Monday, December 01, 2008 

News of the Screws in telling lies shocker.

The Press Complaints Commission adjudication into the News of the World's super-splash back in June, headlined "BURRELL: I HAD SEX WITH DIANA" is another wonderful insight into the world of Sunday tabloid journalism, if not tabloid journalism in general.

A classic story of one man's word against someone else's, Burrell in making the complaint accepted that the PCC could not rule on whether the report was accurate or not. Instead, he complained that the newspaper had not contacted him to put the allegations against him. The Screws argued firstly that it feared Burrell would attempt to get an injunction to stop publication, which is the latest excuse for not putting the claims to the person about to be drawn into a firestorm, and secondly that Burrell was a "self-confessed and notorious liar."

That tells you how much the paper cared about the actual veracity of the claim. If Burrell's such a notorious liar, why should we believe the claims of his brother-in-law about a conversation the two had 15 years ago? The Screws claimed that it had the backing of an "anonymous source", as well as the backing also of Burrell's brother-in-law's son, both of whom had signed affadavits. This though was irrelevant to actually putting the allegations to the person in question, who, as the PCC ruled, should have had the opportunity to deny such prominent claims against him, with the possibility that readers would have been misled into believing he accepted the allegations by there not being any denial.

The entire story was one which the like of the News of the Screws dream of. Completely impossible to prove, and also completely impossible to disprove, while being sensational and completely lacking in any integrity whatsoever. Who after all cares if Burrell had been having sex with Princess Diana, or indeed he hadn't? The only people who do would have been Diana herself (and possibly her sons, who have in the past made clear their distaste for the necromancy the papers practice), who is still very much dead, and Burrell, already disgraced for admitting to lying to the Diana inquest, meaning the paper could say whatever the hell it liked. The News of the Screws after all has never ever been about journalism or investigations; its number one priority is to make Mr Murdoch pots of money, which it still does. Anyone who gets caught in the crossfire is completely inconsequential, as this ruling will be, just as the collapse of the trials involving the "fake sheikh" and the recent victory by Max Mosley were. The ends always justify the means, and until the PCC can do more than just force newspapers to print their adjudications, they will keep on having complete contempt for the self-regulatory code they signed up to.

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Monday, July 28, 2008 

How tabloid journalism works part. 94.

It's the silly season, it's a Sunday, and you haven't got anything approaching a front page story. Do you a: put in the effort and attempt to find a new angle to the problems facing Gordon Brown? b: continue to go on alarmingly about the moral decline in society because a rich man who enjoys being spanked has won a court case or c: turn the most innocuous addition to a social-networking site which just happens to be a rival to the one owned by your own proprietor into a super splash?

There's just no contest if you're a Sun "journalist", is there? I'm not on Facebook as I don't have any friends, but even I know there's a whole plethora of "poke" applications, such as giving one of your friends a virtual sexually transmitted disease, as well as literally dozens of similarly hilarious things. There isn't however at the moment a moral panic about STDs, but there certainly is about knives. "TEENS VIRTUALLY KNIFE EACH OTHER ON INTERNET" still doesn't quite cut the mustard though; no, you have to go the classic tabloid route of getting a quote from an organisation or an individual who has suffered through whatever it is you're railing against. Hence the Scum made a call to the uncle of murdered teenager Robert Knox, and what do you know, he's disgusted by it:

“The stupidity of having this on their site is unbelievable. And they deliberately use the street term ‘shanked’, which is even worse. They are targeting the kids who are on street corners carrying knives.”

Yes, of course "they are" gramps; keep taking the pills. This brilliant quote however gives the paper their headline:
Shank’ website is aimed at the kids who carry knives.' And voilà, where there was previously no story, have we now got one for you!

To call this pathetic, shoddy and disingenuous journalism is to put it too lightly. Not even in the wildest of imaginations can anyone begin to claim that this glorifies or is likely to encourage anyone to commit a crime involving a knife; it's nothing more than a joke between friends. It does however serve another agenda, which is the Sun's continuing low-level campaign to run story after story which is either critical of Facebook or an article expressing horror about something that's happened relating to it, while the paper never deigns to mention its humongous conflict of interest. Indeed, when probably the biggest bad news story of them all to do with social networking websites was released last year, involving the number of sex offenders who had profiles on one of them, the Sun strangely didn't run with it. It couldn't have possibly been because the site was MySpace instead of Facebook or Bebo, could it?

Still, perhaps it was worth it for this comment, which is either a quite brilliant piece of satire, or something rather more frightening:

Some of you appear to be missing the point - young people are becoming acclimatised to knife crime as a normal part of life, the more it is treated like a bit of a joke the more it becomes subconsciously acceptable.

We have a group here in Sheffield petitioning to get the Sheffield United's nickname changed from 'the Blades', knife crime should never be associated with fun. Also we want the swords removed from the badge, it's only a matter of time before it progresses from knife crime to sword crime.

Probably even more hilarious though this weekend was the former Archbishop of Canterbury writing in the News of the Screws that the other victim of the Max Mosley judgement was public morality. On the same page as Carey's bilge you can read such enlightening and moral stories as "RONALDO: Blonde had sex with Cristiano in hotel room" and "VICE: Student had sex with 3 men while high on valium." Such reporting is not of course salacious, sensationalist or purely to make money out of other's behaviour, however depraved, but obviously to shame them into altering it.

