Category: The Sun

Corbyn: all singing from the wrong hymn sheet

16/9/2015

Just three days into the new job and Jeremy Corbyn has already had his donkey jacket moment. That boy isn't hanging around.
The Labour leader is in trouble for wearing a jacket and trousers that didn't match to the Battle of Britain service at St Paul's yesterday. Not only that, but the top button of his shirt was undone and his red tie was not knotted right to the neck.
Oh yes, and he didn't sing the National Anthem.
These are the things you need to know about Jeremy Corbyn's activities yesterday.
He also made a speech to the Trades Union Congress, but for today's newspapers, that was almost insignificant when set against his monumental sins earlier in the day.

The response to Corbyn's silence during the singing - especially when he had been in good voice for the Red Flag on Saturday - was predictable. Guess who popped up to denounce him as rude and disrespectful? Good old Nicholas Soames, descendant of the sainted Sir Winston; reliable retired military folk including Admiral Lord West, Colonel Richard Kemp and a couple of ninety-something war veterans; Nigel Farage, who must miss being on the front pages; and media tart Simon Danczuk and some mostly unnamed fellow Labour MPs.
Did anybody in the real world care? Will the non-singing of a song cost Labour a single vote? Or gain one?

And what if Corbyn had sung? Well, he'd have been a hypocrite. Look at what the Sun had to say yesterday when it was disclosed that he would kiss the Queen's hand etc etc when inducted into the Privy Council.
Damned if he did, damned if he didn't.
Honouring those who served the country at war is a tricky business for Labour leaders. Consider the flak Michael Foot took over his choice of coat for the Cenotaph in 1983. How dare he pick something warm from his wardrobe instead of trotting off to Aquascutum for a classic number in navy serge?

Clothes do matter. Dressing appropriately is an expression of courtesy to those around you. Gordon Brown was guilty of a repeated insult to his hosts when he refused in 1997 and subsequent years to don formal dress to deliver the Chancellor's Mansion House speech. Foot would have done better to have buttoned up, but the coat itself wasn't scruffy. Corbyn could have gone the extra half-mile and done his tie up properly, but did anyone beyond a hostile Press notice or care that his smart jacket and trousers didn't constitute a suit?
If Corbyn's attire and attitude were disrespectful to Queen and country, how disrespectful to the country were this morning's newspapers? "You don't need to know about his policies, take it from us they're laughable. So rather than report what he had to say, we'll just mock the way he said it and concentrate on his bad manners."
The Times splash did at least give a fair chunk to the TUC speech, even though the intro and heading were anthem-related and the overall emphasis - as with the Independent - was on a "day of chaos". The Express gave the address a page lead a few pages behind the St Paul's scandal, albeit in "look what he's come up with now" style; the Mail reported it straight in a box on its "Labour Earthquake spread" - and then gave Quentin Letts four columns to lampoon the delivery.
This, however, was the entirety of the Telegraph's reporting of what its splash described as "the first major speech of his tenure":

Mr Corbyn yesterday travelled to the TUC conference in Brighton where he delivered a rambling speech that called for people to be given unlimited benefits. Just before he took to the stage, the string quartet played a rendition of Hey Big Spender, an apparent reference to his "people's quantative easing" policy.
Mr Corbyn also said the unions would write his manifesto for the next general election, and compared the Government to the fascist leadership of General Franco in Spain.

The story also said that he had forgotten his lines, but the paper forgot, in its outrage over the anthem snub, to say what he had forgotten. The Times let us into the secret - Corbyn had "forgotten" to say that Thatcher had once described the miners' union as the "enemies within" - but are we sure he forgot? Maybe he just edited it out?
Corbyn's campaign and election bypassed the conventional relationship between politicians and the media and thus enhanced the sense of there being something fresh about him.
There was much Twitter joy over the fact that an aide had put the phone down on The Sun's Harry Cole, but how wise it is to refuse to communicate with the country's biggest selling paper remains to be seen.
Corbyn's win may have been a landslide, but it still came from just a quarter of a million votes from politically engaged people. The Sun is seen by 24 times as many people every day and, much as Corbyn and his deputy Tom Watson may wish to declare war on Murdoch, it would be folly to ignore such a huge constituency if they hope to attain power.
They cannot expect to speak to packed halls week in, week out. Social media are just echo chambers where people follow or interact with like-minded souls and jeer at those with a different outlook. As several commentators, including those on the Left, point out today, Corbyn needs to get to grips with the mainstream media. Shunning Andrew Marr and the Sun is not a strategy that will lead to electoral success.

But the Press, too, must rethink. If people are offended by Corbyn's singalong choices or dress sense, it is fair that they are reported. If his oratory leaves something to be desired, it is fair that that, too, is commented upon. But let's get this into perspective. Those are side issues; the first job of the Press is to report the news, so when a new leader makes his first important setpiece speech, it would be good if newspapers told us what he said rather than what they thought. One paper did that. Yes, that red rag the Morning Star. You can read its dead straight reporting here.
Now let's see what the rest of them make of Prime Minister's Questions.

