If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
The Blog
Poor David Cameron, he's not going to live this one down in a hurry, is he? Forget messing up the budget, turning off women voters, strikes across the country and a dismal showing in the local council elections. His greatest embarrassment right now, and if we dare to speculate, for some time in the future, will be his inability to abbreviate his text messages correctly. In quite possibly the highlight so far of the soap opera that is the Leveson Inquiry, ex-News International exec Rebekah Wade outed David Cameron as so far behind the times he needed advice from a newspaper editor to type his texts correctly.
This week we are likely to see yet more drama and revelations in the sage that is the Leveson Inquiry as the prime minister's former spin doctor Andy Coulson and former Sun editor and horse owner Rebekah Brooks take the stand. You may be starting to tire of the blanket coverage but please don't switch off just yet. There are big issues at stake.
In July last year I suggested that the claims made by Rebekah Brooks that she knew nothing of phone hacking under her tenure, if true, suggested she was at best a poor leader, and that if she was indeed neutral in shaping the culture under her at News International, we had to look further up the food chain for those culpable - recalling the old saying, a fish rots from the headhttp://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/alex-jaconelli/a-fish-rots-from-the-head_b_894606.html.
There is a deliciously banal absurdity to the news that Rebekah Brooks, the disgraced tabloid editor at the epicentre of the phone-hacking scandal, was loaned a police horse by the Metropolitan Police.
It's ironic that this week Rupert Murdoch's Sunday Times included a supplement listing the 100 best companies to work for. You won't find his company listed, or any other publisher or broadcaster for that matter.
Last July Rebekah Brooks told her assembled staff that "worse revelations are yet to come and you will understand in a year why we closed News Of The World". We haven't had to wait a year and the evidence from the Surrey Police published today by our House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee lays bare the scandal of phone hacking at the paper during the Milly Dowler case.
How different the world looked for the Murdochs last Christmas. The BSkyB decision had just been withdrawn from Vince Cable. It now looked as though their bid would go through on the nod. Once approved this would allow the Murdoch dynasty to straddle Britain's media like a gloating colossus, dwarfing the BBC and all other commercial competitors. Politically they would be untouchable.
Think of the issues that have raised our national hackles in the past few years; oil prices, cash for influence, expenses, bankers' bonuses...for a while we're appalled, outraged, demanding justice, or at the very least all the juicy details. And then? Business as usual. Should we do more or realise that we're a fickle bunch?
Was I the only one who expected to see Frank Pentangeli wheeled out at the Murdoch inquisition yesterday?
At 80-years-old, Rupert Murdoch has had an equally dated approach to public relations throughout the hacking scandal.
Of course Murdoch wasn't the only one who was blind. But for someone who succeeded in the past by being uniquely in touch with popular sentiment, this latest debacle demonstrates yet another source of blindness: success.
As a computer enthusiast I initially 'brushed off' the term hacking being thrown around by the media. Hacking in my social circles is considered an act whereby a computer user uses their computer to gain unauthorised access to another machine. The current affair concerns 'hacks' (Journalists) ringing a phone and, when it is not answered, inserting the default P.I.N. (personal Identification Number). Not rocket science and not hacking as I know it.
Ian Katz, deputy editor of The Guardian, and Sarah Smith, correspondent for Channel 4 News U.K., discuss the growing phone-hacking scandal that has threatened Rupert Murdoch's media empire.
The problem here is the Left doesn't want people to have what Murdoch offers them. In something akin to the tradition of racist stereotypes, they develop a malevolent and ruthless capitalist bent on exploiting his workers and dumbing down the general population...the devil incarnate.
Corporate culture is established through leadership. If lessons are to be learnt from NewsCorp's misconduct, then perhaps attention is focused first on the board room and not the news room.
Somewhere in a not so far off galaxy called Murdoch the final battle has commenced. The Death Star - emblazoned with the huge but now flickering News Corp insignia - is under sustained attack from the rebel alliance. Huge plumes of flames erupt (bonfires of the vanities, surely) from the crippled leviathan as missiles of truth pierce its thick hull built from a composite of money, power, corruption and arrogance, once thought indestructible.
