- Phone Hacking & Julian Assange Archived Message
Posted by sashimi
on October 16, 2020, 9:00 am
|
(quote) Catherine Brown explores how the wrong journalists escaped prosecution in one case while the wrong one is being subjected to it in the other. The U.K. phone hacking scandal started around 2005 and peaked in 2012. The journalistic malpractices and illegal practices on which it focused long pre-date 2005, however, and continue today. It came to light through the testimony of victims and the investigative journalism of publications such as The Guardian that several newspapers owned by Rupert Murdoch's News International (U.K. subsidiary of News Corp), as well as others including Daily Mirror and Sunday Mirror, were engaged in illegal practices such as hacking individuals' phone voicemails and bribing the police in order to obtain stories. Rupert Murdoch's influence over U.K. politicians was also scrutinized. Victims of phone hacking included members of the royal family, politicians, murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler, relatives of British soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan and victims of the July 7, 2005, London bombings. The public outcry at these revelations and resultant investigations resulted in high-profile resignations including Murdoch as director of News Corporation, his son James as its executive chairman and the commissioner of London's Metropolitan Police Force. There were multiple charges and seven convictions in criminal trials held between 2004 and 2014. News of the World, a News International outlet, closed down after 168 years of existence. In 2011, Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron established a public inquiry into the culture and ethics of the U.K. press under Lord Justice Leveson. This inquiry resulted in the 2012 Leveson Report, which made several recommendations concerning regulation of the British media by an independent regulator, which would give alleged press victims access to arbitration without financial risk. Conservative governments since 2012 have declined to implement Leveson's recommendations. In 2011, the FBI and the Department of Justice launched probes into News Corporation practices in the U.S., but no decisive action has been taken. When the Medium is the Message If you believe the word itself, the media mediates. It isn't anything in itself. It transmits something else. In general journalists do not want to be the story. They want to inform, disinform, persuade, distract, entertain, but not be the focus of attention themselves. This applies to WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange as much as it applies to the journalists who hacked the phone of murdered schoolgirl Millie Dowler. But sometimes the medium does become the message, and the journalist becomes the story written by other journalists, as in both those cases. We have seen the former CEO of News International Rebekah Brookes, and Assange, arrested, put on trial, and subject to huge amounts of journalistic attention, because their journalism, it was alleged, broke the law. In both cases the question of their methods overshadowed their matter - their matter being for example that Dowler's parents left messages on Millie's phone in March 2002 that were hacked, or that U.S. soldiers killed over a dozen Baghdadi civilians in July 2007. These things were revealed around the same time and involved some of the same people. For example, journalist Nick Davies was leading the investigations of phone hacking at The Guardian whilst he was working with Assange to publish the Afghan war logs. But there are differences. And in them I think we see clearly one of the ways in which our society has gone wrong. Though I am going to be concentrating on newspapers, which have increasingly struggled over the past decade in print form, they retain considerable influence in electronic form, setting the agenda for TV news and therefore for politics. Their domination by a few magnates who have influence over politicians parallels the situation in social media, where voices that hold power to account are increasingly squeezed out, albeit in less obvious ways. So, let's compare them. I'm going to compare them on seven points, and then I'm done. (/quote) -- Cont'd at https://consortiumnews.com/2020/10/15/phone-hacking-julian-assange/ |
| Message Thread:
|