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Why Murdoch won't cough up for Anthony France

26/7/2015

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I will do everything in my power to give you total support, even if you're convicted and get six months or whatever.

We will continue to support Anthony in every way we can, and our thoughts are with him during this incredibly tough time.

These were the promises made to Sun staff arrested for paying public officials for stories. The first came from Rupert Murdoch himself, secretly taped during a meeting with his journalists in March 2013. The second in an email from News UK chief executive Mike Darcey last year when crime reporter Anthony France was told he must face trial.

So what happened?
Most of the journalists were cleared - or at least not convicted - and the Crown Prosecution Service retreated from most of the outstanding cases, leaving former head of news Chris Pharo and reporter Jamie Pyatt alone in facing a retrial on a single count after a jury could not reach a verdict.
But one conviction stands - that of Anthony France, who was given a suspended prison sentence by a judge who described him as a decent man of solid integrity.
Judge Pontius made an order that France should pay £34,618 towards the prosecution costs - on the understanding that News UK would foot the bill.
Six weeks later France was back in court to hear his lawyer tell the judge that the company would not pay - and not only that, it was also considering disciplinary proceedings against him.
The judge was not pleased. Sun journalists routinely paid for stories, France had "inherited" his police contact, and the company had funded his defence "at considerable expense":

In these circumstances I’m concerned to learn that News International still refuses to put its hands into its capacious pockets and accept the consequences.
There can be no doubt that News International bears some measure of moral responsibility, if not legal culpability for the acts of the defendant.

The judge reduced the order to £3,461 and a crowd-funding appeal raised the money within six hours.
But why did News UK refuse to cough up?
In that, it was being consistent. It did not pay Nick Parker's costs after his conviction for handling a mobile phone and it has said that it will not contribute to the hacking trial prosecution costs - Mr Justice Saunders made orders of £150,000 against Andy Coulson and £75,000 against Ian Edmondson last week.
There is a difference, though, between phone hacking - which everyone accepts was wrong - and paying contacts for stories, which has proved more of a grey area.
In that covert tape from 2013, later released by Exaro, Murdoch tells the staff:arrested under Elveden that he didn't know of anyone who had done anything "that wasn't being done across Fleet Street and wasn't the culture...Payments for news tips from cops, that's been going on for a hundred years".
Rebekah Brooks had previously told a Commons select committee that her papers had paid police for information, and several respected journalists piped up with anecdotes confirming that such payments had been common practice. Rival news organisations joined the condemnation of the Operation Elveden prosecutions and the celebration of acquittals.

There is obviously more to this than money: the hacking scandal and its fallout have cost News Corp hundreds of millions of dollars, a few thousand more here or there wouldn't make a lot of difference to the business or to shareholders. So why hang out junior staff to dry?
The clue probably lies in the pauses in that Murdoch tape from two years ago; the hesitation when confronted with the question: what if we're convicted?

I'm not allowed to promise you...I will promise you continued health support...but your jobs...I've got to be careful what comes out...but frankly [big pause]...I won't say it...but...just trust me

He has already told the gathering that anyone who was released or acquitted "would just continue", but in the event of a conviction "I've been told that I must not give guarantees, but I can give you something.".
Graham Dudman, the former managing editor who went on to be cleared of some charges and to have others against him dropped, pushes the point:
"Will News International be allowed to make a decision on whether somebody is retained in employment with the company or will that be taken by people in New York?"
Darcey, who has been asked this question in previous meetings, interjects: "We don't know what you mean by 'people in New York'. Were you specifically referring to the MSC?"
[The MSC was the Managements and Standards Committee set up in the panic after the Milly Dowler story broke, which went on to hand over millions of documents to the police, and which in turn prompted the broadening of the initial hacking investigation into payments to public officials.]
Dudman comes back: "The MSC or a News Corp lawyer who says 'No, Rupert, you can't do that. You've got to do this."
Murdoch assures him: "We all take legal advice. I'll take that decision. I'll take responsibility. Absolutely."
Pressed further by Dudman: "So you, as chairman, would be prepared to go against legal advice if you felt that was appropriate?", Murdoch replies: "Sure."

The question now is what advice Murdoch is getting in New York and whether he feels it is appropriate.
For, as he admitted himself, the whole MSC and its messy aftermath was the product of panic, a frantic attempt to protect the business - a business run from New York. And whatever Murdoch's protestations, there remains a
near-universal belief that fear of corporate governance and malpractice litigation in the US has driven every News Corp move over the past four years. To appear to condone law-breaking, whether by paying prosecution costs or by keeping a convicted journalist on the staff, is fraught.
One insider told SubScribe:

There is a lot of dismay about Anthony France. The problem is that, although I believe London would like to support Anthony, everything is run these days by the New York lawyers who are obsessed with how everything is interpreted by the US Justice Department and the American regulatory authorities. Darcey and Dave Dinsmore, and the HR director Derrick Crowley are actually decent chaps who have done their best, but their hands are tied by News Corp honchos.
This is a legacy of the way so much corporate control was handed over to the MSC. Even hacks' London entertaining expenses have to be signed off in New York these days, Once you bring in the lawyers, you can never get rid of the buggers, as Rupert has been discovering.

