News International's new baby
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News International, the people who brought you phone hacking, police bribery and – as we discovered last week – an utterly unrepentant proprietor, have today launched a new organisation, dedicated to . . . . (wait for it) . . . regulating press standards.
Masquerading under the guise of the Newspaper Society and the Newspaper Publishers’ Association, Murdoch’s NI, together with PressBoF, the group which starved the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) of cash and ensured its failure, announced at lunchtime that it is “taking the first steps towards setting up the Independent Press Standards Organisation”. Apparently with a straight face, it describes its relabelled PCC as “the new regulator for the press called for by Lord Justice Leveson”.
Rupert Murdoch’s hand in all this is barely concealed: the press release has been sent out to journalists by Guto Harri, Director of Communications for News UK, formerly known as News International.
The letter is signed by, among others, Murdoch MacLennan, the chief executive of the Telegraph Group, whose executive director, Lord Guy Black, ran the PCC and has been leading the PressBoF charge to block by any means possible the draft Royal Charter that was approved by all parties in Parliament on 18 March, the one based on the Leveson recommendations.
And though they have been careful to hide the name “PressBoF” from today’s document, there is only one organisation that applied a few weeks ago to register the name IPSO, and that is PressBoF.
So, ipso facto, IPSO is the brainchild of Murdoch’s News International and the failed PCC. Just the kind of people you would trust with regulation of the press.
There will be detailed analysis from us later in the afternoon, but here is the first response from Hacked Off’s Executive Director, Brian Cathcart.
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They never learn will they!!!!.They still want to publish and be damned no matter what the consequences are,unbelievable !!!!!!!
I make no secret of the fact that I would like to see Murdoch and his cohorts out of this country.
They do us no good, they are right wing to the point of being fascist,and they defend the ruling class by lying to the working class.
[…] Hacked Off as “no more than a cynical rebranding exercise”, describing it as “News International’s new baby“. Professor Brian Cathcart, Executive Director of Hacked Off […]