Song for Rebekah

Is there no end to parodic uses of the 'Friday' song? I hope not. Here's the phone-hacking version.



and of course the inevitable Downfall versions:

Scenes from a farce

The News of the World hacking saga has reached a Select Committee in Parliament, where they're investigating the brilliant job not done by the police. One of the gems was this exchange:

Michael Ellis, a Conservative, asks Hayman to confirm that he received hospitality from people he was investigating in relation to a criminal offence. Hayman says that's correct.

The MPs on the committee seem to find this surprising. Hayman regards that as normal. He says it would have been odd if he had cancelled the dinner, he says. Operational matters were not discussed.

Imagine the scene, perhaps a cosy Bistro in the East End:
'More Barolo, Fingers?'.
'Don't mind if I do, Piggy. And have a cigar'.
'You're a gent, Fingers'.
'Mind if we talk a little shop, Porker?'.
'Fraid not, old boy. Not while I'm investigating you for that nifty little bank job last week'.
'Ah well, fair dos. As long as we don't 'ave to cancel our little slap-up feeds in the meantime. Dinner's on me, by the way'. 
'Mind how you go, old son'. 

We shall never see its like again

What was Rebekah Brooks thinking about on September 11th 2001? The Telegraph has acquired cassette tapes which give us some insight:

 A few hours after the attack on the World Trade Centre, I was asked by Rebekah to dress up as Harry Potter. She wanted me to dress up and go to her office in the middle of the newsroom.

SK: Which date was that?

CB: That was on Tuesday, September 11. It was the afternoon, less than three hours after [the attacks]. I went into her office and Andy [Coulson, the deputy editor] was on the sofa and Rebekah was on the phone. Andy asked me where was my Harry Potter suit and I made some excuse, saying: it's not here, it's in the photo studio. [Actually], it was in the office, but it was hardly appropriate for a journalist to be prancing about as Harry Potter. Andy told me I should always have my Harry Potter gear around, in case of a Harry Potter emergency, and told me that the morning after, I was to dress up for conference as Harry Potter. So, at that time, [when] we were working on the assumption that up to 50,000 people had been killed, I was required to parade myself around morning conference, dressed as Harry Potter.

GM: I have told you that this is not going to be held against you. Charles, you should think very seriously about coming in on Tuesday.

CB: Well, to be frank, Greg, as far as my future at News International is concerned, I haven't toed the line for the editor's pet project. I didn't prance around while the World Trade Centre was being bombed, for her personal amusement. I can't just stroll in.

GM: Why not? Charles, that is what we do - we go out and destroy other people's lives. 

Wow. So this is the kind of campaigning investigative journalism which various Murdoch representatives have told us will be lost with the demise of the News of the World.

Hang your heads, carping Britons, hang your heads.

Funeral for a Friend

A witty send-off for the News of the World, much unlamented. Daily Mail next? Please? NOTW was the drunk lairy cousin who'd ruin family occasions. The Mail is the evil insidious domineering patriarch that keeps everyone in line with vicious commentary, revealing a deep vein of racism and general misanthropy: it's much more socially corrosive than the NOTW because by behaving like it's important, it's actually become more powerful than it deserves.



Oh, and Billy Bragg has some advice for you.

So you want to be a tabloid journalist? A photo-story

I'm doing this in pictures so even News of the World writers will understand.

Here's the essential kit for every budding hack:

An orange wig. Whatever you do, looking like Rebekah Brooks may be all that keeps your from the dole queue.

Failing that, being mistaken for a Murdoch should see you right

A donation to the Policeman's Benevolent Fund. Much easier than chasing stories.

This is the other way to find things out

If anyone asks, these records never existed

With the aid of one of these, you may be able to find your conscience. Or even the Tabloid Code of Ethics.

But there are benefits to working at the News of the World. You'll eventually get your own company car. Like Mr. Goodman, Mr. Mulcaire and Mr. Coulson.

And here's Fry and Laurie's Murdoch version of It's a Wonderful Life.

I am available for interview

Some of you may know that half my job is in a department of Media and Cultural Studies (the other half is in Literature). So obviously I've had my share of abuse over the years from know-nothings.

Here's a quick corrective.

