Verbal

Is that you, lifelongcherry?

I think you've misunderstood something. Dune is that most reliable of barometers. When he says something is getting better, actually it's going to be far worse - or vice versa. He's precisely and diametrically wrong so consistently that he provides a useful service. Tell your financial advisor about him - he or she will make (you) a fortune.

Time for you then to invest more of your pennies in HMV and my pension.

The 'dark forces' are obviously the Murdochs themselves and their odious senior executives. While the reputation of journalists sinks beneath the waves, the real culprits are the executives (and owner) who've viewed the NoW not so much as a newspaper as a means of exerting influence and control - with inducements, threats and intimidation - over the highest powers in Britain. All the impetus behind the corruption and criminal activity in the NoW stemmed ultimately from this. So the orchestrators, if not the conductors, of a criminal conspiracy hardly fit a 'fit and proper' test - but when did a FAPP ever stop anyone?

All is relative. A few years ago the New York Times employed a young reporter called Jason Blair and he invented stories for the paper - as did Stephen Glass at The New Republic. Because the NYT is the 'paper of record' in the US, and The New Republic is on every President's coffee table, both incidents were regarded as the low point in recent newsprint history. Obviously neither is a patch on the NoW.

I had to laugh at this Nick. You clearly have such a diseased view of journos that you'll believe the OPPOSITE of the truth. The break-in at the Watergate Building was carried out by ex-CIA and others with rightwing Cuban connections whose paymasters were the Nixon Campaign to Re-elect the President (or CREEP for appropriate short). They were caught red-handed by city cops. At the arraignment the next morning, Bob Woodward was on court-reporting duties for the Washington Post, and suddenly found the beginning of the trail that led him and Bernstein to ultimately ring down Nixon. So no, Bob Woodward did not break in Watergate...!

Don't forget it was a journalist from that 'nasty lefty' newspaper The Guardian who broke the original story of a criminal conspiracy at the heart of NI and who ran with it, with his paper's support, through a torrent of scepticism and abuse. Without a journalist, we wouldn't know any of this, the NoW would have got away with it, the PCC would have continued in its stupifying ignorance to lambast anyone for pursuing the scandal, the police would have been able to persist with their 'one bad apple' hypothesis and cover up the fact that they were corrupted by tens of thousands of pounds paid by NoW employees, and politicians like Cameron would continue to suck up to the insufferable Murdoch at the expense of wider public interest. Actually, the last will still happen.

Oh dear. We seem to have lost all perspective. If The Guardian had paid thousands of pounds for the information that Coulson was going to be arrested - in other words, if they'd committed the criminal offence of attempting to corrupt a police officer - then they'd be in the same tank as NoW. But they didn't obviously. Please try to make some simple distinctions here. Reporters go about the usual business talking to contacts, having information leaked to them (and usually checking its veracity), speak 'off the record' (as they do as a matter of longstanding routine in the House of Commons, otherwise lobby correspondents wouldn't exist), and so on. None of this has ANYTHING to do with what the NoW has been up to.

Brilliant.

Says a judge. Good grief.

With the best will in the world, Phil, it's hard to see why you persist in grabbing the wrong end of the stick. Closing such a profit centre in the NI empire is not some sort of gleeful opportunity to rationalise - a decision in which The Guardian somehow unwittingly colluded by exposing the criminal conspiracy within NI. It is a desperate attempt to bury the scandal with the title, and to protect NI's broader commercial interests, particularly the BSkyB takeover. It is a panic measure, however many conspiracy theories suggesting 'convenience' swirl around it. And it won't work. There is a legal juggernaut running now, and it has 11,000 pages of evidence already in its possession. None of the sources you quote support your bizarre contention that the source of the scandal is a deliberately leaking NI itself, in some Machiavellian plot to close the paper. If Murdoch wanted to close the paper, he'd have simply closed the paper, as he did with Today all those years ago, without this ludicrous supposed song and dance.

Peanuts to NI.

We knew.

Among all the condemnations, the reputations of journalists have suffered badly. But let's not forget that it was largely the work of one extremely tenacious Guardian journalist, Nick Davies, which has prised this scandal wide open. Here's his first major piece, published almost exactly two years ago, exposing the details of the criminal conspiracy led from the top of News International. http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/jul/08/murdoch-papers-phone-hacking

No you don't. No one with too much money would voluntarily commute into London in coach class each day - especially if you were Lord Trousers.

