Sequel

Roger Ebert: We've Seen This Movie Before

Yes.

Yes we have.

Entire Eastern Seaboard Destroyed: NYC Now an Extinct Ruin

...At least that's what the media outlets have been leading me to believe.

In other news, Lower Manhattan got a lot of rain.

Now we begin the walkback.

Dodged a bullet.

Not as bad as we told you feared.

Oh fer crying out loud...

Late Edit:
CJR's The Observatory would like to take folks like me to the woodshed. Fair enough.

Later Edit:
And then there's this, which I believe encapsulates a good portion of the irritation that spawned this post. Complain like you invented the sh!t. Makes you all the more deserving in our eyes.

Man on the (Burning) Street Interview

(Via The Big Picture)

Oh my. A BBC interviewer speaks with Darcus Howe, a West Indian writer and broadcaster, about the London riots.

If there's a better illustration of a biased news reader trying (and failing) to stick to the script, I've yet to see it.


Here are her questions

BBC News Reader Fiona Armstrong Q1: Marcus Dowe [sic] are you shocked by what you've seen there [in south London] last night?

Mr. Howe (thank you very much) replies that he was not shocked that it happened. His general point is that there were signs that keen observers could have picked up on for a long time.

Naturally, this point is utterly lost on the news reader.

Armstrong Q2: Mr. Howe - If I could just stope you for a moment. You say you are not shocked. Does this mean you condone what happend in your community last night?

Howe:I condone – if I – Of Course Not! What am I going to condone it for? What I am not – what I’m concerned about more than anything else, there’s a young man called Mark Duggan. He has parents, he has brothers, he has sisters, and two yards away from where he lives, a police officer blew his head off.

Armstrong: Well, Mr. Howe we have to wait-

Howe: Let me finish-

The volume on Howe's mic is lowered.

Armstrong: Well, Mr. Howe we have to wait for the official inquiry before we can say things like that. We don't know what happened to Mr. Duggan. We are going to wait for the police report on it.

Armstrong: If I can take you on a bit, you were talking about your grandson, you were talking about young people...

Howe: They have been stopping and searching young blacks for no reason at all. I have a grandson - he's an angel. And he began to think he was coming of age when a policeman slapped him up against a wall and searched him...I asked him the other day, A propo of a sense that something was going seriously wrong in this country. I asked him how many times have the police searched you. He said: “Papa, I can’t count there’s so many times.”

Armstrong: Mr Howe, that may well have happened and if you say it did – I – I am not to gainsay you. But that is not an excuse to go out rioting and cause the sort of damage that we’ve been seeing over the past few days.

Howe: Where were you in 1981 in Brixton?

Armstrong: ..............Mr. Howe.

Howe: I don’t call it rioting, I call it an insurrection of the masses of the people. It is happening in Syria, it is happening in Clapton, it’s happening in Liverpool. It’s happening in Port of Spain, Trinidad. And that is the nature of the historical moment. There is a, it takes -

Armstrong: Mr. Howe. If I can just ask you, you are not a stranger to riots yourself, I understand, are you? You have taken part in them yourself?

Howe: I’m not a – I have never taken part in a single riot. I have been on demonstrations that ended up in a conflict. And have some respect for an old West Indian negro, instead of accusing me of being a rioter. Because I – you don’t want me to get abusive – you just sound idiotic. Have some respect! Have – have grandchildren-

Armstrong: Darcus Howe, thank you very much for joining us from Croydon, Darcus Howe, the writer and broadcaster.

The BBC has since apologized for suggesting the Mr. Howe was a rioter, but reviewing their list of questions, it's clear they have a lot more to apologize for:

Question 1: "Are you shocked?"
Question 2: "You're not shocked, so you condone it, then?!"
Judgment: "Well, your grandson could have been mistreated by police, but that's no excuse for rioting."
Question 3: (personal attack) "You've rioted, haven't you?"

Ye gods.

Would you Give This Man 100,000 Quid?

Mulcair: No hush money = no hush.

Cos, y'know, the News of the World did. But now they don't.

Gosh, whatever did they pay this man for? I mean, I know he's gone to prison for his role in hacking into personal voicemail, but now that he's out - what's he up to?

Answer: He is deeply mired in legal troubles.The kind that cost lots and lots of money. Until recently Mr. Mulcair has been silent and apparently able to pay his attorney. Wonder if those two facts have a common cause?

Ryan Chittum has one theory.

