Is this Armageddon for Murdoch and NewsCorp?

I think the clip of Hugh Grant at the beginning said it all. When asked what he would like to ask RM he said :

"What have you done to my Country"

Exactly!

The latest is that Ashley Cole is suing Newscorp for telephone hacking, don"t know why not News International but might have happened in the U.S,A,

On Channel 4 tonight at 10pm "Richard Murdoch the Mogul who screwed the News.........should be interesting!!!

Panda wrote:The latest is that Ashley Cole is suing Newscorp for telephone hacking, don"t know why not News International but might have happened in the U.S,A,

is this the same ashley cole who used to send picture messages of himself to various acquaintances in the hope of adding another notch to his bedpost? if so, why would newscorp hack his phone? he made the contents public anyway? or is this about the phone being used as a gay sex toy? makes for an interesting play on the word 'ringing'.

IT IS BEING SAID THAT THE MAIN BENEFITARY(SP?) OF THE NOTW DEMISE IS THE SUNDAY MIRROR WHICH HAS INCREASED ITS CIRCULATION TO 2.6 MILLION SINCE NOTW DEMISE.

Newscorp (Rupert Murdoch} was making a bid for Austar, an Australian Company , but talks collapsed . The Australian Prime minister said the other day that in light of what was happening with NOTW and the meeting of Murdoch and Son with the Select Committee she would be looking into the Murdoch
business interests in Australia.

I AM WATCHING MURDOCH;THE MOGUL WHO SCREWED THE NEWS ON CHANNEL 4+1

Badboy wrote:I AM WATCHING MURDOCH;THE MOGUL WHO SCREWED THE NEWS ON CHANNEL 4+1

Your"e not gonna believe this Badboy.......I fell asleep and woke up 5 minutes before the end.!!!!!!

Wednesday, July 27, 2011









#McCanns mouthpiece Mitchell , made John Ward from the SLOG start thinking...and thinking...






HACKGATE day 120: The McCanns spokesman, Andy Coulson, David Cameron and 13 million of Public Money.

Does PR spokesman Clarence Mitchell know more than he’s letting on?

The Slog finds himself a tad mystified this morning.

Puzzle One:
the Murdoch Sun has been publicising Gerry and Kate McCann’s book about
their missing daughter Madeleine. This despite the fact that in
January, their press agent Clarence Mitchell told the media
he suspected both his and their phones had been hacked. So in the light
of more recent Soham parent revelations about Newscorp allegedly
hacking them in their hour of need, you’d have thought Gerry, Kate and
Clarence might have concluded the Dirty Digger was behind it.

Why, then, sign a book and publicity deal with Newscorp?

Puzzle Two:
as a result of the McCanns’ open letter to the Prime Minister in the
Sun – pleading for the case to be reopened – Call me Dave I’m all heart
Cameron leaned on Theresa May to cough up the £13 million required to do
so; and she, being a lesser flea, rang some littler fleas in the Met to
strongly advise that they do the same. Which they are now doing.

Having initially
wondered why Dave would bother (apart from the chance of some lachrymose
image repairs) I was then surprised to see the Prime Minister
back-tracking over the last two days….insisting he hadn’t leaned on
anyone, but merely ‘suggested’ they ‘might’ reopen the case. I was
especially taken aback, because I know – categorically – that this is
bollocks. Not only is it bollocks, Mr Cameron himself personally assured
Gerry and Kate (they say)
that the investigation “will come out of Home Office, not Police
funds”. Not ‘might’ if it happens – will, when it does. This is an odd
tense to use if you’re only doing the suggesting thing.

Of course, there’s more to this than money. The IoS had an intriguing piece yesterday,
in which Met Police Authority bigwig Jenny Jones was quoted as saying,
“The police should not take this case up in this way. It is ludicrous.
This could take years and will cost millions. It is very unusual for
police to step in like this and it is not an appropriate use of police
resources. The Government is closing down the Forensic Science Service
because there are not enough funds. This is a crucial part of police
work. Although it is tragic and I feel for the McCanns, how can the
Prime Minister justify spending millions of pounds on one case?”

How indeed? Why, I’m asking myself, do something so daft…even if you are David Cameron?

After digging around a
little, The Slog has stumbled upon some people and events connected to
this extraordinary business…connections that seem to make some potential
motives clearer – and other bits considerably murkier.
Let’s start from the beginning.

