Wednesday, July 18, 2007 

Scum-watch: Standard smearing of Galloway.

I'm not going to bother to comment on the 18 days suspension handed down to George Galloway by the Committee on Standards and Privileges (see Lenin, Mr E and Justin for their own takes) but if there's one person the Scum loves to perform a hatchet job on, it's most certainly the gorgeous one.

Not content with just one article, the Scum decides that 4 would do the job much better instead. In the least inflammatory and reasonably accurate article on his suspension, he's still referred to as "treacherous" and "shifts the blame" by err, pointing out that despite allegations being made time and again that he personally profited from the oil for food programme, he in fact never received a penny. Next up we have Trevor Kavanagh on the same page, a man who should know an arsehole when he sees one, seeing as he's been kissing Murdoch's for the last however many decades, who variously describes Galloway as a "nasty piece of work" and having a "ruthless contempt for the truth", which must be a badge of honour coming from one of the biggest liars in Fleet Street. He then bizarrely decries Sky News for showing Galloway's public retaliation. Perhaps you should have got on the phone, Trevor?

Next up is a horrifying transmogrification via Photoshop or judging by the quality of it, MSPaint, with the Scum morphing Galloway into that other favourite bogeyman, Abu Hamza, as they have so much in common. Apart from Hamza being an, err, rabble-rousing idiot who promoted the killing of the "kuffar" in the name of Islam, as well as inciting racial hatred, something which Galloway can most certainly not be accused of.

Finally, we also have a Scum leader, repeating most of the above. Strangely, nowhere in any of the Scum's articles was there space to mention how a certain Mazher Mahmood, resident hack of sister paper the News of the Screws attempted to entrap Galloway - only to fall flat on his face, and resort to legal action against blogs such as this one in an attempt to hide both his embarrassment and his face. Or, indeed, a previous smear-job that claimed that Galloway was going to be on the bill at a rally featuring an extremist Bangladeshi cleric, when the cleric was neither in Britain or intending to visit. Still, why bother bringing up such unsavory information when you can wield the machete with some justification for once?

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7/18/2007 10:03:00 PM | | | links to this post

Friday, June 01, 2007 

Same old Tories, always spinning.



Coulson with former star hack, Mazher Mahmood.

Remember how David Cameron claimed that he wanted to put an end to "Punch and Judy" politics? How the Tories have decried spin for years? We knew only too well that it was mood music, designed mainly to point out the difference between how the new caring, sharing, happy shining Conservative party would listen to the public while the mean old nasty Labour party would continue to govern by decree, legislate on the back of a fag packet and change its mind with the swing of each Sun leader, but just how vacuous and lacking in substance those messages were is confirmed by Cameron's appointment of Andy Coulson, ex-News of the Screws editor and a Murdoch protege as "director of communications", the latest euphemism for spin doctor.

The instant comparison has been with Alastair Campbell, who before he became Blair's liar-in-chief was the Daily Mirror's political editor, as well as having a stint in the same slot at Murdoch's doomed attempt at a "left" tabloid, Today. The difference however is that Campbell never had the full reins over either paper, something that Coulson most certainly did. After taking over at the Screws from Rebekah Wade, he plowed much the same furrow as she did; hysterical campaigns against paedophiles, alarmingly right-wing commentary from the likes of Lord Stevens, and the occasional investigative entrapment dispatch from a man described in court as "dangerously deceitful, ruthless, exploitative and corrupt", namely one Mazher Mahmood. The Grauniad's Diary provides a brief summary of some of Coulson's greatest hits:

How very reassuring that the chap charged with making sure the Broon gets a good press is a career civil servant and top Treasury policy wonk, while the one doing exactly the same job for the boy Cameron is an ex-editor of Britain's biggest-selling newspaper who exposed Becks's affair with Becca and Mark Oaten's adventures with rent boys, accused Wayne of slapping Coleen and Ashley of enjoying "gay orgies", paid witnesses at Posh's kidnap trial, and finally resigned after one of his correspondents was found guilty of bugging mobile phones belonging to members of the royal family.

Coulson was additionally fully behind the attempts by Mazher Mahmood to gag blogs such as this one which had republished his photograph after his failed attempt to entrap George Galloway, enlisting the royal family's favoured solicitors, Farrer & Co, to gain an injunction, which ultimately failed due to their own incompetence and flagrant hypocrisy. Also worth mentioning is his publishing of the smear job perpetuated against the Koyair brothers - accusing one of them of shooting the other, something proven by the IPCC report to be completely untrue, then publishing the additional lies about one having child pornography; the failure of the "red mercury" trial, another Mahmood special; and finally, although it appeared in the Scottish Screws, the smears on Tommy Sheridan after he won his case against the paper.

Coulson was recently cleared by the toothless PCC of having any involvement in Clive Goodman and Glenn Mulcaire's conspiracy to hack or bug mobile phones, including those of Prince William, which raised a number of eyebrows. Coulson himself, because he resigned on the day the two were sentenced, was not called to give evidence: instead his replacement, Colin Myler did. Mulcaire was being paid over £100,000 a year by the Screws, a vast sum within the Murdoch empire for someone outside the top rungs. The paper claimed to the PCC that it was unaware of the work that Mulcaire was additionally doing for Goodman, and that his wage was based on the "legal and legitimate" work he did, mainly lower level searches and investigation through databases, and certainly not anything to do with the underhand methods which he also practiced, which involved hacking into the phones of Simon Hughes, Rebekah Wade and possibly even Max Clifford and David Blunkett. Mulcaire's work was in fact just the tip of the iceberg when it came to the Screws' and other Sunday newspapers reliance on private investigators for the dirt they print week after week; figures released by the Information Commissioner showed that 19 journalists from the paper had used the services of one who had his property raided. Coulson of course knew nothing of any of this.

