Death of News of the World (1843-2011) News Roundup
Posted in british celebrities, cancellation, Death, divorce, legal / lawsuit, news / news anchors, Politics, scandal, shit just got real, side eyeing you, this bitch
Haters use Wikipedia
(this is going to be a very wordy post, by the way)
Rupert Murdoch acted with characteristic ruthlessness by closing the News of the World, Britain’s best-selling Sunday newspaper, in a desperate attempt to limit the political and commercial fallout from the phone-hacking affair engulfing his media empire.
Murdoch’s son James, who runs his UK titles, told the paper’s 200 staff that Sunday’s edition of the paper, which sells 2.6m copies a week, would be its last, ending the 168-year history of the title his father bought in 1969, a purchase that introduced him to the British public for the first time. The last News of the World will carry no commercial advertising.
“The good things the News of the World does … have been sullied by behaviour that was wrong. Indeed, if recent allegations are true, it was inhuman and has no place in our company,” he said.
“The News of the World is in the business of holding others to account. But it failed when it came to itself.”
There was immediate speculation last night that the paper will be replaced by a Sunday edition of the Sun which could be produced by staff at the daily. The domain names TheSunOnSunday.co.uk, TheSunOnSunday.com and SunOnSunday.co.uk were registered two days ago.
Readers and retailers had reacted with disgust to the revelation this week that journalists at the News of the World ordered the private investigator Glenn Mulcaire to hack into voicemail messages left on a mobile phone belonging to murdered teenager Milly Dowler in 2002, one of the most damaging in a series of reports by the Guardian on the hacking scandal over the last two years.
It also emerged that Mulcaire may have targeted the relatives of British servicemen killed in Afghanistan and Iraq and survivors of the 7/7 terrorist attacks on London. A reader boycott also seemed likely and one independent chain of newsagents said it would not stock the title.
Mark Lewis, the solicitor for Milly Dowler’s family, said: “People are losing their jobs in order to sacrifice themselves to save the real perpetrators … lots of good individuals have lost their jobs or will lose their jobs and the people who should have fallen on their swords are still there.”
Of Rupert Murdoch, who was filmed on a golf course during the crisis and refused to comment, Lewis added: “It’s a bit like Nero fiddling while Rome was burning.”
News International’s chief executive, Rebekah Brooks, a former editor of the News of the World, was said to be in tears as news of the closure was announced. A News of the World employee who did not want to be named said Brooks had said she had offered to resign in the wake of Ed Miliband’s call for her to be sacked, but that offer had been rejected. News International denies that claim.
Miliband said last night of the closure: “It’s a big act but I don’t think it solves the real issues. One of the people who’s remaining in her job is the chief executive of News International who was the editor at the time of the hacking of Milly Dowler’s phone.”
Downing Street said last night: “What matters is that all wrongdoing is exposed and those responsible for these appalling acts are brought to justice.”
Staff at the paper reacted with fury to the news, with one source claiming there was a “lynch mob mentality” at its London offices.
Colin Myler, the editor of the News of the World, said: “Whatever price this staff are paying for past misdeeds, nothing should diminish everything this great newspaper has achieved.”
The newspaper was once Murdoch’s flagship title although its stablemate, the Sun, is now more profitable, but it remained a totemic title around the world. In 1951 it sold 8.4m copies, the biggest ever circulation for any newspaper. Even now, only a handful of English-language newspapers can match its circulation.
The closure followed another day of high drama, during which more companies, including O2, the mobile phone company 3, Sainsbury’s and Boots said they would not be placing adverts in the paper on Sunday. The News of the World takes about £660,000 in advertising income each weekend.
James Murdoch admitted to staff it was “a matter of serious regret” that he had authorised a six-figure payment to a phone-hacking victim several years ago, but blamed others at the company for his decision. “I now know that I did not have a complete picture when I did so,” he said. “I acted on the advice of executives and lawyers.”
A News of the World employee said staff suspected Murdoch had closed the title to ensure his £8bn bid to take full control of BSkyB goes through. Miliband has called for the deal to be blocked.
Labour MP Tom Watson, who has been highlighting the phone-hacking scandal at the paper for two years, said: “Rupert Murdoch did not close the News of the World. It is the revulsion of families up and down the land as to what they got up to. It was going to lose all its readers and it had no advertisers left. They had no choice.”
Murdoch is renowned for risk-taking and for making bold moves swiftly. But the closure of the News of the World is one of the most shocking and unexpected decisions he has made since he moved his title secretly to Wapping in east London in a successful attempt to break the print unions. It is the first closure of a national newspaper in Britain since Today was shut down, also by Murdoch, in 1995.