You can far more effectively make the case that the News of the World for decades has been coarsening the public sphere with its warped sense of what is and isn't newsworthy, or indeed, that its practice of "public interest journalism" has directly led to the celebrity culture which Carey would doubtless decry, but none of this is of any consequence when you're doubtless being paid a hefty sum for only slightly more than 250 words. Perhaps even more humourous than this humbug though is those that have taken it seriously: witness Dave Cole doing such. You have to wonder whether even Carey was pretending to be troubled. The reality is that it is not Mosley, judges or the HRA or ECHR that are "dangerous or socially undermining" as Carey puts it. Dennis Potter never put it better:

I call my cancer Rupert. Because that man Murdoch is the one who, if I had the time (I've got too much writing to do). . . I would shoot the bugger if I could. There is no one person more responsible for the pollution of what was already a fairly polluted press. And the pollution of the press is an important part of the pollution of British political life, and it's an important part of the cynicism and misperception of our own realities that is destroying so much of our political discourse.

The same can be said of the deeply immoral but "moral" Daily Mail, the same Daily Mail that thinks nothing of going after lower-class targets that have just lost their daughters, but which sympathises so deeply when life deals "their people" a bad hand. There is only one freedom in which Murdoch and the Mail truly believe in, and that is the freedom to make money.

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Friday, July 25, 2008 

Woman E breaks cover.

Somewhat astonishingly, Woman E of the Max Mosley case has come out of the shadows to give an interview. Even more astonishingly, she's given it to Sky News. Potentially sensational is the fact that not more than two weeks after she was meant to give evidence in court, an appearance which she apparently cancelled as a result of being "mentally and emotionally unfit" to do so, is that although she is tearful during the interview, she seems more than happy to be setting the record straight as she sees it.

It's perplexing that Sky has snatched up the interview for the obvious reason of the links between the satellite broadcaster and the News of the Screws, all ostensibly controlled by Murdoch himself. Even more mystifying is that she deals a further hammer blow to the News of the World's story, making clear that there was never going to be a Nazi theme, but rather a German theme, as the original emails and contact between Neville Thurlbeck and Woman E's husband made clear. It's very rare indeed that the Murdoch media potentially attacks or undermines another section of it, although it is not entirely unprecedented.

There can only be one reason as to why it's decided to do so in this instance - damage limitation. Michelle (as she is now being referred to) has an explosive story, and if she were to take it to the BBC, or God forbid, one of Murdoch's main tabloid rivals, they could have absolutely gone to town. As it is, Sky, rather than Michelle, is the one in control. This can be seen in the way that Sky has given the News of the World ample room to defend itself against Michelle's charges, and Kay Burley does grill her rather intensley on what the differences are between a German prison scenario and a Nazi one, although without landing a blow.

Even so, the News of the World must still be furious. Perhaps it could be said that they're only reaping what they've sown, in first offering Michelle £20,000 and then only paying her £12,000. What's clear is that they've used her just as much as many other of their targets have been. What it most certainly also does is ask questions about why Michelle did really decline to give evidence: she may well have been "mentally and emotionally unfit" then, but was it an eventual fit of conscience on her behalf also, or the Screws' continued failure to "take care of her", as it were?

It will also reopen the conspiracy theories, as also mentioned is the fact that Michelle's husband was an MI5 surveillance officer. Was his offering of the story to the News of the World not his first involvement with the paper? Did MI5 really not know about Michelle's double life, as she claims? Or was his resignation over the fact that with his cover blown, they were likely to investigative whether he had also previously approached the newspaper as a source?

To see just how strange Sky's decision to get the interview is, even if as a damage limitation exercise, you only have to look at today's Sun to see what Murdoch's own response is. The article on the ruling is hilariously biased, hardly mentioning any of Eady's findings but focusing almost solely on his comments on how Mosley did to an extent bring the troubles on himself, and Myler's own response to the ruling. The Sun dedicates its entire leader column to it also, claiming laughably that the ruling will affect the Sun reader's right to know. It also disengenuously repeats the lie that this is an EU law interfering in British affairs - the European Convention on Human Rights was drawn up far before the Common Market even existed, in 1950, and was voted into British law by the Commons in 1998. It hoightly demands the right to print what it thinks is in the public interest, not what a "lofty and privileged" judge thinks is. This of couse completely ignores the fact the Sun is signed up to the Press Complaints Commission code, which also states that the sort of investigation that the Screws used are only valid when the public interest is being served. If Mosley had gone through the PCC and not the law courts, he would probably still have reached the same result, going by the evidence, although that isn't certain.

Michelle's decision to go public now also completely opens her up to potentially huge retaliation by the Screws on the Sunday. She still might regret going public, and while we have learned little more than we did yesterday, it does suggest that the Murdoch press are running terrified of the consequences of a story that it must have believed would only be a nice little earner.

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Thursday, July 24, 2008 

Eady lays down the law.

Some, when hearing that the privacy suit brought by Max Mosley against the News of the Screws was to be heard in front of Mr Justice Eady, were confident in predicting that Mosley would be the victor, purely on the grounds that Eady has been one of the judges at the forefront of creating a privacy law through the precedents set by various rulings, especially since the introduction of the Human Rights Act, with its right to a private life having to be balanced against the right to freedom of expression. It's certainly true that his rulings involving Khalid bin Mahfouz are deeply worrying, concerning as they do information which has in no real sense even been published here, leading to the introduction in the United States of the Free Speech Protection Act, so angered they have been by Eady's rulings that have prevented legitimate investigations into Mahfouz's links to terrorist funding from being published.

