The News (From Bucks Free Press)
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The perfect wife and mother, Rebecca runs a home, a village magazine and is working on her novel. She does not visit the gym or jog but is in amazingly good shape. She enjoys photography, playing the piano and arguing with the TV. She lives in Amersham with her husband and youngest child (aged nine). Her eldest, now 26, lives and works in Buckinghamshire.
The News
3:00pm Wednesday 20th July 2011
Is the phone hacking news of any real surprise to anyone? We as readers don’t really question where the news comes from or how we get it.
We devour gossip and scandal greedily and then talk to our friends and colleagues about it. We’re the audience the press is trying to satisfy.
So journalists have been paying police to help with their stories. And they’ve hacked into people’s emails and mobiles. Although this disturbs me it doesn’t shock me. That in itself might be an effect of wholesale over exposure to graphic and shocking news.
It just feels like this whole drama is just another story; entertainment.
Frankly I’m replete. There’s nothing else I want to know about these people or the events they’re mixed up in.
The virtual high-pitched reporting of reporters reporting the news seems overdone considering we didn’t really expect much more from them. And that very sentence highlights the problem.
The press is telling us that the press used illegitimate methods to get stories. I don’t know how much responsibility to lay at the hands of editors and owners really. Don’t individuals have any personal responsibility nowadays?
If I behaved badly at work when my boss was away for example, is he then responsible? Maybe he is, as though I’m an infant who must be watched at all times.
Bosses usually have their eyes on the business, the finances, how to expand their business, how well they’re doing and so on. I suppose they expect their staff to be honourable (do they have a code of practice they have to adhere to?) Of course families of victims are a different matter. That’s beyond most people’s moral code. And that bit is nasty and vile.
I just wonder (in my jaded vision) why such attention to this news story. The media is obsessed with itself. There was the ‘super injunction’ obsession, now the ‘phone hacking’ mess.
There’s also a drought in Africa – though the way this has been reported makes it sound like it’s happened suddenly. Like a hurricane.
And is there something going on here which the Murdoch mess is shrouding? Ought we to be paying more attention to other news? Hmmm… It’s been known before.
Surely you don’t have to subscribe to a ‘conspiracy theory’ to know that anyone clever enough can get into almost anyone’s phone/email/post messages/bank account etc.
We vote in elections and our slips are numbered against a stub which has a corresponding number. That to me has a greater impact on the individual. I resent this as much as I would someone listening in to my dull calls.
But where’s the outrage at this? This to me is a serious infringement of individuals’ rights to confidentiality when voting. Now how we vote can be checked by some authority or other.
Good luck Murdoch. Continue to be humble for a bit longer. It looks like you’re sorry. Which is what the masses want surely.
No news is bad news. Especially when you own most the news ...
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Comments(6)
ImpeturbableLawrence
says...
8:40am Tue 26 Jul 11
ImpeturbableLawrence
says...
9:09am Tue 26 Jul 11
/
‘Bosses usually have their eyes on the business, the finances, how to expand their business, how well they’re doing and so on. I suppose they expect their staff to be honourable (do they have a code of practice they have to adhere to?)’ Is this the bosses or their staff? Do you have code of practice you adhere to? Should the boss know what’s going on in the business apart from macro managerial affairs? Did Rupert and James Murdoch know phones were being hacked into? Former NoW editor Colin Myler and NI legal manager Tom Crone maintain they did inform James Murdoch of evidence suggesting hacking was being pracised by more than one NoW journalist so James Murdoch must have been lying to the Parliamentary enquiry when he gave evidence to the contrary last week.
/
‘Of course families of victims are a different matter. That’s beyond most people’s moral code. And that bit is nasty and vile.’ Are the victims themselves within our moral codes? Surely it is a matter of interest to all of us if our phone messages can be eavesdropped on by complete strangers.
/
‘I just wonder (in my jaded vision) why such attention to this news story. The media is obsessed with itself.’ It’s probably because we want it – after all, as you say elsewhere: ‘We’re the audience the press is trying to satisfy.’
I think we’re quite right to want information about Murdoch – he wanted to take over a large part of the TV media. He already owns about 40% of all British media and 70% of the Australian media and uses it to peddle sex sensation and xenophobic stories pandering to our basest instincts. I was glad when he withdrew his bid for complete ownership of BSkyB. He ignores regulators and parliamentary enquiries and cross promotes his other products (does anybody remember the ‘I spy Sky’ column in ‘Private Eye’ listing the apparently casual references to Sky TV in the Sun?)
/
‘ .. Continue to be humble for a bit longer. It looks like you’re sorry.’ That’s right get back to normal in a month or a year.
/
(Rupert Murdoch must be thanking his lucky stars for Anders Behring Breivik – ‘hackergate’ is suddenly well off the front page and in the middle of a parliamentary recess.)
Rebecca Leon
says...
5:28pm Thu 28 Jul 11
:
It's just not a surprise. Or a shock. Or scandalous really that strangers can listen in on our calls etc.
:
What's that stat that people throw about that by the time we're 30 there are 700 pages of 'data' on us.
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Collected by... who exactly? For what?
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So it feels like non news to hear that some journos have been spying on other people with the help of the police to get their stories.
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And why the rush to destroy everything related to the NoW? So quickly too.
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Close the paper and destroy all evidence?
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As I say, jaded...
ImpeturbableLawrence
says...
12:26pm Sat 30 Jul 11
/
In ‘How to Manage People’ Michael Armstrong says ‘Management is mainly about the provision, utilization and control of resources. But where people are involved it is impossible to deliver results without providing effective leadership. It is not enough to be a good manager of resources, you also have to be a good leader of people.’
/
Looks like a failure of leadership.
ImpeturbableLawrence
says...
12:28pm Sat 30 Jul 11
Could you hack into this phone?
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The perfect wife and mother, Rebecca runs a home, a bad temper and is working on her novel. She enjoys photography, playing the piano and likes almost anything that's out of fashion and uncool. She lives in Amersham with her husband and youngest child (aged ten). Her eldest, now 27, lives and works in Buckinghamshire.
ImpeturbableLawrence says...
8:38am Tue 26 Jul 11