The Official Newscorp/UK end of season finale/Rebekah Brooks did 9/11 thread

STILL can't read Sabu without thinking ee-cee-dub and getting disappointed remembering things didn't suddenly turn into a death match

About Nixson -- theoretically he'd be arrested as well, yes? Kinda find it hard to believe they'd just go 'oh he's fired for phone hacking' and nobody does anything, at this point.

Related, I suspect:

Marie X
ExNOTWjourno2 Marie X
I could have exposed them all publicly... However I chose to hand their names over to the police. :D M

Marie X
ExNOTWjourno2 Marie X
More people will lose their jobs in the coming week.. I cannot confirm or deny if I had a part to play. M

the sacking's interesting if he dimes coulson really

the james murdoch thing could be a pip tho

matt nixson's finest hour was when he was on a local paper where i worked for the opposition. after 9/11 he wrote their splash which I can still remember by heart: "scouts from finchley last week enjoyed views from the top of the twin towers - yesterday they were coming to terms with their destruction." the paper made it worse by running an ad for "twin towers language school" next to it on the front page.

RIP big man.

Not only a perfect splash of wrong (as it were), it makes it seem like the Scouts were the ones destroyed.

9.52pm: My colleague Nick Watts has more on the sacking tonight of Sun features editor Matt Nixson.

Matt Nixson, who has worked for the Sun for six months, was approached by four News International security guards at 6.30pm at the newspaper's office at Wapping. The guards asked him to leave the building because he was being dismissed. His computer was seized. News International sources stressed this was standard procedure and did not indicate any wrong doing during Nixson's time at the Sun. They said the evidence indicating wrong doing related to his time at the News of the World.

The evidence against Nixson was uncovered as part of the internal News International investigation run at Wapping by Will Lewis, the company's general manager, and Simon Greenberg, the director of corporate affairs. Lewis and Greenberg report to Lord Grabiner, the QC who is acting as the independent chairman of News Corporation's management and standards committee.

Also, lol.

feel a bit bad for nixson now: he was a very good reporter, that lapse aside, and incredibly driven. i think nick davies is right to stress how the culture in places like the notw corrupts.

yeah... this isn't that big of a thing rly. it shows NI is 'cleaning up' or whatever.

Based on his ability to talk Gordon Brown out of pursuing the phone-hacking issue and his knock-back of the allegations of Coulson hacking in Number 10 after a civil servant complained, I say we should be paying closer attention to Sir Gus O'Donnell.

@charleslavery Coulson will face perjury charges and stand trial in Scotland. QC Paul McBride met his client @ London's Matrix Chambers. #hackgate #notw

lol. imo the more shit that gets smeared on cameron and osborne the better. the tories will not enjoy it and will start to get restless -- it doesn't take much with them. this will do the trick nicely.

It's been a busy night. In other news, dumbshit here accidentally broke Lucian Freud's death news to one of his sitters. :-(

Lucian Freud was just about to spill the beans!!!

I believe I was addressing... not you.

Anyway, this'll be Coulson gwan dahhhhhhhhn. The silver lining in the permatanned cloud that is the Tommy Sheridan case.

Watson vs Robert Peston currently on Twitter has the potential to be as hilarious as Charles Arthur vs Sabu earlier.

someone post ed highs

http://www.theage.com.au/business/regulator-deals-blow-to-foxtels-bid-for-austar-20110722-1hrsr.html

^ Murdoch wants to increase his pay TV share here but the competition regulator disagrees. Probably not related to #notw but excellent timing.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/phone-hacking/8653960/Phone-Hacking-emails-next-scandal-says-Tom-Watson.html

breaking us off a lil previews of the remix

I'm wondering what fallout this will all have on Aus's burgeoning NBN (new fibre internet national network) as far as media saturation goes. I would have had NI/Fox chokehold fears up til recently but now, who knows.

i am finding the act of journalistic liveblogging, the type which paul owen has been carrying out today & yesterday, really compelling. the guardian are doing the thing that cameron has posited an enquiry would, of following information irrespective of where it might lead, pursuing whatever's come up - eg the vetting issue & the anomalies it exposes - and tabulating it against what's already happened. i maybe am just vicariously getting my all the president's men on but the incremental, collaborative, syllogising progress is fascinating tow atch.

tow atch toe ouch to watch

Now the Feds are getting involved

the security-check thing is pretty damaging imo. it's exactly the sort of thing the roger altons and kelvin mackenzies of this world will say is 'too obscure for ordinary notw-reading, britain's got talent-voting folk to understand', because they're cunts.

yeah indeed. but it's such an interesting detail, because i'm sure anyone involved would have been relying on that exact idea - that it was the kind of private & obscure thing that would never escape the rooms it was bandied about in. the vetting thing is interesting because the idea that coulson was hired, in spite of warnings, and insufficiently vetted, in spite of procedure & the fact that, more than most, there were reasons to vet him - it brings up wilful blindness again, & stops being about someone overlooking some details. but yeah obviously it is easy for people to compare the smallprint of vetting procedure negatively to (obviously significant &c&c, but disingenuously employed things like) somalia or something else distracting

Well, I asked a Somali friend from a political family what *he* thought should happen - since the pressure to 'think about Somali famine now' seems to come from white people who don't want to discuss NI - and the answer was: go the fuck after Cameron.

Cameron seems to be using the posh person's crutch - insinuating that a topic is too boring or too obscure to be of sustained interest to him.

