justify the company’s oft-repeated claim that, back in 2006-7, it thoroughly investigated the affair, that it deployed a top firm of white-collar fraud experts on the task, that it interrogated its own reporters and sifted through thousands of emails, and that the failure of these Herculean efforts proved its innocence?
Colin Myler, the paper’s editor, told the Press Complaints Commission in 2007 and the House of Commons Select Committee on the media in 2009 that he personally had led the investigation. Les Hinton, now the CEO of the Wall Street Journal, twice assured MPs that this investigation had been thorough. Tom Crone, head of legal affairs at News Group Newspapers, and Stuart Kuttner, former managing editor of the News of the World, helped to make the same case.
It doesn’t end there. James Murdoch, now deputy chief operating officer of News Corporation, approved a secret £700,000 payout to Gordon Taylor which prevented the public from learning important information about hacking, and Rebekah Brooks, the chief executive of News International who refused to testify before MPs, should also account for her role. Are all these people really fit to hold senior positions in a leading public company? We should find out.
And in the background now is Andy Coulson, former editor of the paper and former media adviser to David Cameron. He told MPs he knew nothing of phone hacking, and repeated the assertion under oath in a court of law. It is now acknowledged that his ignorance was not limited to what his royal editor was up to. So just how extensive was it?
We need an inquiry. Indeed if we don’t have one, if we let it lie on the strength of a few million in compensation, we are accepting that there is no kind of trouble that Rupert Murdoch and his company can’t buy their way out of.
READ ALL OF BRIAN CATHCART’S BRILLIANT ANALYSIS OF THE PHONEHACKING SCANDAL HERE
Brian Cathcart teaches journalism at Kingston University. He tweets at @BrianCathcart
2 Mar 2011 | Uncategorized
Will the world change if, as we may be told any moment, Rupert Murdoch is cleared to buy the whole of BSkyB? After all, he already controls the company as the dominant shareholder. So should we care if the government allows him to consolidate that control, especially if some arrangement is found to prevent him turning Sky News into Fox TV?
It matters because for Murdoch this is like stepping on an escalator that will move him steadily and without a pause to a position of far greater and broader control of our media. BSkyB will deliver him large amounts of cash year after year for the foreseeable future, and will enable him to outbid everybody for everything.
We know his domineering tendency from the world of sport. He has bought cricket and Premiership football, for example. No one can compete at auction with the prices he is prepared to pay, and the sports themselves can’t resist what he gives them. The result is no doubt good coverage where his executives choose to deliver it, but these sports are steadily ceasing to be public activities and instead becoming branches of his empire. His people decide on which days matches are played, and at what time they kick off. His employees have a great say in making stars and don’t care about bit-part players (look at the state of lower-division football). And fewer people see these sports because Sky is expensive — far, far more people saw the Ashes won on free-to-air terrestrial television in 2005 than on Sky in 2009.
But sport is just the start. Sky Atlantic shows us that Murdoch is also determined to monopolise big-budget television drama. He has bought (no one can compete) Mad Men, The Sopranos, Treme, Six Feet Under, Boardwalk Empire, Game of Thrones and many more. And he has also just bought Shine Group, the company behind Life on Mars, Spooks and Hustle.
The key to this growing dominance has been cash, and BSkyB will give him more and more of it. Murdoch talks about markets and want us to think he is out there competing, but competition is the last thing on his mind: he likes to own the market and in this country he is being allowed to buy it in big slices in a way that amazes foreigners. Even more amazingly, people in government take seriously his complaints that the BBC is in his way, and are prepared to meddle with the corporation accordingly.
So he just buys everything, and if you want to watch it you have to pay, say, £45 a month to see it at the moment. The more he buys, the less there is elsewhere, the more you are obliged to watch Sky to see half-decent television and the more he can charge. And the BSkyB cash will help enormously.
Even if he was an ethical operator with an established record of transparent and fair dealing in public life we would be extremely foolish to allow him to step on that escalator. He is none of those things. He is a sinister and ruthless businessman with hard-right political views who treats British politics and public life with contempt. Go here and do what you can to stop him. And/or be ready to join a demonstration.
Brian Cathcart teaches journalism at Kingston University London. He Tweets at @BrianCathcart
2 Mar 2011 | Uncategorized
Will the world change if, as we may be told any moment, Rupert Murdoch is cleared to buy the whole of BSkyB? After all, he already controls the company as the dominant shareholder. So should we care if the government allows him to consolidate that control, especially if some arrangement is found to prevent him turning Sky News into Fox TV?
It matters because for Murdoch this is like stepping on an escalator that will move him steadily and without a pause to a position of far greater and broader control of our media. BSkyB will deliver him large amounts of cash year after year for the foreseeable future, and will enable him to outbid everybody for everything.
We know his domineering tendency from the world of sport. He has bought cricket and Premiership football, for example. No one can compete at auction with the prices he is prepared to pay, and the sports themselves can’t resist what he gives them. The result is no doubt good coverage where his executives choose to deliver it, but these sports are steadily ceasing to be public activities and instead becoming branches of his empire. His people decide on which days matches are played, and at what time they kick off. His employees have a great say in making stars and don’t care about bit-part players (look at the state of lower-division football). And fewer people see these sports because Sky is expensive — far, far more people saw the Ashes won on free-to-air terrestrial television in 2005 than on Sky in 2009.
But sport is just the start. Sky Atlantic shows us that Murdoch is also determined to monopolise big-budget television drama. He has bought (no one can compete) Mad Men, The Sopranos, Treme, Six Feet Under, Boardwalk Empire, Game of Thrones and many more. And he has also just bought Shine Group, the company behind Life on Mars, Spooks and Hustle.
The key to this growing dominance has been cash, and BSkyB will give him more and more of it. Murdoch talks about markets and want us to think he is out there competing, but competition is the last thing on his mind: he likes to own the market and in this country he is being allowed to buy it in big slices in a way that amazes foreigners. Even more amazingly, people in government take seriously his complaints that the BBC is in his way, and are prepared to meddle with the corporation accordingly.
So he just buys everything, and if you want to watch it you have to pay, say, £45 a month to see it at the moment. The more he buys, the less there is elsewhere, the more you are obliged to watch Sky to see half-decent television and the more he can charge. And the BSkyB cash will help enormously.
Even if he was an ethical operator with an established record of transparent and fair dealing in public life we would be extremely foolish to allow him to step on that escalator. He is none of those things. He is a sinister and ruthless businessman with hard-right political views who treats British politics and public life with contempt. Go here and do what you can to stop him. And/or be ready to join a demonstration.
Brian Cathcart teaches journalism at Kingston University London. He Tweets at @BrianCathcart
