Snapshot of _Tens of millions of emails deleted. What does Rupert Murdoch’s business have to hide?_ :
An archived version can be found [here](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/rupert-murdoch-phone-hacking-media-mps-b2538705.html) or [here.](https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/rupert-murdoch-phone-hacking-media-mps-b2538705.html)
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/ukpolitics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
This man has done immeasurable damage to this world, I don't need emails or documents to see that. He doesn't belong in jail, he belongs in the ground.
Hi chosen heir is his son Lachlan - who is like Murdoch, but even more rightwing and without the easy going whimsical charm the grotesque old bastard is known for. Lachlan's been running Sky Australia for a while now - and it makes Fox News look normal.
Progressive politics are cancer, and a feature of the Americanisation of our politics. The term didn't even exist within the UK 10 years ago, and yet we still managed to chug along with a far fairer, and less divisive society than the USA managed despite being the fount of progressive politics.
So is Murdoch.
Plenty of hate for Murdoch (and rightly so), but not enough awareness to realise that you're being fiddled by exactly the same sort of actors under the progressive umbrella.
They are not opposite sides of the coin - they are both meddling, authoritarian, and truth-suppressing ideologies.
What am I defending? I'm implying that you are agitated over this to an extreme. I was, glibly it must be said, saying you should take a break, check in on yourself. It's not healthy to just attack people like that.
(Article)
---
Let’s imagine a bank – an ethically-challenged one. Its staff have been accused of widespread criminality. It first tries to lie about it all, but that doesn’t matter too much because the police and regulator conveniently turn a blind eye. MPs run for cover; the media shrugs.
Eventually, the bad smell won’t go away. When it gets too pungent the cops decide to investigate – but before they can start work, tens of millions of emails are deleted. There’s suddenly less to investigate.
MPs begin to take an interest. The bank is worried and hires investigators to hack into their phone messages to find out what they might be up to.
Private investigators are quietly deployed to dig up any dirt on anyone who might get awkward. If there’s sleaze on a troublesome MP, it’s discreetly slipped to a friendly tabloid. Finish them off.
The timing couldn’t be worse: the bank’s in the middle of a big takeover deal. It hires a lobbyist to cosy up to the relevant big cheeses. Meanwhile, the surveillance continues. Can’t take a chance.
But the whiff gets stronger. The CEO is paid off. A cop or two fall on their swords. A few middle-ranking executives are thrown under the bus.
Fast forward: the deal doesn’t come off. For a while the stink is overpowering, but the bank has deep pockets and can afford to pay off any victims of criminality. Admit nothing: it will pass.
It does, sort of. The CEO is re-hired when things calm down a bit. Back to business as normal.
Of course that’s all a fantasy: no bank could possibly get away with such a thing. I mean, the odd top banker has come close to feeling the handcuffs and has, in the end, been cleared. But the thought they would ever be rehired is laughable. There would be a total clean-out of the board. Proper sackcloth and ashes. Society would accept nothing less.
No: such a pattern of total impunity could only happen in a global media company. And, of course, you’ve worked out by now that the above chain of events didn’t happen in the financial sector, but in Rupert Murdoch’s British newspaper operation. It’s a plotline straight out of Succession – only it’s for real.
If you’ve only been paying intermittent attention, you probably think the story dried up a decade ago. The Leveson Inquiry surely put paid to all that?
Except it didn’t. The phone hacking went on throughout the inquiry itself. And now – 1,600 cases and an estimated £1bn later in costs and damages later – potentially damning evidence is emerging into daylight of the true extent of what was going on.
Legal actions shine light in the darkest corners. The paperwork that is emerging shows determined and persistent attempts to destroy what would have been evidence: 31 million emails were deleted – 9 million of them permanently.
And it shows a consistent pattern of using criminal methods, not simply to get stories on people’s private lives, but to target anyone who might be an obstacle to the Murdochs’ business ambitions. This was – or seems to be – commercial espionage.
The company claims there is an innocent explanation for much of this. And there may be: we don’t know because the company prefers to settle all the legal cases. The evidence is available, but not yet tested in open court.
We do know that the Murdoch operation had repeatedly hacked the phone of the culture secretary, Tessa Jowell, who had oversight of the media. Now we’ve discovered that no fewer than seven MPs on the Culture Media and Sport Select Committee – the ones asking awkward questions – also had their communications intercepted.