July 20, 2011 - News International lets it be known that it will no longer pay for Mulcair's attorney.  As in "Oh, you know about us paying his legal bills? Well... we just stopped doing that. So there."

July 29, 2011 - Mulcair makes a public statement:

Glenn Mulcaire has already expressed his sincere regret to those who have been hurt and affected by his activities and he repeats that apology most sincerely.


He was effectively employed by News of the World from 2002 to carry out his role as a private investigator.
As he accepted when he pleaded guilty in 2007 to charges of phone interception he admits that his role did include phone hacking. As an employee he acted on the instructions of others.

There were also occasions when he understood his instructions were from those who genuinely wished to assist in solving crimes. Any suggestion that he acted in such matters unilaterally is untrue. In the light of the ongoing police investigation, he cannot say any more.

Oh, but he will. He'll say a lot more, now that the News International money fairy has gone away. Most likely under oath.
Best prepare yourself for a smear-a-thon, Mr. Mulcair - NI is not going to be happy with you.

Expect every bad thing you've ever done to start appearing on the front page.

My Very Good and Trusted Friends

(Via CJR)

Imagine a parent losing a child to violent crime. Then imagine that crime becomes a national cause thanks to a team of newspaper reporters who refuse to let the story fade away. Laws are changed as a result of the coverage.

It would be easy to understand that the parent would have some affection for the newspaper that championed their lost child's cause.

Even if the paper was the now infamous News of the World.

Were it me, I could see myself writing a supportive column very similar to the one Sara Payne wrote in the NotW's final edition.

It is easy to forget in these dark times that the News of the World has often been a force for good and that has more than anything to do with the people that work on it  And its these people I have come to respect and it is for these people write this piece I do  not pretend that they are perfect or always got it right but I can tell you on a personal level there have been many times when they have stayed close and stood beside me not for the headline or public credit but just because it was the right thing to do.

 And were it me- I could hardly imagine what I would be thinking after reading this:

Sara Payne, whose eight-year-old daughter Sarah was abducted and murdered in July 2000, has been told by Scotland Yard that they have found evidence to suggest she was targeted by the News of the World's investigator Glenn Mulcaire, who specialised in hacking voicemail.

Police had earlier told her correctly that her name was not among those recorded in Mulcaire's notes, but on Tuesday officers from Operation Weeting told her they had found her personal details among the investigator's notes. These had previously been thought to refer to a different target.

Here's the thing: NotW was attempting to hack into a cell phone that - of all people - Rebekah Brooks gave to her.

Her friends at NotW give her a phone to help her keep in contact with her many supporters - and since the phone's details are known to the paper, their hacking wing swings into action to try and get personal information illegally.


Un. Be. Lievable.

Naomi Campbell, Ahead of the Curve

(Via CJR)

Funny how things are in plain sight as "no big deal" until those things turn out to be hacking into a dead girl's cell phone.

Here's Naomi Campbell going after now CNN anchor Piers Morgan back in 2007:

CAMPBELL: What do you think of the News Of The World reporter who was recently found guilty of tapping the Royals’ phones? Did you ever allow that when you were there?

MORGAN: Well, I was there in 1994-5, before mobiles were used very much, and that particular trick wasn’t known about. I can’t get too excited about it, I must say. It was pretty well-known that if you didn’t change your pin code when you were a celebrity who bought a new phone, then reporters could ring your mobile, tap in a standard factory setting number and hear your messages. That is not, to me, as serious as planting a bug in someone’s house, which is what some people seem to think was going on.

CAMPBELL: It’s an invasion of privacy, though.

MORGAN: It is, yes. But loads of newspaper journalists were doing it. Clive Goodman, the NOTW reporter, has been made the scapegoat for a very widespread practice.

So that's CNN's current anchor saying "loads of newspaper journalists were doing it" back in 2007. Wonder if anybody's going to ask him about that?

And you have to wonder who else is going to get caught up in this chain reaction of crazy.

I mean Hugh Grant and Naomi Campbell?

Who writes this crap?

Phone Hacking Scandal - Has There Ever Been a Less Adequate Title?

Not that I think any title could keep up with the crazy now unfolding over the pond.

But consider:

• Corrupt Cops
• The Royal Family
• Actors wearing hidden microphones
• Murder victims
• Victims of Terrorism
• Political resignations
• Police resignations
• 168 year old newspapers vanishing in a puff of smoke
• Multiple arrests of corporate minions of one of the world's most influential billionaires
• Said billionaire being hauled into public hearings
• Said billionaire being attacked with a pie

Seriously, there's video and everything.

