Newspapers
Rishi to the Rescue: How the Prime Minister ‘Moved Heaven and Earth to Help the Conservative Press’
An Abu Dhabi-backed consortium wants to buy the Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail, News International titles, and some journalists from the Telegraph itself, go mad. Conservative politicians also declare their opposition. Rishi Sunak rushes through legislation to prevent such a takeover from occurring. Deal over.
If ever there was proof of the power of the press to get what they want, this is it. That needs rephrasing: the power of the Conservative press to get what they want, when there is a Conservative Prime Minister only too happy to please, in this, General Election year.
It’s remarkable how Sunak moved heaven and earth to appease the proprietors of the Daily Mail and The Times and Sun titles.
Other interest groups can campaign for years for perfectly sound, bona fide, necessary, reform to reach the statute books. Often, to no avail – reasonable as the new measure is, vital as it is, they are kept waiting.
Yet, along come the big beasts of Lord Rothermere and Rupert Murdoch, aided and abetted by some noisy Conservatives (some of them, anxious to curry favour with the influential newspapers), and the Government crumbles. Appallingly, senior figures in the Government were said to be in favour of the Abu Dhabi bid, believing it would cement relations and lead to further investment from that super-rich country. No, the Conservative media titans are against, so against the government shall be.
Rupert Murdoch, seen above in London in June 2023, was against the deal and wants the Spectator. Photo: PA Images / Alamy
No matter that Rothermere and Murdoch had their reasons for kiboshing the Abu Dhabi purchase. Rothermere harbours a desire to own the Telegraph, while Murdoch wants the Spectator, also part of the Telegraph stable. They did declare their interest to their readers, usually towards the end of news reports regarding the progress of the campaign.
They devoted plenty of space to the importance of upholding free speech and defending human rights. The giveaway as to their true motive was, surely, that claims by the consortium that Abu Dhabi was only a ‘passive’ investor were largely ignored. Likewise, the suggestion that this marriage could see the resurrection of a device implemented when another foreign newspaper takeover occurred was similarly brushed aside.
That was when Murdoch bought Times Newspapers and a separate, independent board was installed to act as an objective cut-off on key matters. This time around, with his eyes set on owning the Spectator, Murdoch was seemingly not prepared to countenance a repetition.
Read more: ‘Telegraph Takeover Bid Backed by UAE Doesn’t Matter – Because there’s an Agenda at Every Newspaper’
What’s also telling is that plenty of British assets have fallen into foreign hands, many of them to sovereign wealth funds, down the years without the raising of barely a squeak by the same media or MPs. It’s as if the much-touted phrase, Britain is ‘open for business’ has been taken literally to also mean ‘Britain is for sale’.
Assets to have gone overseas include:
There are numerous examples of all sorts of assets tracing their ultimate ownership abroad. Grocery, retail, hospitality, and fashion brands, many of them historically and iconically ‘British’, have been targeted by foreigners and their money men.
Occasionally there have been protests but they have usually died down. Cadbury’s going to the Americans was an especially emotive one. Royal Mail, no less, may soon join the National Lottery with Czech owners. The newspaper that reports at length on these deals, the Financial Times, is owned by the Japanese. The only sale that attracted a similar amount of column inches, was arguably that of Newcastle United by Saudi Arabia, but, like the rest, it went through.
The pattern is familiar: there’s a bid, there is some disquiet expressed by the employees, unions and stakeholders, then the offer is raised again and perhaps again until the owner’s expectations are met and it’s accepted and the fury, such as it is, falls away.
Fears about Chinese and Russian influence, together with uncertainty surrounding treatments for Covid, saw the government pass the National Security and Investment Act, or NSIA, of 2021, giving the Cabinet Office the ability to intervene and block a transaction on national security grounds. It covers 17 sectors, most of them to do with defence, tech, medicine, bioscience, data and AI.
The idea was to stop the asset and/or its intellectual property, the know-how, falling into enemy hands. At first sight, the figures are impressive – the Act is wheeled out regularly. There were more than 1,000 ‘mandatory notifications’ – the bidders in these sectors must inform the Government – in 2022, the latest and first year to be reported. But 95% of these were cleared unconditionally at the initial screening phase.
Only 5% were subject to in-depth scrutiny and most of these received conditional approval. However, five deals were stymied completely, of which four involved companies with Chinese ownership and one a Russian oligarch.
Another 14 were approved subject to conditions, and these mostly involved Chinese owners. The restrictions were imposed to safeguard national security, including a UK Government attendee at board meetings, external monitoring, commitments for the IP to remain in the UK, and guarantees to continue to supply specified UK contractors such as the Ministry of Defence or an emergency service.
The NSIA might well have been deployed in the Telegraph case. The sectors where it applies are broadly defined and doubtless, a skilled lawyer could have made a case for the paper’s inclusion.
It never reached that stage. Sunak leapt into action and brought forward a new piece of legislation, just to make sure the Abu Dhabi bid perished. Rothermere and Murdoch got their way. The irony is that they may only have made the path easier for another bidder, Sir Paul Marshall owner of Unherd and GB News. Marshall, born in Ealing, is definably British. How the media barons stop him remains to be seen.
Israeli media: Israel ‘totally defeated’ – and terrified of Iran
Source close to discussions about Iran says millions would be fleeing Israel if they knew what was being said
Israeli media are often far more honest about what their country is doing – and what is going on in it – than western ‘mainstream’ media are about the same issues. While UK ‘msm’ still maintain the lie that Hamas ‘beheaded babies’ and raped women on 7 October, Israeli media sometimes freely discuss the truth – and frequently and openly write about the ‘immense’ numbers of Israelis killed that day by the Israeli military.
And now, Israeli media are discussing two further truths that will not be aired by UK broadcasters or printed by UK papers.
First, Haaretz – one of Israel’s major dailies – has splashed a headline concluding that Israel has lost – totally lost – the ‘war’, the genocide, it has been raining down on the innocent civilians of Gaza. Lost so badly that Israel cannot be secure – and will not either regain by force the captives taken by Hamas, or end its pariah status:
And second, journalists with sources close to the Israeli regime’s discussions about Iran – which yesterday achieved a measured but compelling attack on Israel in retaliation for Israel’s bombing of Iran’s consulate in Damascus – are saying openly that those discussions are so terrifying that if the Israeli populace knew what was being said, millions of them would be flooding Israel’s main international airport to try to get out of the country:
The UK government, opposition and media are incorrigibly dishonest about Israel’s genocide and its terrible consequences for the millions of innocents in Gaza and the West Bank – and the ruination of both Israel’s and the West’s always-thin pretence as democratic, humane and law-abiding. But the truth is out there – and will percolate through.
