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."
Send that fuck a bill for Iraq while you're at it.
...here's the new name, complete with domain registration: http://webwhois.nic.uk/cgi-bin/whois.cgi?query=thesunonsunday.co.uk
As a brand new organization, the new tabloid won't be tainted with the bad name of the old one. Nor, presumably, will it be subject to their lawsuits.
The fact that it'll be the exact same people doing the exact same thing is mostly meaningless from a business standpoint.
If the masses can keep you down, you're not the Ubermensch.
If you're singling out Fox News for that, you're nuts. Every single news outlet was doing exactly the same thing. It was disgusting.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Nothing is without bias.
Yes, but honest news outfits do everything in their power to minimize their bias, rather than reveling in it like Fox and the other NewsCorp properties do.
That is all.
Rebekah Brooks, née Wade, who was in charge at the time is already chief exec of News International. The current rumour mill is that the NOTW staff are being sacrificed in order to keep her safe. As to why Murdoch would go to such lengths to protect her, the thinking is that if she went then James Murdoch would also have to go. James Murdoch has admitted to paying settlements to silence people involved in the hacking affair; he claims that the information given to him at the time was incomplete and he didn't know the full extent.
Just so everyone is clear what's going on here, Members of Parliament have started talking openly about how they've been threatened by News International. A murder investigation into a private detective where the prime suspects were two other PIs with close ties to News International was interfered with by the NOTW. The former deputy features editor of the NOTW has openly admitted to bribing police to the tune of £5-10,000 for stories - something he doesn't believe should be illegal. Rebekah Brooks accidentally admitted to Parliament a few years ago that they regularly paid the police for stories, although in a clarification 6 months later that claim was retracted.
There's always been rumours around how Murdoch runs his empire, but now it's being blown wide open. News International runs more like a criminal conspiracy than a legitimate media organisation; they're basically gangsters.
Nick
so they close down one tabloid and move all the employees to another?
No, it's cleverer than that. The close a Sunday tabloid and move a small number of staff to the daily stablemate, just enough additional hands for it to operate effectively over seven days rather than six. The rest are fired, giving massive savings. The News Corp accountants are now punching the air, and the senior management making wry jokes about silver linings.
Hell, that may have been a long-term plan for a while. The scandal had just given them an excuse to bring the plans forward.
Actually, it's not so much the employees that interest me; it's the paperwork. Specifically, what is going to happen to all of the News of The World's emails, accounts and all of those other records that might be of use to, say, a public inquiry or police investigation? I can't help but wonder whether this knee jerk reaction on behalf of Rupert Murdoch is a desperate attempt at damage limitation because knowledge of what was going on goes a lot higher up the ladder than just former News of The World staff.
As an aside, The Guardian has a rather interesting piece on the use of private investigators by UK media from back in 2007 when things first kicked off. The NoTW only came in fifth behind those other stalwarts of quality UK journalism; The People, The Daily Mirror, The Mail on Sunday and, the run-away leader, The Daily Mail.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
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.
I must say that I'm quite surprised that no-one technically minded has yet managed to raid Mr Murdoch and Mrs Brooks voicemails and publish them on YouTube. I'm sure there must have been some juicy irate messages left and would be a most apt thing to do.
Hang on, didn't them crafty LulzSec buggers have a request-line...?! Anyone got the number?
Al Jazeera? BBC? Oh you mean an American news org? Sorry I've got nothing.
As for TFA? When you are hacking into and deleting a murder victim's voice mails, thus hindering an investigation, and bribing the cops for evidence? Then you've gone way past reporting the news into making it. Personally i hope that just because they close the doors won't stop the investigation and every single one who bribed or hacked gets a nice long jail term.
After all in these days of shell corps if you can kill an investigation simply by closing the doors I think we'll see a lot more of this crap in the future.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
The company isn't gone. This is the equivalent of The Coca Cola Company selling cans of Fanta Orange intentionally laced with arsenic, being caught out, and then agreeing to discontinue the brand "Fanta Orange" (but immediately announcing the launch of new "Sprite Orange"). Oh, and firing some factory workers who weren't even on the pay roll at the time of the arsenic-lacing for good measure.