Then there is Murdoch's anti-establishment cussedness: he will not have taken kindly to the suggestion that his organisation should reimburse the Exchequer for the prosecution of his staff - especially when he believes, as he says, that they have been "picked on" in retribution for Sun activities over the past forty years.
We may yet see further examples of that obduracy.

The flurry of acquittals and the capitulation of the CPS may have been a cause for celebration, but they have brought a new set of problems: what to do with the journalists who are now free to resume their careers? You can't run a news organisation for two or three years without deputy editors, managing editors, news editors, picture editors, reporters. Others have stepped up to cover for the Elveden crew who have been catching up on their reading while suspended from work and on bail. And while Murdoch may have said that anyone acquitted would "naturally just continue", he probably wasn't expecting the process to drag on for a further two years.
So negotiations are underway at London Bridge. Older hands are looking for what are delightfully known as exit packages, younger journos with young families and big mortgages are looking to return, and those in the middle are trying to decide which way to jump.
Overlooking all of this is one Rebekah Brooks. Although she holds no official position, she remains close to Murdoch and is seen constantly at his side when he's in town. And while the lawyers are calling the shots in the negotiations, those who have met her have come away with the feeling that she has had some influence over the terms being offered.

What goes around comes around.
Four years ago Murdoch had to abandon his bid to take over the bit of BSkyB that he didn't own because of the hacking fallout. The company has since expanded into Europe and is now called simply Sky, the name Murdoch first gave it in 1984, long before the merger with British Satellite Broadcasting. In the past month, 21st Century Fox (which took control of the network when News Corp was split) has rebuffed approaches from Vodafone and Vivendi for its 39% share of the business, saying it wanted £18 per share - it is currently trading at around £11.31.
With a majority Tory government now in place, some analysts are predicting that Fox may be planning a fresh bid to take outright control.
The man who would ostensibly be in charge of any such bid would be the Fox chief executive: James Murdoch, former chief executive of BSkyB and - during its darkest days - of News International.
James took the helm at Wapping in 2011 when Rebekah Brooks resigned. Her£16m payoff is reported to have included a clause promising her a job of equal status should she be cleared of any criminal charges - which indeed she was.
So there she is now, in her upper floor office in the Baby Shard with no formal title. Mike Darcey is understood to be leaving the company in the autumn and, despite initial disbelief, there is a widespread expectation that Brooks will get her old job back.
As one observer noted: "It would be such a Rupert thing to do - rubbing his enemies' noses in it."
Which doesn't help Anthony France as he knuckles down to his next 100 hours of community service.

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Time for Darcey to put his money where his mouth is

29/5/2015

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When Anthony France was told last year that he would face trial for paying a policeman for stories, News UK's chief executive sent an email to Sun staff promising to support the reporter "in every way we can".
The memo from Mike Darcey (above) was a testament to France's popularity and professionalism:

Anthony is a hugely popular and highly respected member of The Sun team and has been an integral part of the newsroom since 2004....
He joined us after stints on the Mail on Sunday, Evening Standard and Sunday Mirror and almost immediately scored one of the biggest scoops of the year. At the height of concerns over security in The Houses of Parliament, Anthony revealed how lax security still was with the classic front page 'Sun 'Bomber' In Commons'....
Since then he has concentrated on covering crime issues and security, often asking difficult questions of Britain's police chiefs. He broke a string of big stories including the Sally Anne Bowman murder and the John Worboys serial rapist case. Despite being at the centre of a police inquiry, Anthony covered the Oscar Pistorius murder trial and Nelson Mandela's state funeral in South Africa...
We will continue to support Anthony in every way we can and our thoughts are with him during this incredibly tough time.

France was convicted last Friday and today given a suspended 18-month prison sentence and ordered to do 200 hours community service.
Judge Pontius was clearly equally impressed by the reporter, describing him as essentially a decent man of solid integrity, who had written stories of undoubted public interest.
In hissentencing remarks the judge acknowledged that paying people for stories was a well-known aspect of the way the Sun worked, that there was nothing wrong with this if it did not involve encouraging people to abuse a trusted public position, and that there was a recognised procedure for payments:

The defendant was required...to present a request for payment to his editor. It follows, first, that payment of a fee, and determination of the appropriate sum, were matters for editorial discretion and not for the defendant and, secondly, there was no handing over of a grubby envelope produced from the defendant's pocket in a dark corner of a pub.
The defendant, holding a fairly junior post at the Sun, was therefore following an accepted procedure that doubtless had existed for some time, and doing so in relation to a source...he had inherited from a colleague and to whom payments had previously been made.