Ratbiter (who may or may not be Nick Cohen, if anyone knows for certain please drop a comment in) in yesterday's Private Eye opened his piece by mocking Eady's supposed impartiality. However deserving of criticism Eady is for some of his other work, reading in full his judgement today (PDF) ought to show that he had no option other than to rule in Mosley's favour.

It's indisputable, going through, to come to any other conclusion than one which involves the News of the Screws being deeply in the wrong and that their defence was a complete shambles from the get go. When first contacted by Woman E's husband, the prostitute who filmed the S&M session for the Screws, there was absolutely no mention made of any Nazi connotations. Simply, the husband had a story about Max Mosley. Neville Thurlbeck, rang the husband back later in the day without ever making a recording or notes of his meetings with either Woman E or her husband, which is undoubtedly bad journalistic practice to begin with. Woman E's husband regaled Thurlbeck with how Mosley had been involved with his wife, who was a dominatrix, for the best part of year. All of this is recalled from paragraphs 148 onwards, but this one (152) is worth quoting in full:

Mr Thurlbeck asked Woman E’s husband when she would be likely to be attending another of the S and M parties and whether she would be prepared to wear a hidden camera. The original intention was to expose in the News of the World the Claimant’s interest in sado-masochism and his use of prostitutes and dominatrices. There had up to that point been no mention of a Nazi or concentration camp theme. The husband enquired whether there would be “something in it for us” and Mr Thurlbeck indicated that the News of the World would make sure he was paid. No discussion of actual amounts took place at that stage.

It was only afterwards, in a second call, that Thurlbeck claims that Woman E's husband told him there was to be a Nazi theme at the next session with Mosley and the four other women. Again, he didn't make any note or recording of this, but his statement to the court ran like this:

“[The husband] said that this was fascinating because [his wife] had told him that the Claimant had ordered a German theme, that there would be a German-speaking dominatrix at the sex party (in addition to [his wife]) and that the dominatrices had been asked to wear military uniform. [His wife] had been told all of this by a woman whose name was [Woman A] who [the husband] told me was the senior prostitute/dominatrix. From speaking to [the husband], it was apparent that it was [Woman A] (rather than [Woman E]) who liaised directly with the Claimant regarding his instructions for the sex parties. [Woman A] then arranged the parties and their themes."

As Eady later notes:

It is perhaps curious that, at this stage, when giving his account of what he had been told previously, Mr Thurlbeck should omit any reference to a “Nazi theme”. Again, it rather suggests that “German” may have simply been glossed into “Nazi”.

Furthermore:

I am prepared to accept that Mr Thurlbeck and Mr Myler, on what they had seen, thought there was a Nazi element – not least because that is what they wanted to believe. Indeed, they needed to believe this in order to forge the somewhat tenuous link between the Claimant and his father’s notorious activities more than half a century ago and, secondly, to construct an arguable public interest defence. ... The belief was not arrived at, however, by rational analysis of the material before them. Rather, it was a precipitate conclusion that was reached “in the round”, as Mr Thurlbeck put it. The countervailing factors, in particular the absence of any specifically Nazi indicia, were not considered.

When Mr Myler was taken at length through dozens of photographs, some of which he had seen prior to publication, he had to admit in the witness box that there were no Nazi indicia and he could, of course, point to nothing which would justify the suggestion of “mocking”
concentration camp victims. That conclusion could, and should, have been reached before publication. I consider that this willingness to believe in the Nazi element and the mocking of Holocaust victims was not based on enquiries or analysis consistent with “responsible journalism”.

While disregarding that there was a public interest argument in Mosley being exposed for variously, the allegations of criminality, i.e. that the level of the S&M was such that Mosley himself was being assaulted, dealt with from paragraph 110 onwards and "depravity and adultery", from 124 onwards. He does however agree that if there had been a Nazi theme then it would most certainly have been in the public interest for Mosley to be exposed, which he sets out in 122 and 123.

In case you missed the Screws' original publishings of the allegations against Mosley, they're summarised from paragraphs 26 onwards. In the Screws' hyperbolic style, they don't pull any punches whatsoever, describing Mosley as a "sex pervert", and in the next week's paper as a "vain deviant with no sense of truth or honour."

Eady's decision might have been different had Woman E given evidence. She however, for the supposed reason that she was "mentally and emotionally unfit" to do so, did not appear. Neither, as a result, did her husband, who just happened to work for MI5, from which he has since resigned. If she had, she may well have contradicted to a believable extent the evidence given by all the other dominatrices involved, as well as Mosley himself. As Roy Greenslade argues, Eady may well have been justified in halting the hearing there and then, such was the weakness of the case and the evidence given by the Screws' editor Colin Myler, and the reporter, Neville Thurlbeck. Instead, piece by piece, and devastatingly, Eady picks apart the idea that there was a Nazi theme, beginning from paragraph 44 onwards. Some choice parts are:

There was a suggestion that some of the women were wearing Nazi clothing, but Mr Thurlbeck himself ultimately recognised in a memo, after publication, that what was worn was simply “foreign uniform and ordinary blazer”. He had been addressing in the same email the rather incongruous possibility of a “Nazi blazer”. As the Claimant himself pointed out, if there had been a desire to create a Nazi scenario it would have been easy to obtain Nazi uniforms online or from a costumier. The uniform jacket worn by Woman E had been in her possession before either the 8 or 28 March gatherings were organised and had not been obtained specifically for that purpose. It was there to be seen in a photograph on her website which Mr Thurlbeck inspected.

