before the gangrene spreads

So Murdoch has hacked off the diseased limb. The hope here is to give people a nice full stop and turn continuing anger into the province of the usual suspects.  What needs to be pushed, then, is the (quite right) idea that culpability goes right to the heart of NI: Brooks is the key here.  (I wouldn't be surprised if she goes, but then I also suspect you have the turn-on-the-other-gang-members mentioned in comments earlier; she knows where the bodies are buried.)

Also, this presumably means a seven-day Sun. 

Comments

[belle le triste]

The angry outgoing NotW staff have three days to produce the mother of all redemptive final issues.

[Richard J]

Hmm, NI have, up to now, been playing an utterly dreadful hand about as well as they could have been. This looks remarkably like a panic-driven error[1]. Be interesting to see who, if anybody, keeps up the pressure.

[1] True, they'd been making noises recently about integrating newsrooms, etc., but from recent experience on a business restructuring, you're looking at implementation plans and milestones measured in the months, possibly years. To do it in a fortnight, with a domain name registered only two days back [possibly]? That's a tell-tale sign of panic.

[Chris Brooke]

Apparently they were moving towards a seven-day operation anyway.

[Charlie]

Well, hey, it's a decision, and decisions are what boardrooms are for. I have to say I thought it'd take longer. And you'd think that they'd stop to consider putting together a package of resignations (i.e. Brooks) to go with it. This way, the fact that the bosses all get to keep their jobs is about as stark staring obvious as it could be.

[Richard J]

Yeah, that's precisely what I'd seen too, Chris, but the subtext to the corporate jargon is, in my reading, 'possibly in the next few years, but there's no real hurry, and besides, we're not going to have to implement it overnight, ha ha ha. God no. That would be a nightmare. We'd be crazy to do that'.

[dsquared]

Quite apart from anything, I doubt that the "Boycott News Of The World" campaign will simply pack up and go home, and if the NoTW becomes the Sunday Sun, then the "Boycott NoTW" campaign becomes a "Boycott the Sun" campaign, a phenomenon known to the cancer docs as metastasis.

[belle le triste]

Bubby posted this on AaroWatch a little while ago: "After Ed Miliband attacked NI & Brooks yesterday Nick Robinson reported that a Murdoch aide had told him: 'Rebekah Brooks is family. This is a family firm. If Ed Miliband thinks he can win, he is about to be proved very wrong.'

That's the Murdochs, restating Machiavelli: "If you would strike a King, be sure you kill him." And so far so unsurprising, perhaps, except that their messenger is the BBC (and pet Toryboy Robinson) and their audience is the entire watching world. Peter Oborne already took up the challenge, declaring the Telegraph's allegiance with the Guardian...

[Richard J]

Or, slightly less eruditely, in the game of thrones you either win or you die.

[Charlie]

Also, I wonder if their timing isn't a bit off. People - including MPs - are keyed up and what they are all saying is that this is an obvious damage limitation move.

[CharlieMcMenamin]

First recorded occasion of rats throwing sinking ship overboard?

[belle le triste]

People below upper-management level at the Sun (and the Times, and and and) also just saw where the loyalty line is being drawn: yes they've just created a smaller, more streamlined operation in purely practical terms, but they are not painting a good picture for their surviving workforce, let alone ensuring its leak-free commitment to the bosses' well-being.

[Richard J]

Beware La Trahison des Clerks.

[Barry Freed]

So does this bump this morning's revelations of hacking phones of the widows of dead squaddies off the evening news?

So to recap, I guess the consensus seems to be that this is a transparent ass-covering maneuver that not only won't work because transparent but has the potential to back-fire by 1) giving rise to a posse of disgruntled ex-NOTW staff eager to spill and no incentives not to, and 2) damaging other NI properties such as the Sun due to refocusing of the boycott (if that does happen) and 3? 4?

[Alex]

I'd love to know why a nontrading individual registrant called "Mediaspring" must necessarily be News Int. The whole eleventy!one! thing about thesunonsunday.co.uk is way understrength for the conclusions loaded on it.

Could very well be a domain squatter who reads the papers. Or even someone wanting to start a piss take blog.

[belle le triste]

3: other institutions semi-embroiled and needing distance (hence vulnerable and sensitive to pressure): these include the current govt, already divided, and the police
4: other institutions, long the foes or targets of NI, hence eager to seize the moment and dig in: these include all rival media corps, and all the political classes not currently in cahoots with murdoch
5: a significant pile-up of legal actions, from slebs down to soldiers' widows and the families of bombing victims and murdered children, circling
6: minor but interesting, the twitter-parliament loop which outed ryan giggs a few weeks back is now getting breaking stories -- and agitation -- into the house in realtime
7: currently outside all this looking in, the generational street-heat of the student actions of a few months back; large-scale strikes ramping up; etc etc

Not all these will cohere or work alongside one another, but that doesn't matter, I don't think...

[Chris Williams]

Not you is it?

[Chris Williams]

Sorry - my last comment was a response to Alex. BLT appears to have the main points down: though note that the police, crucially, are embroiled. I think that the Morgan murder is likely to bubble up, because UK police really don't like failing to nail someone for murder when they think that they knew who did it. Also note that Stephen Lawrence's law means that double jeapardy is OK, given significant new evidence.

