Britain was awash in a new surge of outrage over the phone hacking scandal on Thursday, as news emerged that Scotland Yard had added to the list of probable victims a woman whose 8-year-old daughter was murdered by a repeat sex offender in 2000.
The tabloid at the center of the scandal, The News of the World, had championed the campaign of the grieving mother, Sara Payne, for a law warning parents if child sex offenders lived nearby, and she had written warmly of the paper in its final edition, calling it “an old friend.” A statement released on behalf of Mrs. Payne by the Phoenix Foundation, a charity she worked with, described her as devastated and disappointed.
The Guardian was the first to report Scotland Yard’s alert to Mrs. Payne, but the e-mail newsletter Popbitch suggested earlier this month that Mrs. Payne’s voice mail had been hacked and that the phone in question may have been provided to her by the onetime editor of The News of the World, Rebekah Brooks, as part of the campaign for the law.
Another outraged denial:
In a statement, Ms. Brooks confirmed that The News of the World had provided Mrs. Payne with a cellphone “for the last 11 years.” But she said she found the allegations that Mrs. Payne’s voice mail had been hacked “abhorrent and particularly upsetting as Sara Payne is a dear friend.”
At what point do we all start openly jeering and laughing whenever Brooks and Murdoch speak?
Thoughtful Black Co-Citizen
What do you mean WE, paleface? I’ve been openly mocking, jeering and using bad language for a while.
scav
@Thoughtful Black Co-Citizen: I’m on team tonto too.
Fargus
Wait, the Phoenix Foundation? Like, the place MacGyver works for?
Warren Terra
Well, that certainly could make things easier for everyone involved to get what they want. She gets a cellphone, they get a slightly easier way to be bottom-feeding snooping scum.
(To be clear: it sounds like she was so close to the newspaper that they could guarantee themselves any stories from her without needing to spy on her. Which might well not have dissuaded them from doing so.)
scav
Dragging up this from the last thread (excuse me Nutella)
kay
Brooks is an advocate for children. To suggest she exploited and used the parents of murdered children to advance her own career and the bottom line of her loathsome corporate owner is scandalous.
It was about the children.
David Hunt
At whatever point that starts, it will be at least 15 years too late. More’s the pity…
Ruckus
At what point do we all start openly jeering and laughing whenever Brooks and Murdoch speak?
Too long ago to remember. However laughing and jeering seems to be too little too late.
Ripley
When their mouths open and words come out.
Thoughtful Black Co-Citizen
Heh. You reminded me of the big deal the GOP once made about Mark Foley’s involvement in the Center for Missing & Exploited Children.
scav
@kay:
Which is exactly why she got out her righteous sword of providing examples and treated Gordon Brown’s child’s medical status as NotW front page property. It was about the children.. I think you understand her unique charm and virtue.
Warren Terra
Not many people commenting in this thread. I guess they’re saving their fire for when Doug J posts the same story in about five hours.
(I kid, I kid).
beltane
The damage Murdoch caused to our society over the past three decades is too deep for our laughing and jeering to make any difference. While it is good that he will be disgraced in his lifetime, as opposed to posthumously, the evil that he wrought will last into the foreseeable future.
comrade scott's agenda of rage
We’re about a decade past openly jeering and laughing is appropriate.
Heads on pikes and placed outside the city gate as an example to others, *that’s* where we should be.
cleek
i didn’t know we’d stopped.
i’m always the last to learn these things.
GregB
The scum also rises.
Newcorp is a criminal enterprise and Fox News is one of their capos.
I knew that something like this would come out after Ms. Brooks made speaking up for the children one of her central defenses in the hearings.
What a pack of filth.
JPL
I’m not a lawyer but I would think that this development is very good news for the prosecution. I saw this earlier on the Guardian and was appalled by the techniques these people would use to print a newspaper. Fox News in honor of it’s sister organization should change it’s motto We Screw victims in a sick and unbalanced way or maybe How low can we go would be better.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
Mark my words, by the time this scandal is done we’ll find out that Murdoch was hiring psychics to wiretap the Ouija Boards used by grieving families to communicate with their loved ones from the Great Beyond.
Warren Terra
Rupert wishes that particular act could be laid at the feet of the NotW. IIRC, It was the supposedly more respectable News International paper, The Times Of London.
scav
@Warren Terra: Or could it have been The Mirror? Cause I’m fairly sure it was a Bekah special. Off to go look.
