… will there by a heart/lung transplant with the later appearance of a replacement Sunday red top?
Rupert Murdoch read the runes after the British Legion suspended its relationship with the News of the World, seeing that past advantage of joint campaigning on issues important to military veterans could not weigh against the gross abuse of the paper having sanctioned the hacking of phones of bereaved military families.
Following the indications that News of the World reporters had hacked into the phones of murdered children and their families, the latest revelations left the paper in an irrecoverable position in terms of public opinion.
There was unequivocal national revulsion at both the mindset and the ‘professional’ practice underpinning such conduct.
The willingness to see murdered children and dead heroes as no more than sources for crooked journalistic scoops was well below what the nation sees as the boundary of basic moral values.
The fear for the Murdoch media stable was that its other titles were likely, after this, to suffer by the contagion of public withdrawal of support.
Murdoch acted decisively, realising that the position of the paper was irrecoverable. His son James announced that this Sunday’s News of the World would be the last.
One could say that the last person to leave WILL turn off the lights.
It will be fitting if this Sunday’s sales of the paper record their lowest ever level.
However, Murdoch is unlikely to bin the earner of a Sunday shockfest paper. It is quite likely that News International will launch a replacement paper at some point seen as plausible.
Readers may well take the view that the issue is not the particular paper, it’s the parental DNA.
Rebekah Brooks, the troubled Chief Executive of News International who was editor of the News of the World when the worst of these alleged abuses took place, has to be unlikely to survive in her job. With Murdoch’s clear determination to defend her, she may hang on for a while but the culture of the paper she condoned or encouraged was, in any normal view, a sick one.
She has damaged the standing of journalism as well as of News International and her steering of the paper at that time has seen it die in one of the most dramatic of media car crashes imaginable.
This cannot be a sustainable position.
It should be remembered that Murdoch also has the possibility of Ofcom, now under real pressure for its longstanding complacent mediocrity, having to take a decision on whether or not News International is a fit and proper owner for B Sky B.
The swift amputation of News of the World will have been designed as a clear piece of evidence for Ofcom to use to find in favour of Murdoch in the planned acquisition of B Sky B. Will it now dare to do so?
It is also curious that the batch of papers handed earlier and voluntarily by News International to the Metropolitan Police were those relating to payments of officers for information.
This smacks very much as a declaration of war or of retaliation. At this stage News International must also have known about the hacking into Milly Dowler’s phone and into those of relatives of the military dead in Afghanistan.
This whole saga has some way still to go.
Members of the general public, in continuing to make their stance known, will help to stiffen the resolve of bodies supposed to act in defence of public values but most often found in dereliction of that duty.
Anyone wishing to add their voice to the campaign to stop Murdoch’s bid for BSkyB could do worse than visit the Avaaz campaign page at http://www.avaaz.org/en/ You can send a message via that page.
I’ve loathed the news of the world since I was old enough to read and am delighted that this inflammatory trash will pass away. Any billionaire’s want to exploit that gap before he can come back with the Sun on Sunday?
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Apologies, I put this really Blackpool type apostrophe in there and I am just off to drown myself in the sea…
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Given what we seen and learned over the past week or so relating to the News of the World and News International, I would hope that no reasonable person would now touch any of Murdoch’s papers with a barge pole.
We can now see that the News of the World is going to return in the near future as the Sun on Sunday or the Sunday Sun. I would hope that no one will now touch the Sun or the Sun on Sunday / Sunday Sun when it eventually hits the streets. I would hope that all political parties will now publicly condemn News International and ensure that none of them give any advertising business to them.
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Murdoch needs to be stopped in his tracks re future aquisitions. As for the bile spouting News of the World good riddance to bad rubbish. Problem is so many buy it wanting to be shocked knowing its manufactures trash, with hardly a grain of truth, obsessed with sex, scandal, ‘exposures’ , crime, hang em flog em, and has the cheek to claim it is some sort of moral crusade champ.
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No-one, would you believe, is as shocked, distressed and disgusted at the behaviour of the NotW as James Murdoch and Rebekah. Murdoch senior doesn’t seem to want to talk about it, but what’s the betting that he’s even more shocked etc than the rest of the world? No wonder that our most senior politicians have held these people in such high esteem (or should that be awe, or fear?) down the years.
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I typed a response earlier, however the hamster must have fell off the wheel at that precise moment LOL
Closing down the NotW. Well, Premiership footballers are having a collective sigh of relief.
What annoys me about this now is their answer is to put 200 people out of work, the majority of whom probably had nothing to do with the hacking and might not have even been there at the time.
And yet Rebekah Brooks has her resignation offer refused. Sickening. She needs to go. My only concellation tonight is hearing that that slimey little rat Coulson is getting arrested.
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The Daily Star offices have now been raided in connection with this story. Personally I have sympathy for those people who are innocent who now find themselves out of work however if this turns out to be a turning point (for the better) in terms of the quality of our mass media then it couldn’t have come sooner.
The British public at large also need to remind themselves that papers go to these lengths and publish this rubbish because so many people crave it. God knows why.
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