The Motley Moose - Recommended

FOTHOM XLII: Boom! With one Data Dump the Hackgate Scandal goes Global ACTION DIARY

Peter Jukes — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 21:33:16 GMT

Tom Watson, the MP who led the charge against Murdoch's UK empire, is asking for help

On the eve of Lowell Bergman's excellent PBS documentary (tonight 10 PM PBS) on the original Hackgate allegations that closed News of the World, we have a data dump which actually takes the hacking allegations to a whole new level: to a global News Corp security group which appears to have been behind pay-TV hacking across the world.

Last Night's BBC1 Panorama Documentary

Through a series of reconstructions, hidden surveillance cameras and interviews with the key players, Panorama alleges that the piracy which crippled ITV Digital was a deliberate attack by the News Corp. subsidiary NDS, which produces about 75 per cent of the encryption software that protects access to pay-tv. The programme centres on an exclusive interview with Lee Gibling, the man behind The House of Ill Compute website which was, until it was closed down in 2001, the main source of codes and software for manufacturing pirate access cards.

Gibling claims he was approached by Ray Adams, head of NDS security, when he was caught hacking BSkyB cards. Rather than threatening prosecution, Gibling alleges that Adams offered him employment instead, and paid him over $100,000 a year to expand the site and distribute software and codes that could breach the encryption of BSkyB's rivals. Adams vehemently denies these allegations, and maintains he hired Gibling to provide anti-piracy advice.

Panorama interviewed another computer hacker, Oliver Koemmerling, who was recruited by Adams to work at NDS' security facility in Israel where managed to crack the rival encryption software devised by Canal Plus, which was at the heart of ITV Digital's anti piracy protection. The time codes of the code that soon appeared on The House of Ill Compute website suggest that Koemmerling's crack had been passed on. But by who? Gibling maintains that Adams passed the code on to him to encourage piracy of ITV Digital cards. Adams vehemently denies this, although Panorama produced internal company documentation which appeared to support the allegations that the code came direct from NDS.

ITV Digital collapsed in 2002, losing $2 billion for its investors and 1,500 jobs in the UK. In the BBC documentary, Simon Dore, former Chief Technical Officer ITV Digital said: "The business had its issues aside from the piracy, no question, but those issues I believe would have been solvable by careful and good management. The real killer the hole beneath the water line was the piracy. We couldn't recover from that".

NDS has been a target of police investigations since 1996 when an Israeli tax raid on their Jerusalem HQ reportedly uncovered evidence of board members bugging their rival's phones, as documented in Neil Chenoweth's book Virtual Murdoch. In 2002 NDS was sued in California for $1 billion by rival smart-card manufacturer Nagrastar and its parent company Echostar for hacking their access cards, and by Canal Plus for passing on these details to pirates.

Eventually Canal Plus exited the case when its Italian arm was bought by News Corp. to create Sky Italia. In 2008 a Californian jury found in Echostar's favor over the piracy allegations but awarded only nominal damages. The subsequent appeal process went all the way up to the Supreme Court, which last week upheld the allegations that NDS had violated antipiracy laws but still refused to reverse a previous ruling that Echostar should cover the $19 million legal costs incurred by NDS. The executive in charge of Sky Italia, Tom Mockridge, replaced Rebekah Brooks as chief executive of News International when she resigned over the phone-hacking scandal in Britain this summer. Last September Financial Review reported NDS was being put up for sale to "distance" it from News Corp. Ten days ago-a few days after the planned first broadcast of the Panorama documentary-NDS was sold to Cisco for $5 billion.

The Killer Blow

More revelations this morning seem to suggest these pay-TV hacking allegations are not just limited to the UK. Though neither NDS nor News Corp. are named in the case, there is still an ongoing trial in Syracuse, Sicily over piracy and access card hacking. The defendant, Pasquale Caiazza, who is accused of decrypting the cards of Nagrastar Italy, has been linked with a former NDS consultant Davide Rossi through Italian police surveillance tapes. According to The Independent this morning the newspaper claims to have documents in its possession which prove Pasquale Caiazza was receiving regular payments from a HSBC bank account controlled by News International.

But now we know the source of the Panorama and Independent documentation, a massive data dump of Ray Adam's emails which Neil Chernoweth at the Australia's Financial Review has managed to secure after a four year long investigation:

Download a sample of the 14,400 emails held by former NDS European chief for Operational Security Ray Adams
Explore a sample of the 14,400 emails on DocumentCloud
A secret unit within Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation promoted a wave of high-tech piracy in Australia that damaged Austar, Optus and Foxtel at a time when News was moving to take control of the Australian pay TV industry.
The piracy cost the Australian pay TV companies up to $50 million a year and helped cripple the finances of Austar, which Foxtel is now in the process of acquiring.
A four-year investigation by The Australian Financial Review has revealed a global trail of corporate dirty tricks directed against competitors by a secretive group of former policemen and intelligence officers within News Corp known as Operational Security.

So calling to action all Mooq who want to see the scale of potential piracy and anti-competitive practices by News Corp across the world. I've a feeling this could be huge, and do for News Corp what Milly Dowler did for News International.

