All Posts Tagged With: "Stuart Kuttner"
THE CMS COMMITTEE AND THE TESTAROSSA
It’s heartening to see the Commons Committee for Culture, Media & Sport displaying a set of strong, tenacious gnashers. They have delayed publishing a report on their long-running Inquiry into Press Standards, Privacy and Libel. It was due out this month, and after all the excitement of Nick Davies’ revelations in the Guardian last July about the News of the World being sued for phone-hacking, it has been awaited with much eagerness, not least by the ShagRags at the dodgier end of our national press, who could well do without too much further inquiry into their practices.
But the Committee were so incensed at the dissembling, some say utter bullshit offered as evidence by the senior Screws staff, and former editor Andy Coulson, that they’ve decided to call in the Boss, Rupert Rumplechops’ favourite larrikin and former Sun editor, Rebekah “TestaRossa” Brooks, from whom, I imagine, they hope to extract some real answers, even the truth. It’s quite a hope.
It will be fun to see if she’s as adept at not telling the truth as her employees, Tom Crone (legal) Stuart Kuttner (Managing Editor for 22 years – now sacked) and Tory spinster, Andy Coulson, when they were in front of the Committee last July.
Titfers off to the committee chairman, Conservative John Whittingdale, who must be under some pressure from Central Office not to harass Coulson and young Dave C’s other new Wapping chums.
James Robinson in MediaGuardian says Mrs Brooks has already submitted written evidence – but it’s not on the HoC website yet. Whatever it says, it will be a work of Spinners’ Art, and well worth a read.
And, talking of the Sun, its feeble little editor, gossip-wallah Dominic Mohan must take credit for a classic, bad taste Sun front-page headline this morning:
Darling just screwed more people than Tiger Woods.
I wonder whose side they’re on?
Will Darling sue? Will Tiger?
Evan Davies’ coy delivery of it on Radio 4’s Today was pleasingly bizarre, too.
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Fake Sheikh Hits New Low
There was a time when the News of the World’s much-heralded “investigations editor”, Mazher Mahmood was creating stories that made the front page of the paper every few weeks. But over the last half dozen years, as his antics have begun to cost the paper, and the country, more and more in wasted police time, legal expenses and libel pay-outs, his name has been seen less and less and further back in the paper.
The former glory with which editors and management, like the disgraced Stuart Kuttner and Andy Coulson, tried to endow him has been replaced by a well-earned reputation for dishonest and inaccurate reporting, incitement to crime, illegally using his employer’s funds (with their connivance) to buy class A drugs, phone hacking, invasion of privacy by the use of covert video camera, entrapment and defamation.
But just to show he’s not quite a spent force (and because management can’t get rid of him as long has he knows where so many bodies are buried in Wapping), this week on, page 20 of the illustrious paper, he reveals the stunning news that a former employee of the later Michael Jackson is in a position to sell a tiny piece of pleated black satin that was, he assures the tireless Fake Sheikh, one of the innumerable face-masks that the late tweeny popster liked to wear to avoid direct contact with the pervasive aroma of LaLa Land and uptown LA where he was conducting rehearsals for the O2 Show that was never to be.
It’s a feeble, easily garnered story by any standards, which, brought in by a less luminary hack, would merit no more than 100 words, with, of course, a mug shot of the late Wacko. Perhaps, one day soon, common sense, and Young Master James will prevail, when the Fake Sheikh, his sycophantic entourage of One, and all his works and pomps will be cast into the fiery furnace where they belong. And the Cats of Kensington will see justice done.
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Rupert, Online Charges and the BBC
Over the last few months Rupert Murdoch has displayed uncharacteristic shilly-shallying over whether or not to charge for online access to the contents of his mainstream papers. (He already charges for digital access to the specialist Wall Street Journal.) It has finally been announced through Times editor, James Harding that his paper – along with other News Corp titles around the world – will definitely be charging for access to online journalism from Spring 2010.
Old Rumplechops has many regrettable traits, but being a fool isn’t one of them, and it’s hard to argue with the logic of his response to the reality that any serious commercial news medium must generate enough income to pay for quality news gathering (overlooking for a moment the high costs and penalties incurred by one of News Corp’s more disreputable British titles as a result of the systematic invasion of privacy, subterfuge, incitement to crime and plain old phone-screwing that has passed as news gathering for years under former managing editor, Stuart Kuttner).