NoW has been the attack dog Murdoch could unleash on any politician or public (or it seems non-public) figure who doesn't toe the line on extending News International's influence and power; NoW and The Sun has been the cash cow that has paid for, among other things, The Times, which has lost money ever since Murdoch bought it, but has brought him immense influence; and the NoW is part of a stable of papers in the Murdoch empire that ruthlessly promotes the extension of Murdoch's other media interests, notably Sky and its sports franchises. So a bit more than just a crappy Sunday tabloid - more of a state within a state with its own powers to threaten and intimidate all the way to the top of British politics and society.

If it gets rid of 'this', then like. Actually, no - it's all too awful. In honour of Deppo, could we have 'lick'?

One important point worth bearing in mind: to make large payments - and they WERE large - to police and other informants for legally protected personal information, NoW journalists would have had to have sought approval from above to make such payments. No journalist, no matter how seedy, walks around with tens of thousands of pounds he or she can dispense as they see fit. So this inevitably goes to the top - and that means Brooks and, quite likely, executives then above her.

Phil, I simply don't believe that it is a 'sad reflection of the state of UK society.' Frankly, with this and your altering of RS's post, you come across as the classic gin-soaked, moaning ex-pat. The reaction to the revelations is surely a reflection of what is good about this country - the widespread determination not to put up with this crap, and a belief that it offends not just the law but common and shared notions of decency.

There are 11,000 pages of this stuff, and the police are going to be keen not to release all of it until cases come to court. So we can be sure that this scandal will run for months and possibly years yet. So as bad as things look now, they can only get worse. This will have a profound effect on British journalism. Can we expect it to be 'professionalised' along the American model - but also subject to compulsory regulation, as it already is with broadcast journalism?

The News of the World is now accused by Scotland Yard of spying on behalf of murder suspects - during Brooks' stewardship of the paper. New depths indeed. http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jul/06/news-of-the-world-rebekah-brooks

So that happened, did it? Your mate got tickets for a police officer in return for illegal favours? If you know this and haven't reported it, I think you could well find it's YOU who's committed an offence. The point relevant to the thread, though, is that there IS a clear line between investigative reporting which searches for evidence by accepted and legal means, and that which depends on corruption, threats, inducements and a breach of privacy laws (and ethics) that is frankly staggering.

Given Alastair Campbell's past history, this post had better not come to his attention (He's not a Saints supporter - Burnley I think). If it does, you could be landing yourself and baj with an interesting libel suit. Curious to see how that one goes. And no, I doubt there are no more than a handful of journalists who pay police for information. Aside from anything else, corruption is illegal, as is almost certainly the release of information being paid for. So if it's exposed, it's jail time.

Heavens above, Viking - as an example of faulty logic this really takes the biscuit. To report on corruption does not mean you've used corrupt means to gain evidence of it. Are you really saying that all investigative reporting is by definition corrupt? By that measure, Woodward and Bernstein are the most corrupt journalists on the planet because their investigation brought down a President. As for the BBC or anyone else being 'whiter than white', you're clearly imagining something I said. However, it would be a useful starting point, surely, to start with some specific allegation, rather than some swivel-eyed finger-pointing based on the square root of FA. Leaks, by the way, take many forms. Many come from the highest sources. Others from whistleblowers trying to expose - to take one example - a hospital that has a habit of killing virtually every baby it operates on when doing heart surgery. Are you really saying that because the information came from a whistleblower (who incidentally are supposed to be PROTECTED by law, not acting outside it), a newspaper or broadcaster, having checked its reliability, should just sit on it and imagine nothing happened? What the NoW did was of a totally different order, and spreading the accusation so wide as to be meaningless actually lets the criminal, corrupt NoW off the hook. Is that what you intend?

In what way exactly have the BBC behaved like NoW, except in your conspiracy-addled opinion? Let's not defuse this into a hopeless delldays-ish moan about 'oh god, the media - but ho hum...' There is evidence here of serial law-breaking, corruption, interference with several criminal investigations, threats, inducements and intimidation.