Not that Coulson is even on that friendly terms with some within the Tory party. During the heat of the argument about Cameron's alleged drug use, the paper splashed with allegations that George Osbourne, Cameron's best mate and fellow Etonian, had used cocaine in the company of prostitutes, something he decried as "completely untrue" and "a smear campaign".

We shouldn't really be all that surprised though. Cameron is no longer being subtle about where he wants to take the party: as the grammar school rebel Graham Brady alleged, he's obsessed with Blairism, the route that he's decided will win them the next election, modelling themselves as the true heirs to 10 years of wars and spin by err, putting the country through God knows how many more years of much the same. In order to bring such a miserable future ever nearer, Cameron has to win over the Scum, which has been highly sniffy of Cameron's efforts so far. Who better to do that than Coulson, someone formerly on a direct line to Murdoch and a friend of Rebekah Wade? As noted yesterday, the Scum's still clearly in love with Blair, but unsure of just how Brown's going to govern, despite his attempts at gaining Wade's undying affection by regularly lunching with her. With Coulson at the helm for the Tories, Murdoch might just be persuaded to change sides. As for the rest of us, fed up with Blairism and of a Tory party which offers nothing other than more of the same, we may as well go swing.

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6/01/2007 06:25:00 PM | | | links to this post

Thursday, November 30, 2006 

Screwed by Inspector Knacker.


Guess who?

2006 is shaping up to be the News of the Screws' annus horribilis. It would be churlish and egotistical to claim that this is down to the curse of Obsolete - after Mazher Mahmood failed miserably in his attempt to stop George Galloway and various blogs from publishing his old photographs - but I'm going to anyway. Ever since Mahmood and Farrer & Co's pathetic legal attempt to silence bloggers, everything has gone tits up. Mahmood's reputation was further tainted when the "red mercury" trial ended with all the accused being acquitted; Tommy Sheridan emerged victorious from his libel trial, only for the Screws to very conveniently get a tape from a former friend of Sheridan's which they claim proves Sheridan committed perjury; then Clive Goodman, the utterly piss-poor Screws' royal editor was arrested, and yesterday pleaded guilty to tapping into Prince William's voicemail.

As well as exposing the shadier, hidden side of tabloid journalism, Goodman's arrest is significant in that the information he obtained was so underwhelming, the kind of banal crap that fills tedious tabloid diaries every day of the week. One of Goodman's exclusives was that Prince William had pulled a tendon - hold the front page! More humourously, the Screws wasn't paying just once for such groundbreaking stories; they were also funding Goodman's accomplice, former footballer Glenn Mulcaire, who did the dirty work, i.e. utilising the well-known voice mail hack which lets anyone phoning in the line have a go at guessing the owner's pin. Most don't change it from the default, leaving their messages easy pickings for snooping hacks and private dicks.

Hilariously, Obsolete's favourite national newspaper editor, Rebekah "Filth" Wade was apparently one of those who was targeted, one must assume by a rival newspaper, although the relationship between Andy Coulson, Screws editor and Wade is allegedly strained. It's often been suggested that Wade is not the sharpest tool in the shed, being ignorant of much outside her favourite topics - stringing up paedophiles and naming and shaming anyone who annoys her newspaper's sensibilities. Even by her standards though, this seems a schoolgirl error - Piers "Morgan" Moron mentions the voicemail trick in his diaries.

Not that anyone should feel any sympathy for Wade - for it seems to have been the voicemail trick which led to this year's earlier outting by force of Simon Hughes, which was accompanied by typically homophobic headlines and reports. Other victims are meant to have included Max Clifford, well known for his likeliness to the little packages left on the streets by dogs.

One can only hope that Goodman is handed a harsh sentence. There only seems to have been one case that could be argued was in the public interest - that of David Blunkett being exposed as having an affair with the Spectator publisher Kimberley Quinn, and even then only if it was affecting his ability to be Home Secretary, which is debatable, as it was after the break-up of the relationship that he in his words became clinically depressed. As the Guardian argues in its leader, what we have learned so far is likely only the tip of the iceberg. The tabloids especially are engaging in illegal methods in order to get background to their stories, whether it's from paying police, getting private detectives to do their dirty work, or blagging information from those with access to databases. Some of the smear jobs conducted on those arrested under terrorism laws seem incredibly likely to have been helped along by these factors. A custodial sentence might send a message that there are real consequences for those breaking privacy laws for less than noble causes. With the government's love for central sharing of information increasing, the situation can only get worse with time, especially as circulations continue to slump.


P.S. Would you believe that there is no mention of Goodman's guilty plea in today's Sun? The only mention of him found via the Sun's search engine is an online report that was put up yesterday, which presumably wasn't spiked as Wade doesn't have full editorial authority over the website.

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11/30/2006 07:36:00 PM | | | links to this post

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