Speaking truth to power, sure. Rooting out corruption, fine. Expressing views freely, go ahead.

But...

Hacking into the voicemail of a missing girl (later found to have been dead), deleting some messages (which gave the family some hope she was still alive), and potentially messing up the investigation (the killer was only found guilty for the murder last month, and had attacked and killed others in the meantime)?

Having a policeman followed by people who were suspects in the case he was investigating to find out of he was sleeping with a tv presenter (he was - they were married to each other at the time)?

How free should the press be?

(this is a rapidly developing story, so this link may show other stuff and the above be hard to find)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/blog/20 ... ve-updates

By the way, the people that own the News of the World also own Fox and several papers in the USA. As much as our media has a certain reputation, the morals of News International (or lack thereof) can transcend national boundaries.

deleted post ... I hijacked Dan's topic. Russ, we can take it up elsewhere if you like.

There's been a new development in Dan's case as well ...

Ray Jay wrote:I And, it looks like Casey Anthony will walk free.

You know this is the one I don't understand. Why did this case became such a national obsession? After all it was just a run of the mill murder case.

Archduke Russell John wrote:

Ray Jay wrote:I And, it looks like Casey Anthony will walk free.

You know this is the one I don't understand. Why did this case became such a national obsession? After all it was just a run of the mill murder case.

Disagree.

Why was it NOT run of the mill?

1. The months that it took to find the body and the advanced decomposition.
2. The mother who likely killed her own child.
3. The horrid mess that is the Anthony family.
4. The lurid photos and the bizarre behavior of Casey.
5. The beautiful, innocent little girl whose life was taken.

All of those things and more (police incompetence, the bizarre meter-reader) made this an irresistible tabloid-type of case. I did not pay OJ-level attention to it, but it was impossible not to notice it over the past few weeks. I'm stunned she was relieved of of all responsibility for Caylee's death (I did think the prosecution overcharged, however).

danivon wrote:By the way, the people that own the News of the World also own Fox and several papers in the USA. As much as our media has a certain reputation, the morals of News International (or lack thereof) can transcend national boundaries.

All involved should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

However, is there an innuendo of guilt by association in your post?

For the benefit of those who may not be familiar with this story, the News of the World is one of the biggest selling tabloids in the world. Commonly known as the News of the Screws, it specialises in uncovering sex scandals and salacious gossip, but also has a long tradition of investigative journalism that's unparalleled in the british press, and probably anywhere in the world. The problem is their methods. Recently they've been facing a running scandal that began with the revelation that they'd hired a private investigator to hack into the mobile phones of various celebrities. At first they tried to claim it was just some isolated incident involving a rogue reporter, but the revelations keep on piling up and it now seems that it was a systematic practice at the paper, carried out over several years. Targets included members of the Royal Family, senior police officers, several senior politicians, inc people like John Prescott, who was Deputy PM at the time, as well as more actors, models and footballers than you can shake a stick at. Many have sued in recent months and eventually reached lucrative out of court settlements.

The latest revelations are far more shocking though. At the time they hacked Milly Dowler's voicemail she was still a missing person subject to a massive police operation. They hacked into her phone so they could listen to her voicemail messages. Now this is pretty grotesque as it is when you consider that pretty much all of them would have been anguished pleas from her desperate parents to get in contact. But what then happened was that after the inbox filled up they went and deleted all the older messages to free up space for more, which not only potentially destroyed vital evidence but also led the family to believe that Milly may have done it herself and so gave them false hope. All this just to try and get a scoop. Since that story broke it's now emerged that they also hacked the phiones of the parents of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, two teenage girls who were murdered by a notorious paedophile, and also targeted survivors of the July 7th terrorist bombings on the London underground. Quite what they thought they were going to get out of this is unclear, but it's pretty sick that a newspaper was invading the privacy of people who were the victims of horrific crimes when they were at their most vulnerable and emotionally scarred and listening to all their private conversations.

So it's a major story that dan has made a thread about here. Not sure what kind of press freedom angle he's trying to discuss though really. What the NotW did was illegal after all.

Doctor Fate wrote:Disagree.

Why was it NOT run of the mill?

1. The months that it took to find the body and the advanced decomposition.
2. The mother who likely killed her own child.
3. The horrid mess that is the Anthony family.
4. The lurid photos and the bizarre behavior of Casey.
5. The beautiful, innocent little girl whose life was taken.

And this happens any number of times over the years. So much so that movies no longer get made about it anymore.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14052909

And now it turns out they were hacking the phones belonging to the families of dead British soldiers. Classy.

Doctor Fate wrote:All involved should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

Indeed. Back in 2006 the initial allegations led to a couple of prosecutions

However, is there an innuendo of guilt by association in your post?

I have no qualms about suggesting that the Murdoch media empire is malignant. The CEO of News International is Rebekah Brooks, who was editor of the News of the World during the period that the two examples I gave. Murdoch is so far giving her his full backing, and it appears that there is a push to try and absolve her and get the blame pinned on Andy Coulson (her deputy at the time, later her successor, then who went to work for David Cameron).

But as early as 2003 it's clear that she knew of payments from her paper to police officers (which are illegal). Because she spoke about it publicly.