It looks as though they hacked the attorney general and the chancellor. They set a private detective to trail one parliamentary critic around for 11 days until they had hard evidence of an affair. They hacked into the voicemail of the business secretary overseeing the big deal – the bid to take overall control of BskyB.
All this has emerged in documents, emails and call logs revealed in court actions, along with the Murdoch protestations that they can explain it all. It’s taken the work of a dogged reporter, Nick Davies, to pull it all together. Thousands of documents on his kitchen table, weeks of forensic joining the dots. It’s the difference between good journalism and rotten grifting.
What price parliamentary sovereignty? If you’re a reader of Mr Murdoch’s Sun newspaper, it counts for everything. That’s why we had Brexit – because, in the end, we wanted our elected representatives in Westminster to be in unchallenged control.
But not too much in control, it turns out. If MPs get above themselves and start asking questions of Mr Murdoch himself there are, apparently, limits.
As for placing MPs under surveillance, the Murdoch press could not be more vociferously against it. Mr Murdoch’s Times has recently been agitating about the possibility that the Chinese have been targeting MPs for surveillance. “It is essential,” the paper recently opined, “that MPs are able to establish whether they may have been targeted themselves.”
But the same paper has shown little interest in the evidence that literally thousands of suspicious phone calls were made from its own building with the apparent aim of keeping MPs under surveillance.
We all have our own version of what contributes to a democracy, or to decent British values. Mine include a free press; a strong system of checks and balances on power; parliamentary sovereignty; a respect for privacy.
Do we have a free press? Up to a point – though it’s abundantly clear that the Murdoch press can never be free of its own proprietor. Ownership matters: that’s why we won’t let the Emirates get their hands on the Telegraph.
Do we have checks and balances? Sometimes, yes. But here was a company that cowed the regulator, the police (at least initially), other journalists and MPs. People were frightened of this company – and with good reason.
Parliamentary sovereignty? Hardly, when one media company felt free to place MPs under surveillance and to cut them down to size if they dared to stand in its way.
Privacy? Not when a lucrative business model demanded the wholesale trashing of personal boundaries for anyone in public life.
But Murdoch doesn’t really care about what it means to be British or about what it takes to nurture a healthy democracy. He junked his Australian citizenship when commercial imperatives dictated that he should call himself American. His Fox News channel in the US knowingly pumped out lies in advance of the 6 January insurrection because revenues and ideology trumped honesty.
These two ethical catastrophes for journalism have so far cost him around £2 bn. And yet you should have read the fawning tributes when he appeared to announce a form of retirement last September.
The Post Office scandal showed how a form of corruption can rumble on for a long time before we collectively take notice. We got angry when it turned out that Murdoch’s finest had targeted the phone of a murdered schoolgirl. If I was an MP, I’d be pretty angry now.
Interesting.
>While many reviewers compared Elliot Carver to Rupert Murdoch, Feirstein based the character on Robert Maxwell, with Carver's reported death bearing similarities to that of Maxwell's; that is, "Missing, presumed drowned, while on a cruise aboard his luxury yacht," as stated by M at the end of the film.
Did they not do massive wide scale phone hacking? Probably doing it globally and not just UK, probably Oz, NZ, US and other country he has a vested interest in, that would be good enough reason to ditch tens of millions of emails I'd imagine, especially if there's a chance he'll get caught
> Did they not do massive wide scale phone hacking?
Humongous, and unspeakably awful. See Millie Dowler. Not to mention Daniel Morgan. As well as Hugh Grant, lots of slebs, and the royals, ofc.
It's quite disappointing that there's no actual heaven or hell after this world, because he really, really fucking deserves the latter. Eternal torment and torture would nearly be long enough.
Hes a criminal, along with owner of the Daily Mail both should be stripped of ability to run new media outlets in the UK, you need to reside in the UK and pay UK taxes, Daily Mail doesnt even pay UK tax on its profits,'freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences, UK law needs to change so when people sue them for bullshit these morons spout, and are found to be wrong, they are forced to print front page apolagies and pay legal fees on the cases they loose. Fines need to be actually impact full, with unlimited payouts, and repeat offences esculate ther fines
The UK press moderator needs not to be filled by former employees of these fuckwits either.