In the first scenario, when the Claimant was playing a submissive role, he underwent a medical inspection and had his head searched for lice. Again, although the “medical” had certain unusual features, there is nothing specific to the Nazi period or to the concentration camps about these matters. Moreover, no German was spoken at this stage – not least because Woman B appeared later, in time only for the second scenario.

Mr Thurlbeck also relied upon the fact that the Claimant was “shaved”. Concentration camp inmates were also shaved. Yet, as Mr Price pointed out, they had their heads shaved. The Claimant, for reasons best known to himself, enjoyed having his bottom shaved – apparently for its own sake rather than because of any supposed Nazi connotation. He explained to me that while this service was being performed he was (no doubt unwisely) “shaking with laughter”. I naturally could not check from the DVD, as it was not his face that was on display.


The first scenario begins with the words “Welcome to Chelsea” and the Claimant uses
the nom de guerre “Tim Barnes”. One of the “guards” is referred to as “Officer Smith”. These factors lend no support to the Nazi role-play allegation; indeed, they would appear to be inconsistent with it. Moreover, the use of the word “facility” is neutral. It is after all an English and/or American word and has no especially Nazi connotations.

In the second scenario, the young women “victims” wore horizontally striped pyjamas. That may loosely suggest a prison uniform but, yet again, there is nothing to identify the clothing as of the Nazi era. Photographs were introduced by Mr Price, for what they were worth, to show that the uniforms worn in concentration camps tended to have vertical stripes. Pictures were also produced to show a group of people running in the recent London Marathon wearing “prison” costumes. These too had horizontal stripes; yet no-one would imagine that they were in any way making reference to concentration camps or “mocking” their victims (as the News of the
World alleged of the Claimant). I was also referred to the invoice for those particular costumes which were obtained for £11.91 each from a “joke” supplier. I did not find any of this evidence especially helpful, since what matters is the simple fact that prison uniforms worn for S and M role-play do not in themselves echo concentration camps or involve “mocking” the victims.

The use of German on 28 March, in the second scenario when the Claimant was playing a dominant role and Woman B was also present, was said to be largely to please Woman D rather than at the Claimant’s request. Odd though it may seem to many people, as does much fetishist behaviour, I see no reason to disbelieve Woman D’s explanation. In any event, she had been interviewed on a weblog at the end of February when she made exactly the same point. So it was plainly not made up for this litigation. In any case, it is clear that the Claimant threw himself into his role with considerable enthusiasm.


Although Mr Thurlbeck thought the use of German highly significant as one of the Nazi indicia, it is noteworthy that neither he nor anyone else thought it appropriate to obtain a translation before evaluating the material for publication. It contained a certain amount of explicit sexual language about what the Claimant and Woman B were planning to do to those women in the submissive role, but nothing specifically Nazi, and certainly nothing to do with concentration camps.

There was, of course, plenty of spanking, and references to “judicial” penalties, but the only passage which is relevant for this purpose relates to an occasion when one of the women was lying face down on the sofa while being given intermittent and rather lack-lustre strokes with a strap. There seems to be some sort of game involving rivalry between blondes and brunettes. At one point, the dark-haired woman lying on the sofa raises her head and cries out “Brunettes rule!” Within a moment or two, a voice from off-camera can be heard (accepted to be that of Woman A, who is indeed blonde) gasping out words to the effect “We are the Aryan race – blondes”.

Not surprisingly, this has been fixed upon by the Defendant as being a reference to
Nazi racial policies. It is said that the reference to “Aryans” cannot bear any other interpretation.

When asked about this, the Claimant said that he had no recollection of any such
remark being made and, indeed, that it was perfectly possible that his hearing aids would not have picked this up in all the excitement. This naturally invites a certain degree of scepticism, although there is no doubt that the Claimant is a little deaf (as emerged during the course of his evidence) and does wear hearing aids.

What is clear, however, is that the remark was unscripted and that it occurred amid a
good deal of shouts and squeals (of delight or otherwise). One had to listen to the tape several times to pick out exactly what was going on and indeed nobody had spotted “Brunettes rule!” until the middle of the trial. It is also clear that there was nothing spoken by the Claimant on this occasion which reflected Nazi terminology or attitudes. There is no reason to suppose that it was other than a spontaneous squeal by Woman A in medias res.

It is probably appropriate at this point to address another remark from time to time used by Woman B. She uses the term “Schwarze” when she is acting out a dominant role in relation to one or more submissive females. The suggestion was that she was pretending that they were black and racially abusing them. She explained, however, that in German the word is used to refer to a dark-haired woman (or brunette) – such as herself. She said “I am a Schwarze”. It had no racial connotations, so far as she was concerned. Although Mr Warby invites me to reject this, since the German word could also refer to a black person, I see no reason to disbelieve her. It seems more natural to interpret her remark in context as referring to the woman’s dark hair (which she had) rather than to dark skin (which she did not). Mr Warby also submitted that
the references by the two women to blondes and brunettes are not connected. Since they occurred within seconds of each other, I believe that is unrealistic. In any event, it could hardly be suggested that the blondes were accorded any more respectful treatment (as “Aryans”) than the brunettes. One of them is abused as a “dumb ass blonde” (in German) and the spanking is indiscriminate in this respect.