(Admit it, you thought I made that bit up... but no!)

Now the hackers are getting involved.
LulzSec claims they've obtained a host of News International emails - making you wonder what other insanity will come to light.

I mean, there isn't enough popcorn in the world for this kind of thing. And we're barely into the first reel.

What. The. Hell?

Also, just an aside, but it occurs to me that a (dubious) but immensely satisfying tactic of a hacking/leak organization would be to announce that they will release a major trove of compromised corporate emails the day after the company's CEO testifies under oath.

Fruits of Their Labor

So Rebekah Brooks has finally resigned.

*Yawn*

In other news - the Telegraph has posted an online archive of the News of The World Stories that mention voicemail and email. I realize that hindsight is 20/20, but looking at newspaper stories that quote voicemail would be a pretty large indication that private voicemails are being accessed by the press.

Yeah, yeah, easy for me to say.

Not Much of a Fan of Gordon Brown, But...

This is downright obscene:

In October 2006, the then editor of the Sun, Rebekah Brooks, contacted the Browns to tell them that they had obtained details from the medical file of their four-month-old son, Fraser, which revealed that the boy was suffering from cystic fibrosis. This appears to have been a clear breach of the Data Protection Act, which would allow such a disclosure only if it was in the public interest. Friends of the Browns say the call caused them immense distress, since they were only coming to terms with the diagnosis, which had not been confirmed. The Sun published the story. On the Sun's website it claims it 'set the news agenda' by 'breaking the sad news that Gordon Brown's baby boy Fraser has Cystic Fibrosis'.

Five years earlier, when their first child, Jennifer, was born on 28 December 2001, a small group of specialist doctors and nurses was aware that she had suffered a brain haemorrhage and was dying. By some means which has not been discovered, this highly sensitive information was obtained by news organisations, who published it over the weekend before Jennifer died, on Monday 6 January 2002.

In 2003, Devon and Cornwall police discovered that one of their junior officers was providing information from the police national computer to a network of private investigators. The Guardian has established that one of these investigators, Glen Lawson of Abbey Investigations in Newcastle upon Tyne, used this contact to commission a search of police records for information about Brown on 16 November 2000. Lawson also commissioned searches related to two other Labour MPs – Nick Brown and Martin Salter.

Lawson made these searches on behalf of journalists, a previously unreported court hearing was told. Transcripts obtained by the Guardian show that the search on Martin Salter was made at a time when the News of the World, then edited by Brooks, was attacking him for refusing to support the paper's notorious "Sarah's law" campaign to name paedophiles. Lawson currently refuses to name the journalists who commissioned him.

An attempt to prosecute this network was blocked by a West Country judge, Paul Darlow, who shocked police by ruling that it would be a misuse of public money to pursue the case. However, Devon and Cornwall police contacted the office of the then chancellor to warn him that he had been a victim, as they also did with his two Labour colleagues.

(H/t The Awl)

News International's Version of Cooperating Fully

Oh, how the rats are running over at News International's News of the World:

(Via the Guardian)

Police are investigating evidence that a News International executive may have deleted millions of emails from an internal archive, in an apparent attempt to obstruct Scotland Yard's inquiry into the phone-hacking scandal.

The archive is believed to have reached back to January 2005 revealing daily contact between News of the World editors, reporters and outsiders, including private investigators.

...

The allegation directly contradicts repeated claims from News International that it is co-operating fully with police in order to expose its history of illegal news-gathering. It is likely to be seen as evidence that the company could not pass a 'fit and proper person' test for its proposed purchase of BSkyB.

A Guardian investigation has found that, in addition to deleting emails, the company has also:

• infuriated police by leaking sensitive information in spite of an undertaking to police that it would keep it confidential; and

• risked prosecution for perverting the course of justice by trying to hide the contents of a senior reporter's desk after he was arrested by Weeting detectives in earlier this year.

CJR's Dean Starkman puts it well. "...like a trapped wolf chewing off its own leg."

Phone Hacking Money Quote

...courtesy of the Guardian's Alexander Chancellor:

"...it is worth pointing out that, however ghastly journalists may be, nobody would know anything about anything without us – not even the extent of our own ghastliness."

Bravo!

Murdoch Takes His Ball and (Tries to) Go Home

Incredible.

News of the World will be shut down in three days.

