"I am concerned that the admitted phone hacking in London by the News Corp may have extended to 9/11 victims or other Americans," he said. "If they did, the consequences will be severe." more by Jay Rockefeller - 1 hour ago - Evening Standard |
I cannot say that I'm surprised. The fact that the 7/7 victims families were hacked is a horrible thing, but if the 9/11 - or as I prefer to call it "11/9" because I have difficulty working out American dates when the two numbers are those of a month and a day, I genuinely sometimes think it's the 9th November rather than the 11th September - victims and their families were hacked, it would be awful.
All of Murdoch's papers are dodgy. It isn't just the News of the World; the Sun illegally obtained private medical records of Gordon Brown's son (and Rebekah Brooks actually called him to say she was running the story and there was nothing he could do about it) and he suspected for a while that the Sunday Times were hacking his phone (and the police have told him since they think it was hacked).
That's potentially 3 out of the 4 papers that Murdoch owns in the UK. Odds are on the Telegraph are at it too and we're bound to find it out once the public inquiry into News International gets underway. If those papers are at it you can be certain other papers are. I believe Murdoch owns (or partly owns) the New York Post, opening a real possibility that the terrorist victims and their families were hacked.
I also bet that it's going on at News Corporation back in Oz. The worrying thing about that is that Murdoch pretty much owns Australia's media. It's not like the US and the UK where he owns a couple of papers - he owns over twenty papers that cover different states. I was talking to my cousin Roz the other say and she said he pretty much owned Australia on the newspaper front.
Getting any dirty work exposed there would be difficult because Murdoch probably has everything watertight there. I should point out that it was a left-wing broadsheet paper The Guardian that exposed the scandals here in the UK. I think left-wing papers all over the world should get their groves on and start ferreting for dirty in Murdoch's empire.
He's backed into a corner and we shouldn't let him slip passed us because he has been controlling our governments and our media for too long. The UK Election is a good example of that; everyone hated David Cameron and hates the Tory party, yet with a combination of the Tories (more or less) buying seats with Ashcroft's money and Murdoch launching an unjust hate campaign against Gordon Brown, Labour would still be in power. They'd have lost a chunk of their majority but I believe that Brown would have beaten Cameron easier than Cameron could hate beat him simply because Cameron and Clegg are both inexperienced and out of touch. Murdoch hates elites and so he likes to make them jump for him, and it's sent him into a potentially dangerous ego trip.
It's like I said to that Green Party representative - power corrupts everyone in the end and Murdoch is a great example of this.
Politicians have been frightened of Murdoch for too long and it's time they stopped asking him to pull out of BSkyB and just told him, "No!" He's covered in crap because he won't let Rebekah Brooks reign. Why? Because she knows where all the bodies are buried. If he lets her out of his sight for too long she might blab. She's already blabbed a lot which she should have been arrested for but there isn't enough evidence.
Seriously, politicians, you never hold back when you see your opponant limping and always go in for the kill. The nasty, painful kill too. Why hold back over Murdoch? If you all join together to give him the heave-ho then what's the worst he can do? Tell people not to support any of you? Grow some balls, Cameron.
The greatest irony of all is that Ed Miliband, written off just a couple of months ago as a weak political geek, is the only person who seems to have correctly judged how the people feel about Murdoch's BSkyB takeover, or him in general. Cameron is (and always has been) completely out-of-touch with his public, and Clegg is just slightly better (although the TRUE politically weak magot - but then so is Cameron). This really has become a case of 'the worm that turned' as Cameron rather cowardly chose to try and sell his Big Society: Privatisation thought the backdoor/Let's get plebs to work for free and get rid of public spending crap to a crowd of unconvinced people, rather than face Miliband's questionning in Parliament. He sent Jeremy Cun-*cough**cough*HUNT*cough**cough* to face him instead. Labour were so pissed off with everything Hunt said you'd have thought they'd start lobbing handgrinades at him.
Cameron just doesn't seem to realise how disturbed the public are by his closeness to a man who is right at the heart of the phone hacking scandal, and who allegedly abused his position while in power. It was his employee and he should have known better. They try so hard to turn this around on all politicians but NO - they are the ones who have been caught holding the biggest cookie from the jar, THEY have to answer for it.
Like I said, politicians are frightened of Murdoch and Cameron is still scared of him. He knows he's only there thanks to money and Murdoch, and he knows that this entire thing is probably the last nail in the coffin FOR HIM. He can't blame the LibDems for once. Furthermore he must realise that Ed Miliband called for this vote in parliament to completely block the BSkyB takeover due to lack of confidence in News International today in order to test the coalition.
Nick Clegg has already come out and made it clear he is keep his hands clean and keeping Cameron at a ten-inch-pole's length this time. He knows he's on his way out and the coalition is crumbling regardless.
Miliband knows that by forcing this vote - which couldn't be denied - forced a wedge between not only the LibDems and the Tories but the Tories in general, those who can see the ship sinking around David Cameron and don't want to be on that ship, and those who cling to Cameron because he's the one who got them their jobs. Moreover if the vote DOESN'T pass it makes Cameron and the Tories look corrupt, and if it does go though then it proves that the Coalition have abandoned Cameron (including Clegg, it seems).
Either way Miliband can't lose. This is a Labour vote, and that has been made clear in the papers. If it passes, it's a feather in their cap - not the coalition's.
I want to leave you all with this video I just uploaded to YT. It's a clip from Charlie Brooker's Newswipe by documentary maker Adam Curtis. I've titled it 'Nixon Syndrome' because it's about how we've all become like Nixon - paranoid that the elite are running the country to suit themselves. It mentions Murdoch in it, stating his hatred of elites:
The irony is that he IS an elite and runs things to suit him.