All of this is of a piece with how we know the News of the World operates. Truthfulness and accuracy coming second to huge splashes. Just in the last few months the paper has paid out damages to Cherie Blair, Katie Price and Peter Andre and Robert Murat, all for inaccurate or completely untrue stories. For years it's given not just house room but the front page on numerous occasions to Mazher Mahmood, who has now also on numerous occasions been exposed as being a fantasist, who uses entrapment to snare his victims before ruining their lives. His splashes on the Victoria Beckham kidnap plot were of his own imaginings, while the same was true of the so-called "red mercury" plot, in which all of those on trial were acquitted.

As for Neville Thurlbeck, as yesterday's Private Eye (1215) made clear, his history is less than spotless also, having tricked Colin Stagg, having promised him £20,000 if he took a "truth drug" which showed he had not carried out the killing of Rachel Nickell, or lied on oath or to the police. He passed with flying colours for the reason he was completely innocent - but the NoW seized on a minor discrepancy, splashed with "I LIED ABOUT RACHEL" and denied Stagg a penny. He also completely made up a story about a naturist B&B being a brothel, claiming that the wife of the couple who owned it had offered him a "full sex session with me and my husband for £75". In fact, he offered them £75 to have sex while he watched, and seeing an easy way to get some extra cash out of a spotty moron, they accepted. Thurlbeck claimed in the subsequent story that he had declined the offer, when in actuality, as the couple's security tapes showed, he had not only watched them, but masturbated while doing so.


It comes as little surprise then to learn that Thurlbeck attempted to blackmail two of the other women involved. As Eady writes:

In order to firm up the story, therefore, Mr Thurlbeck decided that he would like to publish an interview with at least one of the participants and, if possible, contributions from all of them.

In pursuit of this objective, therefore, he sent a number of emails. On 2 April he sent identical emails to Women A and B in these terms:


“I hope you are well. I am Neville Thurlbeck, the chief reporter at the News of the World, the journalist who wrote the story about Max Mosley’s party with you and your girls on Friday.

Please take a breath before you get angry with me!

I did ensure that all your faces were blocked out to spare you any grief.


And soon, the story will become history as life and the news agenda move on very quickly.


There is a substantial sum of money available to you or any of the girls in return for an exclusive interview with us. The interview can be done anonymously and you[r] face can be
blacked out too. So it’s pretty straight forward.

Shall we meet/talk?”


He became more insistent the following day:

“I’m just about to send you a series of pictures which will form the basis of our article this week. We want to reveal the identities of the girls involved in the orgy with Max as this is the only follow up we have to our story.

Our preferred story however, would be you speaking to us directly about your dealings with Max. And for that we would be extremely grateful. In return for this, we would grant you
full anonimity [sic], pixilate your faces on all photographs and secure a substantial sum of money for you.

This puts you firmly in the driving seat and allows you much greater control as well as preserving your anonimities [sic] (your names won’t be used or your pictures).

Please don’t hesitate to call me … or email me with any thoughts.


Regards and hope to do business.


Neville Thurlbeck, chief reporter, News of the World”


This would appear to contain a clear threat to the women involved that unless they cooperated with Mr Thurlbeck (albeit in exchange for some money) their identities would be revealed on the following Sunday. He was as good as his word and attached photographs and also some extracts from their websites. This was obviously to bring home to them the scale of the threatened exposé.

The threat was then reinforced the same day with a further email to Women A and B:

“Ok girls, here’s the offer. It’s 8,000 pounds for an interview with one of you, with no name, no id and pixilated face. And we pixilate all the pics I send through to you this morning.

BUT time is running out for us and if you want to come on board, you need to start the ball rolling now. Call me … if you want to.

Best, Neville”

Perhaps to their credit, the two women concerned resisted these blandishments and
thus risked the further exposure he had threatened.

This is a pure example of how the journalism practised not just by the News of the World, but by the entire Murdoch stable works. You might recall that last year the sex blogger Girl with a one track mind was threatened in almost the exact same fashion by the Sunday Times, that supposed august organ, stooping to the same level as the red-top tabloids to expose her actual identity.

It's therefore completely impossible to have any sympathy for the News of the World whatsoever. They created this story from the get go, not with any great public expose in mind, but with the pure intention of making money out of someone else's private life. There can't even really be any defence provided by the fact that the women were prostitutes, because again, as Eady notes:

Another argument thought up by the Defendant, or rather its legal team, was that the Claimant had been keeping a brothel. This would not bear close scrutiny and is certainly not consistent with the evidence. By the time of closing speeches, this line of argument had been abandoned. It seems clear from the authorities that for premises to fall within the definition of a brothel it is necessary to show that more than one man resorts to them for whatever sexual services are on offer. The only man enjoying the activities in this case was the Claimant himself. He paid for the flat and Woman A arranged parties there with various dominatrices for his (and apparently also their) enjoyment. This was not a service offered to men in general. He was the only one paying, although I was told that it was a standing joke among some of the regulars that they had so much fun that they ought to be paying “Mike”. There was never any question of a business being carried on there or the Claimant taking a cut of the proceeds.

