VIDEO - Leveson Inquiry (Update Dec 21) David Pilditch - Diary - Colin Myler & Dan Sanderson

Just want to say four words in the style of Leveson:

"tittle, tattle, fluff and piffle"

Angelique wrote:Just want to say four words in the style of Leveson:

"tittle, tattle, fluff and piffle"

Hi Angelique.....you are being very polite ,I can think of a more pungent adjective in the style of Kate F***ing Ar*****es.

Afternoon Panda

Good one!

Angelique wrote:Afternoon Panda

Good one!

I never read the all book but do remember her using the F word a few times. When Britain is facing such hard times it makes my blood boil to think they can waste millions of Taxpayers money on the Review and this Enquiry, just what is it"s purpose? The NOTW has closed down, Murdoch, or rather Newscorp
Shareholders have paid millions in compensation , except for the £1 million Murdoch paid personally to Milly Dowlers Parents and the Reporters have
scattered. James has been forced to resign as Director of the Times and Sun, has no chance of succeeding his Father as Chairman of Newscorp and the name Murdoch has lost all respect.

I think sandra would off asked for more than 20,000 euros lol....she's no cheapskate .

Panda wrote:

I never read the all book but do remember her using the F word a few times. When Britain is facing such hard times it makes my blood boil to think they can waste millions of Taxpayers money on the Review and this Enquiry, just what is it"s purpose? The NOTW has closed down, Murdoch, or rather Newscorp
Shareholders have paid millions in compensation , except for the £1 million Murdoch paid personally to Milly Dowlers Parents and the Reporters have
scattered. James has been forced to resign as Director of the Times and Sun, has no chance of succeeding his Father as Chairman of Newscorp and the name Murdoch has lost all respect.

Morning Panda

Sorry had a appointment to keep.

I agree this is no way to use taxpayers money. ISR i think it's all about jobs for the boys. Who are all those people behind their computers?

When you step back and look at the damage that has been done - it's almost as if someone pushed the self destruct button and now can't turn it off. It will just keep going I think. The more they expose the inner workings of the press the more likely we will look further into other areas.

Angelique wrote:

Panda wrote:

I never read the all book but do remember her using the F word a few times. When Britain is facing such hard times it makes my blood boil to think they can waste millions of Taxpayers money on the Review and this Enquiry, just what is it"s purpose? The NOTW has closed down, Murdoch, or rather Newscorp
Shareholders have paid millions in compensation , except for the £1 million Murdoch paid personally to Milly Dowlers Parents and the Reporters have
scattered. James has been forced to resign as Director of the Times and Sun, has no chance of succeeding his Father as Chairman of Newscorp and the name Murdoch has lost all respect.

Morning Panda

Sorry had a appointment to keep.

I agree this is no way to use taxpayers money. ISR i think it's all about jobs for the boys. Who are all those people behind their computers?

When you step back and look at the damage that has been done - it's almost as if someone pushed the self destruct button and now can't turn it off. It will just keep going I think. The more they expose the inner workings of the press the more likely we will look further into other areas.

Morning Angelique

The British tabloid Press is far too big for such a small Country which is why it is salacious, intrusive and prepared to do whatever it takes to increase
Sales. The PCC is a joke and when you think of the number of Trees chopped down to produce a Newspaper I think it"s time the Government stepped
in and reduced the number of Papers and took away the licences of those who overstep the mark of common decency.

guardian.co.uk, Thursday 22 December 2011 12.55 GMT

Media
Leveson inquiry




Leveson inquiry receives more than 200 submissions from outside media

Inquiry says it has been sent 411 submissions of evidence in total, including 93 from those claiming to be victims of the press


reddit this



Lisa O'Carroll

guardian.co.uk, Thursday 22 December 2011 12.55 GMT
Article history



Lord Justice Leveson has received a total of more than 411 submissions of evidence, the inquiry has revealed. Photograph: WPA Pool/Getty Images


The Leveson inquiry into phone hacking and media ethics has received more than 200 submissions from individuals who do not work in the industry.


Lord Justice Leveson's judicial inquiry has received 632 items of correspondence through its generalenquiries@levesoninquiry.org.uk email address in the first month since it opened.


In all 411 submissions of evidence have been made from members of the public and other interested parties.


The majority of the submissions from the public are general comments on the work of the inquiry, including proposals for solutions to the problems facing the press.


In addition, the inquiry has received 93 submissions from people who claim to be victims of the press – the majority of these relation to inaccuracy and intrusion.


Four paparazzi photographers have also made submissions. Freelance photographers who specialise in celebrity pictures have come under sustained criticism during the opening weeks of the inquiry.


Sienna Miller told of how she was spat at and verbally abused by paparazzi, while Charlotte Church and Kate McCann said photographers jumped out of hedges while they were going about their daily business.


