Blog Archives

Thank heavens the Star's watching Big Brother

30/1/2015

The Daily Star should have been having a little lie down to recover from the shock of finding a real news story in Celebrity Big Brother on Tuesday night.
How the never-underexposed Katie Price managed to get this far in her pink fur-edged career without her son's taxpayer-funded school run arrangements becoming known is a mystery. It's an issue worthy of consideration and more serious papers were happy to set their minds to it yesterday.
But the Star's CBB vigil is neverending, so it has moved on from Ms P to deliver the troubling news that housemates suspect that the show's producers have rigged the series so that Perez Hilton would win. Not only that, but police are apparently to question Hilton about an alleged "sex attack" on housemate Katie Hopkins.
According to yesterday's splash:

Celebrity Big Brother faced a “fix” storm last night after hated Perez Hilton’s explosive return to the house. Housemates were in uproar saying the showbiz blogger is being set up to win by TV bosses convinced his attention-seeking antics are ratings gold...they claimed hated Perez has already been secretly decided as winner in a stitch-up by producers who love his wild behaviour.

And today..

Police are poised to haul in Perez Hilton over his "sexual harassment of Katie Hopkins if he is evicted tonight. The bitchy blogger, 36, launched himself at the mother of two and licked her face.
Perez also suggested the 39-year-old journalist and former Apprentice star should perform a sex act on him. In scenes not shown by shocked producers he thrust his hips at Katie...
Police could be forced to quiz Perez about his X-rated behaviour after viewers demanded action.

If there were awards for loyalty, the Star would surely scoop the lot. Even now that there is no in-house (corporate, as opposed to BB) imperative after Richard Desmond's sale of Channel 5, the Star has not wavered in its devotion.
And how is it repaid? With disappointment after disappointment. If you can't trust reality TV, what can you trust?

This time last year the Star was reporting that the show had been fixed for Sam Faiers to win. The source of this claim was the much admired Mail feature writer Liz Jones, the first to be evicted. Towie Sam was taken ill, treated and returned to the show, but failed to make the final, which was won by Jim Davidson.
Come the summer, even with the World Cup distracting attention, the Star remained focused on the house - this time populated with "unknowns", who on this occasion included a woman "known" for allegedly having a fling with Wayne Rooney. Helen Wood was not, apparently, a popular house guest - and when she was given a "free pass" to the final, the Star reported viewers' dismay:

Big Brother fans have accused show chiefs of fixing a win for Wayne Rooney’s ex-lover Helen Wood. This is despite causing mayhem in the house and turning off viewers.The move is unprecedented in BB history and has led to claims Helen is being favoured by producers...Some are convinced she is being kept in to maintain high ratings for the show.

Sound familiar?

Ms Wood was duly crowned, the house was spring-cleaned and by August a new set of celebs was ready to move in. They included the Star's favourite benefits claimant White Dee, the former boxing promoter Kellie Maloney and a 70-year-old American called Gary Busey.
Wouldn't you know it, come September, the paper was again concerned for the probity of the voting system.

"Flasher Gary Busey is the unstoppable favourite to win Celebrity Big Brother – despite his housemates hating him. Bookies claim TV bosses are “fixing” it for him to triumph even though the others have been trying to get him booted out. The Hollywood star, 70, has infuriated rivals with his revolting behaviour, rows and wild mood swings. But last night a betting industry source said... "All the money is going on him and our information is that he cannot be beaten.” Gary has been turned into a fans’ favourite by producers because they believe shocking footage of his appalling behaviour is “TV gold”.

And yes he won. But the celebrations were short-lived. Later that week the Star reported:

Hollywood star Gary Busey walked out the Celebrity Big Brother house last night as the winner and straight into a police probe about his indecent exposure on the show. Viewers voted for the Lethal Weapon actor - who had been the bookies favourite for weeks - to be champ even though all the housemates hated him, found him rude and a nightmare to live with. However his victory may be short lived. There is mounting pressure for him to face a police investigation for flashing his privates at the celebrities. And even the cops admit: "There could be a case."

I suppose we should be glad that, with all the spending cuts and the pressure of spying on journalists' phone calls, the police are now able to respond in one day where it took three in September. Progress?
Maybe, but the Star is the newspaper that never rests. It's not only Big Brother that is cause for concern. During the brief period that show is off air, the D-listers head off to Australia and the Star is on their (bushtucker) trail. And guess what it discovered even before the first episode was aired last November:

Gameoldgirl's Notebook: Another Sunday editor bites the dust

0 Comments

Trials and tribulations

23/1/2015

2 Comments

Fair, even-handed, balanced: this is what we look for in journalism and in justice.
The Sun today compares the decision to seek a retrial of four of its journalists accused of improperly paying public officials for stories to the failure to act against most jihadis who have returned to the UK from Syria.
It's a rum comparison, but the Sun's sense of grievance is understandable. We don't seem to have seen a great deal of balance in matters relating to the Press since the hacking scandal erupted in 2011.