It is inevitable that any reliable and responsibly operated news organisation, in order to survive, will, in the end, have to charge for its product however it is disseminated. And most serious news consumers won’t object. Many already buy fewer hard-copy newspapers each week than they used to, and top up with online editions for free. But those who want to continue to receive quality news, independent analysis and opinion will accept that, in the absence of sufficient advertising revenue to fill the vastly greater space and choices available to advertisers online, it has to be paid for somehow.
Where Harding and (presumably) Murdoch are wrong is in insisting that pay-per-item isn’t the way. He says they’ll offer long term subscriptions, or a daily rate. But this doesn’t reflect the way people now use web news services. They are more promiscuous in their relationship with online news purveyors than they are with the hard copy news they buy. (For example, the Guardian is the online best-seller among British papers, with nearly 33m. worldwide unique online users while it has a hard copy circulation of just 300,000 , compared with the Daily Telegraph’s circulation of c.800,000 with 31m. online users, and the Daily Mail’s huge 2,000,000 circulation and 30m. unique worldwide users.)
As the option to view several different versions or perspectives is there, the users do take advantage of it.
It’s likely that the ultimate means of charging and collecting revenue from online visitors will consist of users signing up to a general news service provider, that will allow then into whichever paper they want to visit, having paid into the single service an advance sum on account of incremental payments of say, 15p per article which the service distributes to the newspapers used.
Multiple subscriptions would be time-consuming and tedious to maintain; most people wouldn’t bother to sign up to everything for that reason. But using a central hub and payment platform, they would be able to access anything from the Tablet, the Spectator or the Telegraph, to the Mail or the News of the World.
Inevitably, some publications – like the Guardian, which already has a very successful online presence – will do better than others, and the competitive incentive for continuing to deliver high-quality, trustworthy news will be as strong as ever.
In practical terms, someone currently spending £15 a week on printed papers and weeklies would be able, for the same money, to access 100 separate articles from the whole range of titles on offer in their newsagent – probably more than most would consume in seven days.
I couldn’t find any logic in Harding’s assertion that “with article-only economics, you will find yourself writing a lot more about Britney Spears and a lot less about Tamils in Northern Sri Lanka.” In case he hadn’t noticed, this is precisely what already separates the Broadsheets from the Tabloids, and has done ever since anyone first noticed the difference.
Regrettably, the single biggest obstacle to the success of online news charging, however achieved, has been widely identified as the BBC’s online news service, which of course doesn’t have to compete for advertising income, because its news gathering operation is funded by the Licence Fee. It can and has been argued that providing free online services is not part of the Corporation’s remit under the terms of their broadcasting charter. After all, they’ve never offered the Radio Times free to all licence holders.
A brave government must address this anomaly by disallowing the BBC to offer this free service, except perhaps in the most basic, headline terms, for if this doesn’t happen, we may well witness within a decade or so in this country the death through lack of resources of the strong, independent news providers we currently have – online and on paper.
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PCC’S PETA GETS HER SHOW ON THE ROAD WITH A ‘FUCK’.
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.
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THE END OF THE AFFAIR – DO THE MURDOCHS STILL LOVE THE SCREWS?
It would be surprising if Rupert ‘Rumplechops’ Murdoch did not have a soft spot for the News of the World; after all, the old tart gave him his first big break in international newspaper publishing, which he now dominates from the offices of the Wall Street Journal – a very long way from the seedy Bouverie Street newsroom he took over back in 1969. Nevertheless, when he first made her acquaintance, buying the notorious ShagRag from under Robert Maxwell’s acquisitive hooter, she was, at least, an honest old tart, with great earning potential.
The tales of rapacious vicars, strippers at policemen’s balls and philandering politicians were more or less true. But over the last 25 years, under the evil influence of men like Stuart Kuttner, recently sacked managing editor, backed up by truth-hating hacks like Trevor Kempson, Mazher Mahmood and Neville Thurlbeck, the paper has utterly abandoned the principles expressed in its 1843 founding mission statement – “Our motto is the truth; our practice is the fearless advocacy of the truth,” perhaps to be replaced by a quote from former news editor, Greg Miskiw: “This is what we do; we go out and destroy other people’s lives.”
Now the culture of lying and fabrication which is endemic in the newsroom is beginning to alienate a better educated public and lose sales. And it’s costing enough in damages and legal fees to make a big dent in the paper’s formerly impressive earnings.
