Ink Lake

Idiot Wind

What We Lost

Cool, Part Deux

True...Not True...Who Cares?

The Colbert Report

To The Editor

Spotted this magazine at a newsstand at the 125th St./Lex. subway station. I’m not a subscriber, so I can’t exactly say what the magazine is about. The thing that caught my eye though, were the grammatical errors for the article, “Crack Facts”.

It's Costs
It's Jail Time
It's Treatment (sic)

This never would have happened when William Shawn was editor!

Hey Kids...Want To Learn How To Be A TV News Reporter?

More March Crazy Than March Madness

From Conservapedia’s headline page today.

And here’s a story that Rick Santorum would appreciate.

At least they didn’t blame that damn liberal dark energy.

No. I Do Not.

Props to Igor Vamos. Tom Paine would be proud.

Home Run

The Colbert Report
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Metastasis

One long week ago, Carl Bernstein compared the Murdoch phone-hacking scandal to Watergate. He would know, and he is right.

What immediately flashed through my mind was John Dean’s comment to Richard Nixon, as recorded by the Oval Office taping system.

“I think that there's no doubt about the seriousness of the problem we’ve got. We have a cancer within - close to the presidency, that’s growing. It’s growing daily. It’s compounding. It grows geometrically now, because it compounds itself.”

I didn’t write about it at the time because the day-job was keeping me busy, and also, it was so obviously true. It wasn’t ever the News Of The World scandal, or the Andy Coulson, Lee Hinton scandal, nor even the Rebeka Brooks scandal. It’s always been the Rupert Murdoch scandal. 

It was under Brooks that the News hacked the voice-mail of murdered schoolgirl, Milly Dowler. That fact was apparently unknown to the police at the time, but Brooks had been called to a meeting with Scotland Yard, where according to the Guardian, she was informed,

Brooks was summoned to a meeting at Scotland Yard where she was told that one of her most senior journalists, Alex Marunchak, had apparently agreed to use photographers and vans leased to the paper to run surveillance on behalf of Jonathan Rees and Sid Fillery, two private investigators who were suspected of murdering another investigator, Daniel Morgan, when the latter was a partner of Rees’s in the firm Southern Investigations. The Yard saw this as a possible attempt to pervert the course of justice.

Brooks was also told of evidence that Marunchak had a corrupt relationship with Rees, who had been earning up to £150,000 a year selling confidential data to the News of the World. Police told her that a former employee of Rees had given them a statement alleging that some of these payments were diverted to Marunchak, who had been able to pay off his credit card and pay his child’s private school fees.

After her stint as editor of the News, she became the Sun’s first female-editor, and two years ago was  promoted to running Murdoch’s entire UK news business.

Reuters reports,

She became a favourite of Rupert, who put his arm around her and told reporters she was his top priority when he flew into London a week ago to take charge of the crisis shaking his global media empire News Corp .

The notion that he would be unaware of that, and later the hacking and the surveillance of the police themselves, is, as the president of Geritol (played by Martin Scorcese) in the perfect movie Quiz Show, says, “insulting.”

“That’s the kind of business-man I am.”