A. Loewenstein Online Newsletter

The Guardian’s Nick Davies on how Murdoch punishes friends and enemies

Posted: 22 Jul 2011

Speaking on Democracy Now!:

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, Nick Davies, many of us here in the United States who watched the hearings this week were really surprised at the extent to which the members of Parliament really were dogged in their questioning and fairly confrontational in their questioning. Could you explain to us the degree of change that’s occurred among these MPs versus how they treated the Murdoch empire in the past?
NICK DAVIES: OK, you look at it this way. For the last two or three years, while we’ve been trying to get this story out, there’s been a maximum of four members of Parliament who were willing to stand up and talk about it. That’s out of a total of about 630.
Take as an example, there’s a guy called Chris Bryant. He’s been very good on this. Back in March 2003, he was a member of one of those parliamentary select committees. And he had in front of him, as witnesses, Rebekah Brooks, the then-editor of The Sun, previously editor of the News of the World, and her close friend and fellow editor, Andy Couslon, who’s the guy who goes to work for David Cameron. Way back there in March 2003, Chris Bryant asked a brave question. He said to Rebekah, “Have you ever paid the police for information?” And she, not considering the impact of her reply, said, “Yes, we have paid the police in the past.” Now this was dynamite. You’re not supposed to admit to paying bribes to police officers. OK, that was March.
In December 2003, the Murdoch press exposed Chris Bryant. They accused him of what is in their ghastly moral framework a crime, which was that he was gay. And they published a photograph of him wearing a skimpy pair of underpants. They did that to humiliate that man, that politician, that elected politician, to punish him for daring to ask a difficult question and provoking a difficult answer. And that is a microcosm of why most of the rest of the 630 elected MPs stayed quiet and why the police go quiet and the news organizations go quiet. The Murdoch organization deals in power. And part of that power is about frightening people.
AMY GOODMAN: Nick Davies, on Monday, on the eve of the Murdochs testifying, Sean Hoare, a former reporter with News of the World, who helped blow the whistle on the Murdoch-owned paper, was found dead in his home. Hoare had been the source a New York Times story tying the phone hacking to former News of the World editor Andy Coulson, who would later become the chief spokesperson for Prime Minister David Cameron—Coulson arrested as the scandal broke open. Hoare discussed his allegations against Andy Coulson in an interview last September.
SEAN HOARE: I have stood by Andy and been requested to tap phones, OK? Or hack into them and so on. He was well aware that the practice exists. To deny it is a lie, is simply a lie.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Sean Hoare, found dead in his home. The police immediately said it was not suspicious. Nick Davies, you knew Sean Hoare. Can you talk about what happened? Do you believe it was suspicious? And what is his significance?
NICK DAVIES: Well, first of all, there has always been a submerged network of former News of the World journalists who have assisted me and other people at The Guardian and the guys at the New York Times. Where Sean distinguished himself was that he was the first to come out on the record. And in doing that, he showed real bravery. And he did this in the New York Times, not The Guardian. Real bravery because of the intimidation which the Murdoch organization uses. And specifically if you’re a journalist and you come out and speak out against this organization, you’re losing any prospect of employment in the biggest media organization in the country. Sean did it. OK.
Now, I got to know him reasonably well, and he was a really, really—he was a good guy, had wonderful stories to tell. He dies this week. I’m afraid that unless somebody comes up with some evidence to contradict me, the sad fact is that Sean, who was many years younger than me, died because his body was ruined by alcohol and cocaine and ketamine. And in the background, the reason why he consumed quite so much alcohol and cocaine and ketamine and all the rest of it is because there was a long period of time when Murdoch’s newspapers paid him to do that. So, the way he put it to me was, “I was paid to go out and do drugs with rockstars.” And he was a show business correspondent, so he went out with a lot of very famous rockstars and ingested massive quantities of alcohol and drugs. And Sean was a great guy. He had enormous bounce to him. So he made no bones about it. He had, you know, enormous fun doing it. He enjoyed doing it. But looking back, he could see that it had ruined his body. He had become very, very ill. His liver was in a terrible state. He said to me, “My liver is so bad, the doctors tell me I must be dead already.” So, a kind of black joke. And so, I am afraid that his body caught up with him, and he died. And it’s very tempting for outsiders to say, “Well, that can’t be a fluke. That can’t be a coincidence.” But unless somebody comes up with something I haven’t heard of, it was just a coincidence.

So this is the culture inside News Limited

Posted: 22 Jul 2011

As the Australian Murdoch empire begin a comical defence of its glorious and ethical journalistic traditions – “What? Us? With an agenda? We’re just here to hold governments to account!” – a far more honest account of life inside the empire by Michael Williams, Senior Lecturer Print and Online Journalism at the University of Central Lancashire:

It was an astonishing admission from one of Rupert Murdoch’s most faithful executives. We’d gone to lunch to reminisce about our years together working at Wapping on Murdoch’s broadsheet papers. This was a man who was once so “on the Murdoch message” that he dismissed an investigation that I had produced into child labour sweatshops as “Well, what’s wrong? It’s the market isn’t it?”
“I now think,” he told me with a deep sigh, “I was in denial.” I had never thought of it in quite that way. The queasy feeling in my stomach was nothing to do with the quality of the steak and kidney pudding at one of London’s most august gentlemen’s clubs.
Now that the truth about some of Rupert Murdoch’s news operations – hacking, blagging, payment to police and worse – is exposed in all its awfulness, I, too, have wondered how much we News Corp journalists all really suspected, but never quite admitted to ourselves.
My time as head of news at the Murdoch Sunday Times through the late 1980s and early 1990s was a relative age of innocence compared with the horrors of recent times. Yet this was the period in which the seeds of the disaster that is now engulfing News Corporation were planted.
News journalism is a complex and often chaotic cocktail of adrenaline, risk-taking, egotism and competitiveness. Most of the time it is underpinned by a genuine quest for the truth and a sense of decency, however confused it might seem. But the Murdoch news machine is fuelled by more toxic and combustible ingredients – a culture of fear, unquestioning subservience to the media tycoon’s political and business interests and a willingness to push the envelope till it falls off the table.
As one former News of the World editor used to advise his staff: “Take the story to breaking point and then ratchet it back a notch.” Unfortunately, many journalists at Wapping conveniently forgot about the last bit as they got carried away in the wild west atmosphere
Unscrupulous though his methods were, I know exactly what the phone-hacking private detective Glenn Mulcaire meant when he told the Guardian that his employers exerted “relentless pressure” and “constant demand for results”. (No wonder News Corp were paying his legal expenses until this week, hoping he might not say anything more incriminating.)
It was precisely this that impelled many people inside News Corps’s London HQ at Wapping to do dangerous things – especially in atmosphere of mass hysteria that followed the 1986 dispute, when Rupert Murdoch sensationally sacked his printers. Many of the Sturmtruppen who cut their teeth in the years following Fortress Wapping were the very same people who went on to high executive positions as phone hacking went on unfettered, including Rebekah Brooks and Les Hinton, Rupert Murdoch’s right-hand man, who have both been forced to resign in the past week.
To my knowledge, there was no phone-hacking on my watch – for the simple reason there was a rule that all reporters were interrogated on their sources for all stories that went into the paper. But as the former People editor Bill Hagerty pointed out last week, editors cannot know everything. At the very least there was some reckless risk-taking – not exactly discouraged by the News International corporate ethos.

This is what Iraqis have been given; unaccountable mercenaries

Posted: 22 Jul 2011