The Leveson inquiry and police investigations focused heavily on the Murdoch papers, but the Independent splashes today on the suggestion that phone-hacking at the Mirror group may have been worse than at News International.
It is generally accepted that hacking all but stopped with the imprisonment in 2007 of Clive Goodman and the private investigator Glenn Mulcaire, but the High Court was told last week that it may have continued for a further four years at the MGN.
Last year the Metropolitan Police were found to have used the anti-terrorist legislation RIPA to uncover journalists' sources. Promises of a tightening of the code governing the use of the act turned out to mean a requirement to "note" when people whose data were being checked worked in areas of confidentiality, such as journalism, the law, medicine. The consultation period for this change ended this week.
Also this week, the Guardian reported that its Edward Snowden material shows that the security services regard journalists as "dangerous" and in the same league as terrorists and computer hackers.

It seems, therefore, an opportune moment to offer - without comment - the following snapshot:

Public expenditure

The Leveson inquiry into Press standards cost £5.4m
The police operations arising from the hacking scandal have cost £40m
That includes more than £11m on Operation Elveden, which is investigating payments to public officials
Prosecutions of journalists since 2011 have cost the CPS more than £4m
Setting up a new regulator under the royal charter has cost £900,000

Journalist trials completed since 2011

Four journalists have been jailed after being convicted of or admitting phone hacking
Three journalists have been given suspended sentences after admitting phone hacking
Two journalists have been found not guilty of phone hacking
One journalist was given a suspended sentence after being convicted of handling a stolen mobile phone
One journalist was found not guilty of handling a mobile phone
One journalist was given a suspended sentence after being convicted of conspiracy to commit misconduct in public office (paying a prison officer)
Six journalists have been cleared of illegally paying officials
Seven journalists face retrials on payments charges

Journalists accused of paying officials

Chris Pharo, Ben O'Driscoll, Graham Dudman and Jamie Pyatt of the Sun are to face a retrial after a jury failed to reach a majority verdict on charges that they illegally paid public officials for stories. Their colleagues John Edwards and John Troup were cleared of the charges against them. All six were cleared of taking part in a "grand conspiracy" and Pharo, O'Driscoll and Dudman were also found not guilty on other counts.
Four more Sun journalists are on trial at the Old Bailey on similar charges. Geoffrey Webster, deputy editor, Fergus Shanahan, executive editor, Duncan Larcombe, royal reporter, and former chief reporter John Kay all plead not guilty.
One News of the World reporter has been found guilty of conspiracy to commit misconduct in public office by paying officials; Clodagh Hartley of the Sun was cleared of that charge.
John Troup, John Edwards and Nick Parker of the Sun and Tom Savage of the Star have been cleared of aiding and abetting such misconduct. Vince Soodin of the Sun faces a retrial after a jury failed to agree in his case last year.
Rebekah Brooks was cleared of conspiracy to commit misconduct in public office at the phone hacking trial last year. The jury failed to reach a verdict on similar charges against Andy Coulson and Clive Goodman and they will be retried before Judge Saunders at the Old Bailey in June. Dan Evans, who admitted all charges against him and gave evidence for the prosecution in the hacking trial, is the only journalist to have pleaded guilty to a charge relating to paying officials.
Six News International journalists (Neil Millard, Tom Wells, Neil Wallis, Anthony France, Brandon Malinsky and Ryan Sabey) and two from the Mirror group (Greg Box-Turnbull and Graham Brough) have been charged in relation to payments to officials and are awaiting trial.