You have got to wonder if this is an attempt to lance the boil before the public learns just how bad it was.

Over and over, NOTW has said this was not a big deal, only to revise their statements after their falsity became obvious to all.

So, now they go dark - and you have to hope that the police (other than the ones on the take) will seize their office computers and records to discover the full extent of their crimes.

And given the swelling believe that NOTW is anything but unique in its behavior, you have to wonder if there will be wider inquiries into the affairs of other newspapers. Now that they all know what they should be looking for.

Hats off to the Guardian. Way to beat on a story.

Late Edit: Reading the recaps of how this story developed, you just have to marvel at how it took this long to detonate. I mean it has everything: Celebrities, politicians, corrupt cops - even Hugh Grant secretly recording a journalist to out his misbehavior.

Makes the collusion on Fleet Street seem even more likely.

Wonder what else those folks are sitting on?

Peter Oborne Puts the Right Spin on It

You'll need to put a part of your brain in Brit-mode to savor all the snark in Peter Oborne's smackdown on the News of The World scandal, (and the tepid media coverage and government response thus far), but it's worth it.

[British Prime Minister David Cameron] finally woke up to the kind of company he has been keeping on Tuesday when during his Afghanistan visit he declared the Milly Dowler revelations ‘truly dreadful’. David Cameron has repeatedly displayed an inability to make a distinction between right and wrong. The press ought to have stepped into the breach. Unfortunately, we in Fleet Street have forgotten that the ultimate vindication of journalism is not to intrude into, and destroy, private lives. Nor is it the dance around power, money and social status. It is the fight for truth and decency.

(H/t CJR)

Hacking the Phone of a Thirteen Year Old Girl

(Via CJR)

I'm probably guilty of ignoring the Murdoch phone-hacking scandal overseas. I mean, it's overseas (the Brits are handling it) and it involves rich and powerful people (who presumably have the money and connections to make NewsCorp pay). The short form is that NewsCorp tabloids in Britain have paid private investigators to hack into the phones of famous people- and that the authorities had tried to give them a pass on it until their efforts were discovered.

All pretty horrid. But again, I've had other things on my mind.

But this is pretty damn horrid:

[Milly] Dowler, a thirteen-year-old from Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, went missing in the spring of 2002 on her way home from school. Six months later she was found murdered, dumped naked in the woods.

In the meantime, the Guardian reports, the News of the World had paid its crooked private investigators to hack into Milly’s cellphone and listen to her voicemails:

As her friends and parents called and left messages imploring Milly to get in touch with them, the News of the World was listening and recording their every private word.

Oh, it gets worse. That’s merely abhorrent and illegal. This, on the other hand, is downright evil:

But the journalists at the News of the World then encountered a problem. Milly’s voicemail box filled up and would accept no more messages. Apparently thirsty for more information from more voicemails, the paper intervened - and deleted the messages that had been left in the first few days after her disappearance. According to one source, this had a devastating effect: when her friends and family called again and discovered that her voicemail had been cleared, they concluded that this must have been done by Milly herself and, therefore, that she must still be alive. But she was not. The interference created false hope and extra agony for those who were misled by it.

Right. So, not content with merely illegally hacking into the voicemail of a thirteen year old girl - they saw fit to destroy her data (read: evidence) so they could continue to eavesdrop on people trying to contact her.

Holy. Fricking. Hell.

Late Edit:
The Awl's Alex Balk points out a great primer on the whole phone hacking mess.

It gets so much worse... after the News of the World hacked into the girl's phone (and gave her family the false impression that she was still using her phone), they went further:

Later [Milly's] family granted the News of the World an exclusive interview, where they discussed their sense of hope - without any knowledge of the fact that it was that very newspaper's interference which had misled them.

Asshats, with a capital "A"

The article's author, Ian Dunt, is less than optimistic that this scandal has run its course.:

It is highly unlikely that the News of the World was the only newsroom to indulge in the practise [of hacking phones].

Our Kind of Sicko

Mother Jones calls it "The Best Journalism Want-Ad Ever, Ever"

And I'd have to second that.

Just read it.

...if you’re the type of sicko who likes holing up in a tiny, closed  office with reporters of questionable hygiene to build databases from scratch by hand-entering thousands of pages of documents to take on powerful people and institutions that wish you were dead, all for the glorious reward of having readers pick up the paper and glance at your potential prize-winning epic as they flip their way to the Jumble… well, if that sounds like journalism Heaven, then you’re our kind of sicko.

