[non-CFS] Hack Attack by Nick Davies

[Esther12]

I think a few people here have spoken of finding his previous book Flat-Earth News to be useful for understanding the British media, and his new book focusing on Murdoch, the Met and the hacking controversy is now out with extracts and reviews around.

We have “the casual arrogance of a group of people who take it for granted that they have every right to run the country and, in doing so, to manipulate information, to conceal embarrassing truth, to try to fool all of the people all of the time”. Hack Attack captures a picture of bullying and nepotism that should be absent from a democratic society.

review: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-e...ttack-by-nick-davies-book-review-9639659.html

tbh, I felt the extracts could have been condensed a fair amount while keeping most of the content, but they're still an interesting read:

Democratic governments across the world create regulators to speak up for the public interest – to protect their markets against the power of dominant corporations, to stop them crushing the competition or setting unfair prices or otherwise abusing their position. Repeatedly Murdoch has had to find ways to beat them, and to sideline the public interest in order to advance his own. Legal fences obstruct him – so he looks to friendly politicians to quietly open gates and wave him through.
The outsiders may assume that this involves striking a deal. The insiders again say it is subtler than that – not so much a deal (finite, static, a conscious agreement) as a somewhat cynical relationship (each side pretending friendship but seeking advantage, both offering a little more than they hope finally to give, neither side ever quite sure of the outcome). And that special relationship, they say, is born and brought up and free to flourish in places like this wedding.

Here, beside this lake, Murdoch and his executives and senior journalists enjoy the first privilege of power: that they are given for free the kind of access for which unscrupulous lobbyists will pay fat packets of cash. The prime minister, his likely successor and their respective followers queue up to hear his views, to pick up the signals, to understand what he wants, to send him their own signals, to bond. Some 46 million voters in the UK might like that kind of access to their leaders, but it is this foreign billionaire – who does not even have the right to vote in the UK – who enjoys it and the special relationship with governments that it brings.

Her fellow Labour MP, the former Anglican priest Chris Bryant, provoked the full wrath of the Murdoch papers when he trapped Rebekah Brooks into admitting that her journalists had paid police officers for information at the media select committee hearing in March 2003. Immediately afterwards, Bryant was warned by a reporter from the Sun that “they will get you for that”. They got him a little bit a few months later when he told the House of Commons that he opposed the idea of a referendum on the new EU constitution and found the Sun telling its readers that he was a “Euro fanatic” who thought they were too stupid to vote. They got him more severely that December when the Mail on Sunday exposed his sex life, complete with an embarrassing photograph of him wearing only a tight-fitting pair of briefs, and Brooks at the Sun and Andy Coulson at the News of the World joined in a vicious monstering. Brooks made it very clear that this was personal, sashaying up to Bryant at a subsequent Labour party conference to deliver a sharp dig at his sexuality, calculated to remind him of the embarrassment of one of his former colleagues who had been accused of cruising a London park for gay sex: “Oh, Mr Bryant, it’s after dark. I’m surprised you’re not out on Clapham Common.”

Extract 1: http://www.theguardian.com/media/20...murdoch-passive-power-hack-attack-nick-davies

The paper ruined a long list of more or less famous men by exposing the fact that they had visited prostitutes. And yet, in search of more of these stories, one News of the World reporter was told to make contacts among high-class sex workers with the specific instruction that he should have sex with them, do cocaine with them and claim it all on expenses. So he did.

On another occasion, according to one source, an editor wanted to expose a Premiership footballer for using prostitutes – and paid one to have sex with him. In the same way, they were ruthless in exposing any target who used illegal drugs, but there was no shortage of journalists using the same drugs. Former reporters tell stories of a Christmas disco where the dancefloor was almost empty while various guests resorted to the toilets to snort cocaine; and of a ripple of panic when the Sun let their anti-drug hound, Charlie the Sniffer Dog, loose in the newsroom.

Some of the journalists, including executives, were running on alcohol. A few ended up in expensive rehab clinics (exploiting the opportunity to find stories about fellow patients).

Extract 2: http://www.theguardian.com/theguard...ign-news-of-the-world-hack-attack-nick-davies

 

[Sean]

Murdoch is one of the most corrupting and destructive influences on our world that I have seen in my lifetime. He needs to be politically neutered if the average person is to have any chance at a decent life.