Phone hacking

Mirror Group Newspapers apologised in the High Court this week after settling with ten claimants who complained that their voicemail had been hacked and personal information accessed by the Mirror, Sunday Mirror and Sunday People. The court was told that eight other claims would go to trial next month. The claimants' barrister said that these were "representative" cases.
The Independent reported today that the court had been told that up to 41 journalists had used office phones to hack mobiles in what was a "widespread and habitual" practice between 2001 and 2008. The paper reports David Sherborne QC as saying that Alan Yentob's phone had been hacked 300 times, with different journalists accessing his voicemail several times a day for five months - although no article was ever published.
Mr Sherborne said 108 articles published in the three papers had been linked to hacking, and that these could be the "tip of the iceberg".
One former Sunday Mirror journalist has admitted phone hacking and been given a suspended sentence.
Four Sunday paper executives from the Mirror group (Tina Weaver, James Scott, Mark Thomas and Nick Buckley) were arrested in March 2013 and are still on police bail.
Piers Morgan, who was Daily Mirror editor from 1996 to 2004, was interviewed under caution in December 2013. He has not been arrested. Richard Wallace, who succeeded him and was Mirror editor until 2012, was interviewed under caution in March 2013.
Jules Stenson, former News of the World features editor, has admitted phone hacking. Neil Wallis, the paper's former deputy editor, has denied a similar charge and will go on trial in June.
Five News of the World journalists (Andy Coulson, Greg Miskiw, Neville Thurlbeck, Ian Edmondson and Clive Goodman - in 2007) have served prison sentences after admitting or being convicted of phone hacking; two others (James Weatherup and Dan Evans) have been given suspended sentences.
Two News of the World journalists (Rebekah Brooks and Stuart Kuttner) have been cleared of phone hacking

Other offences

One Sun journalist (Ben Ashford) was found not guilty of handling a stolen mobile phone
One Times journalist (Patrick Foster) accepted a caution in relation to computer hacking
One News of the World journalist (Alex Marunchak) is on police bail in relation to alleged computer hacking
Three News of the World journalists (Andy Coulson, Bob Bird and Douglas Wright) are awaiting trial for perjury in relation to the Tommy Sheridan libel case.

Press regulation

The Press recognition panel which is to monitor compliance with the royal charter on press regulation has been given £900,000 this financial year and is seeking an executive director, who will be paid up to £120,000. Sir David Wolfe, chairman of the panel, gave the figures to a Lords committee last week. No newspaper or magazine has signed up to be regulated by this body.
Sir Alan Moses, chairman of Ipso, told the same committee that his organisation would be "Leveson compliant" by this summer, but that it would not seek royal charter recognition because publishers being regulated by Ipso did not want anything to do with it. His organisation would work alongside the other regulator, Impress, because their aims were "identical".

News Corp

Rebekah Brooks received a £16m payoff when she resigned as chief executive of News International at the height of the hacking scandal in 2011.
News Corp's legal costs as a result of the scandal have been estimated at about £350m
News Corp shares were trading at $16 when the scandal broke. In 2013 the company was split in two - 21st Century Fox and News Corp - and existing shareholders given four Fox shares and one new News Corp share for every four old News Corp shares .
Fox shares are trading today at $34 and News Corp at $15. This means that someone with 100 old News Corp shares worth $1,600 in 2011 would now have a holding worth $3,825.
The old News Corp's value dropped by $7bn to $41bn in the week the scandal broke. Fox is now worth $71bn and News Corp $8bn.

2 Comments

Gotcha!

22/1/2015

0 Comments

Nicole, 22, from Bournemouth, in the Sun today

"God I hate the Sun," a friend texted late last night after a day of Page 3 nonsense.
Hate is a strong word. But, great heavens, the paper is bloody irritating. Irritating in the way of a bright teenager who plays the idiot in class, fearing that to expose his intellect would make him seem less cool.
Snooty people who don't read the Sun love to portray it as a comic written by imbeciles for imbeciles. They couldn't be more wrong. It is put together by intelligent people who don't talk down to their readers, readers who are too often discounted as layabouts with IQs in double figures.

Yes, there's a lot of soap, showbiz and sex - plus, of course, those women in varying states of undress. But this is a paper with an extremely high story count - and many of its stories are important. Some of them even relate to foreign affairs.
Politics and business are treated seriously. The employment page offers practical guidance to the jobless; health and diet advice is commonsense. Critics are knowledgeable: the Something for the Weekend Friday arts section covers sophisticated music and film, not just chart fodder and blockbusters.
Efforts are also made to explain in plain English the background to issues that suddenly burst into the public consciousness.
Today, for example, it looks into fracking in Lancashire. This is something the paper supports, but local planners are seeking to block Cuadrilla's application to mine shale gas in the area. The coverage is opinionated and too one-sided. But, then again, the coverage is on the opinion page.