On this, and the HCL Data Pool 3 emails that form the basis of the Met's three investigations into News International, Murdoch's top down hierarchical approach has failed to understand both the digital domain and new peer to peer media, and how small local events have network effects. News of the World was killed by online campaigns against the advertisers. The very hackers it is alleged NDS used to take down rivals could well have provided the data to turn the tables

It's new media versus old: and we know who will win this one

A Common Theme as Limbaugh, Murdoch and Beck Self Destruct

Peter Jukes — Sat, 10 Mar 2012 00:37:25 GMT

For anyone following the #hackgate FOTHOM diaries, you'll know that that the slow motion crash of Murdoch's UK Empire is still developing. But it wasn't until Rush Limbaugh's recent implosion that I began to think this isn't just about News Corp, even though it is the world's 3rd biggest media group and run as a one-man-band. It was in Meteor Blade's Nopology diary early this week, that this thought came to me:

I think there's a connection... (40+ / 0-)
between the slow rejection in the UK of the tabloid style of reasoning (basically trollery and personal insult) and the sudden turning on Rush L.
The British Tabloids and the American Shock Jocks basically thrived on the backlash against the civil liberties victories of the 60s: legislation against racial discrimination, homophobia, the rise of women in the work place and reproductive rights. For 40 years they thrived on right wing white male resentment. They had nothing to offer but trollery because they sought to to interfere with communication about race, gender and sexuality, but without an alternative agenda or real ideology, except that of opposition, reduction ad absurdum (looney left fictions about banning nursery rhymes etc) and the shock value of mockery.
This was never anything but a reactionary tribute to all the victories of the 60s. The candidacy of Sarah Palin was the ne plus ultra of this political style. Rebarbative, provocative, posited on antagonism alone, it never could offer much more than a macho guffaw and muttering of unfocused dissent.
Forty years on, the people who find this stuff amusing are diminishing. Shock Jocks have run out of positions. They can only flame out or die down.
The other connection is the rise of social media and blogs like DKos. They can organise dissent. Avaaz and 38degrees focused on the advertisers during the News of the World scandal, and when the public summoned enough outrage through twitter and email, the advertisers withdrew from the paper. That's what killed News of the World.
Thanks to new media, we really aren't passive consumers anymore, but can communicate directly with those to attempt to appease us. I guess this is what has happened to Limbaugh.

Actually this Kos comment was just a combination of two comments I'd made on the Moose in Strummerson's Diary - so that just shows where my real thinking happens.
Well, great minds and all that, but there's much more on this in a great new article by Media Matters: The Self-Destruction Of Limbaugh, Murdoch and Beck

What's fascinating about their startling falls from grace is that each one represented a clear case of self-destruction. Limbaugh hand Murdoch and Beck weren't cut down by their political foes or by partisan dirty tricks. They were cut down by their own moral and ethical failings.
Meaning, Limbaugh's opponents didn't make him call Sandra Fluke a slut and a prostitute, and liberal didn't force him to spend days smearing the women in the most humiliating ways possible, painting her as a greedy nymphomaniac whose parents ought to be deeply ashamed. Nobody egged him on into doing that. In fact, after the initial "slut" and "prostitute" insults, liberals demanded Limbaugh stop using that kind of ugly language. If anything, Limbaugh's foes tried to save him from himself. (By contrast, many of his partisan fans immediately cheered his Fluke attacks.)
The same is true with Beck and Murdoch. Who on the left would have even dreamt up a plot to somehow to get Beck call the president a racist, or to later ramble for weeks about how pro-democracy demonstrators in Egypt represented a spear tip to a looming American left-backed Caliphate uprising in the Middle East. Who even thinks like that, other than Beck?
As for Murdoch, he's cultivated a culture of corruption that's so firmly entrenched that one of his newspaper executives allegedly tried to secure a vote in parliament from a conservative politician in exchange for offering favorable coverage in a Murdoch newspaper. Again, who does that? Who works for a newspaper and doubles as a vote whip for a political party?
All of this behavior is reprehensible and of course falls completely outside the purview of journalism, as even loosely defined to include cable and AM talk shows. For the conservative media, there are no checks in place anymore. Instead, all the introspection has been eliminated and replaced by robotic, partisan defense regardless of the circumstances.

The only part where I disagree is that - while all three are guilty of hubris and over-reach - that was always true in their careers. As I've discovered while writing my book (see my sig) Murdoch has been involved in the dark arts of intelligencing and intrigue since the 60s - his father since World War I. I bet Beck has always spouted gibberish. And Limbaugh has said offensive things ever since I was unfortunate enough to hear of his existence.

What has changed to my mind is the interactive nature of new media: the fact we can all publish on blogs, can drill down through data, and redistribute information peer to peer. This is making the shock jocks and tabloid merchants look old, slow moving and dinosaur like. Their lies can be countered. Our outrage can finally be heard. It's no longer a monologue of the mainstream media, but a dialogue across many platforms.

(On that score, my diary earlier today about A Chancellor, a Dominatrix, Cocaine and a Spoiler is getting quite a bit of traction on the #Leveson strand. Expect to hear more).

FALL OF THE HOUSE OF MURDOCH IX: Showdown in Parliament: the Play and Players: RM No responsibility

Peter Jukes — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 22:51:20 GMT

This is an abbreviated post-festum version of My DKos diary which - because the sessions overran for two hours - I had to abandon before it Rebakah Brooks' testimony. Much played out as I expected it - as you will see in the diary below.

Because testimony wasn't under oath, because MPs aren't trained investigators (like the forthcoming Commissions of Enquiry), and because Rupert, James and Rebekah could hide under the cloak of 'ongoing investigations, it was always bound to be a damp squib investigatively.

However it was full of drama - and even pie!

An annoying and distracting moment, like most pie fights I've seen. Fun in some way - but completely counterproductive. The real drama came from the Wizard of Oz moment.

Whether it was calculated or not (I really doubt it was calculated) the curtain was pulled on the wizard, and what we saw was a rather bumbling, angry, pompous old man used to being powerful, but when it comes to the question "Do you bear any responsibility" the answer was "Nope."

But this is important. Merely tearing the veil on the secret unaccountable power of the Murdochs is a revelation in itself. Murdoch never governed by being loved, by being charming, or by being intellectually respected: he swayed his secret powers by fear: fear of being exposed by him, salaciously, financially, politically, personally.

Now that fear has gone, the emperor has no clothes.

Full diary beyond the flip - I think, in the main, I predicted well. But Moosers, tell me what you think

Drama in the House?

So it's finally here: the day I never thought I would see. Around 2.30 BST Rupert and James Murdoch will appear before the Culture Select Committee to answer questions on the hacking and corruption charges now facing Newscorp, followed by Rebekah Brooks an hour later. Live House of Commons Coverage here and apparently this will also be covered by C-Span.