ETA: God I’m hopeless at papers. Looks to be The Sun
Very Reverend Crimson Fire of Compassion
Completely OT, and I apologize, but thought a heads-up might be in order. Apparently a Muslim U.S. soldier has been arrested outside Ft. Hood with bomb-making materials. Cue wingnut alarm siren in 3, 2, 1, . . .
Also, FYWP
Nemesis
Ummm…
Where is the denial?
And if the phone was provided by NotW, assuming they paid the bill, is it still hacking?
pseudonymous in nc
I think everybody’s waiting for something to break related to the disappearance of Madeleine McCann. At least, everybody now assumes that there’s something buried deep about the tabloids’ activities in relation to that particular sad story that’s set to emerge in a very ugly way.
Ruckus
I want to snark on the whole murdoch cult, I really do. But every time I think about it I get nauseous, you know with that bitter taste in the back of your mouth. I should try to laugh about it for the stress relief but I have lost the will to even chuckle in that general direction.
JPL
From the Guardian..
I’m can’t comprehend how it could be worse than what has been released so far.
Warren Terra
She’d be pretty foolish at this point to claim to be sufficiently aware of the wrongdoing to be able to issue a denial.
I guess my thinking it was The Times might have been of the wishful variety – I’d rather see maximal taint of all Murdoch Papers, especially those less obviously dealing in filth.
beltane
@JPL: Murdoch’s empire has committed acts which even exceed the what a tin foil-hatter with a vivid imagination could comprehend. This is what happens when you have a real-life James Bond villain with no James Bond to stop him. I wonder if the Murdoch mansion has secret torture chambers manned by lobotomised supermodels.
Ruckus
JPL
The only thing I comprehend is that we are probably only seeing the tip of the iceberg. The stuff that is easy to find, once someone started looking. If, and this is a big if, the deep digging commences, I expect to see some pretty crappy things. Both in England and the US. But I’m not holding my breath for anything much happening on this side of the pond.
JPL
The Guardian has a blog of today’s events dealing the mobsters. link
Villago Delenda Est
Because he’s a Ferengi asshole?
Ruckus
Villago Delenda Est.
You know of course that you are making the Ferengi look bad.
Martin
For those curious about how hard it is to hack phones:
scav
For just that little extra schaden with the general freuden, a nice temporal tidbit.
WereBear
Aren’t we supposed to be developing an alternate media in this country? This looks like a big, fat, juicy target to me.
Bulworth
I don’t know but Murdoch’s American Posse of teabag congressmen are trying to put the country into default.
beltane
Murdoch’s laid-off employees are being offered jobs in Siberia
guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jul/28/news-of-the-world-staff-offered-siberia-jobs There is something oddly fitting about that.
Culture of Truth
One does not necessarily contradict the other.
JGabriel
Kay @ Top:
When they no longer have any power. Brooks may have already reached that point, maybe not — it probably depends upon how much support News Corp continues to give her on the side, despite her ‘resignation’.
Murdoch, on the other hand, still has a long way to fall.
.
Yevgraf
Other news of the independence of boards, the fiduciary responsibility demonstrated by directors of companies worldwide and of corporate ethics everywhere:
news.yahoo.com/james-murdoch-faces-bskyb-board-doubts-role-115131407.html
We’re living in “Rollerball”. The only thing up for grabs is who gets to play the James Caan role.
nwithers
Snarky Answer: Karmic snap-back, it’s a terrible thing once it gets going. He really should watch out for falling pianos these days.
Serious Answer: He lived his life by Machiavelli’s “Let them hate, so long as they fear”, which works well as long as you can keep the fear going. EVERYBODY in power knew he was nine ways of dirty, but kept their mouth shut because he had a long history of surviving scandal and getting even. With the phone hacking scandal breaking out, many of those who are afraid of or have been done dirty by Murdoch (and those people are legion) figure that this is their best chance to take him down, therefore the pile-on.
Southern Beale
Wow, and here I just read that James Murdoch was named head of BSkyB. Wonder if he’ll have to resign …
Also curious that NOTW was actively lobbying for a law. Is that appropriate for a media organization? What other laws have they been lobbying for?
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
I predict that Doug’s post on this will be titled Why Does Everything Happen To Me.
Southern Beale
So our GOP governor really loves government to be small, like, really teeny tiny, which somehow explains why he signed a law making it a crime to disseminate “potentially distressing images” over the internet. Chew on that one, if you will.
Now a Tennessee illustrator has taken up the challenge, creating a pretty hilarious but yes potentially distressing image of the governor and his wife.
Ooops.