I was informed
last Saturday by media contacts that Clarence Mitchell says the McCann
phones have been given the ‘all clear’ vis a vis hacking: no naughty
listening in after all, Newscorp found not guilty.

This is a first.

I must also express my
entirely personal opinion that such a finding seems unlikely given
Murdoch’s track record….but you never know.

Curiously, Mr Mitchell doesn’t think his
phone is tickerty-boo: he told my media source he was still in
discussions with the Met. Like another man we know well from the recent
past, Clarence is in danger of becoming the story.

Hold that thought.

He does seem to be centrally involved in this odd affair, but then Clarence Mitchell’s history makes him a natural for the job.

Although in a
Labour-spin role at the COI’s Media Monitoring Unit for a brief period
some five years ago, in May 2007 he was suddenly seconded to the Foreign
Office to work as the McCanns’ chief PR man.

I rang a few people over the weekend.

Nobody seems to know why
that happened – but he obviously did a good job of impressing the
McCanns, because in September 2007, he resigned from the civil service
to become the McCanns’ full-time spokesman – allegedly on a substantial
five-figure salary.

He is still doing that
job, but soon afterwards, Clarence started work at the hugely
influential PR agency, Freud Communications.

Matthew Freud, the
owner, is married to Elisabeth Murdoch, the Digger’s favourite
offspring. A few months back, Elisabeth trousered a very large sum by
flogging her own production venture back to Dad. In October 2008, Freud
gave David Cameron some freebie air tickets to fly to Elisabeth’s
birthday party on the Digger’s yacht moored off the Greek coast.

Mitchell was obviously
making all the right connections to enhance his career. On 4th March
2010, the Tories issued this press release: ‘The Conservative Party
has signed up Clarence Mitchell, best-known as spokesman for Madeleine
McCann’s parents, as the head of media monitoring for its general
election campaign’.

In this job, Clarence worked as second-in-command to…….Andy Coulson. Andy Coulson resigned just one day after Mitchell ‘briefed’ the British media about his mobile phone being hacked.

The good news is that how the open-letter-caring-Cameron bollocks now becomes easier to understand.

Mitchell knows all the major players and has all the right contacts.

He’d
be perfect, in fact – thinking purely hypothetically of course – as the
coordination guy for a McCanns project to extract lots of publicity and
money from Newscorp via son-in-law Matt Freud, and £13 million of
taxpayers’ money from Murdoch’s chum David Cameron.


Given that Liz
Murdoch is being quietly lined up to run the newly acquired BSkyB in
place of potentially toxic Hackgate witness James Murdoch, knowing her
hubby would also put Clarence in good shape for a presenter’s job there
one day. (He used to do that very thing for BBC24, as it then was…until
he fell asleep while due to be on air, and hurriedly left).

The bad news is that, as with most things Murdochio, several unknowns and dark alleys remain.

While this web of chums is partly just another example of The Cameron Club – with all the usual list of suspects present – The
Slog is not as yet in a position to work out the significance (if any)
of Mitchell’s phone hack stories….and why his chosen release date was so
perfectly synchronised with Honest Andy Coulson’s Downing Street
departure.

I’m still very confused about which event was the chicken, and which the egg – if indeed any hatching was involved at all.

However, journalists here and there might speculate in order to accumulate still more evidence, circumstantial or otherwise.

Some might ask whether a high-profile antipodean family is perhaps in Mr Mitchell’s debt in some way.

Others with even more
suspicious minds might even wonder if Clarence knows where some of the
Hackgate bodies are buried….and thus has Newscorp at a disadvantage.

And experienced
conspiracy theorists might even speculate that the Prime Minister
himself has little choice, under the circumstances, than to go along
with the coughing up of £13 million, however unpopular that might be.


Whatever the truth or otherwise of this chain of events might be, the fact
is that Mr Mitchell has extracted a lucrative deal from Rupert Murdoch,
and a police investigation for the sole use of Gerry and Kate McCann.
So he really has done a stunning job for his clients.


What’s more, he seems to have done it for nothing.


The
McCanns and Mitchell have said on the record that the ‘Helping to Find
Madeleine Fund’ did not pay any part of his salary, even when he had no
other job.