A few of the issues raised by the News of the World story:
What constitutes acceptable journalistic practice?
What is news?
What is the difference between the 'public interest' and 'what interests the public'?
Does tabloid journalism poison the public sphere?
Who is 'fit and proper' to own newspapers?
What should be the proper relationship between the press and politicians?
Where does the press fit into the continuation of hegemony?
What does the rise of New Media do to the press and the balance of power?
What's the role of newspapers?
Does self-regulation work?
Does morality have a role to play?
How do readers relate to the media they consume?
Does the pursuit of profit lead to dumbed-down debate?
Are our political leaders and paradigms dictated by media discourse?

A few of the issues raised on Media and Communications courses:

What constitutes acceptable journalistic practice?

What is news?

What is the difference between the 'public interest' and 'what interests the public'?

Does tabloid journalism poison the public sphere?

Who is 'fit and proper' to own newspapers?

What should be the proper relationship between the press and politicians?

Where does the press fit into the continuation of hegemony?

What does the rise of New Media do to the press and the balance of power?

What's the role of newspapers?

Does self-regulation work?

Does morality have a role to play?

How do readers relate to the media they consume?

Does the pursuit of profit lead to dumbed-down debate?

Are our political leaders and paradigms dictated by media discourse?

I await your apologies.

News of the World: Well Ahead Of You

I've had this SOGAT, NGA, AUEW Boycott Murdoch mug on my desk for several years, hailing from a sadly lost age in which trades unions were important. I'm now feeling quite smug (and open to offers).

Meanwhile, did you listen to the Today show on Radio 4 this morning. I was quite taken by the advertising executive Nicola Mendelsohn, who described her children as a 'little focus group' who are marvellous consumers of advertising (from 2 hours 45 onwards). Bill Hicks clearly didn't die in vain then.

The piece was a sob-story about the challenge facing advertisers when we all hate adverts, attached to the withdrawal of advertising from the News of the World. As you can imagine, the tears were rolling down my face as I imagined her dossing down in her Porsche Cayenne, an iPad for a pillow.

News of the World: Why It's Your Fault

You may have noticed that there's a massive campaign afoot to make corporations drop their advertising in the News of the World.

OK, so far so bad. The newspaper has illegally accessed the telephones of politicians, entertainers, a murdered teenager, murdered kids' parents, terrorism victims' friends and families and dead soldiers' families.

But we shouldn't be fooled into thinking that these advertisers (and the Royal British Legion, which has just dropped its 'relationship' with the paper) are in any way better than the News of the World. These allegations have been public knowledge, to some extent, for several years. More widely, the News of the World, the Daily Mail, the Sun, the Express and other papers have been using illegal methods to gather information for decades. You can spot the guilty papers by their lack of coverage of this story over recent years.



Basically: the advertisers know what newspapers do. They've forked over millions of pounds to tabloids which explicitly specialise in vicious, bitter, moralistic, hypocritical, prurient, titillating gossip for decades. To suddenly decide that they can't (temporarily) stand it any longer isn't a sign that these companies exist on a higher moral plane than the papers. For all their handwringing ('I'm shocked, shocked, to find that gambling is going on in here'), they don't have moral values. They have accountants, and they have PR departments, who are both telling them that the outrage dollar (as Bill Hicks would have it) is more lucrative than the News of the World dollar, for now.

Which brings me to my final point. Why do major corporations advertise in the News of the World? Because it's the best-selling Sunday newspaper in the UK. Why is it the best-selling newspaper in the UK? Because millions of otherwise un-evil citizens make a deliberate choice of a Sunday to read vicious, bitter, moralistic, hypocritical, prurient, titillating gossip. Sure, individuals aren't responsible for the cultural soup in which they swim, but you have a choice. You could decide that the sex lives of TV weather presenters, Bolton's second-string fullback, and Big Brother losers simply isn't news, or relevant to you. You could decide that if you really must leer over the breasts of a teenage girl, to have some guts and buy an actual porn mag, or head to the internet, where I'm told flesh is easily found. You could stop dialling the sex-lines which fill the back pages. You could make a resolution to avoid the shrieking racism which pervades these repulsive papers.

And if you're reading this smugly congratulating yourself for not being a News of the World reader, you can wipe that smile off your face, particularly if you have a Sky subscription. 'Oh', you might be whinging, 'I've no choice. I love Boardwalk Empire, and big movies, and live sport, Vole, how can I live without live sport?'. Tough. They're all just commodities, sticky open jam pots designed to suck you in and sell you to advertisers - despite the fact that you've paid a subscription too. If you like films, go to the cinema or even better, the theatre, and make an occasion of it. Read a book. Sports fans: go to a live match, or play in one. Every penny you give to News International or one of its competitors - because blaming NI alone is to deny that there's a structural political, economic and cultural problem - you don't just fund what you're watching. You reward the News of the World and its friends. Ironically, paying to watch your favourite footballer perform involves paying for the 'celebrity news' which has replaced actual news, and funds the hacking, telephoto lens, kiss-and-tells and all the other paraphernalia which will be turned on that very footballer if a media outlet senses sales in the offing.

