Peter Burden » Les Hinton

ANOTHER PAY-OUT AND MORE SHAME FOR RUPERT.

Peter — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 13:12:38 +0000

The News of the World have been ordered to pay out yet again for their sleazy journalism.
    As I predicted on this blog back in January, the High Court in London has today awarded Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie a settlement (undisclosed but likely to be huge) for the paper’s illegal intrusion of their privacy. The Screws had bought some dodgy information, and (as is their practice) drawn the conclusion that suited their permanently warped sense of news. The wrong conclusion, naturally.
   Ol’ Rupert Rumplechops must be getting mightily pissed off with his former love, The Harridan of Wapping, especially as the finishing touches are put to a fresh major revelation about the mess his people made there three years ago when they clumsily tried to cover up their involvement in a string of phone-hacking crimes.
    And the boss in London then, Les Hinton, is now boss of Dow Jones/Wall Street Journal. That will be more than a bit embarrassing.

Andy eases Cameron into the Wall Street Jorunal

Peter — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 16:45:16 +0000

It’s a a great pity that we must be reminded of our Prime Minister’s connection with Rupert Rumplechops through his choice of the Wall Street Journal (The Jewel in the coronet of Rupert’s vanity) in which to write his well-judegd words about the realities of the “Special Relationship”. Of course, DC’s in-house spinner, Andy Coulson is a former partner in crime with WSJ CEO, Les Hinton. How long will he remain to taint the air in Downing Street? The countdown has started.

MAX SETTLES FOR MURDOCH’S MILLION.

Peter — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 16:21:09 +0000

Max Clifford has accepted £1m in what is described not as compensation for invasion of privacy (which is what it is) but as “costs” and a “personal payment” from the News of the World. A Court Order rescinding the Feb 3rd request for disclosure by Mulcaire and of the Screws’ settlement with Gordon Taylor, also states that there shall be no order as to costs, and makes no mention of a settlement, which effectively allows the Screws to deny any wrongdoing, despite this massive pay out to avoid having to make the potentially catastrophic disclosures ordered at the request of Clifford’s lawyers.

No wonder the deal has taken so long to work out, with all this give and take, though it seems likely, with Max holding the whip hand, and Ol’ Rumplechops hopping around in New York, worried shitless about the truth coming out, that he could have held out for a great deal more. After all, Les Hinton was in charge of News International at the time of their Royal phone hacking debacle, and there are few who doubt he knew what was going on, at leat as much as managing editor Stuart Kuttner (who master-minded the scheme), head of legals, Tom Crone and Andy Coulson, who was editor at the time. This is a big problem for Murdoch who is desperate to be perceived as a respectable, major player in New York, as the proprietor of the pre-eminent Wall Street Journal, which Les Hinton now fronts up for Rupert.

I understand that everyone has their price, as Rupert knows well. Since the Royal phone-hacking prosecution revealed five more victims, the Screws have already paid off Clive Goodman and Glenn Mulcaire, the hacks who’d been hung out to dry. They have also given a fat fee to Elle Macpherson for an interview (by Sarah Brown, for heaven’s sake!) in their “Crapulous!” magazine, in which pages are devoted to plugging her range of knickers. They’ve paid Gordon Taylor and his minions c £1m in costs and damages.

But a lot of us were hoping Max would abide by his pledge, issued when he launched his claim against the Screws, that his principal aim was to uncover the Truth. He didn’t especially need the money (and anyway said he would give any proceeds of the suit to children’s health charities.) If he hadn’t take Rupert’s tainted money and persisted with his claim, and won (which he almost certainly would have done), he’d have been lucky to be awarded £30K – £50K, but the News of the World, the Metropolitan Police and Glenn Mulcaire would have been forced to produce details which would have had disastrous effects, possibly leading to widened charges over the original phone-hacking crimes.

So, the Murdoch’s have sort of got away with it this time (for a £1m + their own costs), but the temptation for the growing number of confirmed Screws’ targets to ask for more of the same has been magnified. It only needs one whose sense of public duty outstrips their own greed to go all the way, and force them to throw into the public domain details of endemic illegal news-gathering.

And back in Romania, Albania, and probably still in London,too, is a band of men who have been falsely accused, imprisoned on remand and subsequently acquitted as a result of fabricated stories cobbled together by disgraced Screws Investigations Editor, Mazher Mahmood. In the currrent climate, these victims of the Screws’ outrageous attitude to Truth and Justice could offer a profitable project for a good, hungry lawyer.

PCC’S PETA GETS HER SHOW ON THE ROAD WITH A ‘FUCK’.