As it happens, some of the women were rather reluctant to accept the description “prostitute”. (For the purposes of the Sexual Offences Act 2003, the term is defined by reference to providing “sexual services” in return for payment: s.51(2) of the Act.) Several of them offer a variety of services on their website (usually spanking or being spanked in various guises) but expressly warn that they do not offer specifically sexual services. They apparently made an exception in “Mike’s” case and threw in a bit of sex, as it were, as an “extra” between friends. Indeed, sometimes they were not paid at all. As they liked the premises and found the atmosphere relaxing and congenial, things developed from there, Indeed, although the Claimant’s sexual
activity as revealed in the DVD material did not seem to amount to very much, some of the women stayed on after the party was over and indulged in same sex action purely for their own entertainment.

Indeed, quite apart from Mosley paying the women, what seems to have united them against Woman E is both that they thoroughly enjoyed what they did with him, and also that she had broken one of the unwritten rules of the S&M scene in which they were part: that no one talks about it to potentially disapproving ears, and they certainly do not sell their stories. Woman E has apparently been ostracised from the community since as a result.

The last remaining fig leaf some will bring up is the moral issue itself. After all, Mosley was cheating on his wife, and she apparently, despite the potential slight injuries he might have suffered as a result, never had an inkling that he enjoyed being spanked and dominated. Does the exposing of it to his wife, while not justifying it any means by law, justify it in a moral sense? Some will obviously come to different conclusions on that. That his wife has apparently accepted it, and is also apparently supporting him though seems to suggest that even she might secretly be devastated, she is not to such an extent that she is thinking of leaving him.

The reality is that this has been coming for a long time. For far too long the tabloids in this country have been allowed to get away with blatant intrusions into others' privacy where there is absolutely no public interest whatsoever. Again today Sienna Miller is launching an action against the Sun and News of the World for publishing naked photographs of her, despite last year winning damages after they published, you guessed it, naked photographs of her during filming for a movie yet to be released, presumably on what was a closed set. The implication is obvious: that they simply don't care about the consequences when it potentially boosts sales as a result, or in the new digital world, leads to more one handed online clicks to their website. The Mosley case is just one particular new egregious example. No one thought the Screws was going to win, but everyone tomorrow and already online is screaming that this means the end of investigative journalism as we know it.

It's nonsense of course. These are the last wounded cries of a few select hacks and partisan publishers that know that at long last the great game may be coming to an end. This is half the reason why the tabloids so loathe the Human Rights Act: it's not because it's a criminals or terrorist's charter, it's because it has the potential to damage their business model once and for all. The facts are that they have brought it all upon themselves. Eady himself denies that this case sets a new precedent or is landmark in any way:

It is perhaps worth adding that there is nothing “landmark” about this decision. It is simply the application to rather unusual facts of recently developed but established principles. Nor can it seriously be suggested that the case is likely to inhibit serious investigative journalism into crime or wrongdoing, where the public interest is more genuinely engaged.

Sir Smacks Mosley may not have been the figure we would have liked to have triumphed over the Screws in such a way. It is nonetheless a completely warranted and welcome victory.

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Thursday, July 10, 2008 

Max Mosley, the News of the World, and the fight between press freedom and personal privacy.

There are some cases or matches where it would be wonderful if both sides could lose. Chelsea versus Manchester United in the Champions League instantly springs to mind; Polly Toynbee vs Richard Littlejohn on Question Time; Iran against Israel; BBC3 against the equivalent crap on Channel 4.

So it almost is with Max Mosley against the News of the World. On the one hand we have a man who is hand-in-glove with Bernie Ecclestone, who makes up for what he lacks in height with vindictiveness and avarice; on the other we have the News of the Screws, undoubtedly one of the worst "newspapers" the world has ever seen, which makes its money out of scandal, sex, lies and populist right-wing politics of the most venal kind. Add into this my own little "incident" with the Screws' finest, Mazher Mahmood, and we have the situation so succinctly summed up by Alien vs Predator: whoever wins, we lose.

As much as the battle between Mosley and the Screws is over the issue of privacy, and how far the press can go in seeking out scandal, along with what truly defines the public interest, it's also a wonderful insight into how one of the most ruthless tabloids of them all operates. The anecdote of how the woman, known only as Woman E, who filmed the orgy and who today withdrew from giving evidence for the Screws, was first offered £25,000 but in the end was only paid £12,000 will be familiar for those with a similar penchant for Private Eye, who recall the story of Iraq veteran Justin Smith, who was even given a contract for £15,000 for an interview before the Screws then decided it was worth only £1,000, £1,500 tops. Colin Myler, the News of the Screws editor, also admitted in the court that he didn't know that the hack responsible for the eventual story, Neville Thurlbeck, had planned on fitting Woman E out with a camera, which seems like something that other reporters might have discussed with their editors first. Nor did they set out with the intention of capturing a "Nazi themed" orgy, which is now their defence for exposing Mosley; rather they thought there was going to just film an S&M orgy. Myler also admitted that he himself had been filmed having sex, so he knew what Mosley probably felt like, but he didn't elaborate.