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Caroline Flack’s Lawyer Suggests Decision to Charge her May Have Been ‘Driven by Desire’ to Appease Media as Met Police Probe Case
Caroline Flack's lawyer suggested this week that a decision by the Metropolitan Police to charge the late TV presenter may have been "driven by a desire" to appease the media, as he spoke out after the force confirmed that it will partly reinvestigate its decision to prosecute as "new evidence may be available".
The development comes after a Byline Times special investigation into the case, 'Closure For Caroline Flack: Her Family's Four-Year Search for the Truth', uncovered fresh information. It is the cover story for the April edition, out now.
The Crown Prosecution Service recommended that the former Love Island host be cautioned after an incident with her then boyfriend, Lewis Burton, in December 2019. This was overturned after an appeal from the Met, which resulted in the 40-year-old charged with assault by beating.
Caroline was found dead at her home in Stoke Newington, north London, in February 2020 with a coroner later ruling that she killed herself after learning of the impending prosecution and fearing the publicity a trial would attract.
Her mother, Christine Flack, has been critical of the police's handling of her daughter's case from the outset, and is fighting to uncover the truth about how decisions around charging her unfolded.
She told Byline Times: “It is a big gap in our understanding of one of the most important moments in the whole thing. It has left us as a family in a terrible, stressful position. It is time he cleared it up, so we can get some justice for Carrie.”
The cover of the April edition of the Byline Times featuring the special investigation into Caroline Flack's case
Christine has made a fresh complaint to the Met because her family has been left with "important unanswered questions".
Questioned about the decision to re-examine the case, Flack's lawyer, Jonathan Coad, suggested that the Met Police's relationship with the media may not be "entirely as it should be", telling Sky News: "One suspects the reason why police made this decision was to appease the press pressure, which I remember being there... that she should be charged to rebut suggestions, 'oh, well she's had special treatment because she's a celebrity'."
He continued: "So, it may be that this decision, which indeed is unusual to appeal it, was driven by a desire not to fall foul of the press, and be criticised by the press, in which case is an entirely wrong reason for the appeal to be made."
Following Caroline's death, police watchdog, the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC), conducted a review of the Met's decision to charge her, but did not find any misconduct. It did, however, ask the Met to apologise to Caroline's family for not recording the reason it appealed against the original CPS decision to only issue the presenter with a caution.
The force apologised in February last year, but Christine Flack rejected this, the BBC reported at the time.
The Met confirmed on 11 April that a new complaint was made by Flack's family last week which it referred to the IOPC.
In a statement to the Press Association, the Met said that the IOPC decided that "the majority of the matters had previously been dealt with and no further action was required" but "one aspect" of the complaint had been returned to the Met's Directorate of Professional Standards (DPS) for further consideration.
That, the Met said, relates to the "actions of officers in appealing an initial decision by the CPS not to charge Ms Flack, and because new witness evidence may be available". DPS officers are now making "further enquiries in relation to this".
The IOPC issued a statement confirming this.
Christine told the Mirror that she made the complaint to try to "compel" the officer who was at her daughter's arrest "to give the statement we think he should have given four years ago".
"We won't stop until we get the truth," she told the publication.
As Byline Times’ investigation spread across the British press, the journalists behind the exclusive, Dan Evans and Tom Latchem, spoke about how they went about investigating the case and uncovering fresh evidence.
Evans explained that, after the pair broke the Dan Wootton story for this newspaper, they approached Caroline Flack's family "to see if we could help her get those answers" and through "forensic investigative reporting" discovered that an arresting officer who had played a role in reversing the charging decision – but who had never been named publicly – had left the Met before the inquest took place in 2020, but returned to the force last year.
"This meant he had never given a statement about his role, leaving a gap in Christine's knowledge of what happened on the night of Caroline's arrest," Evans said.
"Tom and I were thrilled that Christine was able to use our findings to lobby the Met, which has announced its Directorate of Professional Standards is seeking to now bridge this gap in the evidence. It’s a breakthrough in the Flack family’s understanding of Caroline's arrest and subsequent charge."
Latchem added: "Christine is a grieving mother and deserves to know the full truth about what happened in the lead up to her daughter's death. We’re happy to have contributed even in a small way, and we will continue to ensure no stone goes unturned.
"At a time when media outlets are cutting funding for investigative journalism to the bone, our ongoing work with Byline Times seeking justice for Caroline, along with the Dan Wootton investigation, and all our other investigative work, shows how important public interest journalism can be for holding power to account."
British singer Olly Murs will headline the Flackstock festival, when it returns for its third year on 22 July. Money raised will be split equally between charities Choose Love, Mind, the Samaritans, and the Charlie Waller Trust.
‘Media Attacks on NHS Translation and Diversity Spending Completely Miss the Point of the Health Service’
This week, the Express published an article headlined 'taxpayers billed £100 million for NHS translators – could pay for 3,000 nurses'. The story completely missed the point of what the health service does.
The standfirst went on to explain that taxpayers "pick up the bill" for translation and interpretation" to ensure that the NHS can be "accessed in languages other than English”.
Given health and healthcare access inequalities, surely spending money to ensure people get the right care they need is a good thing – not to mention a legal requirement.
The Express article published on 2 April about NHS spending on translators
The Express packaged the story to suggest that it had uncovered a scandal. It included data revealed through Freedom of Information Requests (FOI) to 251 NHS trusts and 42 integrated care boards, which “routinely convert standard hospital and health literature into languages including Romanian, Arabic, Urdu, Bengali and Punjabi”.
The article included comments from a Reform Party spokesman, claiming that translation and interpretation services "were simply not necessary" and that artificial intelligence apps, such as Google Translate, could do the job – or that patients could use family members to translate for them.
The Express article followed the Mail’s report last week on National Trust cafés selling “woke scones” (made with margarine and not butter). It was another example of 'stories’ aimed at stirring up problems, rather than solving them.