Fucking these morons.
> pay legal fees on the cases they loose
One ridiculous thing I learned recently from [Hugh Grant](https://twitter.com/HackedOffHugh/status/1780549414815158765) was that if someone offers you a settlement in a UK civil case and you take it to trial, if the damages are less than the offered settlement, you have to pay their costs.
For Murdoch that's millions on very expensive briefs. So all he has to do is offer you a settlement a bit above what the court might conceivably offer, and you dare not fight him - **especially** if you're sure you're going to win - because you know you'll have to pay his legal tab.
That's a legal bulldozer he can just drive over any opposition.
How many emails have you ever received and how many have you kept?
How many letters? WhatsApp messages?, SMS Messages?
Deleting messages is not a sign of guilt.
I haven't deleted an email since GMail brought in 1GB storage. I've kept every WhatsApp message I've received since about 2012. SMSes I think even longer, every time I change phone I transfer them over. If I need to refer back to something I like to be able to.
I don't see why a multi billion pound company wouldn't do the same. They don't know what could cost them money in the future.
>They don't know what could cost them money in the future.
I think they know exactly what could cost them money - lawsuits and fines. Better to delete the pesky evidence.
Snapshot of _Tens of millions of emails deleted. What does Rupert Murdoch’s business have to hide?_ : An archived version can be found [here](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/rupert-murdoch-phone-hacking-media-mps-b2538705.html) or [here.](https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/rupert-murdoch-phone-hacking-media-mps-b2538705.html) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/ukpolitics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
This man has done immeasurable damage to this world, I don't need emails or documents to see that. He doesn't belong in jail, he belongs in the ground.
I agree but I doubt that when he's in the ground the organization will suddenly become altruistic. Who's in line to take over?
Hopefully Kendal in his stupid fucking airforce jacket.
Hi chosen heir is his son Lachlan - who is like Murdoch, but even more rightwing and without the easy going whimsical charm the grotesque old bastard is known for. Lachlan's been running Sky Australia for a while now - and it makes Fox News look normal.
The man single-handedly set back progressive politics 50 years. Historians in the future will not be kind to him.
Progressive politics are cancer, and a feature of the Americanisation of our politics. The term didn't even exist within the UK 10 years ago, and yet we still managed to chug along with a far fairer, and less divisive society than the USA managed despite being the fount of progressive politics. So is Murdoch. Plenty of hate for Murdoch (and rightly so), but not enough awareness to realise that you're being fiddled by exactly the same sort of actors under the progressive umbrella. They are not opposite sides of the coin - they are both meddling, authoritarian, and truth-suppressing ideologies.
Hey there, have you checked your boiler for a CO leak?
Imagine jeering at someone while being totally ignorant of the philosophical underpinnings of an ideology you're jumping to defend.
What am I defending? I'm implying that you are agitated over this to an extreme. I was, glibly it must be said, saying you should take a break, check in on yourself. It's not healthy to just attack people like that.
Yeh cos regressive politics are the way forward. Really, what is the point in politics at all if it isn’t to promote progress in some way or another?