Gerry McCann urged Leveson to consider a new rule requiring newspapers to seek a subject's written consent before publishing photographs of them going about their daily business.


Among the other individuals who have made submissions are 27 journalists, including nine still working in the industry, 18 former journalists and seven former or current editors.


The list of submissions are as follows:

• 215 members of the public

• 93 alleged victims of press treatment

• 27 journalists (including 9 current journalists and 18 former journalists

• 23 campaign organisations

• 21 academics/academic institutions

• 10 MPs/peers

• 7 former or current editors

• 7 regulators (including: from Sweden, the Netherlands, Ireland and New Zealand)

• 4 paparazzi

• 2 police

• 2 law firms


• To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email editor@mediaguardian.co.uk or phone 020 3353 3857. For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 3353 2000. If you are writing a comment for publication, please mark clearly "for publication".

• To get the latest media news to your desktop or mobile, follow MediaGuardian on Twitter and Facebook

Thanks frencheuropean ,


Gerry McCann urged Leveson to consider a new rule requiring
newspapers to seek a subject's written consent before publishing
photographs of them going about their daily business."

Oh, it was O.K. to have the press to take photos to order while the McCanns were in Portugal and wanted the publicity as Kate mentioned in her book, but
when the photo taken in Amsterdam showed them laughing it was soon whoosh-clucked.

Pot

Kettle

Black

Wind

Changed

Again

Time

Jail

Soon

The

End

Is

Nigh

Interesting summary of the Leveson's inquiry in the Guardian:


..........................................................................................................................................................................
Media
Leveson inquiry




Leveson inquiry pantomime season: the story so far

Despite the repetition of denials, an accumulation of horror stories of tabloid practices has emerged


reddit this



David Leigh

guardian.co.uk, Friday 23 December 2011 17.32 GMT
Article history



Lord Justice Leveson: the judge was blunt that the inquiry was about much more than the hacking into Milly Dowler's phone. Photograph: Getty Images


"Oh no I didn't!" "Oh yes you did!" As good as any Christmas pantomime, the Leveson inquiry into tabloid morals may well have been intended, as its critics allege, to distract attention from the prime minister's own ill-advised links with Rupert Murdoch.

But nevertheless, in the first month of what is due to be a long London run in courtroom 73 at the Royal Courts of Justice, Leveson mostly succeeded in laying on a gripping show. There have been 63 live performers so far.

This is despite the absence for legal reasons of key testimony, including from the News of the World executive responsible for hacking the phone of the murdered Milly Dowler.

Piers Morgan, one-time Mirror editor, proved one of the more theatrical of the oh-no-I-didn't brigade. He gave curt and sulky answers, and tried to blame Sir Paul McCartney's ex-wife for a voicemail tape he himself once boasted of hearing. Morgan also lashed out at the Guardian's reporters who unearthed the present scandal, calling them the sanctimonious "bishops of Fleet Street".

His fellow editor Colin Myler, who presided over four years of cover-up at the late News of the World, did at least have the grace to blurt out "I apologise" when accused of deceiving the Press Complaints Commission.

But the overall picture Myler sought to paint was of a saintly process of reform, worthy of any bishop, in which the sinners had long been swept away, and he no longer tolerated misbehaviour.

When he made this claim, "Oh yes you did!" might have been heard at the back of the hall. For he was at once contradicted by a large ex-policeman, Derek Webb.

Nicknamed, rather improbably, the Silent Shadow, Webb's job at the News of the World was to follow people about, the hearing was told. When it became too hot to employ him as a private detective, he explained on oath, he was simply told to get a National Union of Journalists card. This happened under the supposedly reforming editorship of Myler.

The inquiry's lawyers asked Webb whether anything changed at all at the NoW after the new broom succeeded the disgraced former editor Andy Coulson. Webb replied succinctly: "Nothing."

One of the Silent Shadow's most sordid missions was to take himself up to Manchester and trail the provincial lawyers suing on behalf of hacking victims. According to the evidence that emerged, Webb's task was to get dirt on them, try and see whether they were having an affair, and even question the paternity of children.

These allegations apparently got nowhere, but the emerging picture of a Murdoch corporation bent on bullying and blackmail seemed to bear out Labour MP Tom Watson's earlier accusation that the company was like the mafia. For his pains, Watson himself was placed under the same surveillance, presumably in the hope of finding indiscretions in his own private life.

Many more dismaying pieces of testimony about various tabloids came from the small group of journalists willing to take the stand. Some depicted themselves as bullied and beaten down, in constant fear of the sack. Others seemed corrupted by their foot-in-the-door lifestyle. Paul McMullan, ex-News of the World and one of the most feral of the witnesses, said: "Privacy is for paedos."