Tom Crone, head legal honcho at Fort Wapping must be getting nervous, sharpening his pencils and checking the emergency exits in preparation for a long campaign in the trenches. Will his new boss, Rebekah TestaRossa come and hold his sweaty hand? Or will she, along with her boss, Master James, be glad to see the back of the liability and steaming pile of ordure that the tacky little ShagRag has become?
In the last year or so, the paper’s had a lot of big bills to pay for damages and legal fees. The Max Mosley fiasco cost them somewhere between £500k and £1m. They settled getting on for £1m with Gordon Taylor and two of his colleagues at the Professional Footballers’ Association for hacking into their voicemails. A writ from Max Clifford and Sky Andrew for more phone hacking and invasion of pivacy is hovering. In Paris a judge d’instruction is preparing a prosecution against the paper, its editor, Colin Myler, the reporter, Neville “Onan the Barbarian” Thurlbeck, and their lawyers, Farrers for publishing and sending copies of the paper containing details of Max Mosley’s private life to the FIA in Paris, which is a criminal offence in France.
The paper is a source of a great embarrassment to James Murdoch, who must feel that the corporation which publishes the WSJ and wants to be taken seriously shouldn’t be messing about in the gutter with an organ at least as disreputable as the National Enquirer in the US.
Kuttner has had his marching orders; Mazher Mahmood’s by-line is a rare sight these days; even Thurlbeck’s not getting the space he used to. Following the paper’s admission that they had paid off Gordon Taylor (with a far bigger sum than Max Mosley was awarded in the High Court), the extraordinary display of dissembling put on by Crone, Myler, Kuttner and former editor Andy Coulson for the Commons Culture, Media, Sport Committee must have shoved the Screws public image even deeper into the Wapping mud.
Don’t be surprised to see more changes; young Murdoch won’t want to live with his father’s old flame for ever.
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Banging up the Data Thieves
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.
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ANOTHER ROYAL SCOOP FOR THE SCREWS
The Screws royal editor hit the jackpot last weekend. Busy Robert “Bob-a” Jobson revealed the astonishing news that a charitable foundation set up by the late Princess Diana had dropped in value, from c£1.4m to c£1.08m over the last year.
This “25%” decrease was due, apparently, to the global stock market crash. To discover this, one can only surmise that his investigative skills took him as far as perusing the charities’ records open to anyone who cares to see them, as advised by the Charity Commission on their website. The money was left by Diana to her sons to “give to good causes”.
This fatuous, insignificant non-story (for there can barely be any charitable foundation or indeed invest portfolio of any sort that hasn’t taken a hammering in the last year), was his only visible contribution to the great purveyor of truth – “Our motto is the truth; our practice is the fearless advocacy of the truth” – since September 17th. This isn’t much for a week’s wage – maybe half an hour’s work, and another half an hour to churn out less than 100 words.
No wonder the old paper’s profits have dwindled to bugger all. Added to that, the evil and highly mendacious Mazher Mahmood is still on the pay role – and he’s not bringing in much these days, due no doubt to Master James’ intention to see the tacky rag heave itself out of the quagmire of ridiculous grimy fantasies in which it has got immersed. The involuntary departure of Machiavellian Managing Editor, Stuart Kuttner in July (after Gordon Taylor was paid £700,000 out of court) may be the first clear indication of the changes young Murdoch wants to see.
But the culture of untruth and fabrication is so rife at the News of the World that he’ll have a long, long task cleaning out that Augean Stable.
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News Corp Swept by Outbreak of Contagious Amnesia.
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.
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The Screws, the email and the ex-editor's nephew
Among the muddle-headed ramblings that senior executives of the News of the World offered by way of evidence to the Commons Culture Media Sport Committee on July 21st, there was at least one small grain of accuracy, although the details of even that are open to question.
Tom Crone, head legal honcho at the Screws, was deftly ducking his way through some incisive questioning by CMS Committee chairman, John Whittingdale, who wanted to know what had happened to an email sent by a “junior reporter” to Private Investigator, Glenn Mulcaire.
This email had been used by lawyers acting for PFA boss, Gordon Taylor in their action against the Screws for invasion of privacy. It contained a transcript of a message left on Taylor’s voicemail. This transcript had been prepared by the junior reporter and returned to Glenn Mulcaire with the heading, “Hello, this is the transcript for Neville,” clearly referring to senior reporter Neville “Onan the Barbarian” Thurlbeck who was working on the story.