Equally hilarious was Thurlbeck's own suggestion that the News of the Screws needed to film the orgy because of the "very, very high" standard of proof required by the paper. This is the same newspaper which has recently settled cases against it brought by Cherie Blair and the loathsome Katie Price and Peter Andre over allegations made by their former nanny. It's also the self-same newspaper which has been home for years to the fantasies of Mazher Mahmood, who brought the paper such exclusives as the plot to kidnap Victoria Beckham, which turned out to be almost entirely concocted and based around entrapment, and the group of men accused of attempting to purchase the non-existent "red mercury", whose trial ended with all of them being found not guilty.

Also intriguing is just where the security services might fit into all this. It was revealed some time back that Woman E's husband worked for MI5, and subsequently resigned because of his wife's activities; now it emerges that it was in fact he that first went to the newspaper with details of Mosley's S&M habit. It might simply be a coincidence, but it was enough to get Mosley to investigative whether there was any "conspiracy" against him, and this latest tidbit to emerge might further those inquiries.

The News of the World's defence though is on three counts, each of them generally spurious: that there were Nazi elements at play; that Mosley's high-profile job meant he had a responsibility to behave himself and exposing him was in the public interest; and that there was an element of criminality, because in one scene Mosley bled after being spanked, and this act of violence was against the law. The Screws' claims about the first are looking threadbare on account of all four of the other women involved in the "sick orgy" testifying that there was no Nazi element, and although they were moments when the mentioning of the word "Ayran" suggested that this could have been possible, it's mostly come across as far from being cut and dry that that was what they were acting out. On the second, how many people can honestly say they knew of Mosley prior to the Screws outing him? Perhaps you might have heard his name, but if you have little interest in either the fascism which his father represented or in Formula 1, which is far more associated with Ecclestone than Mosley, then it seems doubtful. The last count also ought to be ignored, as Mosley was clearly consenting and had organised the orgy in the first place. For there to be a crime, there has to be a complaint made, and there hasn't. This does raise the spectre of the "Spanner case", as Dave Osler alludes to, but you'd hope that we've moved on the years since then. Even if we haven't, the S&M in the video is nowhere near on the scale of the Spanner case anyway.

Mosley's whole argument is built around the point that the orgy did not have a Nazi theme; but even if it did, who cares what a man and five consenting adults, even if they are being paid, decide to do in the privacy of their own S&M dungeon? While the connotations for Mosley are serious because of the history of his family, if a group of adults who enjoy what they're doing want to dress up in uniforms and torture each other ala Ilsa She-Wolf of the SS, it's of no business of anyone else's. The state, let alone tabloid newspapers, have no right whatsoever to pry into the bedroom of private individuals unless a complaint is made by one of the participants later. This is where the public interest and when the wider public have a right to know becomes difficult; in my view, only when the individual involved is both of high standing, and either because of his activities potentially not doing his job properly, or being outrageously hypocritical, does there become a public interest case for his sexual activities to be exposed.

The Blunkett case is both the most recent and probably one of the most controversial examples of where this potentially both falls and lies. It can be argued that when Blunkett was first exposed as having an affair with Kimberley Quinn, it was neither affecting his job nor did it expose him as being outrageously hypocritical. He made a few remarks and comments about families, as Home Secretaries are wont to do, but he hadn't professed to being either a family man or putting the family at the centre of his policies. At the time, both the Independent and Guardian didn't mention the exposure. However, when it later emerged that he was challenging Quinn over the paternity of her second child, and as later made clear by himself, suffering from depression as a result of the case, then it did enter the public interest, as it also would have done once it became clear he had been involved with the speeding up of Quinn's nanny's visa.

This understandably puts the press in a difficult position. Politicians generally, regardless of who are they are, are considered fair game, and none to my knowledge has challenged the allegations in a similar way to Mosley currently is. Also to be considered is just where the line between the rich and the famous and their relationship with the media ends; some undoubtedly forward details of their affairs to the press both to make money and to increase their profile, while stories of sex in the News of the Screws involving "ordinary" people are also ten a penny. Worth recalling is the case of Garry Flitcroft, a footballer who won a temporary injunction against the Sunday People, which planned to expose his extra marital affairs. There was clearly no public interest justification by the People, as this hardly added up to a "serious misdemanour", and most of those on first hearing the injunction presumed that it was a household name. When it eventually came out that it wasn't, most were thoroughly nonplussed and wondered what all the fuss had been about. Much the same was when Ulrika Johnsson made her allegations about being raped public; when Matthew Wright inadvertently blurted out that it was John Leslie most thought she was talking about, hardly anyone knew who he was.

The complaint, especially from the tabloid media, is that what we might end up with is a judicially decided, through the precedents set by various rulings, privacy law. The ostensible objection to this is that parliament is the only place where such a law should be debated and passed, but this ignores the fact that the power of the press, especially the Daily Mail and News Corporation, behind the Sun/NotW/Times etc is such that no such law would ever get past even the suggestion stage. We saw what happened recently over the incredibly mild proposals put forward by the Information Commissioner for journalists caught using private detectives to spy on individuals to face the potential of being jailed; the Mail roared, the Sun howled and the Telegraph bleated, all making the "investigative journalism" defence, and the government backed down.