This isn't new: here's an extract from George Orwell's 1946 The Decline of the English Murder:

It is Sunday afternoon, preferably before the war. The wife is already asleep in the armchair, and the children have been sent out for a nice long walk. You put your feet up on the sofa, settle your spectacles on your nose, and open the News of the World. Roast beef and Yorkshire, or roast pork and apple sauce, followed up by suet pudding and driven home, as it were, by a cup of mahogany-brown tea, have put you in just the right mood. Your pipe is drawing sweetly, the sofa cushions are soft underneath you, the fire is well alight, the air is warm and stagnant. In these blissful circumstances, what is it that you want to read about?

Naturally, about a murder.

With all this in mind one can construct what would be, from a News of the World reader's point of view, the "perfect" murder. The murderer should be a little man of the professional class — a dentist or a solicitor, say — living an intensely respectable life somewhere in the suburbs, and preferably in a semi-detached house, which will allow the neighbours to hear suspicious sounds through the wall. He should be either chairman of the local Conservative Party branch, or a leading Nonconformist and strong Temperance advocate. He should go astray through cherishing a guilty passion for his secretary or the wife of a rival professional man, and should only bring himself to the point of murder after long and terrible wrestles with his conscience. Having decided on murder, he should plan it all with the utmost cunning, and only slip up over some tiny unforeseeable detail. The means chosen should, of course, be poison. In the last analysis he should commit murder because this seems to him less disgraceful, and less damaging to his career, than being detected in adultery. With this kind of background, a crime can have dramatic and even tragic qualities which make it memorable and excite pity for both victim and murderer. 

So when anyone wonders out loud whose fault it is, you can tell them: it's your fault. You buy the papers. You accept that celebrity gossip is news. You somehow have a definite opinion on who killed Maddie McCann. You let the tabloids define the terms for debates on anything from immigration to public sector pensions. The word you're looking for is 'complicit'.

Who hacked those phones? You did.

(And as an aside: given this week's events, I hope all you snobs will now revise your opinions about media studies).

In honour of the News of the World Phone Hackers, some Jim Hacker

I love the fact that this entirely accurate assessment of British newspapers and their control over the political class is delivered by the fictional Prime Minister, Mr. Jim Hacker. The News of the World is the Sunday edition of The Sun).



and if that doesn't float your boat, here's some Miss Kittin and The Hacker:

Murdoch and the Gothic, together at last

I'm not sure if you've noticed, but there's a massive upsurge of interest in postwar Gothic satirist Mervyn Peake, whose magnum opus, the Gormenghast Trilogy, is a masterpiece of vicious evil set in a dusty, inward-looking, tradition-bound castle clearly analogous for Britain.

Into the etiolated, hidebound institution comes Steerpike, a vicious, amoral narcissist intent on motiveless malignity, as Shakespeare describes Iago in Othello.

Given recent events with the News of the World, I can't help seeing Murdoch and his minions as Steerpike. Luckily, Zoot Horn sent me his scans of Peake's drawings: these two seem particularly relevant to News International's frantic manoeuvring this week.

Click to embiggen.

'If ever he had harboured a conscience in his tough narrow breast he had by now dug out and flung away the awkward thing - flung it so far away that were he ever to need it again he could never find it'

And on the subject of NI's attempt to pin all the blame on a couple of individuals:

'He had to kill Barquentine in some way which left no trace: to dispose of the body and at the same time to mix pleasure and business in such a compound that neither was the weaker for union'.

I first read Peake's work as an angry teenager, incarcerated against my will in a very poor-quality Catholic boarding school. There were two inspirational teachers: Michael Caswell and Mike Elkin. Cas was an uproarious, tempestuous old-school teacher who triumphantly proved to me (though nobody else in class) that what I thought were boring old classics were actually filled with vim and passion. Elks was the French teacher, and had spent the 60s in bohemian Paris squats. He hated the classics as the detritus of a decadent society, and constantly loaded me down with radical experimental stuff. He gave me the Gormenghast trilogy. Between the pair of them, I became well - if oddly - read.