It will come as no surprise, though, that when Mr Crone questioned Thurlbeck about it, the position was that, “He had never seen that email, nor had any knowledge of it. He says that he was brought into the relevant editorial project, the story, at the end of the story and his task was to go and knock on the door of one of the story’s subjects, which was either in Blackburn or Manchester, and put the essence of the story to the person in order to get their comments, which is mostly standard practice in what we do.”
Coincidentally , it’s not the first time Thurlbeck has used this excuse for his extraordinarily hazy memory of major events. He gave exactly the same one when asked in the Mosley case if he knew the origin of a verbatim transcript of a voicemail message left by Prince William for Prince Harry. He had, amazingly, absolutely no idea that the story could have been obtained by illegal means, much as Andy Coulson told the CMS Committee an hour or so after Crone gave evidence last month.
Crone went on to say, “When I spoke to (Thurlbeck) the first time he said he was briefed by one of our executives, Greg Miskiw who was then based in Manchester. He subsequently came back to me and said that he had refreshed his memory and in fact it could not have been Greg Miskiw, because Greg Miskiw left the News of the World on 30 June 2005, which was the day after that email was created. (My italics) He had worked out his redundancy package, I think, a week or two weeks before that, and he was no longer on active duty. Neville Thurlbeck told me that his refreshed memory told him that in fact the briefing that he received was from the London news desk.”
John Whittingdale went on to ask if the London news desk was aware of the contents of this email.
To which Crone replied, “Well, no, I went to speak to the relevant person at the London news desk who told me that he had no knowledge of the email and he had never seen it.”
So Neville Thurlbeck was sent off to ask about a story based on a transcript which none of them were aware of?
Crone admitted, “I do not know whether the story entirely came from the transcript; but certainly part of it must have come from the transcript, yes.”
This was, of course, all standard Screws obfuscation tactics.
Crone said he had also questioned the junior reporter, who also had little recollection of the email and transcript. But Crone did know that about this time, he had only just become a reporter. “Prior to that actually I think he had been a messenger and he was being trained up on the floor. In the early weeks and months of him being trained up as a reporter what he did more than anything else was transcribe tapes of journalists’ interviews – whatever tapes were relevant to the News of the World. He does not particularly remember this job in any detail; he does not remember who asked him to do it; and he does not remember any follow-up from it. He saw the email and he accepts that he sent the transcript where the email says he sent it.”
If the CMS committee had wanted to question the junior reporter, they would have found that in April of this year he left the paper, having filed several key stories about the fatal stabbings of London teenagers, Jimmy Mizen and Robert Knox.
It seems almost too absurd that the Committee should be expected seriously to believe that a young reporter would have no recollection of transcribing an illegally obtained message left on the voicemail of the boss of the Professional Footballers’ Association. And this young reporter, Ross Hall is no fool. He comes from a journalistic background, at least to the extent that his uncle, Phil Hall, now a leading PR, is a former editor of the News of the World.
One of his colleagues told me that in the spring – about the same time managing editor Stuart Kuttner was learning about involuntary plans for his future – Ross Hall decided that he was fed up with working for the Screws, and took off to travel round the world.
It may be a simple coincidence that his companion, a high profile young free-lancer also left the Sunday Mirror at exactly the same time and hasn’t worked in London since.
So the one person who can say definitively who did or didn’t see the email which ultimately cost the Screws over £700k in damages and costs paid to Gordon Taylor is conveniently unavailable for some months to come.
And Ross Hall’s disillusionment with Britain’s leading ShagRag wasn’t so great that it stopped him filing a little puff, disguised as a travel piece in the Screws, for the safari lodge where he was staying in Botswana in April.
I wonder who he’ll be working for when he gets back from his travels.
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The Screws and the Met: A Special Relationship?
Like most reasonable folk that live in Britain, I admire and am grateful for the commitment and self-sacrifice made by those tens of thousands of genuinely public-spirited policemen who do what they can to maintain the rule of law in this country.
It’s right that exceptional acts of personal bravery shown by individual police officers in the exercise of their job should be recognised and honoured, as indeed they are at the annual Police Bravery Awards ceremony. But for some of the recipients of these awards it must be disappointing that this event should be deeply tainted by a commercial sponsor, particularly one so deficient in integrity and moral purpose as the Sun newspaper.
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