The Mail article published on 31 March on 'woke scones'
Helping those in need be heard appears to be a bizarre issue to weaponise in manufactured 'culture wars’.
For starters, the total NHS spend in England for the last financial year was more than £180 billion, with a further £20 billion in local government spending on social care. So £100 million on translation might sound like a big number, but it is a tiny fraction of expenditure and would make little dent in nurse staffing across all NHS organisations.
Citizens or legal residents who don’t speak fluent or even basic English are, just like people with hearing loss, learning disabilities or cognitive impairment, as entitled to NHS care as the rest of the population. And there is already considerable evidence that they are not getting it, with health and healthcare access inequalities between different ethnic communities.
Denying people written information in their own language will only make matters worse.
When people who are sick, scared, vulnerable, distressed or have symptoms to discuss, treatments to understand, or complex psychosocial factors to explain, how can the quality and safety of the care they receive be improved if they can neither express nor understand key information?
There are also legal considerations. To provide valid consent to treatment in common law, patients must have sufficient information about the details, risks, potential harms and benefits of a proposed treatment (which could in some cases involve major surgery, powerful drugs or admission to intensive care). Language barriers must be overcome to make this a reality.
The Mental Capacity Act states that all reasonable efforts must be made to establish decision-specific capacity for treatment or care – which may include overcoming language barriers.
If patients lack capacity, then speaking to those closest to them is a key part of establishing their best interests for further decision-making. Again, this may require translators or clear written information in their first language. We do this for people with hearing loss via written communication or sign language.
Regulatory codes of practice for healthcare professionals are also clear that we must treat people equally, irrespective of characteristics including race, religion or nationality.
Using AI translation apps of variable reliability has its limits in a time-critical or emotionally-charged and challenging situation. And relying on family or friends to translate isn't always possible as not every patient is accompanied. If they are discussing personally sensitive or intimate information, they may be inhibited from doing so. If there are safeguarding concerns regarding abuse or neglect one could suspect the person translating of being coercive when doing so.
The thinly-veiled xenophobia and racism being whipped up by the Express (even against people who pay tax and National Insurance contributions and have precisely the same entitlement to care as native and confident English speakers) is part of a wider set of 'wedge issues’ being pushed by right-wing media outlets and sections of the Conservative and Reform parties.
They share a similar fixation with 'woke’ diversity managers or diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) policies in the NHS or other public services. Several Government ministers have lined up to call for a 'war on waste’ to remove such posts and policies.
Steve Barclay, when Health Secretary in 2023, wrote to integrated care boards in England instructing them to stop recruiting staff as dedicated EDI managers, arguing that the money should be spent on “frontline staff” instead.
The Express has published a number of articles lamenting 'wokery’ in the NHS – including, in January in a story headlined 'NHS spends £40 million on woke non-jobs that could pay for 1,150 nurses'.
Last year, the Spectator ran a FOI-based story showing that, out of an NHS workforce of around 1.5 million people, there were only 800 employees in dedicated EDI roles – yet called for those roles to be abolished.
Again, those employed in such posts account for a small fraction of 1% of the entire NHS workforce or spend. Their presence is de facto required due to the Equality Act and Equality Duty on public organisations and protections in employment law.
NHS organisations do have a very diverse workforce, yet there is clear evidence of ongoing and endemic discrimination towards minorities within it. There is also consistent evidence of discrimination and care inequalities between different ethnic and socio-economic groups the NHS serves.
The idea that a focus on EDI is somehow a bad thing and a distraction from real work, or that organisations should not employ a small number of people to oversee it, is not so much a dog-whistle as a wolf-klaxon. It is a classic distraction from the real issue – the 14 years of Conservative-led mismanagement of health and social care and of wider public health.
This decline has been well-documented by the Institute for Government think tank; as well former King’s Fund chief executive Professor Sir Chris Ham, who set out in expert detail the rise and decline of the service from the late 1990s through to the 2010 election and the current crisis in performance and public satisfaction.
Blaming our NHS crisis on the cost of translation and interpretation services, and diversity and inclusion managers, foments hostility against people from ethnic minorities, white people with poor English skills, and even those with full entitlement to use our public services and who contribute towards their costs.
They aren’t all rich enough to pay for their own personal translator or digitally equipped enough to auto-translate NHS information documents into their own languages.
I don’t see commentators on the right arguing against hospitals in France or Spain finding translations for ill white British expats or embassies around the world employing translators to help British citizens who have found themselves in a spot of bother with the local law. I wonder why.
Princess Diana ‘Phone Pest’ Story Links Both Rupert Murdoch and Piers Morgan to the ‘Criminal-Media Nexus’ of Police Corruption
A newly pleaded document submitted by Prince Harry’s legal team last month as part of his ongoing case against Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers for privacy intrusion sheds more light on what former Prime Minister Gordon Brown called the "criminal-media nexus” of journalists, private investigators and corrupt cops during the heyday of the tabloids.
In an amended claim over alleged unlawful information gathering in the case of HRH Duke of Sussex v News Group Newspapers, the claimants have lodged a notorious News of the World front page, dated 21 August 1994, carrying an exclusive story alleging that Princess Diana was a ‘phone pest’.
The story can only have come from police sources and so implicates both the then Editor of the now defunct News of the World, Piers Morgan, his then Chief Crime Reporter (now Editor of the Express) Gary Jones, and the proprietor Rupert Murdoch himself in the roaring trade between the tabloids and corrupt police officers.
At the centre of it all – and at the centre of many of the ongoing civil claims against both Murdoch’s newspapers, Mirror Group, and the Mail titles – is the role of the infamous detective agency, Southern Investigations, and the murder of its co-founder Daniel Morgan.
Police and Tabloid Corruption
Daniel Morgan was alleged to have been investigating police corruption when he was axed to death in a south London pub car park in March 1987.
His business partner, Jonathan Rees, was the prime suspect. Rees was arrested a few weeks later, along with one of the lead detectives on the initial murder inquiry, Detective Sergeant Sid Fillery.
At the inquest into Morgan's death in 1988, evidence emerged that Rees and Fillery had colluded in covering up the murder. By this point, Fillery had retired from the Metropolitan Police and taken Morgan’s place at the detective agency.
Southern Investigations was now on its way to becoming a one-stop-shop for the ‘dark arts’ of unlawful newsgathering for the tabloids.