Rebekah Brooksfamously told MPs that journalists had paid police officers; Rupert Murdoch was caught on tape saying that they had been doing so forever; the Sun still carries a panel on page two offering money for stories - as the judge noted.
The Sun has also protested loud and long about Operation Elveden - most of whose evidence, remember, was handed over by News International's management and standards committee - and the persecution of journalists doing their job.
So how could it be that in mitigation before sentencing today Anthony Keeling QC told the judge that there was an overwhelming likelihood that France would lose his job and that News UK had indicated that it would not bear the costs of the prosecution?
In ordering France to bear those costs, the judge said he assumed that News UK would pick up the bill and that if it declined to do so, France should return to court to seek a review.
As Keeling said:

There is a sense it is Mr France, who held the most junior full-time position it was possible to hold at the Sun, who stands to be punished for the whole system.

News UK does not enjoy the best reputation in journalism. If it is not to be tarnished even further, it should announce tonight that France's job is still there - if he wants it - and that there is no question of the company leaving him to pick up the prosecution tab.

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If Nick Parker is guilty, Harding and Brooks are too

10/12/2014

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This is Nick Parker in a Lee Thompson photograph taken shortly after a Hamas rocket attack destroyed two homes in the Israeli town of Sderot.
Parkier is the Sun's chief foreign correspondent and in a 26-year career with the paper he has reported from Lockerbie, Iraq, Afghanistan, Bali and Beslan.
He has not, however, worked for 34 months because he has been suspended on police bail since his arrest in February 2012 in the extended aftermath of the phone hacking scandal.
Today he is a convicted criminal, having been found guilty of handling a stolen mobile phone belonging to the Labour MP Siobhan McDonagh. Sentencing him to three months' imprisonment, suspended for a year, Judge Worsley told him: "You were prepared to behave dishonestly in order to get a story...You over-stepped the line between investigate journalism and breaking the law."
This judgment suggests that any journalist offered information in less-than-straightforward circumstances must gamble on whether it is likely to be of public interest without even looking at it.
That is not the same as making a decision on whether to accept the material by balancing its importance against the risk of prosecution.
In 2009, James Harding and Rebekah Brooks were offered tapes detailing every MP's expenses claims. They looked at them, considered the issue of dealing in stolen goods, and turned them down. The material was offered to the Daily Telegraph, which paid £110,000 for it, and we all know the rest of that story.

Harding and Brooks, who knew the tapes were stolen and that they would have to pay to publish them, were guilty of criminally stupid journalistic judgment, but I have never heard anyone suggest that they were guilty of a crime.
Yet they behaved in almost exactly the same way as Parker:
He knew the phone was stolen, he was told that it contained a text about bribery and he agreed to pay Michael Ankers, the student who had turned up with the BlackBerry, £10,000 if the story worked out.
Like Harding and Brooks, he looked at the material, decided against using it, and returned it to the source.

No one would today argue that the publication of MPs' expenses was anything other than in the public interest. Supposing the stolen (or found on the Underground) phone had contained evidence of MPs being involved in bribery. Would that not also have been in the public interest?

Yet today Parker is a criminal for looking to see if that were the case.
This means that journalists will be ever more circumspect about sources and that a whistleblower with important issues to raise may be shown the door if they don't "look right" or because an editor dares not risk checking out what they have to share.
This Government has promised to look after whistleblowers, but the stream of people sacked or hounded out of their jobs for telling the truth flows unabated.
Michael Ankers was not an honourable source trying to right a wrong, but are we to presume that every young man who says he has a story must be a chancer on the make and reject their material without a single, let alone a second, glance?

In an editor's blog for Press Gazette, Dominic Ponsford draws a parallel with the news that Metropolitan Police held on to 1,700 phone records to which they knew they were not entitled for seven months before returning them. It is well worth reading, which you can do here.

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It's 3-1 against the Star on Coldplay Chris

29/10/2014

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Jennifer Lawrence has been househunting in Islington and has told estate agents that she's eager to find a "cosy pad" with Chris Martin.
She apparently loves England and can't wait to put down roots. She's also cleared all her stuff out of her former boyfriend's flat when she was in London earlier this month "to symbolise the start of her new life with Chris. Buying a house together in London is the icing on the cake."
Awww, sweet. After the heartbreak of the conscious uncoupling with Gwyneth Paltrow, it's all going to turn out all right for Chris.
Or so the Star told us in its showbiz lead yesterday.

But the Mail and Sun had different ideas. They spoilt the fun with news that the couple had split after a four-month romance. Jen dumped Chris "a few days ago", after he had been out to a family dinner with Gwynnie, according to the Sun. They've gone their separate ways, said the Mail, attributing the report to the website E! News.
Today the Mirror's US Editor weighs in with a page 3 lead that adds flesh to yesterday's Mail and Sun stories.
He reports that Jen was fed up with Chris's continued closeness to Paltrow, who was apparently spotted tenderly stroking his face at that dinner, "while a glum Jennifer was pictured elsewhere in Los Angeles having dinner with a friend".
Sources close to the Hunger Games star said: "Jen felt there were three of them in the relationship and didn't feel comfortable..She is one of the most desirable women in Hollywood and quite rightly deserves to be leading lady for any man and not play second fiddle."
So what we'd really like to know now is...
How long had that estate agent story been sitting in the Star reporter's notebook? If only they had got it into print a day or two earlier...