Quite, detractors might say. The paper's so rightwing, so biased.
Dur, yes. Its editorial stance is conservative, anti-Europe, pro-market, reflecting the view of its proprietor. Isn't that what papers do? Reflect the views of their owners? That's how it works, folks. Proprietors are hardly likely to appoint editors and executives with diametrically opposing views, are they? But when the proprietor is Keith Rupert Murdoch, that becomes a sin.
The Telegraph, Mail, Mirror, Express, Guardian all follow the agendas set by their owners. Some do it in a po-faced way, some stridently, some have built a business on outraged disdain for the very people they sell to. The Sun at least has warmth and wit. It understands and relates to its readers.
We have, however, seen the all-pervasive influence of the Great Satan, influencer of politicians, wheeler of deals.

Brit feminists bang on forever about page 3. I bet never buy paper I think old

Brit feminists bang on forever about page 3. I bet never buy paper I think old fashioned but readers seem to disagree.
— Rupert Murdoch (@rupertmurdoch) September 10, 2014
fashioned but readers seem to disagree.
— Rupert Murdoch (@rupertmurdoch) September 10, 2014

Page 3 again. Aren't beautiful young women more attractive in at least some fashionable clothes? Your opinions please.
— Rupert Murdoch (@rupertmurdoch) September 10, 2014

For example, when he tweeted last September that he thought the tradition of topless women on page three was old-fashioned, the editor responded... by continuing to print pictures of topless women on page three.

Last Monday the woman on page three was wearing underwear. On Tuesday the Times reported that the topless feature had been "quietly dropped", after 44 years, on orders from on high in New York. The story made headlines on BBC radio news bulletins all day - in some instances ahead of the Isis threat to kill two Japanese hostages if a ransom were not paid.
Twitter went wild. No More Page Three campaigners celebrated victory. The rest of Fleet Street went into overdrive, hauling into service any and every female commentator it could find (men, apart from the Independent's Simon Kelner, were apparently not allowed a view). The Guardian ran a highbrow voxpop that included soundbites from the likes of Katharine Whitehorn and Polly Toynbee. Comment threads ran into the thousands.
And all the while, the Sun kept its counsel. No comment, no comment, no comment. "It's wild speculation."

Today Nicole, 22, from Bournemouth appears in the usual slot, braless and winking under the heading "Corrections and clarifications". The presentation and caption writing is pitch perfect.
While the heavies are left huffing and puffing, the Star will be mourning the loss of what seemed a golden opportunity to pick up disaffected Sun readers. Its front page today declared "We love page 3" and to prove it there were 12 breasts on the first inside right-hander.

That was backed up with a "where are they now" centre spread on the glamour greats, including Sam Fox, Linda Lusardi, Nell McAndrew and a woman the paper insists on calling Kate Price, aka Katie or Jordan.
"I'll never believe the Sun again," one woman tweeted. Excuse me? The Sun didn't say it had dropped page three boobs.
And to those campaigners who saw Monday's paper as a victory, how great a difference is there between women parading their bosoms unrestrained or bursting out of a basque? Are they not equally demeaning? (If you need assistance in this judgment, compare the pictures on SubScribe's OpEd page yesterday.)

SubScribe thinks that Rosie in her bra and suspenders on Monday was the support act, sent on to test the audience. We may have to wait for the headliners - but not for long.
The Sun now has the results of its free market research. We can be pretty sure that bare boobs will vanish from page three, but they will do so without the paper appearing to have surrendered to a "spoilsport" campaign.

In the meantime, the Sun has had a bit of fun. And that's what it's best at.
Editor's blog: The beginning of the end?
SubScribe: Women of note

PostScript: There is, of course, a far more serious side to the production of the Sun, as seen today by the decision to order a retrial of four of the paper's journalists on charges of illegally paying public officials for information.
The four men were arrested between 2011 and 2013 and have gone through a three-month trial based largely on evidence provided to the prosecution by News International, now News UK. Two of their colleagues were acquitted during the proceedings at Kingston Crown Court and all four facing retrial were cleared of at least one charge.
The defence argued that the six had been "thrown to the wolves" by their employers. Rebekah Brooks openly admitted to a committee of MPs that the newspaper paid police officers for tips on stories, and successive trials - which resulted in both guilty and not guilty verdicts - have heard that, as editor, she took control of cash payments.
Neither Brooks nor her deputy and successor Dominic Mohan has been charged in relation to these historical payments, which all now accept were wrong.
In the light of all that, and the cost to the public purse, is it really in the public interest for the Sun four to go on trial again?
SubScribe: "Staff sacrificed to save Brooks and NI"

0 Comments

Thank heavens the Star's watching Big Brother

Trials and tribulations

Gotcha!

Liz Gerard

Archives

Virtual cat

Categories

Thank heavens the Star's watching Big Brother

﻿Trials and tribulations

Gotcha!

Liz Gerard

Archives

Virtual cat

Categories

Trials and tribulations