Alastair Morgan, his partner Kirsteen Knight, and solicitor Raju Bhatt at the 2021 publication of the Daniel Morgan Independent Panel report. Photo: Kirsty O'Connor/PA/Alamy
Throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, Southern Investigations became the main hub for selling confidential personal and financial information to the press obtained by phone-tapping, burglary, covert surveillance, and computer hacking.
Its major purchaser was Alex Marunchak, News Editor of the News of the World.
Rees and Fillery were also instrumental in training up a raft of Fleet Street journalists in subterfuge and surveillance – the most notable of which was Mazher Mahmood, the Sunday tabloid’s famous ‘fake sheikh’.
One of the main sources of both this illicit information, and the techniques for gathering it, was a network of corrupt police officers in south-east London. The trade was so extensive the CID in the area was known as the ‘News of the World Regional Crime Squad’.
Rees and Fillery’s close relationship with organised crime, and the ‘firm within a firm’ of corrupt Met Police officers, saw them engaged in a roaring trade with News International. But, even if the amounts of money siphoned-off to Southern Investigations didn’t attract the attention of the company’s proprietor, Rupert Murdoch, the political dimensions of their dark arts surely would have.
When the then Culture Secretary David Mellor suggested in 1991 that the “popular press is drinking in the last chance saloon”, Southern Investigations set up the surveillance and bugging devices to expose him in an extramarital affair.
Rees and Fillery were also instrumental in the brokering of letters stolen from Paddy Ashdown’s solicitor, showing that the Liberal Democrat Leader had also once had an extramarital affair. The information was revealed just before the 1992 General Election.
In effect, Southern Investigations and Alex Marunchak were becoming masters of politically targeted kompromat – years before the Russian term was well-known. But where do Piers Morgan and Express Editor Gary Jones fit in? And what did Rupert Murdoch know?
The Phone Pest Story
The following is an edited extract from 'Who Killed Daniel Morgan?’, which I co-authored with Daniel Morgan's brother Alastair Morgan
Piers Morgan took over the Editorship of the News of the World at the age of 28 in February 1994, at the height of the tabloid frenzy around the break-up of the marriage of Princess Diana and Prince Charles.
Morgan's only journalistic experience to date was penning the ‘Bizarre’ celebrity column at The Sun. He appointed an even younger Rebekah Brooks to become Features Editor that spring.
Given his inexperience with reporting, Morgan relied heavily on the older guard at the newspaper, especially his then News Editor, Alex Marunchak, whom he described as having a “deadpan, half-Ukrainian, moustachioed visage”.
Marunchak’s police sources would soon land Morgan in trouble.
Piers Morgan, who went on to become Editor of the Mirror, after the High Court ruled there was "extensive" phone-hacking by Mirror Group Newspapers from 2006 to 2011. Photo: PA Images/Alamy
In his autobiography The Insider, Morgan explains how, in August 1994, Marunchak and Chief Crime Reporter Gary Jones walked into the Editor’s office in Wapping and explained: “Got rather a big one here, boss. Diana’s a phone pest.” Marunchak went on to elaborate: “The cops are investigating hundreds of calls she has made to a married art dealer called Oliver Hoare.”
Jones backed up his News Editor with “a read-out from the police report" which he then quoted verbatim.
Hoare had received hundreds of silent, anonymous phone calls and reported them to the police. With the help of British Telecom, the police had traced the calls to Kensington Palace, the home of Princess Diana.
When Hoare was informed of the source of the calls, he told police officers that he and his wife were friends of Charles and Diana and he had been – according to the police report – “consoling her and becoming quite close to her” after her separation from the then heir to the throne.
The News of the World called the antique dealer for comment. Hoare did not deny there had been a police investigation. Under the bylines of Gary Jones and Royal Reporter Clive Goodman, the News of the World splashed the story over the front and four inside pages.
The details in the exclusive could only have come from the police documents: the date of Hoare’s first complaint, the involvement of BT’s specialist Nuisance Calls Bureau, the special code BT was given to trace the calls, the activation of the code on 13 January 1994, transcripts of six silent calls, and then the tracing equipment which linked the calls to a private number used by Prince Charles.
All of this detailed information could only have been sourced from the police.
The next day, in a long interview in the Daily Mail, Princess Diana denied the story.
Piers Morgan began to worry that he had made a huge career blunder. There were calls for him to resign. Marunchak tried to reassure the News of the World Editor by telling him: “We’ve had the report read to us, she’s lying." But Morgan still feared that the document could be a forgery.
“I felt sick to the pit of my stomach,” Morgan recalled in The Insider. “I couldn’t eat or even drink a cup of tea, it was hellish.”
What Murdoch Knew
The only thing that finally put Morgan's mind at rest was a call from his proprietor, Rupert Murdoch.
“Hi Piers,” Murdoch said. “I can’t really talk for long but I just wanted you to know that your story is 100% bang on. Can’t tell you how I know, but I just know.”
He then instructed his Editor to get on TV and tell the world that Princess Diana is "a liar", and to promise more material in the Sunday tabloid the following week.
Though relieved, Morgan couldn’t help admitting to Murdoch that he didn’t have any more material. Murdoch replied: “Oh, you will have by Sunday, don’t worry. Gotta go. Good luck.”
How had Murdoch independently verified the story? It was Alex Marunchak who had seen the police report. Would the proprietor have checked with his veteran News Editor?
At the Leveson Inquiry into the practices, culture and ethics of the press in 2012 – following the exposure of the phone-hacking scandal the year before – Murdoch explicitly denied even remembering meeting Marunchak. But, in careful legal language guarding against any surviving photos, he added: "I might have shaken hands, walking through the office."
By that point, Marunchak had served in a number of senior roles at the News of the World from his first days in the Wapping dispute, attending parties with the News International CEO and senior police officers, to being made Editor of the Irish edition two decades later.
Steve Grayson, a freelance photographer who worked at the Sunday tabloid in the late 1990s, recalls Marunchak explicitly saying that he had a direct call from Murdoch on one occasion.
Despite his growing global influence, there is also no doubt that, during this era, Murdoch himself still called senior management at the newspaper most Friday or Saturday nights to check what stories were coming up. And there’s more evidence that Murdoch was well aware of the existence of Marunchak, who had served his company for more than 25 years.