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Press freedom, Hacked Off and credit where it's due

7/10/2014

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SubScribe is not a fan of Hacked Off. This website does not believe that the Leveson inquiry was a good idea, that statutory involvement in Press regulation was desirable or necessary, or that people who believe themselves to be aggrieved should have any role in determining the fate of those they perceive to be at fault - in either the civil or criminal courts.
SubScribe is even less of a fan of newspapers with entrenched ideas. An open mind is an essential part of a journalist's make-up. Approaching any subject with preconceived ideas is likely to lead to important nuances being missed or overlooked.
The Daily Mail has ranted loud and long about Leveson, the royal charter, the Guardian's role in unearthing the hacking scandal and about Hacked Off.
On Sunday, its sister paper splashed on the fact that Kent Police had used the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa) to trawl through phone records and uncover the identity of the source of the Chris Huhne speeding ticket story. This was even though a judge had ordered that the source should remain anonymous.
Press Gazette has for more than a month been seeking signatures on a petition to stop police using this act to spy on journalists. The Save Our Sources campaign began after the disclosure that the Met had gone through the Sun political editor's phone records to discover whose leak started the Plebgate scandal.

Today Richard Littlejohn jumps on the bandwagon with a blast at both forces, a quick jibe at Leveson and a reminder that many journalists have been arrested since the phone hacking scandal broke in 2011 and that some are still "languishing" on police bail after three years. The headline on the piece is reproduced above.
SubScribe would hazard a guess that Littlejohn is no supporter of Hacked Off. But he doesn't mention the organisation in this column. It's appearance in the heading is hardly likely to have been the work of a lowly sub, rather to have been dictated from above. As it happens, Hacked Off is standing four square alongside the Mail on this.
Dr Evan Harris, associate director of the organisation, stood up at the Liberal Democrats' conference in Glasgow yesterday and persuaded his party to adopt a policy of creating public interest defences in law to protect responsible journalism.
Harris, a former LibDem MP, said that his party's ministers should do more to enhance, improve and protect press freedom, particularly in relation to investigative and public interest journalism. He pointed to various examples where this might work:

First is RIPA, and the lack of safeguards for journalistic material, including confidential sources and indeed for legally privileged material. The report of Operation Alice into the Plebgate affair
revealed...that the police had got the phone records, both the mobile phone and the desk phone, from Tom Newton-Dunn, the political editor at The Sun...
There is no judicial oversight or indeed any oversight for
the police for that decision. The police authorised themselves to do that, something they...should not be allowed to do. There must be greater safeguards.

Harris endorsed Press Gazette's SOS campaign and even went on to suggest that hacking by journalists might be acceptable in the right circumstances:

The second area dealt with in this amendment are public interest defences. For example in the Computer Misuse Act, which would mean that when Sky News hacked into the computer of the "canoe man", who you may remember faked his death to get insurance money, they would not
have been threatened with the chilling impact of a police investigation.
Similarly with the Bribery Act. The Sun...ran an operation to expose fraud at a magistrates' court where a clerk was letting people off speeding tickets. And they ran the risk of a police investigation because they were effectively breaking the Bribery Act and had no statutory defence.
If the News of the World, instead of their thousands of innocent victims of hacking, had hacked the phone of Jimmy Savile to expose him when the police were failing to do so, then they should not have faced for that example the threat of a police investigation. But there is no public interest defence.

The Sun, which has made a formal complaint about the Met's use of Ripa to track Tom Newton Dunn's phone calls, reported Harris's speech, but not his association with Hacked Off. A deliberate omission?
This is not the first time Harris's addresses to conference have attracted the Sun's attention. Three years ago it wrote:

A women's think-tank yesterday blasted the Lib Dems for plotting war on Page 3 — and hailed The Sun’s curvy babes as role models.The party’s po-faced conference motion this week to stop shopkeepers selling The Sun before a 9pm “watershed” was condemned by the organisation WomenOn.
The group said of the crusade led by Evan Harris: “Where should it stop? Should we ban all photos of people lest someone somewhere finds them attractive?”
Ex-MP Dr Harris brandished photos of topless Page 3 models on Monday as he ranted against “sexualised images” in newspapers and lads’ mags.
His potty idea for a TV-style watershed to restrict when publications can be sold is now official Lib Dem policy. WomenOn said it “smacks of desperation”.

It's good to know that at least one paper doesn't hold grudges.
Or maybe it's a case of "my enemy's enemy is my friend"?

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Page 3: the beginning of the end?

