The Murdoch Empire's Greatest Test

[hippifried]

Well, we get more coverage than y'all because we're infinitely more interesting.

As for Murdoch: I predict that the only way to stop the hemorrhage is for him to retire & divest himself from the business. Even that might not work as long as it's controlled by the family. It's not just over there. There were already a slew of broadcast licence challenges to the FCC on grounds of "moral turpitude" before the scandal ever broke. There's a story breaking that they were doing the same thing over here, & it doesn't matter who the targets of the hack/taps were/are. The News Corp stock is dropping like a rock. I wouldn't be surprized to see the WSJ & maybe even Dow Jones on the auction block if the slide continues. I don't think tossing some underling scapegoat under the bus is going to work if the stockholders get any more panicky.

[robertlouis]

I thought that this article by Marina Hyde in Saturday's Guardian had an interesting slant on the current state of the scandal.

Without a constitution, we are once again left in Clusterfakia

The phone-hacking scandal shows us where power really lies. A written rulebook is the only way to stop this cycle of squalor

For an industry built on words, Her Majesty's press hasn't half found itself short of vocab this week. Thrice-minutely, we hear the crisis engulfing the Murdoch empire is "deepening". Deepening? It's already like the Mariana trench. At this rate, it will be akin to deep space by tomorrow, while the latest buzzphrase to crack under the burden is "uncharted territory". We have been in uncharted territory for almost a fortnight now. No cartographer has mapped this place, though naming rights are presumably up for grabs by whichever explorer has the chutzpah to plant the flag first. I'm suggesting Clusterfakia.

Try to imagine recent events as that brilliant shot in The Truman Show when Jim Carrey's boat literally bumps up against the painted-on horizon and he suddenly realises reality was not as it seemed. Yup, the creepily cosy bubble of Murdochvision that nurtured and narcotised us has been burst, and it's a brave new world out there. Brave and deepening. And uncharted.

Yet the first question isn't how we're coping. It is: is there a "we", for all Ed Miliband's talk of victory for "the people"? I'd suggest that people have been coping in at least two very distinct ways – and later, why this disconnect should ring alarm bells.

A popular way of coping has been to carry on as normal. Public disgust at the News of the World manifested in the paper selling more copies last weekend than it had for 13 years. The souvenir factor counted, obviously, and the Sun did drop a quarter of a million sales last Saturday, but the public had inhaled sufficient smelling salts by Monday for sales to rally to near-ish normal levels. The Sun continued the week slightly down, though given it's July and the major push for their £9.50 holidays promotion was last week, a dip might have been expected.

Meanwhile, tabloids that may or may not have judicial questions of their own to answer are preparing increased print runs, even as the Sunday Sun prepares to launch in time for the football season. Let's reserve judgment on quite how meaningfully revolted by the scandal the "public" really are.

And so to the second means of coping, adopted by the group who have got all the airplay. Indeed, they are the airplay, because we're talking about the politicians and the media. They – or rather we, given I'm of their number – are not carrying on as usual. We are in week zero, anno non-domini, and no one knows the rules. Thursday saw senior parliamentarians wondering if the deputy serjeant-at-arms could technically drag Rupert Murdoch to parliament. Would he have to wear tights? The Speaker hadn't a clue.

Someone recalled the Commons cell (no longer in use). The chairman of the committee Murdoch will face admitted: "We are in territory that has not been explored for 50 or 60 years." Since 1880, someone else said. Clouds of dust were blown stagily off Erskine May, the parliamentary bible governments have long ignored.

I kept thinking of Chris Morris's Day Today news anchor bellowing "Peter! You've lost the news!" at hapless reporter Peter O'Hanraha-hanrahan. We've lost the rulebook! Where the hell did power lie, if not somewhere in Murdoch's core, which accounted for the many expeditions of the great and good sent burrowing up his backside these past few decades?

You could almost have been listening to dispatches from a country that had recently overthrown an entrenched dictatorship and emerged blinking into the unfamiliar light of democracy. Now, some optimists will shriek that is exactly what we have done – in which case, perhaps the international assistance offered to states struggling to make the transition might be afforded to us.

I'm afraid we will need it, because the one thing that you can never underestimate is Britain's potential to lapse back into another version of the same dysfunction that brought it to whichever pretty pass it has come to. If the wasted anger over MPs' expenses taught us anything, it is that things can always proceed much as they were before if nothing material changes.

And so, yet again, to the only way to break this cycle of squalor and begin rebuilding this country's self-worth – a written constitution. Along with Israel and New Zealand, we remain one of only three countries in the world without a written constitution. During the chaotic limbo that followed the election last year, it was suggested the best authority on how to proceed was a 1950 letter to the Times, penned pseudonymously, but believed to be from one of George VI's private secretaries. And people wonder why it is that abuses of power just keep happening to us.

So, if David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband really want to do something in the name of "we the people", they could enshrine the golden rulebook for ever. Any other solution to the Clusterfakian messes in which we keep finding ourselves will be a short-termist failure, a sop thrown to us by an elite in whose eternal interest it is to preserve the lack of rules. Surely we've finally, finally been done over enough now?

[Stavros]

Ae we letting slip a little of the mask here to reveal a Tory bias lol?

No, Prospero, far from it, and I don't know any of my posts have been close to Tory thinking! But this is a thread on the Murdoch empire, not my Labour Party past....

[robertlouis]

Rebekah Brooks has been arrested.

Is James Murdoch going to be next?

[Prospero]

Why not go direct for Rupert? We could transport him to Australia? Oh wait a imnute....

[robertlouis]

Bloody Nora! Sir Paul Stephenson, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, has resigned.

Who's next? The Queen????

[Stavros]

Stephenson has basically said News International lied to the police, he either doesn't know if John Yates and Andy Hardy kicked the evidence into touch and colluded with News International, or he does and isn't saying -but for once, someone at the top has done the honourable thing and stepped down, which can't be said for Brooks, Murdoch J or Murdoch R, but I still think this ought to be settled in the courts and not in front of a parliamentary committee. Also, if Sue Akers is still going through thousands of pages of Glenn Mulcaire's notes, we still don't know the full extent of this scandal.

I don't think the Queen is next, but in a month's time, the only people left in Government could indeed be the Queen... and the Archbishop of Canterbury....

[Prospero]

Cameron's head to roll maybe... this gets better and better and better

[Stavros]

Yes I have been wondering about Cameron -the problem with the hubris of the Murdoch enterprise over the years, is that instead of being called to account they got away with it but drew so many into the net: Alex Salmond is now nin the frame; Gordon Brown is desperately trying to save his arse/ass by going on the attack: Ed Balls and his petite wife are in the frame; Blair can't be far behind: without yet knowing the full list this looks like some kind of political version of a nuclear meltdown -at least we do have Our Noble Majesty, and His Grace The Archbishop to save us from Armageddon....I wonder, are they any good at banking?

[zocco]

Rebekah Brooks has been questioned for 13 hours
wonder what she had to say or didn't say
this just gets deeper every hour