Prince Harry with his lawyer David Sherborne at the High Court during his recent trial against Mirror Group Newspapers. Photo: PA/Alamy
In correspondence from September 1997, the then Taoiseach of Ireland, Bertie Ahern, wrote personally to Murdoch to thank him for the News of the World’s coverage of the country's General Election. He said he particularly “appreciated the very professional approach of your Associate Editor Alex Marunchak”. Ahern even asked Murdoch to pass on “my thanks and best wishes to Alex”.
Murdoch replied on 30 September 1997: “I shall be delighted to pass on your comments.”
Whatever Murdoch’s uncertain memories of Alex Marunchak, the ultimate source of Piers Morgan’s scoop was a confidential police file. Later, Morgan was careful to say that the source wasn’t a ‘serving police officer’ – partly because that would have opened him, and any police officer, up to criminal charges.
Nobody was censured or sanctioned for the phone pest story. In fact, it was quite the opposite.
Gary Jones went on to win the Press Gazette’s Reporter of the Year Award, partly due to his News of the World exclusive about Diana’s anonymous calls.
Criticised by the then Press Complaints Council for another intrusive royal splash, Morgan would leave the Murdoch Sunday tabloid in 1995 and take up an even more senior position editing its rival, the Daily Mirror.
He would soon bring over Jones and, with him, the dark arts of Sid Fillery and Jonathan Rees.
Ongoing Trials
While the judge has not ruled whether Prince Harry’s claims can date back to 1994 and the targeting of his mother, the evidence of Gary Jones’ relationship with Southern Investigations has already been heard in the case of the Duke of Sussex and other claimants against Mirror Group Newspapers.
The judge in that case, Justice Fancourt, concluded that Piers Morgan, as Editor of the Mirror newspapers, must have known about phone-hacking and other unlawful information gathering.
Meanwhile, similar evidence is due to be heard in the pending claims by Prince Harry and others (including Baroness Doreen Lawrence) in claims against the publishers of the Mail and Mail on Sunday.
According to the particulars of claim issued so far, Associated Newspapers also procured the services of private investigators involved in illicit information, including allegations that Southern Investigations were involved in targeting the family of Stephen Lawrence, murdered by a racist gang connected to the south-east London underworld in 1993.
Like the tabloids used to say, this story will run and run.
‘Telegraph Takeover Bid Backed by UAE Doesn’t Matter – Because there’s an Agenda at Every Newspaper’
Many years ago, I was a junior business reporter on Rupert Murdoch’s Sunday Times. It had been decided that I was to write that weekend’s main editorial based on an official report castigating Mohamed Al Fayed over the purchase of House of Fraser which included Harrods.
Fayed, it seems, had been deliberately opaque about the true origins of his funding. We were having an editorial meeting, me and the paper’s much more senior executives, about what the leader should say, when who should walk in but Murdoch. We all leapt to attention. He made a gesture for everyone to sit down, and then asked what we were discussing. They said that I was just explaining the importance of the report and that it was going to be the paper’s leader and I was going to write it. Murdoch turned to me, inquisitively. Thanks guys.
Murdoch fixed me a stare. “Son, who cares? Why does it matter?” he inquired softly and slowly. Nobody else said anything. I was on my own. I was sweating but the room felt chilly. Gulp. I blathered about how we could never be too careful, how it was vital that people didn’t lie about the source of their wealth, how we had anti-money laundering rules to prevent this sort of thing, how organised crime was a growing problem and we had to be more on top of it, and drugs and terrorism…
Murdoch looked blank. I could feel the ground opening beneath my feet. Then, a man who was accompanying the press mogul – a tall American in black, shiny, crocodile shoes – said: “Hey, Rupe you remember that Fayed took us for 100 million, down in Texas?” Murdoch turned to him, and said, “You’re right, he did.” He wheeled round to me and added: “Son, write it as hard as you like”. With that, he and his pal walked off.
Rupert Murdoch, pictured at his annual party at Spencer House, St James' Place in London, June 2023
The Sunday Times was my first national newspaper and this was my first introduction to how proprietors secure a product that is to their taste and beliefs.
This was an overt example, where the man himself was present. Most of the time he did not need to be. It occurred subliminally – self-censorship, reporting a story in such a manner that you knew would please the bosses, would stick to an unwritten agenda and earn you an approving nod from on high.
It occurred in the same way at every newspaper where I’ve worked: Sunday Express, Daily Express, Observer, Independent on Sunday, Independent, Evening Standard. Really, it happens everywhere, in every job: you know what the chief thinks and unless you’re desperate to leave you toe the party line. Which is why it is perplexing to read so much guff about the proposed takeover of the Telegraph by a consortium backed by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan, vice-president of the United Arab Emirates.
The Sheikh also owns Manchester City and, in that regard, his being a member of the UAE government is rarely mentioned; references to him in the football press tend to dwell on his fabulous wealth.
A football club is very different from a major newspaper. But, honestly, reading the howls of protest from some journalistic quarters you could be forgiven for thinking they are allowed a free hand in everything they write, that they’ve never been told to temper an argument or as I say, have done it themselves, without being instructed?
Perhaps they are, in which case, I must be an oppressed rare species – on my own, wandering through the media landscape, subject to the inability to express myself. I am not, because most articles do not touch the management floor.
There have been occasions, though, when I’ve been encouraged to pursue a subject in which the owner has a ‘special interest’. Again, I ask, has anyone else not experienced the same, and provided what I write is true, is it that bad?
To that list of titles, I could have added another, The National. That’s right, for the last four years I’ve written a weekly column for the UAE newspaper owned by one Sheikh Mansour. Ah, I hear you cry: "he’s told you to write this, you’re under orders." Not a bit of it. In that period, I’ve had no contact with the Sheikh or his official representatives. I do speak to the paper’s Editor-in-Chief, Mina Al-Oraibi – that’s right a woman in charge of a newspaper, a concept still unfamiliar to those main critics of the Mansour deal, the Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail and The Times.
One piece I submitted was rejected; post-COVID, a firm of consultants produced a study saying that luxury goods were over, that the outbreak had made us turn our backs on excess. I thought this would be a suitable column topic.