Matt Driscoll, a News of the World sports reporter awarded £800,000 by a tribunal for flagrant mistreatment by Coulson, said Sir Alex Ferguson's medical records had been obtained by his bosses. His testimony was particularly chilling. The medical records were not published, he said, but after being made aware of what the paper had obtained, Ferguson started to "co-operate", presumably by giving them stories.

Richard Desmond's tabloids, too, were the subject of some withering testimony. Former reporter Richard Peppiatt elaborated his account of torrid times at the Star, saying: "Stories which sell well … had to be sourced on a daily basis, whether there was a tale to tell or not. This naturally led to fabrication."

A trio of Express reporters tried haltingly to explain why they had trashed the lives of the McCanns, as the inquiry had heard. They told the same story as Peppiatt. While rival NoW journalists ran a black market copy of Mrs McCann's anguished diaries, the Express reporters sent out to Portugal filed endless cruel and defamatory fabrications about the couple. One said Desmond's editor, Peter Hill, was "obsessed" with the McCanns and demanded a daily front page story because it sold papers "regardless of how strong the story was". Another said: "It would be quite a brave reporter to call the desk and say 'I'm not really sure about this'."

At the Mirror too, a former reporter under Morgan, James Hipwell, described the febrile atmosphere on the 22nd floor of the Mirror building, in the showbusiness department. He claimed in the late 1990s phone-hacking was rampant and regarded as "bog-standard".

Such horror stories accumulated daily. Few outside the sometimes surreal world of the tabloids had realised until the Leveson hearings got under way that a paper like the News of the World was being largely put together not by journalists, but by private detectives.

The paper employed one private eye, Steve Whittamore, to blag ex-directory phone numbers, "friends and family" numbers, and addresses from car number plates. They employed another, Glenn Mulcaire, to hack into voicemails, using the phone numbers thus obtained. They employed a third, convicted criminal Jonathan Rees, apparently for his relations with police officers. They paid a fourth, Silent Shadow, to put people high and low under surveillance. And finally, a fifth private eye, who currently has to be known as "Soldier X" for legal reasons, was, according to allegations made at the inquiry, employed to plant a Trojan virus to hack into a target's computer.

Such testimonies are shining a rare light of accountability on modern newspaper behaviour, although only those who logged on to the Leveson website streamed hearings and daily transcripts got the real picture. Many newspaper groups have, unsurprisingly, reported very little of the washing of their own dirty linen. Even the Independent, scarcely a big player in the world of chequebook journalism, published a hostile editorial about the alleged irrelevance of Leveson.

But the judge himself, at any rate, appears to have no doubts about the importance of what he is unearthing.

When it was suggested that new uncertainties about the cause of deletions on the murdered Milly Dowler's phone might undermine the rationale for his inquiry, Leveson was blunt that it was about much more: "If anybody had any doubt about that, I anticipate that the last month has dispelled that doubt."

He has also shown little patience with the red-tops' elastic attitude to the truth. Morgan announced: "My books were not intended to provide a historical record. They were assembled and recounted in a manner designed to entertain the reader."

When Sharon Marshall, ex-NoW, talked of "topspin" in her own memoir Tabloid Girl, Leveson could stand it no longer. He burst out: "What do you mean by the word topspin? Lie?"

Something else has also been happening at Leveson beneath the surface. Beyond the Hugh Grants and Steve Coogans, the emotion and the retaliatory tabloid venom, there has been an interesting historical inquiry at work.

Rather in the way the origin of the Aids virus is believed to have been traced by scientists to some primates in the heart of the Congo, so Leveson seems to have been toiling through the tabloid jungle, in search of an incubator of the original phone-hacking virus.

A voice from the grave – that of Sean Hoare, who died recently of drink – pointed to one possibility. His brother testified to Leveson that Sean had been one of a raffish group of young men writing sex and celebrity stories in the late 90s. They all clustered around the Bizarre showbusiness column on the Sun, from which three tabloid editors were later to be selected – Piers Morgan at the Mirror, Andy Coulson at the News of the World, and Dominic Mohan, the current editor of the Sun.

Hoare claimed that phone-hacking started there at the Sun. He said it was "routine", and migrated from the Sun to the News of the World, where it went out of control. This chimes to an extent with a claim aired at Leveson on behalf of the actor Jude Law, that private eye Glenn Mulcaire wrote "the Sun" on the corner of one hacking file he compiled .

News International has so far denied vehemently, and at times frantically, any suggestions that the Sun, its most profitable publication, shared any hacking infections with its sister paper, the News of the World. These denials are firm despite the repeated traffic of staff back and forth between the two tabloids.

So far, there is little convincing evidence against the Sun and its editor, Mohan, who is due to testify before Leveson. This will be one of the high spots to look out for when the curtain goes up again in the new year.