Peter — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 12:47:52 +0000

Baroness Peta Buscombe, the newish boss of the Press Complaints Commission, made an unfortunate choice over the timing of her first set-piece gig. Last April, after much searching, she was appointed to the PCC Chair after a string of rumpuses had been mismanaged by her predecessor, renowned downhill banana-skin skier, Sir Christopher Meyer, since when she has pragmatically maintained an almost undetectable profile. She must have told her colleagues and members of the commission that she’d like to take a little time to bed into the job and learn what it was about before delivering her mission statement.
The occasion chosen for this formal spout was the annual conference of the Society of Editors last weekend, and it was bad luck for her that it happened so soon after the body she heads had loudly hammered in one of the last few nails needed to seal its own coffin.
Only a week before, she’d put her name to one of the most pusillanimous, cringe-making, Murdoch-arse-licking reports that the PCC has delivered to date, unequivocally supporting the cabal of evil, mendacious men who run – or, in the case of Stuart Kuttner, used to run – the News of the World, while at the same time trying desperately to rubbish the irrefutable and damning evidence of an investigative reporter on a paper that still has an interest in delivering the truth – evidence which, when offered to members of the Commons Culture Media Sport Committee, left them in no doubt that they were being lied to.
(I’ve previously referred more than once to the spectacle of former Screws editor, Andy Coulson leafing through a copy of the paper, telling his questioners that he has no recollection whatever of a story, flagged on the front page of an issue of the paper that he’d edited, occupying the whole of Page 7, depicting a verbatim transcript of a message left by one prince on another prince’s voicemail, knowing that not a single person in the Wilson Room in Portcullis House, or viewing the session on Parliament TV, or in the evening news broadcasts would believe him, a which point you had to conclude that here is a youngish man who sees his whole future in jeopardy if he breaks and admits to a scintilla of knowledge of the phone-hacking that was involved in acquiring the story.)
   So, at this inauspicious moment in the PCC’s shameful career, the week after it had blatantly rallied round to uphold the obvious untruths of all the senior staff at the News of the World and ex-News International Chairman, Les Hinton, Baroness Buscombe chose to deliver a dog’s dinner. Her speech, empty of wit or erudtion was carefully – and irrelevantly – implanted with a “fuck”, ( “Peta Buscombe? Who the fuck is he?”), just to let the hard men know what a ballsy gal she is. She devoted a lot of it to party politics, MPs’ expenses, Lords’ reform and what it’s like being a woman in a man’s world. Her views on the function of her new body were expressed in a torrent of weasel words and Dacre-speak about the State ‘spying’ on citizens and ‘terrorising’ parking offenders, and the sanctity of press ‘freedom’, dutifully regurgitating the tabloid mantra that if papers weren’t able to tell stories about the private lives of famous people, the public would be deprived of a basic human right. She offered a little moan about PC gone mad, asking, ‘Whatever happened to common sense and a sense of proportion?’, and suggested that people were blind to put faith in laws and regulation – for, ‘as Gibbon pointed out, “Laws rarely prevent what they forbid”,’ an argument sometimes out forward for the dismantling of the whole penal code (though not usually by Conservatives).
   She told editors that Simon Cowell had successfully used the PCC to give him freedom from intrusive paparazzi, although he could have afforded to go to the courts if he’d wanted. She may have forgotten that only last month, Max Clifford was seen on clips from the documentary film, ‘Starsuckers’, saying that Cowell had been paying him a large retainer for several years, just to keep his name out of the papers. Or perhaps, as the film shows how easy it is to sell totally fictitious stories to most of the tabloids, her paymasters forbade her to see it.
   It was a feeble performance by a person who seems to have no clear concept of her function, which will only hasten the demise of this doomed organisation. MPs and even some serious-minded journalists are realistic enough and, in the case of MPs, brave enough to face down Murdoch and Dacre and accept at last that the concept of self-regulation by an industry that includes publications like the News of the World, the Sun, the Daily Star, the Express and the Daily Mail is not a feasible option. Next year should at last see moves towards establishing an independent, statutory body with quasi-legal powers to curb the excesses of the Shag Rags and their tawdry hacks, while making Britian a cleaner place to live.