10/9/2014

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This is the Coronation Street actress as seen in her 2015 calendar. Is she what you would describe as a beautiful young woman in fashionable clothes?
If so she could be just what the big boss wants to see instead of naked girls on page 3 of the Sun.
Rupert Murdoch had a bit of a one-man Twitterfest this morning, starting with this shot out of the blue:

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

Way to go, Rupert. Start with an attack and then signal retreat in fewer than 140 characters. We've known for a while that he thinks Page 3 is outdated - he told Leveson as much last year - and it was surprising that, in the light of that knowledge, David Dinsmore was so adamant on his appointment as Sun editor that Page 3 was going nowhere.
Perhaps the old man thought it was time to gee him up with a gentle hint. Or not so gentle, as he swiftly followed up with this:

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

Unsurprisingly, he was rewarded with hundreds of replies. Surprisingly, very few of them were abusive or condescending. Most engaged with conversation and, yes, most were of the view that naked women had no place in a newspaper. Some respondents asked: why pictures of women as eye candy at all? Others embraced the idea of a fashion spread instead - one suggested that he contact Anna Wintour. One was an example of unerring loyalty:

. @rupertmurdoch Yes, well-styled women in clothes definitely a #page3 idea whose time has come. @TheSunNewspaper
— Les Hinton (@leshinton) September 10, 2014

But by that time, Rupert had long since moved on from Page 3. He had got his teeth into Scotland.

Bigger problem! Wrestling with Scottish vote. Scottish Sun No. 1. Head over heart, or just maybe both lead to same conclusion.
— Rupert Murdoch (@rupertmurdoch) September 10, 2014

Whatever did he mean? Yes Scotland a bigger problem. But for him? What's it got to do with him? What does he mean Scottish Sun No 1.
Ah...he's wrestling with the Scottish edition's editorial view on the referendum. And there were still some who thought that was the editor's job.
For a naturalised American Australian with Scottish ancestry, roots matter and he soon became quite sentimental:

Scots better people than to be dependants of London. Hard choice with real pain for some time. Maybe too much.
— Rupert Murdoch (@rupertmurdoch) September 10, 2014

Generations of Scottish preacher forefathers came from beautiful northern fishing village, Rosehearty. Now totally silted up. Sad.
— Rupert Murdoch (@rupertmurdoch) September 10, 2014

Then there's another abrupt change of tack:

Piers Morgan seems unemployed after failing to attract any audience in US. Seemed out of place. Once talented, now safe to ignore.
— Rupert Murdoch (@rupertmurdoch) September 10, 2014

Poor Piers, what did he do to deserve that out of nowhere other than have a spat with Jonathan Agnew about Kevin Pietersen? And look - it gets three times as many retweets as the posts about Page 3.
At this point what I'd love to know, and have failed to find out, is where is Rupert when he's writing all this? If he's still in California after the Apple launch - w ere we saw him looking quite excited - it's midday and his posts can be regarded as "considered". But if he's back in New York, he's tweeting at 3 o'clock in the morning. Are these the ramblings of a man who can't sleep?
By 6 tonight BST (10am California, lunchtime New York) he had switched from writing Morgan off as someone to be ignored to declaring him a "friend and a legend" and was back on the Scottish tack:

What happened to the Scottish Enlightenment? US owes more to it than England. How would Salmond rule?
— Rupert Murdoch (@rupertmurdoch) September 10, 2014

As I write, he is now tweeting about maths teaching.
So are we to read anything into any of this? The consensus seems to be that he is coming out in favour of Scottish independence. There is no doubt that that is a bigger political issue than the appearance or otherwise of breasts on the first righthand page of a tabloid newspaper.
But not in terms of the Sun.
It may or may not have been the Sun wot won it for the Tories in '92 - a headline Murdoch told Leveson he disliked - but whichever way he jumps is unlikely to have any impact on the referendum result. The people of Scotland will no more be swayed by a foreign media magnate's sentimentality than they will by the Westminster trio on their wayzgoose or by the monarch who has the sense to keep out of it.

On Page 3, however, there may be much more at stake than feminist disdain or bringing a slow-to-catch-on editor to heel.
Roy Greenslade noted in his Guardian blog on Monday that the signs were there that change was afoot. For four days running, he wrote, there were no bare breasts in the paper.
As anyone who might have read the pictures blog on this site, SubScribe is against token pictures of women (or men or horses or even kittens) in any state of dress or undress. I should be glad to see the end of Page 3 in its present incarnation. I'd like to see real news there.

Rupert has no reason to care what I think. He does, however, have reason to reach out - overtly and not covertly - to others in this country with more influence. Like those who may one day determine whether 21st Century Fox should be allowed to take over the bit of BSkyB it doesn't own. Yes, we've been there before and Milly and Nick and Brian and Andy got in the way.
SubScribe is written by an old hack at a laptop who knows nothing, but to her, the story that seems most relevant to today's Twitter musings is this one:

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Honour the fallen, but not with this ersatz emotion

5/8/2014

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Did you turn out the lights between 10 and 11 last night? Did you leave a single lamp burning? If so, was this a deliberate act of remembrance or the usual bedtime routine?
Yesterday was the 100th anniversary of the start of the First World War. Today is the 30th anniversary of Richard Burton's death (the actor, not the explorer). Tomorrow is the 125th anniversary of the opening of the Savoy.