Nutella
@Southern Beale:
We certainly never see Fox lobbying for any particular laws or parties! That would be inappropriate, too. /snark
srv
OT, WTF. Remember the Hunt brothers trying to manipulate the silver market? Guess who is trying to manipulate the aluminum market?
Tony J
What’s now plain as day is that Murdoch’s newspapers were hacking – everyone – in the public eye, regardless of how they got there. It was just standard practice, approved from the top on down. They even hacked the phones of people like Mrs Payne, who was – more – than willing to work with them, just in case they ever needed something to hold over her.
Don’t want to throw your support behind our latest campaign to have all paedophiles painted lime-green? That’s a pity, because there’s a story doing the rounds that you’ve been drinking a lot. We wouldn’t – want – to run a story about you being an alcoholic, but this is a business, and at the end of the day we’ve got to have something to print. Which is it going to be?
That kind of thing has been the meat and drink of the British tabloid press for a couple of decades, the Murdoch papers just industrialised it and made it their business model. Blackmail on a national scale, with every celebrity, public figure and politician offered the same choice. Do you want to be part of our story, or do you want to – be – the story?
That’s the part of this that is really going to bring Murdoch down. To grasp at an analogy, Murdoch is like the teenage cool-kid whose Dad runs the local car lot and he’s allowed to ‘borrow’ the keys so he can take his friends for midnight drives through the bad parts of town, slowing down so they can hoot and holler at the deadbeats, then speeding away whenever they run after them. It’s all just fun.
Unfortunately, he’s been doing it for so long he got used to busting through red lights. This time he drove straight into a local girl who everyone liked, and suddenly none of his friends knew that it wasn’t really his car, and his Dad has no idea Junior was stealing the keys from his desk drawer. How could this have happened?
With the proviso that Junior is also an avid hacker who has footage of Dad paying the maid to bang him with a twelve inch dildo while Mom is at work, pictures of all his friends getting aggressively gay with the poor kid they pick on at recess, and taped conversations with Town bigwigs laughing at his rule breaking and agreeing to turn a blind eye to his reckless behaviour, because it only pisses off deadbeats, and who gives a fuck about them?
It’s going to take time for the dichotomy between what -should – happen and what the people with the power to make things happen dare to do to work itself out. Outrage and frustration, loudly expressed, will only speed that up.
Sly
@JPL:
If it goes all the way back to Diana, who IIRC had some fears about her phones being tampered with, that’ll be pretty shocking. I know of one incident where some freelance P.I.s recorded one of her conversations and try to sell it to The Sun, but the paper refused out of fears of being sued.
What little public information there is about the involvement of the royal family is basically limited to Princes Harry and William and some of their aides, and there’s some speculation that they hacked Prince William’s wife’s phone as well before they were married. Listening in on a few voicemails of two princes and one of the prince’s fiancee is one thing; waging more than a decade-long campaign of espionage against the entire royal family is quite another. Especially if it involves Diana, who’s like friggin’ Jesus to a lot of English folks.
Other than that, it could possibly be in reference to more high-profile crime victims.
eemom
This exchange between the Guardian and “No 10” about the vetting of Andy Coulson is pretty amusing.
I love how Cameron keeps saying there’s no evidence that Coulson did anything bad while he worked for him. It is such an exquisitely lame defense. Yes, I hired a lying thug, but he magically transformed into a Boy Scout while he worked for me.
Yevgraf
Resign? Hahahahaha. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Fuck, he won’t have to resign. He’ll get a notice, some pats on the back, and various UK MsOTU will offer up their daughters to have affairs with him.
Pound for pound, the UK money class is just as venal and shortsighted (if not moreso) than the US money class.
PeakVT
@beltane: That’s funny. It’s also Damn stupid. It’s like NewsCorp is just daring former NotW staff to talk.
Danny
OT: Christie is pretty much dead for the 2012 speculations I suspect..
eemom
I’ve read that his newspapers were publishing stories that drove their subjects — including young teenagers — to suicide going back to the early 1960s.
arguingwithsignposts
@Yevgraf: I was informed on an earlier thread that such behavior is entirely rational when the objective is solely to increase profits.
eemom
@ Danny
Too bad he’s not dead, period. That’s what I was hoping for when I heard he’d been hospitalized. I am unabashedly evil that way.
Litlebritdifrnt
“Heads on pikes and placed outside the city gate as an example to others, that’s where we should be.”
Ahhhh the good old days.
kay
“Today is still more humble”.
“Humbled I am, today, again”
They should just keep calling him back up to hearing. Just put it on the calendar at three month intervals.