As everyone is warning, it might be disappointing theatrically: Brooks and the Murdoch's will both be heavily lawyered up and PR air brushed; expect no killer blows or sudden confessions; MPs are not trained examiners either. As Tom Watson, the courageous MP who along with Chris Bryant doggedly pursued the hacking allegations despite being ignored, ridiculed and then threatened has said:

"There is not going to be a killer blow on Tuesday. Expectations are way too high," [Watson] told the Guardian. "We will get the symbolism of parliament holding these people to account for the first time. We will look for facts, and not just offer rhetoric. This story has been like slicing a cucumber, you just get a little bit closer to the truth each time."

Chris Bryant himself has just reiterated on the BBC:

The theatre of [today's appearance] is irrelevant. In the end we've got to get to the bottom of what is a very murky pool. And I tell you Rebekah Brooks was right. We're only half way into that pool at the moment.

However, earlier there is another committee - the Home Affairs committee - could be just as relevant as the two senior policemen who resigned in the last two days are to be quizzed by MPs. There actually could be more fireworks here, since Sir Paul Stephenson has already lobbed a passing shot at the Prime Minister David Cameron over his associations with News International. Live Parliamentary coverage here.

Holding Unaccountable Power to Account: It's A Wonderful Life

I actually find this quite moving, and a Panorama documentary about Murdoch actually bought me to tears last night. This will always be a significant day, because after 42 years, the man who was rumoured to be, and now revealed to be, the most powerful man in Britain is finally having to face its elected representatives.

Murdoch faced a closed, untelevised session of a Lords Committee years ago, which moved to New York for his benefit: but this is completely different occasion. Having suffered, like all of us, four decades of Murdoch's tabloid menace and broadsheet right wing ideology, MPs who previous ran scared of Murdoch (because he could make or break their careers) are now going to face him without fear or favour. As Charlie Brooker put it hilariously, it's like Losing God:

A few weeks ago, Murdoch, or rather the more savage tendencies of the press as a whole, represented God. Fear of God isn't always a bad thing in itself, if it keeps you on the straight and narrow - but politicians behaved like medieval villagers who didn't just believe in Him, but quaked at the mere suggestion of a glimmer of a whisper of His name. You must never anger God. God wields immense power. God can hear everything you say. You must worship God, and please Him, or He will destroy you. For God controls the sun, which may shine upon you, or singe you to a Kinnock. Soon he will control the entire sky....
But then suddenly everything changed. The revelations over the hacking of grieving relatives' voicemails were the equivalent of a tornado ripping through an orphanage. "What kind of God would allow such a thing?" asked the villagers, wading through the aftermath. And they started to suspect He didn't exist.
They thought about the hours and days they'd spent in church, saying their prayers, rocking on their knees, whipping themselves with knotted rope, or flying round the world to address one of God's conferences, and they grew angry.
One by one they stood up to decry God. "He's a sod," said one. "No he's not, he's a monster," said another. Eventually they formed the consensus view that he was a sodmonster.

For my generation (born in the 60s) not only has Murdoch dominated our entire adult lives in terms of news, but his model of the media has disfigured politics. Of my college friends in the 80s, many got siphoned off into the financial services to earn lots of money in entirely unproductive asset bubbles. But a large number also got sucked into journalism, PR, media. I know my journalists - the mother of my children was a very senior BBC News executive - and while all of them were excellent, clever, committed people: I knew something was wrong.

I'd often ask TV presenters or news investigators why, given their passions and interest in politics, they didn't go into politics themselves, and become and MP. Generally, the answers were awkward. They couldn't say it, but they knew they would earn less money, and the route - being selected and then elected by the people - would be long, arduous and unpredictable. But one senior figure was bluntly honest with me:

Why would I become an MP, Peter. They have no power.

So that's part of the problem here, a system dysfunction that goes beyond the Newscorp empire to the wider world of the blogosphere. Pundits and opinion writers make much more noise, more money, and an easier route to political influence than the normal political careers. I have no problem with it as such - except this one anomaly. Politicians are ultimately accountable for their power - at the ballot box. As former Home Secretary Jack Straw has just said

Parliament should be the cockpit of the nation and not the newspapers

Today it looks like it will be.

So let's celebrate today whatever happens. The people's representatives are finally confronting the unaccountable 'state within a state' which Newscorp is. Whatever the outcome, I can't help think of It's A Wonderful Life and the way George Bailey stands up to Henry F Potter. The confrontation isn't direct. Indeed, at the end of the movie, the grasping monopolist - who would have turned Baileys hometown into a sleazy tabloid Pottterville - basically just disappears. The collective goodness of the community, which saves Bailey, makes Potter irrelevant. He keeps his riches. There is no denouement. Potter just fades away into moral oblivion and narrative insignificance.

This is how I guess the Murdochs will eventually depart, not with a bang but a whimper.

Ok a brief background on some of the dramatis personae:

Rebekah Brooks (nee Wade)

This is the one major figure in today's showdown who I have met personally. I recounted that anecdote a few days back on Motley Moose.

It was at the Hay on Wye book festival, attended by many celebrities including Clinton and Gore, where I met her one night in 2006. Everyone was very drunk at this late night venue, but we started dancing and chatting, and kind of hung out in a corner, occasionally attended to by one of her quite merciless suspicious minions.
But the thing about Rebekah was that she displayed quite a ineluctable mix of flirtation, vulnerability and intimacy. She didn't know me from Adam, but she was soon telling me all about the split from her husband. She also felt people 'hated' her at the very liberal leftie event that book festival actually is. But her one moment of passion - though we kind of had our arms around each other shoulders for some unfathomable reason (i.e. alcohol) - was when she told me how, after her night in prison, Rupert was waiting for her in the car outside.
The evening went on - it was already around midnight when it started - and we carried on chatting for a while. I think we exchanged numbers, I can't frankly remember much else, except that impression of vulnerability and openness.
But one passing moment made me realise. Rebekah was alerted by her merciless minion that a photographer had been taking snaps of us together. Rebekah said she was worried for my sake ("Ross will kill you") and walked over to the photographer and chatted with him. A minute later she returned with a smile and the photographers whole memory card. I asked her what she said, and she just smiled.
It was only the next morning, less befuddled, that I worked it out: she either said to the photographer "Give me that card and you'll never work again/have to worry about work again." Indeed, such was the monopoly power she and Rupert exerted on Fleet Street, the two statements are almost the same.
So there you have it. As many have pointed out here, Murdoch has already sacrificed the world's biggest English language newspaper to 'protect Rebekah': he may even give up the whole of News International for his quasi daughter (if the family and shareholders will let him). Maybe this vignette gives an insight why...

