Comrades, I wondered if this might pop up here. Please allow me to try and summarise the story briefly.
This week a huge scandal broke where the News of the World, a weekly Sunday newspaper, was revealed to have 'hacked' into the cellphone voicemail accounts of a kidnapped and murdered child, the victims of the London public transport terrorist bombings of July 7 2005, and British soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan in order to get stories. In fact the 'phone hacking' had been known about since 2007. The difference that in the latest revelations, the victims weren't only the royal family, members of parliament or famous footballers, but ordinary people who had died very tragically. Several laws have been broken but so far, only one person has been prosecuted. News International, the company which owns the News of the World, decided on Thursday to close that paper. Advertisers and readers had begun to boycott the paper. The 200 staff of the News of the World have been made redundant, but Rebekah Brooks, who was editor of the paper during the years when the phone hacking was going on, has kept her job as an executive of News International. News International is owned by the octogenarian Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch, along with the famous British newspapers The Sun, 20th Century Fox films, the Fox TV network, Fox News, satellite broadcaster Sky and various other media companies around the world. Currently, Britain has the Press Complaints Commission. This is a self-regulatory body (in other words run by the media, for the media) with a voluntary code of conduct (in other words the media follow the rules only as far as they want to). An enormous amount has been written and said about this in the last week, so a web search for 'News of the World' or 'phone hacking' should return more results than you could possibly read. James ________________________________ From: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> To: [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected] Sent: Saturday, 9 July 2011, 8:01 Subject: [CU] Uk to regulate media UK Gov seek ways to regulate media. http://m.timeslive.co.za/?i=3692/0/0&artId=4155123&showonly=1 Moses Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device -- You are subscribed to the "Communist University" e-mail forum. The group site is at http://groups-beta.google.com/group/Communist-University The Communist University blog at http://domza.blogspot.com/ and our wikispace web site is at http://amadlandawonye.wikispaces.com/ To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]; or e-mail [email protected] -- You are subscribed. This footer can help you. Please POST your comments to [email protected] or reply to this message. You can visit the group WEB SITE at http://groups.google.com/group/yclsa-eom-forum for different delivery options, pages, files and membership. To UNSUBSCRIBE, please email [email protected] . You don't have to put anything in the "Subject:" field. You don't have to put anything in the message part. All you have to do is to send an e-mail to this address (repeat): [email protected] .
