At around 15:30 UTC today, James Murdoch, Chairman of News International and son of the wrinkly media mogul Rupert, announced that the troubled News of the World newspaper will close. The final edition will roll off the presses on Sunday 2011-07-10. Seems that mounting pubic anger, coupled with many big advertisers including Ford and Orange withdrawing their advertising, meant that the 168 year old newspaper had to go.
- http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/phone-hacking/
8623589/News-of-the-World-to-close-on-Sunday-says-James-Murdoch.html - http://bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14070733
Thus 250 people, many of whom were not even employed by the paper when the hacking took place, get the sack. Meanwhile, Rebekah Brooks, the woman who was in charge at the time keeps her job as News International’s Chief Executive.
So why does the person in charge keep her job, when hundreds of innocent workers lose theirs? Why is Rebekah saved, while Andy Coulson, another Screws editor who permitted rampant phone hacking on his watch, gets thrown to the wolves? Or, as Kevin Maguire, associate editor of the Daily Mirror put it earlier today, “…astonishing that 168 years of history had been wiped out but that Rebekah Brooks is still there.”
One can only conclude, as I did in my last post, that the “Slapper” knows where all the proverbial bodies are buried.
Also, was closing Britain’s oldest newspaper paper really such a sacrifice for the Dirty Digger? Well no. As with anything involving Murdoch, there is another agenda at play here that may not be immediately obvious. Seems that Murdoch wanted to rationalise things at Fortress Wapping (the newspaper plant) anyway. Moreover, there were already plans in place to run a 7 day week for his daily gutter rag, The Sun. In fact The Guardian covered that development, over a week ago:-
Further proof of Murdoch’s intention may be found by undertaking a simple lookup on the new domain. For those of you with access to a Unix terminal, type:-
whois thesunonsunday.com
Seems this domain was registered 2011-07-05, two days before the closure was announced. The domain’s owner is anonymised.
Good ol’ Rupe certainly knows how to make a virtue out of necessity, doesn’t he?
Honk Honk! 😉
PS. If you fancy a good roll in the gutter, then you’ll probably find The Slapper ‘s Wikipedia entry rather entertaining :-