There's now a growing concern that the police have had five years to look at the data they took in the original case and discover what is only coming out now. People are putting two-and-two together and suggesting that there are corrupt elements in the police who have put off the investigations.

I'll lay my cards out on the table. I've regarded the Sun and News of the World to be despicable rags for some time. The event that made it most clear to me was the Hillsborough disaster. google 'Liverpool Sun boycott' if you want to know why. That was another example of the press attacking victims to get a story (and also involved the police).

Murdoch cannot pretend that he doesn't know what the papers or other outlets he owns are like, the kind of stories they trade on, the distortions and lies they put out, the political campaigns that they do. He pretends to abide by agreements to avoid interfering with the editorial stances, but it's odd how similar all these are politically. Maybe the kind of methods used by the News of the World are not going to cross the ocean and be used over there. I would hope not.

Oh, and if you don't worry about that, there's always his chummy relations with the PRC via Star.

Sass - I suppose I'm trying to explore what the limits are of a free press. After all, when the Telegraph obtained leaked information that showed our MPs were abusing the expenses system, it was lauded, despite the illegality of the source. Clearly there are times when investigative journalism can cross lines and be justified by a Public Interest defence.

Also, there are issues of privacy, which bring in issues like 'super-injunctions' (over here you can -if you can afford the lawyers - get an injunction put on a story so the press cannot legally print it, which are themselves subject to injunction, so it's illegal to even say that the injunction exists). On the one hand powerful people are able to use the law to keep things a secret, but powerless people (and the victims of murder, their families, or other people in similar situations are usually powerless).

I was kind of hoping we could discuss these issues in a broader way, with the (perhaps vain) hope that we could avoid it being confined to only America (how boring and annoying it is that you get into a debate and then someone applies what seems to be a general statement, but when you respond they say 'I mean America only, leave the outside world out of this'), and without it necessarily becoming a partisan issue.

So, as much as we value freedom of the press, and as much as we are perhaps even prepared to tolerate some bending or breaking of laws to get stories that affect the public interest, should the press really be 'free' to employ such practices in order to trawl for salacious stories? Self-regulation of the press has been tried to some extent here, but the Press Complaints Commission is a joke. Is there a way to strike a balance between press freedom and the right to know about things that affect us and the right of people to privacy?

Archduke Russell John wrote:

Doctor Fate wrote:Disagree.

Why was it NOT run of the mill?

1. The months that it took to find the body and the advanced decomposition.
2. The mother who likely killed her own child.
3. The horrid mess that is the Anthony family.
4. The lurid photos and the bizarre behavior of Casey.
5. The beautiful, innocent little girl whose life was taken.

And this happens any number of times over the years. So much so that movies no longer get made about it anymore.

I don't think you can support this. I don't really care if you can, but this is a unique case because of Casey's wanton behavior, the 31 day delay in police being notified, etc. And, I would note that there have been several cases of mothers killing their children that captured the public's attention before this one. The woman who drowned her kids (Texas, I believe) in a bathtub. The woman who drove her kids into a body of water and tried to blame it on a "black man."

However, this one had a number of unique circumstances. I don't think you can find another case to rival this in its lurid, shocking, and confusing details.

Children die every day. Mothers, on occasion, kill them. However, it's rare they celebrate, get a tattoo, and mislead the police successfully for 31 days. It's rare that the grandfather subsequently tries to commit suicide. It is rare that we have such a parade of sociopathological behavior in a woman against her own child. No remorse, no mourning, not even cooperating with the police.

Please. Find one that even comes close to the totality of circumstances in this case. On the "wow, that's weird" scale, this one hits about 101 on a scale of 1 to 100.

Well, as long as we've hijacked the UK erudite discussion on freedom of the press, I'll put in my 2 cents on Casey.

I'm with Steve. I've also been fascinated by this case. Other interesting details are the research on the mom's computer of how to use chloroform, and the duct tape (which matches the atypical brand in their house) that was used to tie her up. Add in the mom's telling grandma that she couldn't see the kids because they are being taken care of by the nanny Zanny, and the mom calling the elementary school to tell them that daughter won't be in school because she is not feeling well. It's all very bizarre.

This morning reports that Casey is thinking of adopting a baby or of getting pregnant again. And then there's the upcoming reality TV show ...

I guess the jury did their job. There wasn't conclusive evidence that the mom actually murdered her daughter, even though there was tons of evidence that she knew about it, protected the killer, and behaved in a crazy fashion ever since. Yeah, this is a 101 on Steve's scale.

You should have known better than to expect a discussion to break out on a non-American subject here Dan.

Well, you were discussing freedom of the press ... we were exercising our freedom by example.

Sassenach wrote:You should have known better than to expect a discussion to break out on a non-American subject here Dan.

I'm interested to see how this all unfolds. I think the investigation is in its embryonic stages. Let's see what happens. I've no interest in hanging Murdoch until he deserves it.

Does he own tabloids? Yes.

I would argue his corrosive effect on the Western world is dwarfed by that of Soros.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/ju ... d-to-close

Well here's one rather serious bit of fallout. News International have announced that Sunday will be the last ever issue of the NotW. Just to put that into perspective, we're talking about a newspaper that's been in existence for 168 years and that has the largest circulation of any paper in the English-speaking world, gone just like that due to an outbreak of public revulsion.