(H/t Felix Salmon)

Fukushima Parody

Oh sweet mother of God...

Alternate Headline: Sen. Graham is a media whore

Because, really... what would a nuclear crisis be without Sen. Graham leveraging it for his own visibility?

Teachers vs. Wall Street

Only because this was too perfect...

Hey, I wonder how those same people who would have the government limit teacher pay and benefits would feel about the government limiting CEO pay at bailed-out-with-taxpayer-money firms?
-Jon Stewart

Oh and Fox News Business Contributor Tracy Byrnes? You get my vote for hypocrite of the year.

O'Reilly, Fox News: Still Full of It

(H/t to AK)

Oh this is art. O'Reilly runs a clip supposedly from the protests in Wisconsin -

-and it features palm trees.

Seriously.



As a UW alum... I seem to have missed all the palm trees around the capitol building.

Ye Gods.

Detroit's Rebuttal

(Via Viceland with a H/t to Felix Salmon)

Climbing a hillock for a better view of the grassy wastes surrounding 

Jane Cooper Elementary School. If you move the camera just a few inches to the left you’ll get a bustling,
well-maintained food-packaging plant in frame, so be careful to crop that shit out.

It's dated, but worth a read

Something, Something, Something, Detroit: Lazy Journalists Love Pictures of Abandoned Stuff

The Baying Hounds of the Foreclosure Mess

Yowza. Lots of "I'm as Mad as Hell" articles making it into the press these days.

(Via Felix Salmon) Here's a full on rant by Joseph Tauke at the Daily Caller, One Nation Under Fraud. He does a nice walkthrough of the issues - and brings a pieces that were new to me:

• A company called DOCX offered its services to "recover." As Yves Smith pointed out - this means they created documents that the banks thought should have existed. Created from nothing - for a set price.
  
• There are tax implications for trust companies who do not acquire the mortgages they will hold within three months. Implication might be an understatement - the payments to the trust go from untaxed, to taxed at 100%. Ow.
• A class-action lawsuit was just filed in California which challenges MERS legal standing to hold mortgages. I'm thinking that might cause some re-valuing of some 60 million mortgages that list MERS as their mortgage owner.

David Kotok is cited over at The Big Picture, where he posts the anonymous rant of one of his sources in finance:

“You can endorse the note as many times as you please…but you have to have a clear chain of title right on the actual note: I sold the note to Moe, who sold it to Larry, who sold it to Curly, and all our notarized signatures are actually, physically, on the note, one after the other.

“If for whatever reason any of these signatures is skipped, then the chain of title is said to be broken. Therefore, legally, the mortgage note is no longer valid. That is, the person who took out the mortgage loan to pay for the house no longer owes the loan, because he no longer knows whom to pay.

“To repeat: if the chain of title of the note is broken, then the borrower no longer owes any money on the loan.

“Read that last sentence again, please. Don’t worry, I’ll wait. “You read it again?

Good: Now you see the can of worms that’s opening up.

Put me in the camp that says there is no way government is going to allow defauting homeowners to remain in houses for free in perpetuity. Kotok's suggestion seems the most rational:

An example of a possible fix in a full blown litigation might be for the court to order the mortgage modified to the current equity value of the home, so that it a) punishes the lenders who failed to do their proper legal work on the documents, but b) does not give a home to a defaulted homeowner for free. The odds would be that the homeowner still gets foreclosed on, but does not owe additional monies to the bank. Since these are very often uncollectible judgments anyway, the court’s judgment can mete out justice fairly, not give anyone an undeserved windfall, yet move the cases forward. That is but one “just” solution, and I am confident that most courts have the sophistication to fashion an appropriate remedy.

Homeowners get a shot at staying in their homes based on better terms - lenders get a shot at owning SOMETHING of value - and we take a long, slow walk out of the woods.

Gah.

Also - from the NYT's always ass-kicking Gretchen Morgenson - a story about how Countrywide Financial kept up appearances.

Money quote from their CEO, Anthony Mozilo, describing their 80/20 loan (which allowed borrowers to finance 100% of a home's value):

“In all my years in the business, I have never seen a more toxic product,” he wrote to Mr. Sambol in an April 17, 2006, e-mail cited by the S.E.C. “With real estate values coming down ... the product will become increasingly worse.”

Nice to hear, Ant'ny - but would have been a lot more useful if we'd heard it a few years ago, no?