But though a stellar networker, there are now multifarious pieces on what a useless editor she was. According to Paul McMullan, she knew little about writing a story, was distant and vindictive with staff. She could also be merciless against opponent. Chris Bryant MP was one of her early targets when he spoke up against The News of the World, and her paper published photos of him in his underwear. Several years later, when they passed each other one evening Rebekah noted the time and suggested Bryant should be "out on Clapham Common" - a notorious cruising spot. Her husband at the time, the actor Ross Kemp, retorted

Shut up you homophobic cow.

James Murdoch

I have no personal anecdotes to add about James, and there are plenty of profiles in the papers about the family dynamics in the Murdoch dynasty. Two things however - he's next in the frame for a possible arrest for 'perverting the course of justice' and is the 'smoking gun' that leads directly from the corruption and law breaking at News International (the UK papers) to the heart of Newscorp in the US.

The second thing is his intellectual arrogance. I was first alerted to his right wing libertarian agenda two years ago, when he gave a stunningly pompous lecture about how the BBC needed to be shrunk, and that Newscorp - that arch monopoly - would bring competition and innovation to the 'market in news'. As I called him in a previous diary, James is the Rand Paul of the Media:

Unlike his father (who was merely the son of a millionaire) and was an outsider with an Australian twang when he came to the snooty UK newspaper scene of the late 60s, James Murdoch is the son of a billionaire, speaks with a horrible Blair-like transatlantic twinge, and has the smug permatan look of the new apparatchiks - the MBA/McKinsey/Davos set who run the world without roots in any particular county.

The following year I met NI journalists and Tory apparatchiks at a conference who repeated this libertarian tosh almost word for word: here's some of the hyperbole from his Edinburgh Speech:

For hundreds of years people have fought for the right to publish what they think. Yet today the threat to independent news provision is serious and imminent....
Sixty years ago George Orwell published 1984. Its message is more relevant now than ever. As Orwell foretold, to let the state enjoy a near-monopoly of information is to guarantee manipulation and distortion.
We must have a plurality of voices and they must be independent. Yet we have a system in which state-sponsored media - the BBC in particular - grow ever more dominant. That process has to be reversed.

His idea of 'reversing the process' was getting the Tories he supported to reduce the BBC (they did that in 2010) and to push for a cross platform monopoly with 100% ownership of our monopoly pay per view TV, and bigger than the BBC in terms of revenue, BSkyB. And this from a company which already owned 37 per cent of the UK press.

Plurality and independence? James is clearly a great dissembler. We don't know yet whether or how he's deceived Parliament. He may be yet be proved to be a liar, or maybe even something worse - maybe he has even deceived himself.

But let's remember how close James was to both Rebekah and David Cameron: and let's not forget: until this time last week the BSkyB deal was going to go through.

Rupert Murdoch

What can I say here that has not already been said? Ever since his arrival here in 1969 to take over the News of the World and The Sun, and then his courtship of Thatcher to allow him both to break competition rules and take over The Times stable of papers and then base Sky offshore, he's been the bane of my life. I had a tough adolescence, with years spent on a council estate thanks to family bankruptcy, and one of the things that keep me going through my teens - a shard of cultural light which saved me from the brink and gave me a taste for writing and culture was The Sunday Times, then edited by Tina Brown's husband Harold Evans. It was an amazing paper, full of investigative journalism, great columnists, great accessible coverage of theatre, books, TV reviews. When Murdoch took it over it became of pompous unreadable mass of supplements, with no clear editorial direction: right wing politics and ignorant cultural snootiness. (Though I think I did appear in it in 1983 thanks to the surviving theatre critic, James Fenton, reviewing one of my plays).

His influence carried on spreading throughout my life, both politically and professionally. His newspaper standards brought down ALL the broadsheet papers. He constantly attacked the BBC, which often cavilled under his blows. And of course, after the deal done with Thatcher, he constantly promoted an anti Europe, laissez faire, Thatcherite agenda. One of my heroes, the dramatist Dennis Potter, called the cancer that would kill him 'Rupert'.

I briefly worked for one of his subsidiaries in the 90s, and though all his organisations are staffed with excellent people, ideologically and managerially, this was a culture of control, power, hierarchy, dynasty and monopoly: despite all of Rupert's avowed belief in 'free markets' and 'meritocracy' and his pretence that he is anti-elites.
Michael Wolff, Murdoch's biographer, and someone who has spent over 60 hours with the man, is still the best independent source of insight into Rupert's character. What he says about today's select committee appearance could be a useful guide to what might happen today:

He will handle it very poorly. This is something that Rupert doesn't know how to do, has never done, has resisted doing and frankly can't do. Rupert is - on top of everything else - an incredibly shy man and he is also a very inarticulate man and he is also a man who, I don't think he is going to know what to do with the fact that he will be confronted here. It is very likely he will get angry. He will say things that people should not say in public. I know they are drilling him and rehearsing him over and over and over and over again and they are saying to him 'do not say anything, just answer the questions in as few words as possible'. Whether he absorbs that lesson or not...actually I can't imagine that he will or that he has.