Anniversary mania is a condition that had historically been controlled by keeping the features department in quarantine. But then along came open-plan offices and dodgy air conditioning units and before you knew it, the disease had become endemic in newspaper offices and quickly spread to all areas of public life.
Every decade after every slightly significant advance had to be marked with a book, an interview, a film, a television special (backed up with another book).

The American bicentennial in 1976 was a biggie. So was the Queen's silver jubilee the following year.
You'd expect the golden and diamond celebrations to be clearer in the mind - what with being more recent - but they are much fuzzier. Mugs and sovereigns for the kids, Brian May at the top of Buck House, Brian Wilson control-freaking it over the party at the palace crowd for the gold; a sodden river pageant and its dire television coverage, Gary Barlow, the Madness Our House light show and the Duke in hospital for the diamond.
You can have too many parties and pick up too many stray balloons and damp flags to maintain enthusiasm for another shindig round the corner.

What do you remember about 2005 and the bicentenary of Nelson's victory at Trafalgar? Do you know or care what has been planned for next year to mark the 200th anniversary of Wellington's victory over Napoleon at Waterloo? Or if anything is in the pipeline for October next year to mark the 600th anniversary of our archers' success against the odds at Agincourt ? (One imagines that people were too busy worrying about the Western Front to have concerned themselves with jollities for the 500th.)

Yesterday the country was apparently united in remembrance of the boys sent to their deaths in the high summer of 1914. Boys sacrificed because the whole of Europe had taken up such intransigent positions and mobilised forces to such an extent that the Queen's grandfather and his two cousins had little choice but to wage war with each other, once Gavrilo Princip obligingly fired the starting gun.

A hundred years on, against the distant clamour of neighbour fighting neighbour and brother fighting brother in Israel, Syria and Ukraine, we heard the sirens of platitude from European leaders, a solemn celebration of peace and lessons learnt.

The Press, too, dutifully fell into line; backbenches vying to produce the starkest front page, the most evocative headline.
"The world remembers" proclaimed the Times wraparound - untruthfully, for this was essentially a European weep-in. There were pictures from London, Belfast, Balmoral, Liege, Mons - and Afghanistan, because we still have troops there.
And against what background was this sombre sentiment set? A picture of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, who could as well have been heading across the grass to a country church wedding as to a memorial service.
The tell-tale gravestones were safely at the back of the wrap; the far more evocative picture - Paul Kingston's photograph of a Second World War veteran saluting a statue of a First World War tommy - kept inside.

The Sun had Prince Harry looking noble above the heading "Harry's hero", and the Mail almost hit the jackpot with Kate and Harry - if only the Archbishop of Canterbury hadn't been in the foreground.
It wasn't only the royals on front-page duty: the unknown soldier was pressed into service again, with a lone candle on the tomb at Westminster Abbey, while young men dressed in early 20th century uniforms and a shower of poppies provided the Express and Star with their cover pictures.

There is, of course, no one left who served in the war, no one left who remembers the individuals who died. But we can create the illusion with photographs of old soldiers from other conflicts. Royalty with heads bowed, old men with campaign medals pinned to misshapen blazers, Chelsea pensioners, and Beefeaters among the Tower of London poppies are all brought into play.
[Paul Cummins's installation which will eventually have more than 888,000 ceramic poppies is, incidentally, the most imaginative, moving and spectacular memorial of all. SubScribe has been surprised by the limited space devoted to it in the papers so far, but Wills, Kate and Harry went to see it today, so it will no doubt figure prominently tomorrow.]

Photo credit: Historic Royal Palaces

Those boys of a hundred years ago who thought they were fighting for King and country, for a great cause, did they want to be remembered like this - as characters in a giant act of enforced national breast-beating; their personal letters to their mums read out to the world?
If they believed they were engaged in the war to end all wars, what would they think of the symbolism of a prince wearing medals celebrating his grandma's longevity on the throne carrying a lamp around a Belgian field while hundreds of his contemporaries adjust to life without the arms and legs blown off by roadside bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan?
What would they think if they knew that far from "learning the lessons" of the Great War, their country would go on to send nearly half a million more young men and women to die in a score of conflicts all over the world; that not a year would go by in the following century without British troops being involved in combat somewhere?

Of course we should honour the fallen. Of course we should remember and acknowledge the day that set the world on such a bloody path. But these events don't feel real, they don't seem heartfelt and instinctive. This is orchestrated homage and we are in danger of wallowing in this sea of reverence as we did in that ocean of sentimentality after the death of Diana.

That initial spontaneous show of respect by the people of (now Royal) Wootton Bassett was the real deal, but it turned into a ritual and then a tourist attraction, until the town was finally swamped.
We appear to have an unerring ability to take a pure moment and reduce it to a source of entertainment, an occasion to publish a souvenir supplement, to snipe at a politician over the wording on his wreath or to assess the fashion sense of the lesser royals.