Colleagues at the paper disagreed; they had plenty of evidence to show the claim was wrong, that bling was very much alive. I said I would choose another subject. As it was, they were right, the consultancy was wrong. Another piece, on Al Fayed, I quoted him using a profanity against Prince Philip. It had to come out, they said, as, to be fair, it probably would have done in any British-based title.
It may hurt the anti-Mansour investment (and it is an investment, his people are insisting, saying he will only be a ‘passive partner’ in a US-run vehicle) brigade to learn this but in my experience, The National is run along professional lines. It has a newsroom of the sort they would recognise. To my knowledge there is not a UAE commissar sitting alongside Al-Oraibi and her senior team.
It's staffed too by journalists from across Fleet Street, from the Telegraph, Independent, Daily Mail and others. Its editorial offices in UAE, London and Washington DC are fully manned and well-resourced. I deal regularly with the London bureau and as far as I am aware, the editor, Damien McElroy (ex-Telegraph) is free to cover whatever he likes.
Because it’s not so tightly constrained and prone to the cycles of advertising as others, The National can keep its website open to all – a breath of fresh air in this age of paywalls and subscriptions. The paper has as its mission ‘The Middle East. Explained’.
That’s its USP, writing about the Middle East, and yes, often providing a UAE slant. Is that awful? It’s where the title hails from, it’s home. It’s no different from London newspapers seeing things through British eyes. No different either from pro-Conservative newspapers seeing things through a pro-Conservative prism. Perish the thought.
‘Starmer Cosied Up to the Murdoch Press in the Same Week It Faced New Allegations of Criminality – Why?’
What is the word for a politician who will do anything to get hold of power?
The question arises thanks to the front page of Friday's Sun newspaper, on which, beneath a banner reading "Labour leader at Sun HQ", we were told that "Keir joins revolt over 3 Lions shirt – he blasts woke flag and high price".
There are only two possibilities here. Either the Leader of the Labour Party sincerely believes that the design of the England football shirt is a matter that should properly engage the attention of a leader of the Opposition. Or – surely much more likely – he just doesn’t care what he says so long as it gets him nice coverage in the Sun, in which case he provides an answer to the question above.
It is actually worse than that, because this is only the latest evidence that Starmer is selling his soul to Murdoch.
He has already attended the media baron's summer party, paying personal homage to the old man and drinking his champagne. And now he is happy to visit the Sun’s offices and play rent-a-quote in support of a vacuous anti-woke jibe.
In terms of displaying lack of principle, this obviously does not compete with refusing to call for a ceasefire in Gaza and failing to acknowledge the economic disaster that is Brexit, but it is amoral in its own way.
For the Murdoch press is not only responsible, over decades, for demeaning everything that could be described as decent about Britain and for wrecking the lives of countless innocent people – it is also responsible for wholesale, proven law-breaking.
And remarkably, Starmer’s visit to ‘Sun HQ’ took place just a day after we were presented with a new and shocking picture of the scale of that criminality – some of it well established as fact, some in the form of fresh and very detailed accusations.
It comes in a series of monster documents revealed in court, some of which can be accessed here.
These latest legal claims allege that law-breaking at the Murdoch tabloids has been even more widespread and systematic, has persisted for much longer and has implicated even more staff and senior executives than previously acknowledged.
The allegations extend far beyond phone-hacking and unlawful information gathering to include, for example, perjury and the deliberate destruction of evidence of criminality – matters which, you might think, would be of concern to a former Director of Public Prosecutions such as Starmer.
And though – yes, this needs to be placed on record – the company continues to deny a good deal of it, the Labour leadership should ask itself why the company systematically chooses to avoid confronting the charges in open court and instead pays off the claimants, thus far at a cost of £1.2 billion.
Quite a few of Labour's new chums are named in the documents.
There is an awful lot, for example, about Rebekah Brooks, Murdoch’s longstanding CEO in the UK and a former Editor of the Sun. She knew more and earlier about criminal activities than previously admitted, the documents allege, and they suggest directly that she participated in the cover-up. Again, she has denied these things and was cleared of similar criminal charges back in 2014, but the new claims draw on a wealth of evidence not available back then, including evidence relating to the hacking of Milly Dowler’s phone.
The name of the Sun’s current Editor, Victoria Newton, also keeps turning up in the court documents in very dark contexts. How, for example, will she account for the email she sent Brooks in 2006 saying "just blagged the bill from the Dorchester now – 11 grand – v expensive?"
And there is veteran Sun reporter Nick Parker who, phone records show, phoned a specialist blagger of medical records 1,763 times between 2005 and 2010 – more than once every working day.
The catalogue of names and worse-than-doubtful alleged behaviour is very long – and the allegations relate to events up to 2011, including during the Leveson Inquiry into the press, when Murdoch witnesses swore blind they had never done anything dodgy.
Ancient history, people will say. Hardly.
These are people Keir Starmer is associating himself with right now. And remember that Murdoch is also still the owner of Fox, a channel that encouraged an insurrection in the US in 2020.
People will also say there is nothing new in it all, because Tony Blair sucked up to Murdoch before the 1997 election and Gordon Brown was pally with Brooks before 2010. Well, we now know that Murdoch people hacked Labour phones behind those leaders’ backs – shouldn’t Starmer and his people see that as a warning?
And, of course, people will also say that you need to do unpleasant things to win power, which brings us back to the question we started with. Surely there is a line you don’t cross? And, surely, given all we know about his methods, Murdoch must be on the far side of that line.
Getting ‘Closure for Carrie’ – the Family of Caroline Flack is Seeking New Answers from Scotland Yard after Byline Times probe
Read Dan Evan's and Tom Latchems's exclusive three-part investigation into the Caroline Flack Story in the April edition of Byline Times. Available as a digital edition online now, or in stores and newsagents from 20 March.
Read Dan Evan's and Tom Latchems's exclusive three-part investigation into the Caroline Flack Story in the April edition of Byline Times. Available as a digital edition online now, or in stores and newsagents from 20 March.
The family of Caroline Flack is hailing a breakthrough in an ongoing four-year battle for answers from the Metropolitan Police over the assault charge that led to the presenter’s suicide, it can be revealed.
New information, uncovered by a Byline Times investigation, means the arresting officer in the case must now explain their role in overturning a decision by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) to issue Caroline with a caution because of her risk of self-harming.