Banging up the Data Thieves

Peter — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 09:15:01 +0000

At last, it’s been announced that the Justice Minister, Michael Wills, will activate a clause originally passed by Parliament in last year’s Criminal Justice and Immigration Act. Shamefully, it was then effectively neutered by three press heavies leaning hard on Gordon Brown to have it removed.
One of them was Les Hinton, former CEO of News International, who displayed such strong symptoms of convenient, chronic News International Amnesia when interviewed over a satellite link by the Commons Culture, Media, Sport Committee last month – like the senior management of the News of the World, who had already sat in front of the committee outrageously claiming they couldn’t remember/didn’t know how much and on what terms they’d paid off miscreant reporter Clive Goodman and private investigator, Glenn Mulcaire. Even Stuart Kuttner, wily old managing editor and architect of many of the distasteful journalistic scams that the paper has pulled off, didn’t know who would know – which was a bit of a surprise. [And former Screws editor Andy Coulson couldn't remember publishing a verbatim transcript of a message left on Prince Harry's private voicemail by Prince William and illegally accessed by two of his staff who went to prison for it. He'd have gone too, if he'd admitted being party to it. But he said he wasn't - at least, he couldn't remember anything about it..... not.]
Also present at what was reported to be a dinner with the Prime Minster, was Paul Dacre, the man who employs Richard Littlejohn (in itself a crime against human decency). Muckraker Dacre then described the provision to make Data Theft an imprisonable offence as “a truly frightening amendment.” Truly frightening, for sure, to the editor of a newspaper which was found by the Information Commissioner a few years before to have routinely engaged in wholesale illegal information gathering (and got away with it).
Gordon Brown, as lily-livered as any politician confronted by press bosses who might have nasty things written about him and his government, agreed to “suspend” the clause, which the former Information Commissioner, Richard Thomas had fought so hard to have put in place.
The current Commissioner, Christopher Graham last month accused MPs of chucking out the clause, when, in fact Parliament had passed it. It was the Government, not Parliament who changed their mind.
Now, after the Guardian’s valiant disclosure that the Screws had been hacking into the voicemails of Gordon Taylor and two other people involved in the Professional Footballers’ Association, the government has accepted [as I have advocated many times on this blogspace] that it has no choice but to enact the clause. That they should now qualify this with a public interest defence is quite right and proper – no one wants to see responsible journalists impeded from exposing crime and corruption.
But the core fact is that medical records, bank account details, tax records, phone-call traffic information, or even journey details obtainable from registered Oyster cards, of individuals who have committed no offence greater than being of interest to those who read the Shag Rags can easily be passed on by an employee of the many companies and agencies that keep these records, using a USB stick with little risk of being caught and for a sizable cash fee. A serious penal deterrent is the only way this kind of traffic can be contained.
The press will circle to cut off this development, and it should be made clear to the government that public concern over personal privacy will not tolerate any more back-tracking, however many seductive dinners Dacre and Co buy the Prime Minister.

News Corp Swept by Outbreak of Contagious Amnesia.

Peter — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 16:18:58 +0000

I don’t know if swine flu is yet rife within the offices of News Corp’s world wide operations, but there is a visible increase in cases of galloping amnesia, if not downright mendacity, doing the rounds among their senior executives, especially when being asked questions by Members of Parliament.

Les Hinton, with silver locks well coiffed and a chummy habit of calling his questioners by their Christian names, consented to give evidence today to the House of Commons Culture Media Sport Committee via video-link from New York. He used to be Executive Chairman of News International, which owns the Murdoch newspapers in Britain, until December 2007, when he was promoted CEO of Dow Jones in New York, after Murdoch’s News Corp acquired it in their takeover of the Wall Street Journal.

He was, therefore, boss of Stuart Kuttner, Tom Crone and Andy Coulson, the management in charge of the News of the World when Royal Editor, Clive Goodman was jailed along with private investigator Glenn Mulcaire for tapping the phones of members of Prince Charles’ household.

As executive chairman at the time, he was as responsible as any of his subordinates for what went on – unless, of course, they knew more than he did about those events. But one of the committee today pointed out the striking similarity in the way Hinton answered the questions put to him and the efforts of his former executives. The number of times he shrugged his shoulders and declared he was “sorry but he just didn’t know”, or that, “given how busy he was at the time, he just couldn’t remember”, almost rivalled Andy Coulson’s performance in front of the same committee in July, when he declared he had no recollection of his paper publishing a transcript of a telephone message left by Prince William for Prince Harry, reproduced verbatim on p.7 of the Screws with a strap across the front page.

However, Les did let slip one little droplet of truth.

Asked, ‘Did it surprise you that Andy Coulson didn’t know that a voicemail had been hacked?’ he answered, ‘He might well have known.’

Thanks, Les. That’s what we’ve all been saying.

But, on the other hand, Les didn’t know why News International had given Gordon Taylor and his associates a million quid in damages, although he was very much in charge when the events that led to it took place.

That is so surprising, you could be forgiven for thinking Les was being a tad disingenuous. And when asked who had given him the advice that NI should give a substantial settlement to a journalist who had been dismissed for plainly breaking his contract, or how Clive Goodman had been able to afford a top QC to fight his case (when he’d already pleaded guilty), he’d jolly well forgotten again.

If I were a share-holder in News Corps, I think I’d be very worried that one of its principal assets is being run by a man who has lost his capacity to remember such important details.