Hacking inquiry – Hacked off

**From CNN.com by Brian Cathcart There had to be something special about Rebekah Brooks. Here was a woman, after all, who managed to be a close friend of Tony and Cherie Blair, then a friend (perhaps less close and more briefly) of Gordon and Sarah Brown, and then a very close (‘lots of love’) friend [...]

by Brian Cathcart Peter Hill was editor of the Daily Express for seven years, from the end of 2003 to early 2011. Among his claims to fame is that he edited the newspaper throughout the Madeleine McCann affair in 2007-8, overseeing coverage that led to a £550,000 libel pay-out by the group and to grovelling [...]

Four and a half members of the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee have put their Conservative colleagues in an awfully tricky position. Therese Coffey, Louise Mensch, Philip Davies and Damian Collins voted as a block on 10 of the 16 proposed amendments in the CMS Select Committee report into whether Parliament had been by [...]

“I should have gone there and thrown all the damn lawyers out of the place” (Rupert Murdoch, Leveson Inquiry, Thursday 26th April 2012, p.68) Amongst the many people and organisations Rupert Murdoch lambasted during his two days in the stand at the Leveson Inquiry this week, lawyers and law firms were particularly prominent. Lawyers and [...]

by Brian Cathcart After all the excitements of the Murdoch week it would be easy to imagine that the Leveson inquiry’s job of tackling press abuse in this country is done, or at least that the worst is over and the objective is in sight. Not so. We might never have imagined that News International [...]

**From Comment is Free/Guardian by Brian Cathcart Murdoch’s persona is ingenious, but News Corp’s corrupting influence is laid bare in cold detail in the Jeremy Hunt emails Rupert Murdoch’s critics, watching him testify, were no doubt thinking: “The devious old bastard. He forgets so selectively and he dissembles so artfully.” And what were Murdoch’s many [...]