LOL so true

Michael Rosen's piece in today's Graun about the language 'appropriated' by James Murdoch is good, but doesn't go nearly far enough in pointing out that a nation got drunk playing MBA Bullshit Bingo - QUANTUM EDITION whenever Murdoch fils opened his mouth. There was also the cackhanded attempt to apply NLP stylings. If I were on the panel, and I was faced with 'I stand by my earlier statement', it would be tempting to reply 'That makes you a bystander. Now: yes or no, did you mislead the committee?'

private eye has a one-panel cartoon in it this week that makes the exact same joke as that times cartoon btw

context is kinda everything here though i guess since in private eye, it's essentially taking the piss out of the publication it appears in (private eye does nefarious doings of the upper classes like no-one else) but in the times it's the opposite

the security-check thing is pretty damaging imo. it's exactly the sort of thing the roger altons and kelvin mackenzies of this world will say is 'too obscure for ordinary notw-reading, britain's got talent-voting folk to understand', because they're cunts.

It's also the kind of thing the Altons, Mackenzies and esp the Dacres would have excoriated past governments for.

Tom Watson: James—sorry, if I may call you James, to differentiate—when you signed off the Taylor payment, did you see or were you made aware of the full Neville e-mail, the transcript of the hacked voicemail messages?

James Murdoch: No, I was not aware of that at the time.

That question is so classic. If that's the blow that takes Murdoch out, then he couldn't have delivered it in a nicer way.

Michael Rosen's piece in today's Graun

Thought this was interesting although I find linguistics v. confusing. I'm glad he mentioned Cameron's "The point I'm trying to make is this…" because that is really quite irritating.

"At the time"

!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Like, "no, not until five minutes later"...

Cameron seems to be using the posh person's crutch - insinuating that a topic is too boring or too obscure to be of sustained interest to him.

it would have been nice if he'd been challenged in the same fashion that one might use to press James a little harder; the first time Cameron was confronted in the Commons about this he successfully moved the discussion on by playing down the talk of warnings from fleet street etc as unimportant smallprint, then a few days later as wild conspiracy theories. it's gross that he's answering questions in a way that doesn't recognise the importance of it being interrogated, consequential of his shitty behaviour.

xps - haha, yes, i lolled at that bit esp. in context of much vaunted hatred of Watson by Murdochs.

Michael Rosen's piece in today's Graun about the language 'appropriated' by James Murdoch is good, but doesn't go nearly far enough in pointing out that a nation got drunk playing MBA Bullshit Bingo - QUANTUM EDITION whenever Murdoch fils opened his mouth

yeah i enjoyed that piece but would have liked it to be three times the length (or, hell, a whole book on the subject would be a good idea).

it was v much the elephant in the room at the time: as suzy says, it's what every spectator was commenting on, but every one of the MPs felt for some reason they couldn't comment on what was a very obvious tactic, trying vainly to pin the murdochs down on content => a mug's game.

Hmm:

A leading private investigations firm said it had strong reason to suspect that Will Lewis, a senior executive of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, was involved in "orchestrating" a leak of material from a competing news organization which helped Murdoch's business interests.

...

Kroll advised the Telegraph that because of the number of people who had access to data banks - including employees for telecoms giant, BT, to whom the Telegraph outsourced technical support functions - that even if the leak investigation continued, it was unlikely to produce a conclusive result.

However, Kroll investigators say in the report that they have strong reason to suspect that Will Lewis, a former chief editor at the Daily Telegraph and by late 2010 a senior executive at News International, was involved in facilitating the leak, along with another former Telegraph employee who also later moved to News International.

This is all apparently to do with the Cable recording.

^^^Will Lewis is also Robert Peston's best friend and is widely believed to be the NI insider that RP cites in his reports.

Clarity.

Meanwhile on the security clearance front:

3.27pm: Ian Katz writes: Andy Coulson had begun undergoing high security vetting in November, around three months before he resigned as David Cameron's director of communications, the Guardian has learned.

Downing Street has been under pressure to explain why the former News of the World editor was not subjected to so-called "developed vetting", the high security checking process most previous No 10 press secretaries have undergone. Both Coulson's successor and his former deputy, Gabby Bertin, are undergoing developed vetting.

A Whitehall source said the decision not to subject Coulson to developed vetting was taken by Jeremy Heywood, the Downing Street permanent secretary. The source said it was decided that, as director of communications, Coulson did not need access to highly secret material and that developed vetting was a costly, unnecessary expense.

The source stressed that Coulson's lower level of clearance, "security check" or SC, did allow him to have access to material designated "secret" and to "top secret" material under supervision. He also said that the controversy surrounding Tony Blair's press chief Alastair Campbell's access to intelligence material was a consideration in deciding to give Coulson a lower level of vetting.

The source said that following the discovery of an explosive device on a plane at East Midlands airport in October, it was decided that Coulson did need developed vetting to deal with similar terrorism-related issues and the process was started. The process can take three to six months and had not been completed when Coulson resigned saying the phone-hacking scandal meant he could no longer work effectively.

He also said that the controversy surrounding Tony Blair's press chief Alastair Campbell's access to intelligence material was a consideration in deciding to give Coulson a lower level of vetting.

Bollocks

Context, pls? How could a prior controversy lead to a lower level of vetting?

I assume the logic is that the controversy was caused by the press chief having access to intelligence material, so if you withhold access you don't have to do the vetting.

Indeed. Still reads like a pathetic dig at New Labour to me though.

That explanation is bollocks, and totally digs on Campbell out of tribalism rather than any substantive comparison between his and Coulson's positions.

I am sure Coulson was paid the same or more than a directly vetted official, even if he was only cleared to 'top secret', so Number 10's point is what, exactly?

i wonder if coulson ended up having access to top-level security documents despite his low clearance rating..

i.e.

Assistant Commissioner John Yates told MPs he had met Coulson to discuss, among other issues, counter-terrorism.

Yes, but you never know with the Met, he was probably discussing it with the cleaning lady as well

Who was also recommended by NI.

...because right now, it's looking like Campbell was able to pass DV with flying colours, whereas Coulson abandoned the process and his job.