They
say that he was paid by ‘an anonymous backer’. But Clarence Mitchell
won’t say who that backer is, nor why that backer is giving him so much
support. And he has changed his mind on at least one occasion about
whether there was a backer at all.The
$64 million question has to be, can we trust what Clarence Mitchell
says? Well, this quote from Carlos Anjos, head of the Portuguese police
professional association, who had dealings with Clarence Mitchell, is
brief and to the point: “He lies with as many teeth as he has in his mouth”.

There’s
much to ponder upon here; but in the meantime, I offer this tantalising
little postscript: Mitchell also reported extensively on the murder by
Ian Huntley of Soham girls Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells.



Newscorp
now stands accused of hacking the parents. I’d love to ask Clarence
what he knows about that alleged hacking….and others. But
despite repeated attempts over the last 48 hours to raise Clarence
Mitchell on his mobile, he has not returned The Slog’s calls.



Those
with sharper spades than mine may wish to dig further. In the meantime,
if anything further comes to light, Sloggers will be the first to know.



Catch up on the full Hackgate saga here.



http://hat4uk.wordpress.com/2011/05/16/hackgate-day-120-the-mccanns-spokesman-andy-coulson-david-cameron-and-13-million-of-public-money/#comment-7246

This is just a bit of fun but I enjoyed it.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5z4CJRFBKY&feature=player_embedded

Angelique wrote:This is just a bit of fun but I enjoyed it.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5z4CJRFBKY&feature=player_embedded

Yes, Angelique and it is looking increasingly likely that James will be asked to step down as Chairman of bskyb because he has to face the Committee
again. Directors of NewsCorp have already nominated someone to take over from Rupert Murdoch and are going to ask him to stand down. I can see
Newscorp being broken up .

There is a Board Meeting today at bskyb and profits are expected to be good which should keep James Murdoch in his job as Chairman. However, it
remains to be seen what happens at the Committee, but in any case the concensus among Analysts appears to be the NewsCorp Empire will be broken
up and Legislation in America and Britain introduced to avoid an Empire the Murdoch Family have enjoyed happening in future.

Newscorp Directors have sent a survey to all Shareholders for anonymous reply asking what they think of the following:-


The fact that Murdoch trades at a discount

Indepenedence of the Board


Declining Share Price

Murdoch"s Power


Looks as if they are looking for change at the top and have someone lined up.

Afternoon Panda

Yes I heard about this meeting on Radio 4 this morning. I am not sure if he is going to get the push. But thinking of what he is connected to even if he doesn't admit he knew it can't be good.

I watched the Dispatches programme on Monday and the one last evening which I thought was very good and informative. Murdoch: the Mogul Who Screwed the News.

They had Hugh Grant on again and I was unaware that it was through his and the concerted effort of FI Boss, Max Mosely and a few MP's - Chris Bryant being one of them and Tom Watson and Sean Hoare (which I think is definitely a suspicious death)that forced this to fruition. I expect this has been discussed earlier but I didn't actually know it was a planned attack on Murdoch. I just thought it was circumstances and Hugh Grants recording of Paul McMullan.

Angelique wrote:Afternoon Panda

Yes I heard about this meeting on Radio 4 this morning. I am not sure if he is going to get the push. But thinking of what he is connected to even if he doesn't admit he knew it can't be good.

I watched the Dispatches programme on Monday and the one last evening which I thought was very good and informative. Murdoch: the Mogul Who Screwed the News.

They had Hugh Grant on again and I was unaware that it was through his and the concerted effort of FI Boss, Max Mosely and a few MP's - Chris Bryant being one of them and Tom Watson and Sean Hoare (which I think is definitely a suspicious death)that forced this to fruition. I expect this has been discussed earlier but I didn't actually know it was a planned attack on Murdoch. I just thought it was circumstances and Hugh Grants recording of Paul McMullan.

Hi Angelieque, as I said to Badboy......I fell asleep through the programme , until the last 5 minutes Anyway. James has kept his job but there
is crrently an FBI investigation and as I said above, a survey of Newscorp Shareholders., so I think Murdoch Senior will be asked to stand down.
Apparently, his daughter Elizabeth is becoming more involved in the Business.

Newscorp profits rise to U.S. 6.6 billion from 5.7billion. No wonder Murdoch was keen to purchase the shares he doesn"t own. James Murdoch is
credited with the improvement , together with a strong team, however the latest hacking may affect his position.