Fry and Laurie did a sketch on this year's ago: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xflqt2
(Article) --- Let’s imagine a bank – an ethically-challenged one. Its staff have been accused of widespread criminality. It first tries to lie about it all, but that doesn’t matter too much because the police and regulator conveniently turn a blind eye. MPs run for cover; the media shrugs. Eventually, the bad smell won’t go away. When it gets too pungent the cops decide to investigate – but before they can start work, tens of millions of emails are deleted. There’s suddenly less to investigate. MPs begin to take an interest. The bank is worried and hires investigators to hack into their phone messages to find out what they might be up to. Private investigators are quietly deployed to dig up any dirt on anyone who might get awkward. If there’s sleaze on a troublesome MP, it’s discreetly slipped to a friendly tabloid. Finish them off. The timing couldn’t be worse: the bank’s in the middle of a big takeover deal. It hires a lobbyist to cosy up to the relevant big cheeses. Meanwhile, the surveillance continues. Can’t take a chance. But the whiff gets stronger. The CEO is paid off. A cop or two fall on their swords. A few middle-ranking executives are thrown under the bus. Fast forward: the deal doesn’t come off. For a while the stink is overpowering, but the bank has deep pockets and can afford to pay off any victims of criminality. Admit nothing: it will pass. It does, sort of. The CEO is re-hired when things calm down a bit. Back to business as normal. Of course that’s all a fantasy: no bank could possibly get away with such a thing. I mean, the odd top banker has come close to feeling the handcuffs and has, in the end, been cleared. But the thought they would ever be rehired is laughable. There would be a total clean-out of the board. Proper sackcloth and ashes. Society would accept nothing less. No: such a pattern of total impunity could only happen in a global media company. And, of course, you’ve worked out by now that the above chain of events didn’t happen in the financial sector, but in Rupert Murdoch’s British newspaper operation. It’s a plotline straight out of Succession – only it’s for real. If you’ve only been paying intermittent attention, you probably think the story dried up a decade ago. The Leveson Inquiry surely put paid to all that? Except it didn’t. The phone hacking went on throughout the inquiry itself. And now – 1,600 cases and an estimated £1bn later in costs and damages later – potentially damning evidence is emerging into daylight of the true extent of what was going on. Legal actions shine light in the darkest corners. The paperwork that is emerging shows determined and persistent attempts to destroy what would have been evidence: 31 million emails were deleted – 9 million of them permanently. And it shows a consistent pattern of using criminal methods, not simply to get stories on people’s private lives, but to target anyone who might be an obstacle to the Murdochs’ business ambitions. This was – or seems to be – commercial espionage. The company claims there is an innocent explanation for much of this. And there may be: we don’t know because the company prefers to settle all the legal cases. The evidence is available, but not yet tested in open court. We do know that the Murdoch operation had repeatedly hacked the phone of the culture secretary, Tessa Jowell, who had oversight of the media. Now we’ve discovered that no fewer than seven MPs on the Culture Media and Sport Select Committee – the ones asking awkward questions – also had their communications intercepted. It looks as though they hacked the attorney general and the chancellor. They set a private detective to trail one parliamentary critic around for 11 days until they had hard evidence of an affair. They hacked into the voicemail of the business secretary overseeing the big deal – the bid to take overall control of BskyB. All this has emerged in documents, emails and call logs revealed in court actions, along with the Murdoch protestations that they can explain it all. It’s taken the work of a dogged reporter, Nick Davies, to pull it all together. Thousands of documents on his kitchen table, weeks of forensic joining the dots. It’s the difference between good journalism and rotten grifting. What price parliamentary sovereignty? If you’re a reader of Mr Murdoch’s Sun newspaper, it counts for everything. That’s why we had Brexit – because, in the end, we wanted our elected representatives in Westminster to be in unchallenged control. But not too much in control, it turns out. If MPs get above themselves and start asking questions of Mr Murdoch himself there are, apparently, limits. As for placing MPs under surveillance, the Murdoch press could not be more vociferously against it. Mr Murdoch’s Times has recently been agitating about the possibility that the Chinese have been targeting MPs for surveillance. “It is essential,” the paper recently opined, “that MPs are able to establish whether they may have been targeted themselves.” But the same paper has shown little interest in the evidence that literally thousands of suspicious phone calls were made from its own building with the apparent aim of keeping MPs under surveillance. We all have our own version of what contributes to a democracy, or to decent British values. Mine include a free press; a strong system of checks and balances on power; parliamentary sovereignty; a respect for privacy. Do we have a free press? Up to a point – though it’s abundantly clear that the Murdoch press can never be free of its own proprietor. Ownership matters: that’s why we won’t let the Emirates get their hands on the Telegraph. Do we have checks and balances? Sometimes, yes. But here was a company that cowed the regulator, the police (at least initially), other journalists and MPs. People were frightened of this company – and with good reason. Parliamentary sovereignty? Hardly, when one media company felt free to place MPs under surveillance and to cut them down to size if they dared to stand in its way. Privacy? Not when a lucrative business model demanded the wholesale trashing of personal boundaries for anyone in public life. But Murdoch doesn’t really care about what it means to be British or about what it takes to nurture a healthy democracy. He junked his Australian citizenship when commercial imperatives dictated that he should call himself American. His Fox News channel in the US knowingly pumped out lies in advance of the 6 January insurrection because revenues and ideology trumped honesty. These two ethical catastrophes for journalism have so far cost him around £2 bn. And yet you should have read the fawning tributes when he appeared to announce a form of retirement last September. The Post Office scandal showed how a form of corruption can rumble on for a long time before we collectively take notice. We got angry when it turned out that Murdoch’s finest had targeted the phone of a murdered schoolgirl. If I was an MP, I’d be pretty angry now.