Omnes Omnibus
@ kay:
Uriah Heep?
arguingwithsignposts
@eemom: I particularly liked Cameron’s little “hindsight” gambit when before Parliament the other day.
How can someone not take a job that is not offered?
Tony J
kay,
Every six months. We must honour the ‘Tache.
slag
With all this going on, I’m starting to wonder if journalism is coming back in vogue.
Has anyone else been noticing the kick-ass investigations This American Life has been doing lately? I have no idea how long this has been going on since I’ve only recently started listening to it again, but as of now, Ira Glass has become the Rupert Murdoch of media power in my bizarro dream world.
Dennis SGMM
Good thing that the UK’s seemingly inexhaustible appetite for tabloid crap in no way provided the motivation or the cash for NotW’s acts.
Yevgraf
arguingwithsignposts
My retort to that argument is this:
Nonsense. There is also an inherent value to long term stability, and corporate officers who make rash, poorly considered decisions that instantly increase the short term profit nonetheless fail to demonstrate the responsibility necessary to implement long range goals which favor stability and prudence, and thereby can endanger the enterprise.
In the old days, we’d talk about moral hazard. Apparently, that conservative doctrine doesn’t matter anymore, given the extent to which we’re favoring hazardous, risky standards on investments,derivatives and fiduciary decisions – all courtesy of Our Conservative Justices on SCOTUS.
arguingwithsignposts
@slag: TAL has been perennially good, they just haven’t been noticed for it. It was really when they did the Giant Pool of Money that people started paying attention. That was in 2008. The problem, from my perspective, is that they do too much other quirky stuff to be taken seriously by the village people. I don’t mean that as a knock. It just is what it is. Their recent report on the Pennsylvania Marcellus Shale shakedown was just brutal. But it wasn’t anything new.
ETA: While they do sometimes get into the “Both Sides Do It” frame, I’d also encourage you to check out On the Media. They’ve done some good stuff on Rupertdammerung as well.
Danny
@eemom
“God bless his heart”?
kay
‘umbled
Nutella
@Sly:
Speaking of Diana, was the source for her most embarrassing phone messages (about Squidgy) and Charles’ (about Tampax) ever identified?
tmpg
Way to conflate being a homosexual with being a pedo.
Martin
Also OT. As of this morning, available cash:
Apple: $79.356 (est)
US government: $73.768B
Microsoft: $64.443B (est)
Bill Gates net worth: $54B
kay
I listened to their bedbug piece in the car. I will never forget that woman they interviewed. Her absolute despair when she’s talking to the interviewer about how she thinks she has this problem licked and finds new evidence of a re-infestation in the seams of the couch. I was pulling for her.
scav
@Sly: [RankSpeculation] Or more or less active interference into law-making or the operation of the court system? NI is a corporation with loads of other activities that could benefit. There are certainly hints of more business oriented skull-duggery on this side of the Atlantic so why not over there? I don’t think even they would interfere in matches, but that just might cause even more of a row that anything to do with Ste. Di. Entrapment could get them into some very dodgy areas especially if they go the bunga bunga route. We’ve also not plumbed in detail the spectrum of what they were hacking/oozing their little fingers into. Loads of unexplored shock-value stuff there if managed on a near-industrial level say, and involved big companies or institutions. [/RankSpeculation] Speculation is easy.
Dennis SGMM
@Martin:
The Republicans won’t be long in demanding that we sell the naming rights for the nation to Apple by way of raising a bit of the ready. iAmerica: what could go wrong?
slag
@arguingwithsignposts: Yeah, I remember the money one. Not bad at all. But for some reason, the Pennsylvania story stood out to me as being better than all of the TALs I’ve heard in the past. And this week’s patent story was equally amazing. Right now, my only problem with This American Life is that it makes me want to give away money every time I listen to it. The kleptocracy that our corporate culture has become angers me beyond words.
I’ve heard On the Media and have appreciated many aspects of it. But I agree that their “Both Sides Do It” frame sometimes gets in the way of what they’re really trying to do there. Or, at least, that’s how it’s been with the shows I’ve listened to. But per your recommendation, I will give it another go! Thanks!
eemom
but that is a chicken and egg sort of thing, isn’t it? You couldn’t have an inexhaustible appetite for junk Mexican food if there weren’t any Taco Bells. Or something.
arguingwithsignposts
@slag: For another recent TAL episode that’s good, check out The Psychopath Test, or the one about the head of maintenance in a school district in New York, or the one about the California education reform guy who was a fraud, or the one about the health insurance industry: “Other People’s Money.”
I wish there were more programs like them.