FALL OF HOUSE OF MURDOCH VI: Elisabeth actually said "James and Rebekah F*cked the Company"

Peter Jukes — Sat, 16 Jul 2011 20:22:14 GMT

After Bloody Friday, and the late but inevitable resignation of Rupert Murdoch's two closest personal lieutenants - Rebekah Brooks and Les Hinton - News Corp are trying to run damage limitation: apologies in the British Press, denials of hacking 9/11 victims.

But despite the best attempts of their PR firm Edelman, this will not wash, and there's already enough known and proven in the public domain to turn our attention to the Newscorp Executive who took over from Hinton as head of Newscorps European arm, and who supervised the payout of millions in hush-money to the victims of phone hacking two years ago: a certain man by the name of James Murdoch.

As Michael Wolff - the Vanity Fair writer and biographer who knows the ins-and-outs of the family court - tweets:

Wolff also corrects the rumours yesterday that Elisabeth Murdoch said "Rebekah fucked the company" at a book party last Sunday. No, she didn't say precisely that. James' sister said:

"James and Rebekah fucked the Company"

So here's a little more about the crass libertarian ideology that has driven her brother - and potentially the company - over the cliff.

James Murdoch: The Rand Paul of Media

Unlike his father (who was merely the son of a millionaire) and was an outsider with an Australian twang when he came to the snooty UK newspaper scene of the late 60s, James Murdoch is the son of a billionaire, speaks with a horrible Blair-like transatlantic twinge, and has the smug permatan look of the new apparatchiks - the MBA/Kinsey/Davos set who run the world without roots in any particular county.

But two years ago he announced his plan to destroy my country's freedom of speech. His father had already nearly destroyed our press after 30 years of downmarket sleaze and broadsheet censorship. But our broadcasting media were still relatively intact. In his now infamous McTaggart Memorial Lecture at the Edinburgh Film and TV Festival 2009, James Murdoch set out his vision.

A radical reorientation of the regulatory approach is necessary if dynamism and innovation is going to be central to the UK media industry.

Er... Sounds boring I know. But after the speech writer had padded out the jargon and thrown in some obtuse and irrelevant quotations of Darwin, Murdoch Jnr announced his real target - the global and domestic brand of the BBC.

There is a land-grab, pure and simple, going on - and in the interests of a free society it should be sternly resisted. The land grab is spear-headed by the BBC. The scale and scope of its current activities and future ambitions is chilling.

Yes, chilling. You read it right. This is the Newscorp executive who already owns 40 percent of the Print Journalism in the UK, basically paving the way for his now abandoned takeover of BSkyB - larger than the BBC in terms of revenue. Of course, he couldn't just say 'our paywalls aren't working so take BBC online down'. No, like US libertarians, he had to dress his naked self interest in the rhetoric of 'freedom':

There is a word for this.
It's not one that the system likes to hear, but let's be honest: the right word is authoritarianism and it has always been part of our system....
Dumping free, state-sponsored news on the market makes it incredibly difficult for journalism to flourish on the internet....
We seem to have decided as a society to let independence and plurality wither. To let the BBC throttle the news market and then get bigger to compensate.

Plurality and Independence? So great to hear these words from you James, you arch monopolist. But surely you can't get any more hyperbolical....

For hundreds of years people have fought for the right to publish what they think.
Yet today the threat to independent news provision is serious and imminent....
Sixty years ago George Orwell published 1984. Its message is more relevant now than ever.

Please... please... don't bring one of my heroes, the democratic socialist George Orwell to support your fatuous defence of privilege, your dad's cosying up to the Chinese Government. Please don't go there...

As Orwell foretold, to let the state enjoy a near-monopoly of information is to guarantee manipulation and distortion.
We must have a plurality of voices and they must be independent. Yet we have a system in which state-sponsored media - the BBC in particular - grow ever more dominant.
That process has to be reversed.

Oh. You went there.

Well, that was 2009, and by that point Newscorp had the backing of David Cameron, then Conservative Party Leader and putative Prime Minister. Andy Coulson, editor of the News of the World during the height of his hacking scandals, was installed as his press supremo. The deal had been done. Indeed, weeks after this scary lecture, Cameron's response was to describe a 'bonfire of the quangos' and the first regulatory body he mentioned dismantling was Ofcom - the broadcasting regulator. On coming to office last May, Rupert Murdoch was one of the first visitors to Number 10, and one of the Coalition Government's least talked about and vicious acts was cutting the BBC's budget by 16 percent overnight.

James got his blood money. None of this is a coincidence. But he didn't managed to complete his newspaper monopoly with a broadcasting one.... Thanks to two MPs and one tenacious Guardian journalist.

Murdochification of News 1: The Criminal-Media-Nexus and Self Censorship*

*according to former Prime Minister Gordon Brown

But James' florid ridiculous speech is worth examining because it reveals the deeper ideology of libertarian/commercial thinking which justifies any means in pursuit of profit. One of the conclusions of that speech was

The only reliable, durable, and perpetual guarantor of independence is profit.

James claims there is a 'market in news' - which there surely is - but then elides to the illogical inversion: therefore all news is a market

As I've debated with right wing apologists and News International apparatchiks ever since: you cannot have a pure market in news. Free access to impartial information - whether election results or reporting of business - is the precondition of a democracy. If news was purely driven by the profit motive it would lead to hacking, blackmail, blagging, corruption and crime...

Oh wait. What happened the News of the World last week? Why are apologies all over the UK papers? QED. But let's not pretend this Murdochification of News hasn't happened in the US too. As Adweek explores in detail: Murdoch Maelstrom Comes West: Did News Corp. properties break any U.S. laws?

The criminality of many of Murdoch's news operations in the UK is now subject to multiple inquiries - including our largest current police operation - and will lead to further convictions, as might well the DOJ investigations just commenced in the US. But there's something more to the Murdoch operation than criminality: it's the completely 'chilling effect' (to use James' own words) on independent coverage and journalistic standards.

