Les Tricoteuses - Part Deux

[BornSicky]

new thread to discuss phonehacking scandal.

I'm not saying the BBC is a bogeyman. But I don't think it shouldn't be questioned with its paying of million pound salaries out of the public purse. It is being cut. I think Dacre makes many good points about its power and influence.

Claig, did you notice the earlier post pointing out Dacre's on very dodgy ground? The Information Commissioner's report a couple of years ago found the Mail was the biggest user of private detectives amongst newspapers. Mail loves to fulminate about other people's morals - and about the BBC -but not so hot on applying ethical standards to its own work.

Cameron will try his best to smash the BBC and the police out of this, much like Thatcher helped Murdoch break the print unions back in the day. To suggest he is doing anything other that covering his own back and boosting his corrupt friends is either disingenuous or naïve.

Using PD's isn't illegal or against the code of conduct though - it's whether or not those PDs use underhand means to source information for you

The ICO's report was about the use of private eyes to obtain information illegally i.e. breaching the Data Protection Act. Hence the ICO's involvement, given s/he's reponsible for enforcing the Act. If the Mail's behaviour was legit, the ICO wouldn't have been concerned.

Dacre made his speechg years before all this erupted. Yes, I have heard that the Mail used private detectives. Apparently all papers use them. But that doesn't mean that tehy hacked phones. Trevor Kavanagh of the Sun was on the BBC this morning and said that the Sun has not been involved in that.

Nobody will touch the BBC. It is a state owned institution. It is too useful for the state.

See my previous post - the ICO report says the Mail is the biggest user of illegally obtained information from detectives. Report dates from several years back before the latest revelations made everyone take phone hakcing seriously. So Dacre was fulminating while encouraging law-breaking by his own staff (or possibly, like Rupert and James, he just didn't know what was going on in his own business).

Isn't Dacre a crook from years back anyway? Or am I mixing him up with Conrad Black?

Why didn't the Labour government do something about this alleged illegal activity? It's not as if the Mail is the progressives' favourite paper and they never relied on the Mail to keep them in power, unlike with Murdoch's papers?

Don't think dacre is a crook....

Conrad Black is in jail. As far as I know, Dacre is a man of the utmost integrity.

claig as has been said ad infinitum on this and t'other threads neither Labour nor Tories come out of this looking good.
whatever people's personal political affiliations on these threads they have generally agreed on that.
imho this is why i want the politicians to stick to the facts of the matter and NOT make it party political thing - because if they do then frankly it's a plague on both their houses and we miss the fundmental point that NC/NI had disproportionate influence over the pillars of the establishment and they acted illegally to get stories and intimidate politicians and police alike.
i do not believe NI were alone in doing so, but their actions were particularly reprehensible and toxic (based upon what we know to date).

do we really think the sun never used hacked info kavanagh may think that, but then a lot of people in NI apparently didn't know what was happening right under their own noses....

I agree with you teejwood. I tend to believe them when they say "we're all in it together". I think they are probably all in it together. Of course what the News of the World did was reprehensible. Let's hope that others weren't doing the same. What shocks me is that the politicians weren't powerful enough to stop what was going on.

And claig my point about the FT is that you make assumptions about the political affiliations of the people who work at/run the beeb. maybe it's not quite as clear cut as you think.

Nothing would surprise me.

But I always thought that the majority of people at the FT were progressives and I always thought that was also true of the majority in the news and current affairs departments of the BBC.

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-411977/Yes-biased-religion-politics-admit-BBC-executives.html

'Even one of the BBC's most senior journalists, political pundit Andrew Marr admitted that the corporation was unrepresentative of British society.
He said: "The BBC is not impartial or neutral. It's a publicly-funded, urban organisation with an abnormally large number of young people, ethnic minorities and gay people.
"It has a liberal bias not so much a party-political bias. It is better expressed as a cultural liberal bias."

But I thought you liked bias, claig?

I don't mind bias. I am all for free expression and freedom of ideas. Everyone should be allowed to say what they believe in. But I am against the people being forced to pay for it. I believe in free competition and free markets. I don't believe in subsidising progressives just because they are unable to make a profit in the market. I am all for the Morning Star and the Guardian and the Daily Mail and the Sun all competing without subsidies in a free market. I believe in the market, the public and freedom.

I'm not a progressive, I'm not like Kinnock, I don't believe in a "balanced press". On the contrary, I believe in a free press for a free people.

And do you feel commercial monopolies or near monopolies constitute that freedom?

(Rupes has a driving force for deregulation of press ownership in the UK for decades.)

So you'd be fine with all the papers vying for tits on page three and shrieking about bringing back hanging, then? Because that's where your lowest common denominator approach takes you, and it's not terribly freeing for anybody.

No, I agree with regulation of the press to ensure that no one individual (e.g. Murdoch) or institution (e.g. the BBC) has too large a share of the media. I believe in plurality of the press and media. But we also live in a free country, and many individuals and organisations are free to try and open TV channels and newspapers if they want to.

claig what you're saying is you like bias as long as it fits with your own world view