It follows the intervention of police in December 2019 to reject an initial “public interest” decision to accept Caroline’s admission of causing injury to her partner Lewis Burton without going to court in favour of a public trial the prospect of which, a coroner later found, led to her death.
Coroner Mary Hassell said in August 2020: “I find the reason for her taking her life was she now knew she was being prosecuted for certainty and she knew she would face the media, press, publicity – it would all come down upon her.”
Caroline’s mother Christine is now expecting a statement from Met. Detective Constable Jack Bilsborough detailing the “rationale” behind the challenge, which was raised unilaterally by a more senior officer, Detective Inspector Lauren Bateman, without notes being kept as to why.
A new three-part probe published in the April edition of Byline Times tells how DC Bilsborough left the police before the inquest and other investigations by the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) and could not, until now, be compelled to speak.
However, after this newspaper learned the officer returned to service in October 2023, Mrs Flack has now lodged a new complaint with the IOPC in order to obtain his evidence.
She said: “We need, as a family, to understand. Were it not for Byline Times, I would never have even known Jack Bilsborough had re-joined the police.”
A spokesperson for the Met. added: “Any officer in the Met, regardless of whether they left the Met and later re-joined, who is subject to a complaint, would be expected to provide
an account. The officer mentioned wants to make it clear he would offer every assistance as required.”
Our investigation also reveals the truth behind the worst of the news output that led almost two million people to call for a ‘Caroline’s Law’; legislation - never in the end debated at Westminster - to make it a criminal offence to publish unduly oppressive media coverage that pushed people to suicide.
Sources inside The Sun tell how the tabloid bought and published a picture of Caroline’s blood-stained bed - likely to be key evidence in the then-upcoming trial - without explaining it was her own self-inflicted injuries that had caused the scene.
And members of her former management team reveal that despite having three journalists named as authors on the piece, the paper claimed it had been too short-staffed to seek a right to reply comment from the presenter before running a story Christine says played a big part in her suicide.Christine also tells Byline Times of the emotional impact on the Flack family of having to still doggedly battle for the truth four years after her death – and how what happened to Caroline at Holborn Police Station on Friday 13 December 2019 led to changes for the police nationwide.
Read Dan Evan's and Tom Latchems's exclusive three-part investigation into the Caroline Flack Story in the April edition of Byline Times. Available as a digital edition online now, or in stores and newsagents from 20 March.
Read Dan Evan's and Tom Latchems's exclusive three-part investigation into the Caroline Flack Story in the April edition of Byline Times. Available as a digital edition online now, or in stores and newsagents from 20 March.
UK News Coverage of Conflict in Israel and Gaza Showed ‘Overwhelming’ Bias, Report Finds
UK news coverage of the Israel-Gaza conflict in the month after the 7 October attacks showed an “overwhelming” bias in favour of Israel, according to a detailed analysis published today by the Centre for Media Monitoring, an offshoot of the Muslim Council for Britain.
Pro-Israeli sources were quoted more often and challenged less frequently than Palestinian sources, the report says, while news reports were frequently framed in ways that overlooked or marginalised Palestinian perspectives.
Israeli deaths also tended to be described in emotive language while Palestinian casualties were often presented dispassionately, it says, so that while Israelis were frequently presented as victims of massacres and atrocities, Palestinians simply “died”.
The report’s authors analysed more than 176,000 broadcast news items across 13 channels received in the UK (including some repeats) between 7 October and 7 November last year, and 25,000 news articles appearing on 28 online media websites in the same period.
“What we’ve uncovered,” they write, “is that the majority of news outlets have chosen to present news from an Israeli perspective, with major failures of basic fact-checking and verification.”
Citing recent research that found US news media unduly favouring Israeli narratives, they state: “Our analysis shows the same broad finding... There is an overwhelming bias against Palestinians and their cause.”
Key Findings
● Israeli opinion and commentary were sought nearly twice as often as Palestinian viewpoints in online and three times more often in broadcast news.
● Over the whole month of the period studied, in which many more Palestinian civilians were killed than Israeli civilians, terms such as “atrocity” and “slaughter” were 70% more likely to be applied to Israeli deaths.
● The rights of Israel were mentioned in broadcast reports five times more often than the rights of Palestinians.
● More than three-quarters of online articles described the conflict as the “Israel-Hamas war” – a form of words favoured by the Israeli Government and which identifies all residents of Gaza with the governing party there.
● In more than three-quarters of online news articles making reference to Israel, Hamas or Gaza there was no mention of the words “Palestinian” or “Palestine”, indicating a tendency to deny Palestinian identity.
● Whereas Palestinian news sources were frequently treated by reporters and news presenters with scepticism, Israeli sources such as the IDF, which has a proven track record of inaccuracy, were often taken at face value.
● Unverified, sensational news stories such as the (never substantiated) allegations that babies were beheaded and burned in ovens by Hamas attackers were given widespread coverage, often without any reference to sourcing.
● Israel’s claim that Hamas was responsible for the bombing of the Al Hathi hospital in Gaza on 17 October was widely accepted by news media, though when Channel 4 News analysed the recordings presented as evidence for this it quickly found it had been manipulated.
● Even after claims were disproved, commentators, presenters and journalists sometimes repeated them on air, or allowed them to be repeated, without challenge.
The report cites examples of good journalistic practice and points out that some journalists stepped forward to criticise coverage of the conflict by their own and other media.
“The evidence that we have gathered shows unequivocally that the overall tone of coverage in the Western media has been pro-Israel," it states. "This is also a conclusion drawn by journalists and staff at some media corporations who have accused their own outlets of among other things ‘journalistic malpractice’."
The study notes difficulties faced by international journalists who are allowed access to Gaza by Israel only "under strict limitations including being forbidden to speak to Palestinians”, though it criticises media that failed to draw attention to the distortion of coverage caused by these restrictions.
A theme of the report is what it calls the “dehumanisation” of Palestinians in Gaza, which included “the minimisation of their suffering, effectively rendering them invisible despite the huge numbers of those killed”.
Where emotive language was used by journalists it was chiefly in reference to the suffering of Israelis, while Palestinian suffering tended to be reduced to a death count that was itself often treated with suspicion and not explicitly linked to Israeli action.