Murdoch bought the News of the World 42 years ago after a protracted takeover battle with the late Robert Maxwell and immediately took it in a direction that many regarded as downmarket. It became the building block for his UK newspaper empire, which would in turn finance the expansion of News Corp into a global media conglomerate.
Andy Coulson, the prime minister’s former press spokesman, has been arrested and is being held in custody at a police station in south London.
Scotland Yard said that at 10.30am on Friday officers from Operation Weeting – the phone-hacking inquiry – and a team investigating illegal payments to police officers within the Metropolitan force arrested a 43-year-old man who had arrived by appointment.
Scotland Yard said he was being held in custody and would be questioned in connection with allegations of corruption and phone hacking.
The arrest came after Operation Weeting officers were handed further information from News International three weeks ago which detailed allegedly illegal payments to a handful of officers at the Yard.
It is understood Coulson, a former editor of the News of the World, will be held for several hours for questioning. Officers will take him through documentation, much of it handed over by his former employer News International.
He will be questioned on suspicion of conspiring to intercept communications, contrary to Section 1 (1) Criminal Law Act 1977 and “on suspicion of corruption allegations” contrary to Section 1 of the Prevention of Corruption Act 1906.
Coulson, who resigned in January as David Cameron’s director of communications, had been contacted on Thursday by detectives from Operation Weeting and asked to present himself at a police station. The arrest was brought forward after the new documentation received from News International.
Coulson, who ran the News of the World between 2003 and 2007, is likely to be questioned for most of the day by two teams of officers involved in both inquiries into police bribes and phone hacking.
He is the sixth person to be arrested by the Weeting team. His three former colleagues, Ian Edmondson, Neville Thurlbeck and James Weatherup, were arrested earlier this year.
Last month a freelancer for the News of the World and a reporter from the Press Association were also arrested and bailed.
Coulson’s arrest came less than 24 hours after the decision by NI chiefs to shut the News of the World because it had betrayed its readers’ trust.
A Scotland Yard statement said: “The MPS [Metropolitan police service] has this morning arrested a member of the public in connection with allegations of corruption and phone hacking.
“The man, aged 43, was arrested by appointment at a south London police station. He is currently in custody.”
Hugh Grant, in his time, has played many parts. He has been the diffident, floppy-haired charmer in Four Weddings And A Funeral; he’s been the caddish lothario in the Bridget Jones movies and the troubled quasi-dad in Nick Hornby’s About A Boy. Off-screen, he’s been the sheepish bad boy caught in flagrante by the roadside in LA, but also the brilliant investor in property and contemporary art.
But now he’s found what could be his greatest role. On BBC TV’s Question Time, he was the campaigner for decent values and fearless scourge of the slimy News Corporation which hacked into people’s phones and sacrificed 200 jobs to protect Rebekah Brooks. It was a magnificent performance – and TV watchers all over the country remembered why they loved Hugh Grant.
With elegance, with insouciance, Grant dismissed the whingey complaints from fellow panellist, Sun columnist Jon Gaunt. He suavely batted away jibes about blow jobs. He called Rupert Murdoch’s act of corporate self-mutilation “cynical” and the studio audience applauded.
The Daily Mail columnist Jan Moir has jeered at “St Hugh of Grant”, and Piers Morgan – a man whose moral compass directs him unerringly to that side of the bread where the butter is to be found – tweeted that Grant was “a screechy, sanctimonious little prick”. He found himself un-followed in droves. Morgan discovered that people supported Grant. And they wondered if being screechy and sanctimonious was a wise subject for Morgan to be talking about.
Grant had already shown remarkable flair and boldness in uncovering hacking, making secret tape recordings for the New Statesman. His detestation for the tabs and the paps is well known, and has occasionally sounded petulant on the subject. But the Hacked Off campaign had brought out in him a new authority: in interviews, he has even, emolliently, conceded that the general public were not too sympathetic about publicity-hungry celebs getting hacked, but Milly Dowler was a different matter entirely.
How has Grant emerged as the scourge of News International? I think it is because he, unlike everyone else, really doesn’t care about the whole silly showbiz carousel and could step off any time he liked. Perhaps that is what he is doing now. Very often he had given the impression that he wouldn’t be fussed if he never made another movie ever again. Plenty of stars hate Murdoch’s papers, but they want to appear in movies made by Murdoch’s Fox group, and to work with people who are similarly in awe of the great potentate’s tentacular reach.
Grant is different. He is now rich and successful enough – and perhaps simply unconcerned enough – not to care. He is the unruffled David Gower of the cinema – and campaigning. And his new role as the Hammer Of Rupe is just so unlikely that it commands attention.
This is a great new career direction for him. I say: bravo Hugh!
Also David Cameron said some things about the phone hacking crap too (audio)
There’s even more articles on the guardian (here & here).
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