[belle le triste]

sub editors! it's like we're the miners of the 21st century (maybe)

[belle le triste]

Just saw this (unsourced) claim on twitter: "News of the World was killed after newsagents told News Int that they were not prepared to stock the paper this weekend"

(Nick Buckley being Head of News at the Sunday Mirror, so not an unbiased commentator...)

[Alex]

No, it's not, but either belle or ttam suggested the other day that the Murdoch achilles was that they relied on (essentially) Pakistani immigrants for distribution while constantly abusing them.

[belle le triste]

Must have been ttaM, it's an excellent point.

[Barry Freed]

I'd been wondering about that and meant to ask here if anyone had noticed its absence from news kiosks in the last couple of days.

[jamie]

Alex: reminds me of run up to Iraq war when I went to buy a paper from the local newsagent and he shook my hand because I was buying the Observer and he thought it was antiwar. Didn't have the heart to disabuse him. But those were exceptional times.

I've never known any newsagent to refuse to stock or sell a paper. Don't think they can for contractual reasons. It was embarrasing sometimes seeing people march up to the counter with papers whose front page were given over to rancid bigotry. Here's fifty pee. Ta. Here's a big ration of shit for you.

[belle le triste]

How does it work with dailies and weeklies? Or does the news vendor take a gamble and take the hit if no one buys? What happened in Liverpool after Hillsborough?

If it's sale or return I can't see how anyone could stop a newsagent in Oswestry just leaving a stack of papers under the counter, and telling anyone who asked they'd all sold out, or hadn't arrived. Then telling the supplier that no one bought it this weekend.

[belle le triste]

s/b "Is it sale or return? Or does the news vendor"

[Alex]

By observation, returns seem to be pretty important. I've never been in a newsagent that didn't have a sign up somewhere wagging finger about returns. Books, frex, are sale-or-return.

[belle le triste]

Dear God, Bob Woodward is a nincompoop. He thinks this scandal should be called -- wait for it -- "Rupertgate". This was actually the most insightful point he made.

[Strategist]

Doesn't this (admittedly bold and decisive) move by Murdoch/Matthew Freud to stop the gangrene spreading fail when the first stories about hacking and paying coppers at the Sun start to come out? Let's hope Nick Davies has got the goods.

Oops - Barry Freed has already said this.

BTW, a truly reptilian Max Clifford defending Rebekah Brooks on the Brillo Pad show. One player who thinks she's sticking around.

[Alex]

Is it just that he stays bought?

[Seeds]

Could the rot spread outside of the NI empire? Or am I just thinking wishfully? Nick Davies' Flat Earth News fingered the Mail as the real practitioners of the Dark Arts, and he seems to have done a lot of the legwork in taking down the Screws...

[Barry Freed]

I've been wondering that too, Seeds. Also has it spread elsewhere within News Corporation generally, like in Australia and the US. We had a sexxy Hollywood scandal a few years back involving illegal wiretapping and the only one who did time for it IIRC was the PI who did the actual taps. A lot of slebs even listened in on taps they commissioned from him but not one was even indicted. Kind of takes out all the disincentive. Someone must have taken notice that you could get away with almost anything. We need our own Nick Davies.

[JamesP]

One of the better Downfall recuts -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtk3yLVUOKg&feature=player_embedded

[Seeds]

Apparently Paul McMullan was on Al Jazeera, claiming that the Milly Dowler deletions were to prevent other papers from getting a scoop, rather than / as well as to free up space. So some form of confirmation that NotW weren't the only ones doing the hacking.

It's surprising that NI haven't moved onto the "but everyone else was doing it!" defence, which could be taken to imply that the Sun was one of the others.

[Seeds]

Don't know what the NotW's circulation was in Liverpool, but presumably a Sunday edition of the Sun isn't going to be picking much of it up.

[dsquared]

It's surprising that NI haven't moved onto the "but everyone else was doing it!" defence

I am now wondering that maybe everyone else wasn't doing it, or at least, not nearly on the same scale.

[Cian]

On the Sale and Return thing. The Guardian is the only newspaper that isn't sale and return (not sure about the Observer), which is why it tends to sell out early.

I doubt most newsagents could afford not to sell the News of the World. Maybe in leafy areas, but its the biggest selling weekly; plus those people usually buy other stuff as well. Newsagents tend to have thin margins at the best of times.

[Phil]

It's surprising that NI haven't moved onto the "but everyone else was doing it!" defence, which could be taken to imply that the Sun was one of the others

I think you mean 'not surprising'.

[Seeds]

Well, yeah. Maybe "interesting" was the word I was looking for.

[Seeds]

No, wait! I want to change to "suggestive".

[Seeds]

Sorry for commenting so much.

Apparently the judicial inquiry is going to look into other papers as well.

Also the PCC is being abolished and replaced with a watchdog, which is surely a good thing?

[Alex]

Yes, a watchdog has nice fur and a waggy tail, plus it may even bark now and then.