An aspect of this dehumanisation, the report indicates, was the readiness of many journalists and media outlets to accept a representation of the population of Gaza as synonymous with Hamas. It notes that Hamas has not been elected in Gaza since 2006, when it won 44% of the vote, and that in a poll weeks before 7 October two-thirds of Gazans said they did not trust Hamas.
Journalists, it says, rarely put such points to speakers who asserted that Gazans were collectively responsible for the 7 October attacks. Nor were those points made when marches in London in support of a ceasefire were described in some media as ‘pro-Hamas’ demonstrations.
Another theme is what is called the denial of context. The report cites numerous examples of presenters interrupting speakers who sought to refer to events before 7 October and often insisted instead that they denounce the Hamas actions. It describes this as an Israeli perspective.
“Our view is that whilst news outlets can (and perhaps should) focus on a specific incident at the time it occurs, when it is part of a broader news story that continues over many weeks and months it is unreasonable to simply take the Israeli perspective and not provide the relevant context," the report states.
"Whilst no context justifies terrorism, acknowledging the historical context within the overall news coverage is important to ensure that audiences have a fuller understanding of what perhaps led to the attacks on 7 October.”
Elsewhere the report states that “media outlets must not be advocates of one cause, yet accuracy and correct framing leaves no room to ignore the context of 75 years of Palestinian suffering".
"Nor should it allow for the fact that this is fundamentally a conflict of two unequals, namely an occupier (Israel) and an occupied (Palestine) recognised in international law and by a majority of countries and people as well as the historical record,” it adds.
The report is critical of news outlets including the Express, TalkTV and GB News, which it says used the opportunity to give platforms to commentators expressing Islamophobic views.
The Express, for instance, published a comment article attributing the 7 October attacks to “historic Islamist bloodlust” and “an ever-present cancer” having a “medieval ambition” which is “the genocide of the Jewish people”.
On TalkTV, the report states, Sun columnist Trevor Kavanagh was left unchallenged when he said: “By the very definition of being a Muslim voter, you are going to be anti-Jewish.”
‘The “Dangerous Muslim” Trope is Being Weaponised to Avoid Scrutiny’
It’s not about the women and children being massacred in Gaza, it’s about Lindsey Hoyle and UK's elected representatives feeling scared. Somehow the House of Commons Speaker turned a motion by the Scottish National Party calling for a ceasefire in Gaza into a debate on who runs the country. According to former Home Secretary, Suella Braveman it is the “Islamists”.
It is a far-right trope that effectively defines Muslims in Britain as a 'Trojan Horse’. Braverman and her acolytes are now puffing out their chests, determined to face down this phantom menace to the democracy which they themselves have so readily undermined.
Lee Anderson turned his fire on London Mayor, Sadiq Khan, who he opined was being controlled by Islamists. Khan’s Muslimness has so offended Conservatives both in Britain and across the pond that, every few years, they accuse him of being in cahoots with undesirables. In their eyes, he is now nothing more than a puppet.
Braverman and Anderson have been joined by William Shawcross, the former extremism tsar who lamented that the Government had ignored the recommendations from his review of the counter-terrorism Prevent Strategy – a strategy considered by critics to be a mechanism to criminalise religious and political beliefs.
Shawcross cited the safety of the public, which he claimed is now at increased risk in the UK due to the war in Gaza. Official police statistics show that the arrest rate for the millions of people who have marched since October is lower than the Glastonbury Festival – a fact not reported in any mainstream media outlet.
Both in its timing and execution, the campaign by those against Palestine employed its 'dangerous Muslims' card in a manner that has left journalists on right-wing radio stations aghast at how possibly “orchestrated” it is.
Academic Ben Whitham has called it a well-crafted “racist tradition”. As he posts, “politicians and journalists have worked hard over many years to perpetuate the idea that British Muslims represent a fifth column and secret cabal plotting to 'Islamicise’ the UK”.
The lives of Palestinians are now a political game, whereby those supporting the idea that they should not be murdered and maimed are cast as the 'baddies’. This isn’t about the safety of MPs. Turning themselves into victims of a phantom threat is really a panic about their moral culpability in supporting the mass slaughter of civilians in Gaza – aided and abetted by the media class.
This nexus was at work again this week in the spike in online articles and broadcast mentions of the word 'Islamist’ . The use of the word and its associated terms suggests that detractors don’t hate Muslims per se, it’s just the really, really bad ones they’re concerned about.
Yet time and again, 'Islamist’ is used when reporting on any issue in which Muslim voices are raised, leading to debates on safety and extremism.
Democracy is great, we are told, because alongside other things, it encourages citizens to voice their concerns on issues they feel strongly about. But if you do this as a Muslim, there’s a high chance you will be labelled an Islamist; an extremist; and, in the case of Palestine, an antisemite.
As a new study on the media’s use of language when reporting on Muslims concludes, Islamism is “represented as being totalitarian and as such is incompatible with democracy and other modernist values”.
The Government has made no secret of its disdain for Muslims for many years.
The Prime Minister and his Deputy can’t bring themselves to use the word “Islamophobia”. Conservative MP Paul Scully joined the chorus when he claimed particular areas of Britain with large ethnic minority populations are no-go zones, citing the heavily Muslim-populated Tower Hamlets in east London and Sparkhill in Birmingham. Again, 'no-go zones’ is a suspiciously coded phrase which most likely means areas people like Scully don’t like visiting as opposed to anyone actually being denied entry. The last time a newspaper printed such lies the press regulator ruled against the Daily Mail and forced it to publish a correction.
The tropes now being launched against Britain’s Muslims are no longer obscure fringe talking points –they are being thrust into the mainstream by Conservative politicians and the right-wing media, irate at seeing mass protests in support of the Palestinian people. The Telegraph, a pillar of Britain’s right-wing media long hostile to any Muslim protest, front-paged the absurd allegation that Islamists were now running the country.
The next time a frustrated Brit has to endure cancelled trains or can’t get a GP appointment, or an entire council goes bankrupt as many are predicted to do, remember: it’s the Muslims who have done that.
More concerning is the fact that the kind of rhetoric that was routinely found on the pages of right-wing publications now has a broadcast presence, on the likes of GB News and TalkTV.
This is not mere 'news’ but polemic against British citizens. At a time where much of the population continues to face the challenges of a fall in living standards and the destruction of institutions, there are few if any solutions being offered to them.
Instead, they are being served an enemy.