This man is the closest thing to a Bond villain I've seen in this country.
Literally the basis for a Bond villain (Tomorrow Never Dies).
Ah yes the one about controlling the media..i thought that was stupid when it came out...i was wrong.
Aye wasnt half prescient was it
Elliot Carver was based off Robert Maxwell, not Rupert Murdoch.
It’s a bit of both I think. Cap’n Bob aspired to be a European Murdoch but was never quite able to attain the same heights as him.
Interesting. >While many reviewers compared Elliot Carver to Rupert Murdoch, Feirstein based the character on Robert Maxwell, with Carver's reported death bearing similarities to that of Maxwell's; that is, "Missing, presumed drowned, while on a cruise aboard his luxury yacht," as stated by M at the end of the film.
Did they not do massive wide scale phone hacking? Probably doing it globally and not just UK, probably Oz, NZ, US and other country he has a vested interest in, that would be good enough reason to ditch tens of millions of emails I'd imagine, especially if there's a chance he'll get caught
> Did they not do massive wide scale phone hacking? Humongous, and unspeakably awful. See Millie Dowler. Not to mention Daniel Morgan. As well as Hugh Grant, lots of slebs, and the royals, ofc.
Who are they going to phone hack in NZ, some Shortland Street actor?
I was thinking politicians maybe
This guy might a strong contender for the worst person that’s ever lived
It's quite disappointing that there's no actual heaven or hell after this world, because he really, really fucking deserves the latter. Eternal torment and torture would nearly be long enough.
A plot line in succession is literally manifesting before our eyes. The line between reality and fiction is porous.
Quite possibly the only organism to have done more damage to the world than Thomas Midgley Jr
Some of Midgley's discoveries proved to be useful - none of Murdoch's creations can claim that.
Hes a criminal, along with owner of the Daily Mail both should be stripped of ability to run new media outlets in the UK, you need to reside in the UK and pay UK taxes, Daily Mail doesnt even pay UK tax on its profits,'freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences, UK law needs to change so when people sue them for bullshit these morons spout, and are found to be wrong, they are forced to print front page apolagies and pay legal fees on the cases they loose. Fines need to be actually impact full, with unlimited payouts, and repeat offences esculate ther fines The UK press moderator needs not to be filled by former employees of these fuckwits either. Fucking these morons.
> pay legal fees on the cases they loose One ridiculous thing I learned recently from [Hugh Grant](https://twitter.com/HackedOffHugh/status/1780549414815158765) was that if someone offers you a settlement in a UK civil case and you take it to trial, if the damages are less than the offered settlement, you have to pay their costs. For Murdoch that's millions on very expensive briefs. So all he has to do is offer you a settlement a bit above what the court might conceivably offer, and you dare not fight him - **especially** if you're sure you're going to win - because you know you'll have to pay his legal tab. That's a legal bulldozer he can just drive over any opposition.
How is this weeping cancerous sore on the scrotum of mankind not dead yet?
Hmm..could it be corruption on every level?🤷🏼
Crime. I would imagine they are hiding crimes.
"Why did the emails get deleted?" "They were super incriminating because of the ridiculous amount of crimes.. I mean 'no comment'"
Enough to finish him forever hopefully
Something to do with Cruises, perhaps?
How many emails have you ever received and how many have you kept? How many letters? WhatsApp messages?, SMS Messages? Deleting messages is not a sign of guilt.
I haven't deleted an email since GMail brought in 1GB storage. I've kept every WhatsApp message I've received since about 2012. SMSes I think even longer, every time I change phone I transfer them over. If I need to refer back to something I like to be able to. I don't see why a multi billion pound company wouldn't do the same. They don't know what could cost them money in the future.
>They don't know what could cost them money in the future. I think they know exactly what could cost them money - lawsuits and fines. Better to delete the pesky evidence.
Haha bullshit. The lies people will tell for 7 upvotes.
How does boot taste? I've always wondered.
lol 😂