Just announced, the Guy who threw the shaving cream pie has been fined £250 and jailed for 6 weeks...bit harsh , he obviously did not mean harm, just embarassment. He is 26yrs old and a Comedian

He is going to appeal apparently as the person who threw flour in the House of Commons didn't get a custodial sentence.

Angelique wrote:He is going to appeal apparently as the person who threw flour in the House of Commons didn't get a custodial sentence.

Morning Angelique, he will only serve 3 weeks in Prison apparently.....this is Rupert Murdoch he assaulted though, much more important than MPs

May-Bowles should bring private charges of ABH against Murdoch's wife who continued to attack him long after he been prevented from further violently endangering Murdoch's well being by assaulting him with a vicious cardboard plate and blob of shaving cream.

British law is again shown to be pathetic and biased towards those with money and perhaps a hold over those in high powered positions.

It is obscene to allow sentences such as this to be passed when our streets are reminiscent of a battlefield. Thugs carrying and using guns and knives are a common event....Our emergency services are reviled and abused, our elderly population terrorised in their homes and the perpetrators will invariably walk away almost Scott free when caught. Paedophiles set free to walk the streets and re offend...

But the thrower of a foam pie demonstrating a protest against the man... who is not even a British Subject... who almost certainly knew what actions his employees were taking and their abuse of the civil rights of the British people by hacking their phones is given a custodial sentence? It's little more than a corrupt joke and the officials of the court that brought down this sentence should be relieved of their responsibilities to the people of this country.

rant over

malena stool wrote:May-Bowles should bring private charges of ABH against Murdoch's wife who continued to attack him long after he been prevented from further violently endangering Murdoch's well being by assaulting him with a vicious cardboard plate and blob of shaving cream.

British law is again shown to be pathetic and biased towards those with money and perhaps a hold over those in high powered positions.

It is obscene to allow sentences such as this to be passed when our streets are reminiscent of a battlefield. Thugs carrying and using guns and knives are a common event....Our emergency services are reviled and abused, our elderly population terrorised in their homes and the perpetrators will invariably walk away almost Scott free when caught. Paedophiles set free to walk the streets and re offend...

But the thrower of a foam pie demonstrating a protest against the man... who is not even a British Subject... who almost certainly knew what actions his employees were taking and their abuse of the civil rights of the British people by hacking their phones is given a custodial sentence? It's little more than a corrupt joke and the officials of the court that brought down this sentence should be relieved of their responsibilities to the people of this country.

rant over

Good rant too malena.

The Judicial system in the U.K. are woefully inept, a sledgehammer to crack a nut in some cases, a complete inability to let the punishment fit the
Crime in other cases.

malena stool

Yes totally agree - but then these are the 'supposed elite' and they can't allow any form of protest to contaminate their hemisphere.

What happens on the streets does not affect them so they ignore it - we are lessor mortals and can put up with it!

HEATHER MILLS PHONE WAS HACKED.
AT THIS RATE,IT MIGHT BE EASIER TO ASK,WHICH CELEBRITIES PHONE HASN'T BEEN HACKED

Badboy wrote:HEATHER MILLS PHONE WAS HACKED.
AT THIS RATE,IT MIGHT BE EASIER TO ASK,WHICH CELEBRITIES PHONE HASN'T BEEN HACKED

I think this must have been the reason Newscorp set aside $4.2 Billion, to pay for all these claims. Off topic, Pele is in London to support a Charity, he
look great!!!

This snippet was shown briefly " Murdoch clean up effort draws fire from Independence Unit, Committees Independence Mandate.". . Not quite sure
whether this relates to the Commons Select Committee or Newscorp whose Directors recently canvassed Shareholders .

This is an extract from the Guardian article on the Piers Morgan thread.




Meanwhile
the FBI is widening its investigation of News Corporation's activities
within the US to look at whether allegations of computer hacking by one
of its subsidiaries was an isolated case or part of a "larger pattern of
behaviour", Time magazine is reporting.

Time suggests that the
FBI inquiry has been extended from a relatively narrow look at alleged
malpractices by News Corp in America into a more general inquiry into
whether the company used possibly illegal strongarm tactics to browbeat
rival firms, following allegations of computer hacking made by retail
advertising company Floorgraphics.

In a civil lawsuit against
News Corp in 2004 Floorgraphics told a court that its website had been
breached 11 times over four months without authorisation. The source of
the alleged hacking was traced back to an IP address registered to News
America in Connecticut.