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News & ArtsThursday, July 7, 2011
Media End of the News of the World
Posted by Paul Constant on Thu, Jul 7, 2011 at 12:36 PM
Rupert Murdoch's scandal-plagued scandal sheet just released a surprise announcement that they're shutting down on Sunday:
The Murdoch media empire unexpectedly killed off the muckraking News of the World tabloid Thursday after a public backlash over the illegal guerrilla tactics it used to expose the rich, the famous and the royal and become Britain's best-selling Sunday newspaper.
The abrupt decision stunned the paper's staff of 200, shocked the world's most competitive news town and ignited speculation that Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. plans to rebrand the tabloid under a new name in a bid to prevent a phone-hacking scandal from wrecking its bid for a far more lucrative television deal.
1
Yeah, I can't imagine a parasite like Murdoch abandoning a hugely profit-making enterprise, unless he thought it might jeopardize his prospects for an even huger profit-making enterprise.
2
Pretty easy to see how this is going to go down. No one cares what the NAME of a tabloid is, just the vile shit it screams, so he's going to wait a few months for this whole deal to die down and then open up another wrag under another name and staffed by the same stripe of people. Judging by his surprisingly public dislike of Ailes and O'Reilly, though, it does seem like he's feeling a little old for this kind of bullshit, which is amusing.
3
Maybe common sense will prevail and that rat Murdoch will be banned in Britain. One can hope, anyway.
5
The whole thing sounds like how organized crime operates. Perhaps the US should look into News Corp's operations, in a RICO kinda way?
6
May I take the opportunity to remind folks that they should read Anthony Burgess' "THE END OF THE WORLD NEWS"?
7
so let's get this straight:
murdoch: no punishment
brooks: no punishment
bskyb deal: still on
NOTW journalists (most of whom DIDN'T fuck this all up): unemployed.
sounds downright murdochian.
murdoch: no punishment
brooks: no punishment
bskyb deal: still on
NOTW journalists (most of whom DIDN'T fuck this all up): unemployed.
sounds downright murdochian.
8
(from a pal on twitter) NOTW staffer: "Today 500 staff have been sacrificed... if Brooks had done the honourable thing we'd all still have our jobs."
9
@7,@8: no shit. This is just a shitty ploy to keep the BSkyB deal going, at the little people's expense.
And you can bank on there being a new Sunday Sun coming out.
And you can bank on there being a new Sunday Sun coming out.
11
NOTW hacks aren't fucking journalists – they type out sicky right-wing drivel for a foul, exploitative shit-rag.
If one day they shut down Fox News would you shed a tear for all the talking-head reporters? Course not.
Good fucking riddance, the world is a slightly better place without them
(and they’ll be re-employed on “News of World, The” in six months anyway).
If one day they shut down Fox News would you shed a tear for all the talking-head reporters? Course not.
Good fucking riddance, the world is a slightly better place without them
(and they’ll be re-employed on “News of World, The” in six months anyway).
12
It looks like, since they're closing down, they don't have to preserve any records, so nobody can prove what they've done: http://blogs.reuters.com/mediafile/2011/…
"Under British law, Stephens explained, all of the assets of the shuttered newspaper, including its records, will be transferred to a professional liquidator (such as a global accounting firm). The liquidator’s obligation is to maximize the estate’s assets and minimize its liabilities. So the liquidator could be well within its discretion to decide News of the World would be best served by defaulting on pending claims rather than defending them. That way, the paper could simply destroy its documents to avoid the cost of warehousing them—and to preclude any other time bombs contained in News of the World’s records from exploding."
"That’s a very different scenario, Stephens said, from what would happen if a newspaper in the U.S. went into bankruptcy. In the U.S., a plaintiff (or, for that matter, a criminal investigator) could obtain a court order barring that kind of document destruction. In the U.K., there’s no requirement that the estate retain its records, nor any law granting plaintiffs a right to stop the liquidator from getting rid of them."
"Under British law, Stephens explained, all of the assets of the shuttered newspaper, including its records, will be transferred to a professional liquidator (such as a global accounting firm). The liquidator’s obligation is to maximize the estate’s assets and minimize its liabilities. So the liquidator could be well within its discretion to decide News of the World would be best served by defaulting on pending claims rather than defending them. That way, the paper could simply destroy its documents to avoid the cost of warehousing them—and to preclude any other time bombs contained in News of the World’s records from exploding."
"That’s a very different scenario, Stephens said, from what would happen if a newspaper in the U.S. went into bankruptcy. In the U.S., a plaintiff (or, for that matter, a criminal investigator) could obtain a court order barring that kind of document destruction. In the U.K., there’s no requirement that the estate retain its records, nor any law granting plaintiffs a right to stop the liquidator from getting rid of them."
13
They were getting the pants sued off them. Hundreds of people knew their phones had been hacked and all of them were suing. They had already started getting awards of millions of pounds each, and with thousands more hackings now revealed it was going to add up to many billions of pounds before long - a large blow even to a mega-corporation like News International. At the same time, the paper's advertisers were fleeing. And surely all the public outrage was causing a drop in subscriptions. NOTW's value as an asset therefore plunged and its liabilities exploded. Terminating its existence in these circumstances is just good business sense.
14
The demise of this disgusting rag is something everyone should cheer. The paper's total lack of anything even remotely resembling journalistic ethics - privacy invasion for the pure sake of gawking, bribery of police officers, deleting messages from a murdered child's phone to make room for more, all of this done with no thought whatsoever given to any consequences it might have beyond getting a scoop - puts a stain on the entire profession. Real journalists are supposed to think about the public interest and the welfare of their subjects, and not compromise the latter unless it serves the former. Every last one of those worthless hacks is now out of a job, and that is something that they completely deserve. All the protestations of not knowing about it, and trying to put the blame on a few bad apples, are preposterous. News of the World was rotten to the core.
This culture of disregard for ethics is sadly not unique to NOTW. NOTW may have been an extreme example, but the basic problem is part of the culture of News International, having been imprinted into the company by Murdoch himself. Fox News, the Sun, the Wall Street Journal and all the tabloids that Murdoch owns share a lack of respect for facts, fairness and the public good. A bad seed grows into a bad tree, which yields more bad seeds in turn.
This culture of disregard for ethics is sadly not unique to NOTW. NOTW may have been an extreme example, but the basic problem is part of the culture of News International, having been imprinted into the company by Murdoch himself. Fox News, the Sun, the Wall Street Journal and all the tabloids that Murdoch owns share a lack of respect for facts, fairness and the public good. A bad seed grows into a bad tree, which yields more bad seeds in turn.
16
@14: "The demise of this disgusting rag is something everyone should cheer."
It's not gone. The brand is tainted. Murdoch's still in control.
It's not gone. The brand is tainted. Murdoch's still in control.
17
@16 - last issue of NotW was today so it is, in a sense, gone. The daily version (The Sun) still being published and no doubt a re-branded Sunday rag will be up and running soon.
Still, a minor victory.
Also, this potentially fucks up Murdoch's chances of getting full control of BSkyB and it makes our Tory PM look dirty by association (Andy Coulson was the Tories' communications director for 4 years).
Still, a minor victory.
Also, this potentially fucks up Murdoch's chances of getting full control of BSkyB and it makes our Tory PM look dirty by association (Andy Coulson was the Tories' communications director for 4 years).
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