Fox New's inability to comment on this has already begun to make it a laughing stock, and even occasioned a rare criticism from CNN. But here's a major US Trader, Terry Hill, talking about his recent experience with an interview on Britain's Sky Channel, owned only 39 percent.

In the Temple of Doom by Terry Hill

The interviewer from Sky demonstrated a blatant pro Murdoch bias.
I posed the question to her that I am the CEO of a public company. If I had indulged in the following:
1. Paid $500m for MySpace and then sold it for $35m;
2. Paid $5.7bn for Dow Jones and written off $2.8bn;
3. Paid $615m for my daughter's business;
5. My company's shares had underperformed for 15 years;
6. And some of my staff had engaged in criminal phone hacking and bribing Police officers and this had been covered up by my management.
I think the shareholders would have had me fired.
So I asked, why hasn't Murdoch been fired...?
...My responses about the Murdoch situation were clearly not what the Sky interviewer was expecting or wanted to hear. She mounted a defence of Rupert Murdoch's achievements in building a 'big empire'. The word 'empire' was a Freudian slip....
The interviewer ended by cutting me off after she said she would like to take me through the achievements of James Murdoch and Elisabeth Murdoch. I would have welcomed that debate on live TV, especially in light of Elisabeth Murdoch's recent achievement in getting the company her father controls to pay $615m for her business, largely with other people's money. The fact that the interviewer, who works for Sky where James Murdoch is Chairman, thought she was capable of any objectivity on this subject not only beggars belief, it also shows how pervasive and pernicious the influence of the Murdoch's had become.
This situation has to change.

And in today's New York Times is a brilliant takedown by Joe Nocera of the language of casuistry, censorship and self-censorship that has vitiated the Wall Street Journal's coverage of event The Journal Becomes Fox-ified

On Friday, however, the coverage went all the way to craven. The paper published an interview with Murdoch that might as well have been dictated by the News Corporation public relations department.....The two most obvious questions - When did Murdoch first learn of the phone hacking at The News of the World? And when did he learn that reporters were bribing police officers for information? - went unasked. The Journal reporter had either been told not to ask those questions, or instinctively knew that he shouldn't. It is hard to know which is worse.

When you're criticised for your ethics by Larry Flynt, then you have really limbo danced under any professional standard.

The way in which we push those boundaries, however, is where we differ. I test limits by publishing controversial material and paying people who are willing to step forward and expose political hypocrisy. Murdoch's minions, on the other hand, pushed limits by allegedly engaging in unethical or criminal activity: phone hacking, bribery, coercing criminal behavior and betraying the trust of their readership. If News Corp.'s reported wrongdoings are true, what Murdoch's company has been up to does not just brush against boundaries - it blows right past them.

So beyond the criminal in the known activities of UK papers, and the potential activities of US papers, we have the ne plus ultra of libertarian thinking. James Murdoch quoted Orwell as an attack on the BBC, and yet as senior exec of Newscorp he has overseen some of the most craven newspeak I've ever seen, across multiple channels.

A libertarian once again ends up defending authoritarian censorship on a par with Comical Ali, Egyptian State TV before Mubarak fell, or the Czech Communist apparatchiks in Milan Kundera's Book of Laughter and Forgetting, who airbrushed away an out-of-favour Politburo member from a photo, but forgot to get rid of his hat, which just floated in space as an absurd reminder of how people in power can make themselves into laughing stocks.

Oh - and James Murdoch oversaw the payment of millions of pounds hush money to phone hacking victims.

Him next please

FALL OF THE HOUSE OF MURDOCH IV: Spitzer Slates Newscorp and Challenges DOJ

Peter Jukes — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 22:28:38 GMT

Yes, it's working. The storm of outrage is crossing the Atlantic to Newscorp's US base. As we've learned, the FBI have now launched an investigation into allegations of phone hacking by the Murdoch Empire thanks to the instigation of Pete King as I diaried yesterday. This is leading The Guardian and is featured heavily both on the the BBC, The New York Times and CNN.

Even Rupert himself is showing signs of flagging. He's just released a rather dispirited, desultory but defiant interview in his own Wall Street Journal in which the main message really seems to be:

I'm tired.

Though many of you have been sceptical that the US public or MSM would pay attention to this, it seems some of the massive public revulsion here in the UK is beginning to transfer to Murdoch's adopted homeland and commercial base - the United States.

But there's more to this than just law-breaking: there's Murdoch's nefarious role in law-making.
There's a more dangerous law for the owner of Fox News, with prima facie evidence needing investigation: as Eliot Spitzer has just written on Slate [UPDATE] the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) makes US citizens liable for their practices overseas.

Bribery, illegal wiretapping, interference in a murder investigation, political blackmail, and rampant disregard for both the truth and basic decency. The behavior of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. in Britain has shocked even his closest allies and cynical British journalists. The Murdoch empire is falling apart-criminal behavior and disregard for basic ethics having permeated its highest ranks...
So how does all this concern Americans?...... the facts already pretty well established in Britain indicate violations of American law, in particular a law called the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The Justice Department has been going out of its way to undertake FCPA prosecutions and investigations in recent years, and the News Corp. case presents a pretty simple test for Attorney General Eric Holder: If the department fails to open an immediate investigation into News Corp.'s violations of the FCPA, there will have been a major breach of enforcement at Justice.

So Spitzer is laying down the gauntlet to Holder to do something about this, rather than avoid a confrontation leading up to the next election.

Guess what? Surprise surprise - maybe they saw what was coming round the corner - Murdoch has already donated $1,000,000 to the US Chamber of Commerce to lobby against this very law. The Guardian - a real guardian of British liberties in this important revolt - joins the dots:

Rupert Murdoch donated $1m to a pro-business lobby in the US months before the group launched a high-profile campaign to alter the anti-bribery law - the same law that could potentially be brought to bear against News Corporation over the phone-hacking scandal.
News Corporation contributed $1m to the US Chamber of Commerce last summer. In October the chamber put forward a six-point programme for amending the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, or FCPA, a law that punishes US-based companies for engaging in the bribery of foreign officials.
Progressive groups in the US have speculated that there is no coincidence in the contemporaneous timing of the Murdoch donation and the launch of the chamber's FCPA campaign, which they claim is designed to weaken the anti-bribery legislation. "The timing certainly raises questions about who is bankrolling this campaign - if it's not News Corporation who is it?" said Joshua Dorner of the Centre for American Progress action fund.