The paradox is that while the media is all powerful, so are the ridiculous libel laws, which are currently enabling foreign individuals accused of terrorist financing to pulp books which make such allegations against them, even if they've never technically been sold here. The libel laws are however open only to the rich, who can afford the lawyer fees, as legal aid isn't provided in libel cases. The obvious solution would be to change the stifling libel laws, while also setting up a privacy law, but as argued above, this simply isn't going to happen. We're caught potentially in the worst of all worlds: with a privacy law which protects the rich and the powerful but not the likes of those who had their lives ruined by Mazher Mahmood, and with libel laws which protect the rich and the powerful but not those who find themselves viciously attacked for some alleged misdemanour by the tabloids. The thing is that if this happens, the tabloids will have no one to blame but themselves. For years they've thought nothing of stalking celebrities, considered fair game, regardless of the potential consequences, taking photographs of them on the beach, asking dubious questions about their health or whether they're pregnant, with them able to pay the occasional libel damage due to their wealth. At the other end of the scale they accuse the most vulnerable in society like Colin Stagg of being murderers, perform hatchet jobs on anyone who crosses them as a public service, and think nothing of pontificating on crime and demanding tough sentences for everything under the sun, all while breaking the law themselves by spying on royals or just anyone they think they can get an eventual story about. If Sir Smacks Mosley brings to end such an era, who except the pitiful editors and hacks themselves will complain?

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Monday, May 19, 2008 

Of conspiracies, conflicts of interests and prostitutes.

The conspiracy theorists will inevitably be swarming over the news that the prostitute who sold the story of Max Mosley's antics to the News of the Screws was the wife of an MI5 officer, and it is indeed a remarkable twist to what has been the Sunday gutter press "scoop" of the year.

Of more immediate interest is that Mosley has hired Quest, Lord Stevens' private security firm, to investigate whether he's been the victim of a "conspiracy" to discredit him. Although Stevens no longer seems to be writing the most reactionary column in the Screws' history, his involvement with the Murdoch paper surely presents something approaching a conflict of interest. Then again, if Mosley is paranoid enough to believe that someone is out to get him when he was stupid enough to think that being dominated by five pros would go no further than that room, then perhaps he deserves to be fleeced of his cash.

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Sunday, December 23, 2007 

British sex for British people!

Unbelievably vile cliches and prejudices from the News of the Screws, via PP and Parbury:

A GIRLFRIEND set to marry her fiancé flushed her relationship down the drain when she started having sex with their Polish plumber.

Besotted Lindsey Goodman, 26, has now left Philip Martin and moved in with new love Adam Stojak.

Randy Stojak—one of the millions of East Europeans over here accused of taking British jobs—admitted he had no qualms about stealing our women too.

Perhaps Gordon Brown/the BNP can take up the News of the Screws's clarion call and start demanding British sex for British people.

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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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Wednesday, January 31, 2007 

Scum-watch: Private Eye on the "Windsor Muslim yobs", heartless Screws journalists, and more.

The Eye provides us with the information of where the correction actually appeared in the paper:



Issue No. 1177 also provides this valuable insight into the ethics (or lack of) of News of the Screws hacks:



Then there's the curious incident of the Sun's overwhelming support for the Dome to house the supercasino which instead went to Manchester:

MANCHESTER was as stunned as anyone after the dubious decision to make it Britain’s gambling capital.

The big question is how it beat London and Blackpool for the money-spinning super-casino.

For all its attractions, Manchester was hardly hot favourite. Most bets were riding on the Dome.

Err, no it wasn't. Most assumed and hoped it was going to Blackpool, which seemed the best bet.

To most people, the Dome was the most sensible and logical location.

After which follows a rant about why giving the casino to Manchester is meant to buy off the locals' votes. That most natural Labour supporters would probably be at best curious or incredulous about this government's addiction to gambling doesn't seem to be worth mentioning. Not that suspecting there was something of a stitch-up is necessarily conspiratorial; BlairWatch lists some good reasons for questioning the line up decided upon.

All becomes clear to why the Sun so favoured the Greenwich bid however. As today's Guardian reports:

Yesterday some in Greenwich said the furore which followed the deputy prime minister's admission may have damaged London's case. The result will also have provoked gloom elsewhere. The Guardian has learned that Rupert Murdoch's News Corp holds a 10% interest in AEG's dome development subsidiary.

Who woulda thunk it?

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Friday, January 26, 2007 

News of the Screws screwer set to meet screws.

So, farewell then to Clive Goodman for four months at least. The News of the Screws piss-poor royal editor has been sent down for intercepting messages on the phones of the royal family, while his private investigator co-conspirator Glenn Mulcaire has been sentenced to six months.

That Goodman has been sent down for accessing such banal information that not even the average News of the Screws reader would care about says much about the tabloids in the age of the internet. The scramble to get any tidbit of celebrity gossip has become so fierce as a result of the dedicated celebrity weeklies and websites such as Popbitch that the methods of journalists are increasingly entering the realm of the illegal, as the log books of a private investigator showed. As a result, they are bringing the whole profession into disrepute with their tactics.



One can only hope that Mazher Mahmood is the next one to feel the long arm of Inspector Knacker. Oh, and it'll be interesting to see if the Scum covers Goodman's sentence tomorrow.

Update: The Scum's website is reporting it, but we'll see if it actually appears in tomorrow's paper.

Update 2: Coulson's gone. Did he jump or was he pushed by Murdoch?

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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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