And if you aren’t subscribed to the podcast, you should do so. The episodes are free if you’re subscribed. If not, you have to stream them after the first week. I have them archived on my iPod.
Thoughtful Black Co-Citizen
It looks like you’re trying to be a troll, would you like help?
[]Yes, please help me be a troll.
[]No, I do not need help being a troll.
Xenocrates
@40. nwithers: Just to be pedantic, “Let them hate me, so long as they are afraid” was more often attributed to Caligula, not Machiavelli. Otherwise, spot on. Here’s a link, though Wikipedia must always be taken with a grain of salt: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Latin_phrases_(O)
Martin
@Dennis SGMM: Doesn’t really roll off the tongue with the double vowel there. I think ‘iNation’, with the generic term is more suitable. The upshot is we would likely lose our fairly horrible national anthem in favor of something from Bob Dylan.
Mnemosyne
Given that Foley was specifically hitting on underage boys, is your argument that it’s okay for adults to try and bang teenagers as long as they’re gay?
JPL
News International has released a statement..
Martin
@Mnemosyne:
Maybe TMPG is the new acronym for NAMBLA.
nwithers
@76 thanks for the correction, Machiavelli has gone up a notch in my estimation due to that.
slag
@arguingwithsignposts: Yeah. The Psychopath Test one was interesting. And I thought it was funny that they were all worried they’d end up being psychopaths. Mostly because I’d probably be worried too. And that head of maintenance guy you mentioned was friggin’ unbelievable! Hard to believe he got away with that for so long.
Now that you mention these stories, I’m trying to figure out what I’ve liked best about the last couple I’ve heard and how exactly they compare to previous TALs I’ve heard. Since I haven’t heard Other People’s Money, I don’t think, maybe I’ll start there in my analysis.
Good call on the podcast. I try to download them to my Droid, but I think my RSS feeder there blows. Will have to dig in and resolve that problem so I can get my TAL on. I loves me some good radio! Especially at times when I’ve got a lot of other things going on that don’t require too much intellectual attention. Then, I put on TAL or RadioLab or one of the others (somebody here recommended the How Stuff Works shows, which are good!) and get to think about stuff while I’m performing other more menial tasks. Radio…great invention!
arguingwithsignposts
@JPL:
Whew. I’m relieved. Aren’t you?
arguingwithsignposts
@slag: One more and I swear I’ll stop. You should check out American RadioWorks. It’s put out by the same people who put out Marketplace (American Public Media), but it doesn’t suck.
They did an entire series on the economy, including looking at the Great Depression at length, last year. And they have recently done some podcasts on race relations and education. Fascinating stuff. Check out their archives. I believe all of their back episode podcasts are available – at least via iTunes – so you can load up.
I usually listen to podcast documentary stuff when I’m on long drives to keep my brain engaged and not yelling at the radio.
Dennis SGMM
@Martin:
That alone almost makes it acceptable.
Edit: iNation sounds way better.
arguingwithsignposts
@Dennis SGMM: Unfortunately, we’d have no such luck. Probably they would want Lee Greenwood or Let the Eagle Soar.
ETA: the teatards, that is.
Dennis SGMM
@arguingwithsignposts:
“We will blame low-level employees for those things in which we’ve been caught out. We will make certain that the rest never see the light of day.”
Martin
@arguingwithsignposts:
Well, I’m assuming that if Apple is buying naming rights, that they’d also scoop up national anthem rights and probably flag design rights as well – it’s kind of their style to keep everything in balance. I’m thinking the stars and stripes would be right out, replaced with a square black flag with a single white star in the center.
scav
@Martin: It’s apple. Song would be the iMine.
Dennis SGMM
@Martin:
Or a nice green flag with a big, gold dollar sign.
Roger Moore
@Xenocrates
eemom
Nice work, and a fine example of the old adage, if the tubez send you trolls make trollerade.
Dennis SGMM
@Martin:
After a bit of thought I am all in favor of becoming iNation. Think of the jobs that will be created as we rush to build sufficient coffee shops (With Wi-Fi, natch) to enable each and every iCitizen to hang out and impress passers-by with their iPhone, iPad, and their iBarfbag dispensers.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@Danny:
From that link:
I think Christie might want to downplay that ‘accomplishment’. I say ‘accomplishment’ as there is no possible connection between law enforcement work and getting Bush II elected that warrants state-level merit.
Whoever came up with that ‘award’ had their wingnut cranked a bit tight that day.
Comrade Kevin
From Private Eye magazine:
priscianusjr
@nwithers
toledored
you rock kay