When it comes to what our former Prime Minister Gordon Brown described yesterday as the "criminal-media nexus' this can't be a coincidence, and from UK experience the connection between a financial interest, media presence and lobbying clout is where the real abuse of power lies.

Just to reiterate, after countless diaries on this: News International, across its stable of four newspapers, has already had two employees jailed for phone hacking, and now 4,000 victims have been identified, just from one employee. Moreover, News International paid millions in gagging fees to some of these victims. We have clear evidence, beyond phone hacking, of cover-up, suppression of evidence and money handed to police officers and hush money for litigants.

The FCPA Act, brought into law under President Jimmy Carter, and more strenuously enforced under your current President, is targeted against US Citizens and Corporations that bribe foreign officials

Newscorp is a US listed company. Both Rupert and James Murdoch are American citizens.

So I urge my fellow Kossacks:

THE PHONE HACKING ALLEGATIONS ARE ONLY ONE PRONG. MAKE SURE NEWS CORPS IS INVESTIGATED FOR FCPA VIOLATION AS WELL.

And don't forget that Murdoch channelled a million dollars in lobbying money to get this law overturned

(PS: haven't even touched the extensive and multifarious UK news, but the Sergeant at Arms delivered a summons to Rupert and James Murdoch, who'd initially said they wouldn't appear at the Select Committee of the House of Commons next Tuesday: now they will)

FALL OF THE HOUSE OF MURDOCH III: Senate Commerce Committee Chairman expects "Criminal Stuff

Peter Jukes — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 15:03:54 GMT

BREAKING,-Murdoch-withdraws-bid-for-BskyB: News International has now entirely withdrawn its bid for 100 percent of Britain's Biggest Broadcaster - BSkyB. Tenacious investigative journalism, political pressure, and immense people people exercised online and through our elected representatives have seen off this threat - the greatest threat to media plurality and political transparency in my lifetime.

Now keep pushing for Murdoch to be discredited and disarmed in US public life

After revelations that victims of 9/11 were targets of illegal phone hacking, the scandal that has rocked his Murdoch's mendacious empire empire can no longer be contained in the UK: Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller has called for an official investigation into the company's methods and activities:

In a written statement, Mr Rockefeller said he was concerned that hacking by News Corporation journalists may have extended to American targets, including victims of the 11 September attacks.
He did not present any evidence to support that claim, but called on the authorities to look into any possible wrong-doing.
"I encourage the appropriate agencies to investigate to ensure that Americans have not had their privacy violated," he said.
"The reported hacking by News Corporation newspapers against a range of individuals - including children - is offensive and a serious breach of journalistic ethics. This raises serious questions about whether the company has broken US law."

France Presse has just reported:

Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller, who called Tuesday for a formal probe into whether alleged improper behavior extended to US citizens, told reporters that his "bet" was that "we'll find some criminal stuff."
Asked whether he was saying he thought there would be evidence of criminal acts in the United States and whether he was referring to possible phone hacking, Rockefeller replied "yeah" each time.

Gordon Brown in the House of Commons has just called News International "a criminal-media nexus".
In other developments today:

* HOUSE OF COMMONS VOTE TODAY: In an unprecedented move, a motion by the Labour Party leader Ed Miliband that opposes Murdoch's acquisition of the satellite TV monopoly BSkyB, will be supported by all three political parties in the House of Commons this afternoon - though whether it has any force of law is another matter.

Join the liveblog at Labourlist around 10.30 EST, where I write under my real name (visible in my twitter link)

Here's a video from the Previous Prime Minister's Questions at 12.30 pm BST.

The debate is also carried on Parliament Live

* COVERUP AND POLICE COMPLICITY: It's now clear that News International, whose Chief Executive Les Hinton is now publisher of the Wall Street Journal and the Dow Jones, lied to Parliament, obstructed the initial police investigation in 2007, and hacked investigators phones. Yesterday's Select Committee re-interviewed the Senior Police Officers involved in the initial investigation:

It's also clear that News International continue to obstruct the police investigation even now through selective leaking and document destruction.

* US RELEVANCE: MEDIA AND MONOPOLY: In what the New York Times has called 'a kind of British Spring', politicians, celebrities, journalists and thinkers are finally speaking out against 30 years of tyranny by News International. At the heart of this are large reaching issues about the Media, Monopoly Power, Money and Democracy - even more relevant in the US. As Will Hutton says:

Which is why Ed Miliband must spell out that the issue goes beyond party. This is about Britain's capacity to sustain a good capitalism, hawklike about monopolists, and a good democracy - hawklike about private, insider lobbying. The takeover of BSkyB could scarcely raise more profound issues. It is about whether Britain is prepared to sustain a state within a state - a proposition to which all of us, of whatever political hue, must surely say no. Which will then require the creation of whatever processes that are needed to make that "no" an ongoing reality. We are going to have to start thinking harder about capitalism, ownership, the media and democracy. The thinking starts now - and Britain will be the healthier for it.

I'll try to update this diary as news comes in.

PREVIOUS DIARY: Big Kudos and Apologies to Ericlewis0 whose original diary on this I missed this morning. PLEASE REC IT UP. Happy to defer to his diary, or any others to keep the pressure on News corp.

WHAT YOU CAN DO: More suggestions welcome, but please join the Twitter and Facebook campaigns to Boycott Newscorp products: @BoycottMurdoch. Avaaz is also organising an online petition - Stop the Murdoch Mafia - which has 80,000 signatories, including Australian and Irish respondents. Of course feel free to write or call you US representatives and senators to back this investigation suggested by Senator Rockefeller. Please pass on any links.

