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Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Former News International CEO Rebekah Brooks charged with perverting the cause of justice



The Week reports:

FORMER News International CEO Rebekah Brooks and her racehorse trainer husband Charlie have been charged along with four other people of perverting the course of justice in relation to the phone hacking scandal.

That's right. The former CEO of what, not so very long ago, was the UK's most powerful newspaper group charged with a crime which can carry a sentence of life imprisonment.

But as The Mole reports here, NI's problems are only just beginning.

Oh, how the mighty have fallen!


3 comments:

Martin Meenagh said...

It is the beginning of a new act here. We're over the start of things, and now an 'Imperial press'-- in reality a set of institutions which are mostly preaching to smaller and smaller bands of followers and failing when compared to blogs--are imploding. This thing will propagate. Already, one can make a good case that Jeremy Hunt and the Prime Minister disclosed market sensitive information and that the FSA should begin a criminal investigation on the back of the revelations. News International's behaviour and power is being broken. The senior managers are going to jail or exile--and Labour is free, if it wants the chance, to be a People's Party again.

I can't emphasise the importance of this point. We've really been run, to a shocking extent, by a thuggish, blackmailing, extremely popular, and very professional press outfit for thirty years. Now they're listing and will not be righted.

Ed Milliband has really played things well. He's not beholden to anyone. We have a sort of Peter Shore, Union-supporting catholic in charge of the policy process in the form of Jon Cruddas, a realistic chance of an EU referendum, and the prospect of an oil rise which even the IMF recognises as locked in leading to the mines reopening. Even if he's elected, Romney won't be able to start the war drums up again, Sarko's gone, and Cameron is trapped in a coalition that may well break the Tory party into two. Translation; no more mad wars started by us (well, I hope).

Happy Days as far as I am concerned, except of course for all those unemployed or about to be chucked off their benefits. Still, with oil up and China in trouble, we may even regionalise and reshore industry within ten years, and farm prices will head upwards meaning that rural incomes will increase.

I hope that Labour can find the opportunity in this crisis to free this country from what it has threatened to become.

Neil Clark said...

Hi Martin,
Great post.
"an 'Imperial press'-- in reality a set of institutions which are mostly preaching to smaller and smaller bands of followers and failing when compared to blogs--are imploding. "
Brilliantly put. The elite are talking to themselves, and no-one is listening any more.

neil craig said...

Far better a popular Murdoch press, which has to rely on customer approval than the oligoply of totalitarian state owned media, the BBC & C4. They provide the large majority of "serious" news coverage to most people in Britain. They lie and censor in a manner as monolithic as Stalin's whether it be to hide "our" government's genocide ethnic cleansing, organlegging and sex slavery in Kosovo; promoting the catastrophic warming scare; hiding the undeniable fact that it is our thieving parasitic politicians, alone, who are responsible for the recession; censoring other parties; the backhanders paid to politicians and senior civil servants for contracts; the fact that government contracts cost an AVERAGE of 8 times what such things cost in the rest of the world or used to cost here & so on.