Finger on the pulse, Uppal, finger on the pulse

Yesterday in Parliament, the entire Labour Party got to their feet (it's a tradition thing) to demand a debate on the little matter of the News of the World hacking into the phones of murdered little girls, bombing victims and various other citizens.

It was particularly notable that the Conservative Party MPs stayed seated and silent. All the political parties are utterly guilty of outsourcing their policies - especially on immigration and trades unions - to the columnists of the Sun, Daily Mail and Express, but the Tories are on particularly shaky ground.

So you won't be entirely surprised to learn that my mediocre millionaire MP Paul Uppal was one of those Tories who kept schtum.

But he hasn't been wasting time. He knows what the great British public really care about, and it's not perverting the course of a murder investigation. It's this:

Glad to have spoken in popular debate on dangerous dogs, issue of owner responsibility needs addressing urgently.

Talking of guard dogs, I think recent events (especially the News of the World spying on a policeman investigating one of its private investigators in a murder enquiry) have solved the conundrum of quis custodiet ipsos custodes: it's the Murdoch press. And may I say what a fine job they're doing?

The Dog Ate My Homework

I'm loving the last week's politics stories: lying Tories on the run, corrupt scum running Ireland falling, and Murdoch's empire under hostile scrutiny.

Part of the fuss about Murdoch taking over the Sky shares he doesn't control is the fear that he'll use the full spectrum of his media holdings to pursue his own agenda. So it was fascinating to see that the Sun's response to Sky commentators' sexist abuse of a young female referee: they published shock-horror pictures of her, revealing that young women sometimes wear short skirts and go dancing. Disgraceful.

The other big story is the ongoing saga of the News of the World's phone hacking. It turns out they've done it very recently, rather than once or twice in the distant past. The best line in the new story is this one:

However, a senior News International executive has claimed that Dan Evans's defence is that he phoned Kelly Hoppen's number for legitimate reasons and accidentally accessed her voicemail when the keys on his phone got stuck.

Seems perfectly plausible to me.

Meanwhile, here's German Stasi film The Lives of Others resubtitled a là Downfall for the News of the World:

Football - and more important things

Well, it's a big day for football - in serious as well as lighthearted ways. Firstly, Liverpool are playing Blackburn on the nearest day to the anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster: poor stadium design coupled with aggressive, thoughtless policing led to the deaths of 94 people. The BBC broadcast a rightfully passionate, pointed program this morning which moved me to tears. It ended with a radio broadcaster (I didn't catch his name) ending his analysis later on that day with 'The gymnasium is today being used as a mortuary. And the sun shines'. That's top quality broadcasting.

The other wonderful part of the show was the section which reminded us why Rupert Murdoch, News International and The Sun are so utterly evil. While others mourned, the paper's front-page stories accused Liverpool fans of urinating on the police and robbing the bodies of the fans - complete lies from start to finish, but great for newspaper sales. It took 20 years to admit that the stories were untrue, and to this day Liverpudlians who support any of the local teams won't buy The Sun. I urge you to join in. It's too late for some of those fans, but the business model continues. Lies, slander and poison are the meat and drink of tabloid journalism, and none are quite so greedy as The Sun and its Sunday version, The News of the World. Liverpudlians are accused of being over-sentimental (they are a mix of Welsh and Irish), but in this case, staying bitter is absolutely the right thing to do. A proper inquiry was never held into Hillsborough and The Sun remains evil.

It reminded me of a period in which football was a matter of huge, mass emotion - sometimes violent, sometimes sentimental. Footage of the Liverpool team of the time reminded me of how much we've missed - so many Liverpool players spoke with Liverpool accents, shared surnames with the victims and some lost neighbours and friends - how many of the current Premiership players live anywhere near the average fan (who is more likely to be a middle-class high-earner anyway)? Hearing John Aldridge describe attending the funerals of fathers and their sons, of two sisters, was heartbreaking. On another level, these men remind me of a vanished (and probably quite unpleasant) time in other ways. Many of them speak the language of the fans, they don't have advisers, agents, lawyers and PR employees polishing every word, weighing every statement, looking out for themselves, or beating people up in nightclubs. These men were fans and from the people. On the other hand, safe stadia require massive amounts of money, and ticket prices are going to do it, so perhaps hugely expensive days out are the price we have to pay for safety.

On a lighter note, Stoke has the chance to strike a blow for honest football and the past today, by beating the arrogant, pseudo-galactico chancers of Newcastle United. If only it were MUFC we were sending down (as we did once in the 1970s), but anyone will do. One more win - or even a couple of draws - will do nicely.