FALL OF THE HOUSE OF MURDOCH II: Murdoch Paid Police for hacking details of Royals and 9/11 Victims

Peter Jukes — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 12:26:30 GMT

FINAL UPDATE: well it seems this news has caused a stir across the pond, not only with shareholders wondering why Murdoch treats Newscorp like "family candy" but a call from Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington calling for a Congressional Inquiry into Newscorp:

Despite claims by NI executives that the phone hacking scandal enveloping Murdoch and his media empire was confined to the now-defunct News of the World, new evidence shows other Murdoch papers used the same tactics. Former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown was repeatedly targeted for more than a decade by other Murdoch publications.
Further, a former New York City police officer claims he was offered money by News of the World journalists to retrieve the phone records of 9/11 victims and their families.

Yes, the scandal that is shaking the Murdoch Empire is expanding to the US, implicating not only the publisher of the WSJ in hacking the Royal Family with details bought from the police, but also - just as they hacked the victims and relatives of the London 7/7 bombings - there are reports that News International tried to suborn US police officers for hacking details of victims the 9/11 attacks.

According to today's Daily Mirror:

a former New York cop made the 9/11 hacking claim. He alleged he was contacted by News of the World journalists who said they would pay him to retrieve the private phone records of the dead.
Now working as a private investigator, the ex-officer claimed reporters wanted the victim's phone numbers and details of the calls they had made and received in the days leading up to the atrocity.
A source said: "This investigator is used by a lot of journalists in America and he recently told me that he was asked to hack into the 9/11 victims' private phone data. He said that the journalists asked him to access records showing the calls that had been made to and from the mobile phones belonging to the victims and their relatives.
"His presumption was that they wanted the information so they could hack into the relevant voicemails, just like it has been shown they have done in the UK. The PI said he had to turn the job down. He knew how insensitive such research would be, and how bad it would look.
"The investigator said the journalists seemed particularly interested in getting the phone records belonging to the British victims of the attacks."

This comes hard on the heels of revelations from Robert Peston at the BBC that emails, seen by senior NI executives in 2007, but only handed to the police a few weeks ago, show that the News of the World paid police domestic protection officers, looking after the Royal Family, for private phone numbers and personal details...

Regarding the emails that were found in 2007 but only passed to the police on July. At least some of them provided evidence that the NOTW was buying the contact details of the Royal family and their friends from a Royal protection officer. This suggests that the security of the head of state was being compromised. It's a remarkable story. As soon as the newer management of the NOTW became aware of what was in the emails, they were told them that they had to give them immediately to the police. But here is evidence that the private details of the Royal family were sold, by a protection officer, to the News of the World.

So many laws, suborning a police officer, lying to Parliament, court perjury are exposed by this revelation, let alone the security risk to our nominal head of state. I don't like Monarchy, but the idea that News International could break the law to bribe, distort and blackmail with impunity for so long staggers me.

And this has ramifications for his US operations too.
As others have pointed out, Les Hinton, who oversaw the internal 2007 News International internal inquiry into the hacking of phones in 2007, said that the journalist and investigator involved were one-offs:

Hinton, who then ran NI which is owned by News Corp, spoke to the Commons culture committee looking into the Goodman affair on 6 March 2007. He was asked whether the News of the World had "carried out a full, rigorous internal inquiry" into phone hacking and whether he was "absolutely convinced" the practice was limited to a single reporter.
The Guardian understands that Hinton was among five NI executives who had access to the report. The then News of the World editor, Colin Myler, and legal counsel, Tom Crone, are also understood to have seen it.

Having met with the family of the murdered schoolgirl whose phone was hacked, the Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg has now come out against the News International bid for BSkyB - an amazing turnaround - and making Murdoch's complete acquisition of Britain's largest broadcaster potentially dead in the water.

But Murdoch still has a largely intact media empire, both here and in the US. As it stands Les Hinton could be in defiance of various British laws, and therefore not a person of standing to be publisher of the WSJ, either under simple corporate governance rules, or the FCP act.

NB: For the best live feeds on this, try the Guardian here, the Daily Telegraph, and videos and Tweets from the BBC.

UPDATE: Just to underline that it's not just NOTW nor just celebrities, victims or royals, Michael Crick, a well respected BBC reporter, is tweeting that the former PM, Gordon Brown, is going to make a statement this afternoon about The Sunday Times.

The news is now in thanks to the stellar reporter at the Guardian, Nick Davies: News International papers targeted Gordon Brown

Journalists from across News International repeatedly targeted the former prime minister Gordon Brown, attempting to access his voicemail and obtaining information from his bank account, his legal file as well as his family's medical records.
There is also evidence that a private investigator used a serving police officer to trawl the police national computer for information about him.

It gets more disgusting still - Brown's children were a victim. According to a BBC reporter

BBC told medical records of Gordon Browns son with cystic fibrosis illegally obtained + info then published by the Sun when Brooks in charge

UPDATEX2: Is US pressure now working? According to the Guardian via Reuters:

It appears that lawyers from a group of News Corporation institutional shareholders have filed a complaint at the chancery court in Delaware - the famously business-friendly state where News Corp and thousands of other companies are incorporated - saying the company's board should have taken action against phone hacking years before.

I've just heard Michael Wolff, Murdoch's biographer, say it's "headless chicken" time at Newscorp and:

I think Rupert Murdoch for one of the first times in his life has absolutely no idea what he should do.

As of 19.00 BST Newscorp stock is down 7%

Is this potentially an ENRON moment for Newscorp. As Virginisland Guy says on the Moose:

Ruperts empire is a classic "Grow or Die" model. Cut off his expansion plans and shine the spotlight on the unprofitability of many of his holdings, and the whole will crumble under the leveraged debt load.

James Murdoch could be subject to DOJ and SEC inquiries because of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act