There will be many sad centenaries over the next four years - of the Easter Rising and the Russian revolution as well as the Great War. We shall also see the 70th anniversaries of VE Day, of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, of VJ day, the 60th anniversary of Suez, the 20th anniversary of the Good Friday agreement.

Would it not be good if these could be marked with restraint and respect, rather than as an opportunity to sell a book, plug a television series or give away a free bone china thimble (plus p&p, collect the whole set for £25).

The photograph inside the Times wrap, by Paul Kingston

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The Sun's misguided bit of devilment

29/7/2014

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Just because you can doesn't mean you should.
Press freedom is about the right to challenge powerful people and hold them to account; the right to rootle around in the dank undergrowth to hunt down corporate and political crocodiles, using whatever weapons you can muster.
Press freedom is also about the right to run idiotic stories about foolish people desperate for their 15 minutes of fame; the right to use subterfuge to expose the greed or hypocrisy behind a star's "wholesome" public image.
But to go too far with the latter is to risk losing the former. If we wield our greatest power against the insignificant, what do we have left to fight the important battles?
The Sun should be feeling chastened this week after the collapse of the Tulisa court case that forced it to suspend its star investigative reporter (a story, incidentally, that made several front pages but surfaced only on page 13 of the Sun).
Yesterday's splash was a serious examination of the state of the NHS. Today the paper has regressed to its Comic Cuts persona, which wouldn't matter if it didn't involve demonising - I use the word advisedly - a four-year-old boy.
It will also inevitably bring a fresh chorus of that old favourite "The (Murdoch) Press must be tamed".

What kind of brain thinks that a sinister picture crop of a clearly identifiable child coupled with the heading "Boy, 4, has mark of devil" is acceptable?
The Sun apparently believes this was a "light-hearted" treatment of the story of a boy whose parents spotted a strange mark (one that happened to resemble the pattern seen on many a hairdryer grille) on his chest.
They took him to the GP, who was apparently baffled. They asked teachers, who were equally bemused.
Then they did what any sensible parent would do: they posted pictures on Facebook and contacted American websites that specialised in "mysterious body marks" and abductions by aliens.

They also came to the attention of the SWNS agency, which took photographs of Mum and son, helpfully pointing towards his chest. Gosh, that was fortuitous.
The mark duly faded on June 16 after three weeks (don't you love the precision of the date), but the craving for attention didn't.
And so, thanks to those SWNS pictures taken nearly two months ago, the boy makes the front page of the Sun today.
The "light-hearted" treatment involves the use of such words as "sinister", "horrified", "nightmare" and the mother saying:

It’s a nightmare. Some people have said it’s the Symbol of Mammon — the sign of the Devil’s first born — which has been very upsetting.
Just looking at it made me shake thinking something unnatural had visited my boy....
You see this kind of thing on scary sci-fi films. It isn’t supposed to happen to families like us.
Now we sleep with the landing light on and ***** often comes into bed with me and *****.
I know it sounds crazy but I have found myself listening out for bumps in the night.”

Yes, it does sound crazy. It is crazy.
This woman needs to get a grip and so does the Sun.

The fact that a parent agrees to their child being photographed in the knowledge that it might be put in the public domain does not mean that it should be put in the public domain.
The fact that these parents do not respect their son's privacy does not mean the Sun should condone and capitalise on their foolhardiness. It should exercise responsibility on their behalf and save them from themselves - for the boy's sake.

Yes, it's the silly season and now a marker has been put down. Watch out for a rash (sorry) of stories about mysterious symbols suddenly appearing on kids' bodies.
Think of crop circles, think of the Virgin Mary turning up on a cheese toastie. Harmless nonsense (not that the farmers would agree). But if children start branding themselves with anything other than a marker pen, someone is going to get hurt.

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A 'miracle' that just 'happened' to happen

11/7/2014

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The Mirror and Sun share a heart-warming (no pun intended) splash about a woman who "sensed" her dead son's heart beating in another man's chest. It appears in a number of other papers too. But whether it's the "most amazing" story you'll read or even a "miracle" depends on your astonishment threshold.
Freda Carter had wanted for years to find out who had received her son John's heart, but hospital rules allowed her to be told only that the recipient was a teenager called Scott.
Last year she attended a memorial service for transplant donors. A young man called Scott gave a reading. She put two and two together and came up with four. Happy days for everyone.
The meeting took place in November, why it has surfaced only now is unclear. But that's probably beside the point.
The Carters live in Sunderland, Scott lives in North Shields, the transplant and the service took place in Newcastle.
Mrs Carter isn't psychic, as the Sun tells us. This isn't an 'of all the churches in all the world' chance-in-a-zillion story. It's one of a determined woman overcoming bureaucracy (in place, incidentally, for good reasons of privacy and emotional stability) to achieve her heart's desire (pun intended).
Let's hope that she can be content with this as her happy ending.