Verbal

I think you're slowly getting the hang of this pop music thingy.

Milkshake or McFlurry?

Disagree Nick. The whole cosy-ing up between politicians and the Murdoch press began with the close relationship between Margaret Thatcher and the then Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie. Here's an excruciating taste of the mutual smarm: http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/107430 This relationship certainly WAS one that was incredibly important to Thatcher, who face electoral annihilation after her first term, but for the Falklands War. The Murdoch press (famously with the Sun and its 'Gotcha' headline) was doing everything to buttress Thatcher's electoral support that it could, and both parties, Thatcher and the Murdoch press, saw themselves as in some kind of mutually dependent relationship. This went even further in 1992, when the truly hopeless John Major faced a (admittedly over-confident) Neil Kinnock and a resurgent Labour Party. Much to everyone's surprise - including Major - the Tories won, and with a working majority (somewhat better than the last election!). The Sun couldn't be more explicit in its belief that its relentless campaigning for Major and against Kinnock was what single-handedly turned the electoral result. The paper trumpeted its owner's electoral interference with the famous headline on 12 april 1992: 'It's The Sun Wot Won It.' From that awful moment in particular, the power of the Murdoch press was not only courted by politicians but actively feared.

McMullen is almost as much a caricature of a tabloid journo as Danny DeVito in LA Confidential. But it's the earlier YouTube interview you posted which I find the most repugnant, with Roger Alton, a senior executive at The Times. Sneering at mumsnet and anyone else who called for an advertising boycott, and accusing them of destroying a newspaper is stupid, reprehensible, and evidence of precisely the kind of siege mentality and superiority complex within New International that caused this mess in the first place.

As the revelations about the criminal conspiracy within NI turn from bad to worse, I see even the Daily Mail has come around to the Saintsweb collectively agreed point of view that, in the midst of this, Cameron is a bellend. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2012719/News-World-shutting-A-disaster-David-Cameron.html He saw it coming, but simply didn't believe in anything else than that News International was the place where those who aspired to the political summit had to supplicate. And before the wrong-trousers-benjiiiii-dune gaggle wind up their ya-boo-sucks stock replies, yes, of course, the Blairites did exactly the same. This time, though, it could, and should, ensure that Cameron's equation of political success with fawning to Murdoch will end with the walls falling down around his ears.

She'll be shopping her boss, then, if this is right... James Murdoch admits making what turned out to be illegal payments? http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2012419/News-World-phone-hacking-James-Murdoch-needs-answer-says-Cameron.html

How's Avram doing these days?

More depths to be plumbed yet. Rebekah Brooks says there are worse revelations about the criminal conspiracy inside NI still to come. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/phone-hacking/8617707/News-of-the-World-phone-hacking-live.html 'In a year you will understand why we made this decision.' A year?!

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'?