Andy Coulson

Convicted NoW journalist claims phone hacking widely discussed at paper

Turgon on August 16, 2011, 8:59 pm

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The furore over the News of the World phone hacking had seemed to be dying down. However the BBC are now reporting that former NoW journalist Clive Goodman wrote a letter alleging that hacking was widely discussed at the newspaper. Goodman was appealing against his dismissal by the NoW following his conviction for phone hacking. However in the letter to News International’s Head of Human Resources copied to Les Hinton, News International’s then executive chairman, and Stuart Kuttner, the then …

Hackgate exposes the Press as an ‘unreliable narrator’?

Mick Fealty on September 9, 2010, 7:30 pm

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Charlie Brooker, a man I rarely read, reckons it is the press itself is the Elephant in the room of the hackgate story: The phone-hacking affair is one of those stories where the media itself becomes the elephant in the room – an elephant that’s steadfastly ignoring all the smashed and trampled furniture, and is sitting quietly in the corner, mumbling about Hague’s sexuality and the Pakistan cricket squad, and occasionally nodding off mid-sentence to dream about an imaginary crowd gawping …

#Hackgate: An inquiry would go to the detail no one else wants

Mick Fealty on September 6, 2010, 4:49 pm

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I honestly thought we’d seen the last of the (or as Dizzy puts it, the unhacked stupidity of individual politicians) #hackgate scandal last summer… According to a lengthy New York Times piece, apparently not. That said, apart from the onset of a judicial review, apart from evidence from ‘unnamed sources’, I cannot see what distinguishes the current situation from the way it was left last summer. The shabby dealings and evasions of News International are the same now as then… But …

Murdochgate: “It is not, as News International claimed, one rotten apple; it is a culture…”

Mick Fealty on July 16, 2009, 1:06 pm

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BBC Radio Four’s The Media Show yesterday opened with a bit of a ding dong between John Lloyd of the Reuters Institute at Oxford and Anne McElvoy of the London Evening Standard. Lloyd opened with this: John Lloyd – “Whether it was on a modest scale or an industrial scale what some journalists where doing was using their power and their money and the backing of their news organisation to substantially diminish people’s privacy and their civil and human right …

Murdochgate: Time to stop feeding a desparate and overbearing ferryman..?

Mick Fealty on July 15, 2009, 12:55 pm

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The #Murdochgate affair trundles on with big guns coming out on both sides. On Sunday Tim Montgomery one of the most respected figures (on all sides) of the British blogosphere came out with not so much a defence of Mr Coulson (no one who looks closely at his alleged role in a NOTW fishing expeditions can do that) as a spirited attack on the Guardian. Meanwhile Nick Davies at the Committee for Culture, Media and Sport yesterday, has named the …

Phone tapping: No new Guardian facts to dent NoW rebuttal

Brian Walker on July 12, 2009, 3:59 pm

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As Mick has just offered a shrewd review of the political vibes, I’ll go on today’s press stand-off. Certainly, you can never fault the News of the World for lack of chutzpah. The great phone tapping scandal centres on two questions: were the News of the World Goodman and Mulcaire convictions in 2007 for phone tapping the tip of an icebeg of “thousands “ of other cases as the Guardian suggests? And can David Cameron’s PR chief Andy Coulson, the …

If Blair played footsie with the tabloids Cameron has brought them in-house…

Mick Fealty on July 12, 2009, 1:25 pm

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The story in Westminster continues, if at a decidedly lower pitch now the Guardian has shot most of the bolts in it possession. For context, the Tory blogosphere until three days ago confident and even bellicose in it’s prosecution of the case against an ageing Labour administration is now unusually silent on any matters of substance. Guido’s list of what’s hot and cooking in the media is normally a highly reliable weather vein towards some of the sharpest comment on …

Hacking row widens as Yates of the Yard investigates.

Brian Walker on July 9, 2009, 4:16 pm

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The very idea of a gagging out of court settlement in the News of the World hacking case is highly dubious in this age of trumpeted accountability. That a media group should seek such a settlement is typical hypocrisy of a high order. That a court should grant it and that the police and the CPS should take no further action when, as it appears, they knew most of the Guardian’s facts boggles the mind. Without the Guardian’s scoop who …