Brooks: 'I Had No Knowledge Of Hacking'

[oldironside]

"Rebekah Brooks has told told a committee of MPs she had "no knowledge whatsoever" of phone hacking while she was the editor of the News Of The World."

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/brooks-had-no-knowledge-milly-hacking-154525478.html

In other news, Keith Richard had no knowledge of illegal drugs, Gallileo had no knowledge of the solar system and Joe Orton had no knowledge of the interior of public lavatories. Just to be clear.

[LeftishBrit]

1. Anyone who believes that, will believe anything!

[muriel_volestrangler]

2. Video here?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6EaoPMANQM

[oldironside]

3. Well...

... if we're talking about coaching someone to lie...

http://youtu.be/oB-NnVpvQ78

[fedsron2us]

4. Apparently sweet Rebekah and her chums are still dishing out threats

The Mail carries an astounding list of Labour figures right up to Milliband who have apparently been threatened with dire personal consequences unless they lay off NI.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2013027/News-World-Tony-Blair-tried-hush-phone-hacking-scandal.html

Now much as I loathe Rupert Murdoch I doubt the Godfather of NewsCorp would be quite as crude in wielding his power as being implied here. This suggests that the 'goodfellas' at NI under James Murdoch are getting carried away with themselves. I have seen enough Gangster movies to know that the mob hate its members drawing attention to their rackets by garnering unwelcome publicity. Usually it is the signal for the inconvenient underling to be 'whacked'. Unless I am very much mistaken this is what is going to happen metaphorically to Rebekah Brook in the very near future. It. would help Murdoch take some heat out of the crisis as well as appease the NI journalists who clearly hate her guts and are now singing like canaries to the rest of the Media. She needs to remember that in her line of business it is your supposed friends not your enemies you need to fear. I expect her to be sacrificed when the time is convenient. If she is not then the Dirty Digger has clearly lost it in his old age and his empire is doomed.

[oldironside]

5. I wouldn't normally be seen dead...

... reading the Mail, but I'm glad I followed your link.

'Brook, criminal enterprise, catastrophe': How Rebekah's clueless proofreaders failed to spot parting shot in NotW crossword

Aware that News of the World staff might use their final edition to fire a parting shot at her, Rebekah Brooks is said to have instructed two senior executives to read the paper with a ‘fine toothcomb’.

According to sources, they received the simple instruction to ‘ensure there were no libels or any hidden mocking messages of the chief executive’ of News International.

However, while the news pages may have been sanitised of any subliminal messages, the proofreaders appear to have failed to spot some less subtle jibes in the crossword section.

Among the clues in the ‘Quicky’ puzzle were: ‘Brook’, ‘stink’, ‘catastrophe’, ‘digital protection’, ‘cease’, ‘lamented’, ‘servant’ and ‘prestige’.

The Cryptic Crossword was perhaps even more sardonic, with clues including: ‘Criminal enterprise, ‘mix in prison’, ‘string of recordings’, ‘will fear new security measure’.

Also among them was the hint ‘woman stares wildly at calamity’ – which may refer to the photograph of Mrs Brooks’s stony-faced departure from the News International HQ in Wapping, east London, on Thursday after staff were told the Rupert Murdoch-owned paper would be shut down.

Answers printed on page 47 counted: ‘Deplored’, ‘stench’, ‘stir’, ‘disaster’ ‘menace’, ‘desist’, ‘racket’ and ‘tart’.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2013133/Brook-criminal-enterprise-catastrophe-How-Rebekahs-clueless-proof-readers-failed-spot-parting-shot-News-World-crossword.html#ixzz1RiFGIOc1

[fedsron2us]

6. I am no lover of the Mail but this is a media story

and they are as well informed as the rest of the press in this area. They also stand to benefit from Murdochs discomfort which lends an edge to their investigations.

Surprisingly the rest of the right wing press have provided some decent coverage as well. This excellent analysis by Peter Osborne shows how a small group of Ministers led by George Osborne persuaded Cameron to employ Coulson against the more sage advice of his political aide Steve Hilton

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/phone-hacking/8626421/Phone-hacking-David-Cameron-is-not-out-of-the-sewer-yet.html

Ironically, although the print media in terminal decline this story looks likely to be an epic swan song both to it and the Murdoch era. Nick Davies at the Guardian has almost single handedly also revived the profession of true investigative journalism just when everyone thought it was dead.

[fedsron2us]

7. To be fair to the James Murdoch and the unlovely Rebekah.

the current feeds from the Guardian and Independent suggest that they may not have been fully aware of the extent of the original hacking cover up. In particular James Murdoch who was head of BSkyB until 2007 appears to have had no direct involvement in running NI or the Wapping press prior to that date . Instead, the indications are that former NI head and long time Rupert Murdoch sidekick Les Hinton may have suppressed some of the evidence. Of course this does not leave Brooks and James Murdoch completely in the clear since they may have deliberately chosen not to conduct their own internal investigation or to look to closely at what was hidden under certain Wapping stones. More worryingly for the wider NewsCorp it also raises the awkward question about how much Murdoch senior knew about the matter since Hinton was his consigliere and his man. In particular it needs to be established to what extent his ultra aggressive business methods encouraged a culture of criminality at certain of his publications.

http://m.guardian.co.uk/ms/p/gnm/op/srMFY3LqbW1iwGDXpnMhwxQ/view.m?id=15&gid=media/2011/jul/10/phone-hacking-investigation-les-hinton&cat=top-stories

http://m.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jul/10/news-of-the-world-executives?cat=media&type=article

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/press/news-international-knew-hacking-was-widespread-in-2007-2311629.html

[muriel_volestrangler]

8. It's more believable that James Murdoch had little knowledge

Less so that Brooks - deputy editor of The Sun 1998-2000, editor of News of the World, 2000-2003, editor of The Sun, 2003-2009, chief executive of NI after that - didn't know of the extent of phone hacking, and that the claims that it was only one reporter indicated a huge cover-up. James Murdoch didn't join News International until Dec 2007 (after the report, I think, which, as you say, was under Hinton), so his alibi looks a bit sounder.

Brooks' position on payments to the police looks very dodgy too - the admission to Parliament in 2003 (subsequently spun as "we're not talking about anything illegal, of course - perish the thought"), the meeting with the police at which she was told her reporters were tailing police officers, apparently on behalf of criminals - her best bet on that may be to say she didn't realise the payments were illegal, and hope she can get away with a resignation.

[LeftishBrit]

9. Yes.

And at least according to Piers Morgan, in 1994 the young Rebekah Wade prepared for an interview with James Hewitt by preparing a suite, with bugging devices everywhere they could be hidden, including the flowerpots. If true (and it *is* one nasty liar talking about another nasty liar), it means that this has been her style from the beginning.