Slashdot Mirror
Voicemail Hack Scandal Leads To Closure of UK Tabloid
Some Bitch writes "Britain's biggest selling Sunday tabloid will close after this Sunday's issue. The tabloid has been embroiled in a voicemail hacking controversy for some time now and the news that they compromised the voicemail of a murdered schoolgirl and paid bribes to Metropolitan police officers for stories kicked off a renewed assault on the paper. The News Corp daily counterpart to Sunday's News of the World is the Sun; the domain sunonsunday.co.uk was registered two days ago."
...here's the new name, complete with domain registration: http://webwhois.nic.uk/cgi-bin/whois.cgi?query=thesunonsunday.co.uk
Hugh Grant just called the Murdoch Empire a protection racket live on Question Time.
<deep breath>Let's keep this /. related while I try to calm down from the state of induced rage I've been in from hearing the constant use of the work "Hack" in the UK media the past week when talking about using the default pin code for a mobile networks voicemail system. THAT'S NOT A %£^%£"%" HACK!!!! </deep breath>
Okay, I feel better for getting that off my chest.
She's on CNN.
(My wife is unfortunately an addict of that damnable show).
Personally, I have zero respect for someone whose very paycheck apparently requires rhetorically feeding from the literal corpses of children, but that aside and to be fair, it wasn't just her, it was the whole damned channel's prime-time lineup: Dr. Drew, "Issues", and the rest of that particularly incestuous bucket of shows.
To be fair to Fox, they really didn't invest nearly as much time in the whole affair. I don't think MSNBC did all that much on it either, but in their case I don't know offhand. CNN on the other hand seemed like they should have named themselves the Casey News Network and been done with it. :/
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Hugh Grant just called the Murdoch Empire a protection racket live on Question Time.
Strangely enough Hugh Grant, someone I previously disliked for his films has actually shown considerable stones in this whole debacle.
The schoolgirl was arguably the worst however as they actually deleted some of her voice mails to make room for new messages to see what else they could dig up about the terrified friends and family. This is both deleting evidence in a murder investigation but also led the family to falsely believe she was still alive by thinking she was freeing up space on her voice mail.
According to FT (sorry pay walled link http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/1a199004-a8d5-11e0-b877-00144feabdc0.html) Murdoch was planning to convert his other newspapers (The Sun) into a 7 day newspaper by sharing content/news with TNotW anyway. As it is, his 4 newspapers share the same printing press and he often moves around editors/writers.
From the FT story
The second obstacle is that Mr Murdoch and Ms Wade had made known their plan to cut costs and overlap by bringing the News of the World close into line with The Sun as a seven-day operation. It seems likely that News International will resurrect the Sunday title as The Sun on Sunday.
http://slashdot.org/submission/1062723/Cheap-mobile-data-plan?art_pos=2
Not sure if you're being serious but Murdoch, I'll say allegedly and then quote and link an old Guardian article, was pro-Iraqi war and this was largely the editorial position taken by many of his media outlets, papers and television channels.
Rupert Murdoch argued strongly for a war with Iraq in an interview this week. Which might explain why his 175 editors around the world are backing it too, writes Roy Greenslade