News Of The World

It is impossible as an employee of Rupert Murdoch to offer any thoughts on the phone hacking scandal in the UK without being accused of being a company patsy and probably also a sycophant, even a liar.

On a personal and professional level I have found some of the revelations which have come out of the UK to be troubling at the very least, and appalling at their absolute worst. It is also the case however that two of the biggest and most damaging allegations against the company aren’t actually true at all.

From where I sit, working for the Australian arm of this media business, the whole affair is starting to look like a psychotic and reckless fight-to-the-death by British journalists who, in that hyper-competitive media culture, have often cut corners or chanced their arms to be first with the news.

Continue reading "Biggest moments of 2011 #6 Hackers and clangers" »

A former Sun editor has had an almighty crack at the Guardian, after the latest twist in the News of the World saga in which police revealed there’s no evidence journalists deleted Milly Dowler’s voicemails.

The Guardian had claimed that NOTW journos, by deleting messages from Milly’s full mailbox, had given her parents false hope that she was still alive. That report helped spark a maelstrom that is still sucking people in and down.

Turns out the phone company automatically deletes messages after 72 hours. The Guardian apologised for the error. Sort of.

Now, former Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie has unleashed on the Guardian and reporter Nick Davies, demanding a better apology, and an apology to Rupert Murdoch, and blaming him for the 300 staff who lost their jobs when the paper closed. And he doesn’t stop there.

Continue reading "Punch on: Open thread 15/12/2011" »

From a crowded field, one of the more embarrassing moments from my troubled phase as a teenage Trotskyist involved selling issues of the socialist newspaper Direct Action on the streets of Adelaide. On occasions I sold it outside Football Park, Adelaide’s home of Aussie Rules, where I hoped to capitalise on that niche readership of people who both loved their footy and loved the idea of capitalism being paralysed by its contradictions.

In hindsight “selling” isn’t the right word. On a good day I sold three copies of Direct Action. On most days I sold no copies of Direct Action. The reason I sold no copies of Direct Action is that it wasn’t a very good newspaper. It was a crap newspaper. It was preachy, dour, earnest, poorly designed, massively overpriced for what it was, and full of articles which were about as far away from mainstream sentiment as you could imagine, with discussions of whether indigenous organisations should take up arms against their oppressors, calls for trade bans with pariah nations such as the United States, editorials calling for transgender prisoners to be given sex changes on Medicare.

Today, about three million Australians will shell out a couple of dollars to but their favourite Sunday newspaper. They do so because they like and enjoy it.

Continue reading "Trotting out nonsense at an inquiry into nothing" »

After 30 years of making the world a happier place, Apple co-founder and chairman Steve Jobs died yesterday, age 56. The world mourns the man some have called the Edison of our time.

People around the world took to social networks yesterday to express their condolences. Bill Gates tweeted: “I will miss Steve immensely”. Tony Hawk said: “Steve Jobs was the man”. Barack Obama’s statement, “There may be no greater tribute to Steve’s success than the fact that much of the world learned of his passing on a device he invented,” got retweet after retweet. 

While this was happening, Wikileaks was also tweeting about Steve Jobs. Except in doing so, the organisation was committing a journalistic crime taken straight from the playbook of the News of the World. You wouldn’t even read what they published on TMZ.

Continue reading "Wikileaks does a News of the World job on Steve Jobs" »

Here is a quick multiple choice question. I am writing this column because:

A) Rupert Murdoch instructed me to in his morning email;
B) I am on a personal mission to destroy the ALP;
C) The regular columnist is on holiday and I had to cobble together something at the last minute to fill this giant white space.

If you are a member of the Greens, a self-proclaimed ethicist or a journalism lecturer you will of course know the answer is A. It’s perhaps best that you stop reading now, as to actually find out the truth would ruin your next six-part lecture series at the Enmore Anarchist Collective.

Continue reading "Click here for an insider’s look at Gillard vs. Media" »

From the parliamentary precinct across Lake Burley Griffin to this correspondent’s home takes six or seven minutes by car - max.

But that was easily long enough on Wednesday night to highlight a massive contrast between the grindingly dull and scripted performance of the Australian House of Representatives and the more dynamic, and frankly more honest British equivalent on which ours is modelled.

Thanks to the storm over phone hacking and political entanglements associated with the now defunct News of the World, Question Time in the mother of Westminster parliaments was broadcast on the ABC’s News Radio.

Continue reading "Britain can teach us how to keep our House in order" »

So much for the schadenfreudegasm.

Last night’s grilling of Rupert and James Murdoch by the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee was rather more like a ‘rose ceremony’ in an episode of The Bachelor: slow and excruciating, but compulsive viewing nonetheless.

The entire event was full of tension and politeness in equal measure, and James Murdoch’s long-winded non-response to the first question was more heavily scripted than the episode of Winners and Losers which aired earlier in the evening.

Continue reading "Po-faced and pie-faced, what next for Murdoch?" »

It is one of the great dangers of this new technological age that we are all potential victims of “computer hacking”.

Computer hacking is an insidious and underhanded practice that infliltrates “computers”, which are like typewriters that you can play solitaire on.

The risks of hacking were brutally demonstrated in the 2007 documentary Die Hard 4.0, in which Bruce Willis spends two hours and eight minutes trying to send an email, only to give up and get someone from Generation Y to do it.

Continue reading "All this hacking raises this hapless hack’s hackles" »

The end of the News of the World as we know it. I can’t help but feel partly responsible. It’s not because I ever worked for the paper masquerading as a fake sheik exposing celebrity transsexuals, randy bishops and corrupt snooker stars.

It’s not because – as a writer for a News Ltd publication – I feel infected by some sort of communicable corporate unscrupulousness. It’s not even because I belong to the broad – and now broadly disgraced – field of journalism.

Nope. The real reason I feel partly culpable for the foul play of this nasty little tabloid is because I like reading about grubby celebrity scandals. And grubby celebrity scandals often require grubby journalistic tactics.

Continue reading "In our own way, we all love a little News of The World" »

The push by Bob Brown and Julia Gillard for a parliamentary inquiry into the media is so cynical, manipulative and transparently biased that if we really were as evil as they believe we’d congratulate them both for joining the dark side.

Both leaders are seeking to establish a connection in the public’s mind between the obscene and illegal practices exposed in the UK and perfectly conventional and legitimate journalism and commentary in Australia with which they just happen to disagree.

It is extraordinary both how blatantly they have hijacked the issue and how seamlessly the more naïve and ideological sections of the community have followed them to this at best offensive and at worst dangerous illogicality.

Continue reading "Gillard and Brown are shootin’ the messenger" »