Marbury

the judgement of lynn barber

This week's media-furore is a very trivial one - it's over a book review. A judge has ruled that the Telegraph should pay £65,000 in damages to the author of a book about the Turner Prize that was given a bad review by Lynn Barber, a grande dame of British journalism and former Turner judge. Much attention has been given to the fact that the judge deemed the book review "spiteful". The core of the case, however, was whether Barber defamed the author and told lies about her in the review (in particular, Barber said Thornton had never interviewed her for the book, when in fact she had). The judge decided that she had. That would have been bad enough, but the Telegraph compounded Barber's error by refusing to acknowledge that the author in question, Sarah Thornton, had been wronged. When they finally issued an apology it was late, grudging and partial.

I'm not sure there are any great learnings or morals to be drawn from this unfortunate episode but I will say this: if you can find time, read the judgement in full. Actually, once you start, it's hard to stop. It's a compellingly written narrative of how the whole thing played out, and rich in delicious detail. You get plenty of fascinating insights into the worlds of journalism, the arts, law, and, er, the Telegraph. This bit is about when Thornton first sent an email of complaint to the Telegraph's editor:

Dr Thornton's e-mail of 11 December 2008 is timed at 11:06. Two minutes later the editor (or someone in his office) forwarded it to the Consulting Editor, Mr Rhidian Wynn Davies, and to the head of the legal department Mr Arthur Wynn Davies. Mr Arthur Wynn Davies is the father of Mr Rhidian Wynn Davies. I shall refer to them as Mr Arthur and Mr Rhidian. The message from the Editor to Mr Rhidian and to Mr Arthur was "over to you chaps please”.

Later in the judgement the judge goes deeper into the reasons he decided that Barber, rather than being forgetful, was guilty of deceit.

Ms Barber introduced into her witness statement her own book "An Education", published in 2009. She did that to illustrate what she claimed to be her bad memory. In it she states her age to be 65, and she lists a number of matters which she says she can no longer remember. So far as I can judge, they appear to me to be matters which a 65 year old person with a normal memory would no longer remember. She says she "can't even always remember whether I've interviewed someone". She is a professional interviewer. Professional people cannot normally remember all the people with whom they have had professional talks. She writes that she used to be able to do shorthand at 100 wpm but cannot now. That is normal. She writes that she got top marks in A-level Latin, but cannot now translate a line of Horace. That is normal. However, Ms Barber remembers enough of Horace to make an elegant literary reference. She wrote in her book: "Eheu fugaces, I can't translate a line of Horace now". So she remembered the two opening words of a famous poem by Horace lamenting the speed with which years pass by and we grow old. The purpose of introducing into her own book the claim that she has had "a flaky memory all my life" appears to me to be a literary device to warn the reader that the memoir does not purport to be completely accurate.

The judge also decided that well, he didn't like the cut of Barber's gib:

I have also considered the manner in which Ms Barber gave evidence. While the demeanour of a witness is not the best guide to whether the witness is lying or not, in this case I found nothing in her demeanour which suggested to me that she cared one way or another whether the interview allegation was true or false. She manifested no sign of caring at all.

But do read the whole thing. The Telegraph are appealing the judgement.

wall street journal and john mccain mindmeld

Well, colour me confused. This is from the Wall Street Journal's latest editorial on the debt ceiling debate. The paper takes the extremist wing of the Republican Party to task for its dumb politics:

The idea seems to be that if the House GOP refuses to raise the debt ceiling, a default crisis or gradual government shutdown will ensue, and the public will turn en masse against . . . Barack Obama. The Republican House that failed to raise the debt ceiling would somehow escape all blame. Then Democrats would have no choice but to pass a balanced-budget amendment and reform entitlements, and the tea-party Hobbits could return to Middle Earth having defeated Mordor.

This is the kind of crack political thinking that turned Sharron Angle and Christine O'Donnell into GOP Senate nominees.

Now, here's the New York Times reporting on John McCain's speech from the Senate floor this morning:

Mr. McCain mocked Tea Party-allied Republicans in the House for believing — wrongly, he said — that President Obama and Democrats will get the blame for a default if Republicans refuse to increase the nation’s debt ceiling.

By that flawed logic, he said, “Democrats would have no choice but to pass a balanced budget amendment and reform entitlements and the Tea Party Hobbits could return to Middle Earth.”

“This is the kind of crack political thinking that turned Sharron Angle and Christine O’Donnell into G.O.P. nominees,” he jeered, referring to two losing Tea Party candidates for the Senate in 2010.

Either John McCain has got very lazy or there's something missing from the reporting of this story.

UPDATE: the article has now been updated to reflect the fact that McCain was quoting from the WSJ, at least for the hobbit bit. But it still reads as if the sentence about "crack political thinking" was McCain's own. Odd.

headbanging chart of the day

While banging your ahead against the nearest hard surface, ask yourself:

- How do the Republicans get away with blaming Obama for the deficit?

- Especially when Obama's smaller contributions were temporary measures (bailouts, stimulus) rather than ongoing commitments (wars, tax cuts, Medicare benefit)?

- And how - in the name of God, how - do Tea Partiers fail to see that the biggest contribution to the deficit are the tax cuts they want to keep and extend?

It was improper use of language for a government minister, of course, but I'm starting to think that Vince Cable was right: the world economy is being held to ransom by a bunch of nutters.

The chart is from the New York Times. Related links:

- The Guardian's Richard Adams has a very good summary of where the debt ceiling negotiations stand today.

- If you're wondering what a debt ceiling is when it's at home, try this.

- David Brooks, who has directed most of his fire at his own side (the Republicans) during these negotiations for their extremist posturing, criticises Obama today for his lack of negotiating skill. He notes that the old guard - the congressional leaders - are taking over because the president has effectively marginalised himself. It does seem to me that Obama is just too aloof from legislators and too inexperienced in Washington dealmaking to get that broken machine working again. Neither does he have the kind of Reaganesque boldness and communication skills to force it to fix itself. There must be more than a few Democrats wondering whether it wouldn't have been better, at a time like this, to have a Clinton in the White House.

in the name of...

Had Anders Breivik killed in the name of Islam we would now be hearing full-throated cries of "We told you so" from those, like Melanie Phillips and my fictional friend Andrew Craze, who believe that Europe is on the verge of being overrun by Jihadists (even though the data says anything but).

As it turns out, Breivik thought he was defending Christianity. I somehow doubt that these commentators will now blame the religion rather than the man. Boris Johnson has written an excellent column about this:

It wasn’t about immigration, or Eurabia, or the hadith, or the Eurocrats’ plot against the people. It wasn’t really about ideology or religion. It was all about him, and his feeling of inadequacy in relation to the female sex. The same point can be made (and has been made) about so many of the young Muslim terrorists. The fundamental reasons for their callous behaviour lie deep in their own sense of rejection and alienation. It is the ideology that gives them the ostensible cause, that potentiates the poison in their bloodstream, that gives them an excuse to dramatise the resentment that they feel in the most powerful way – and to kill.

There is an important lesson, therefore, in the case of Anders Breivik. He killed in the name of Christianity – and yet of course we don’t blame Christians or “Christendom”. Nor, by the same token, should we blame “Islam” for all acts of terror committed by young Muslim males. Sometimes there come along pathetic young men who have a sense of powerlessness and rejection, and take a terrible revenge on the world. Sometimes there are people who feel so weak that they need to kill in order to feel strong. They don’t need an ideology to behave as they do.

Michael Ryan had no ideology in Hungerford; Thomas Hamilton had no ideology in Dunblane. To try to advance any other explanation for their actions – to try to advance complicated “social” factors, or to examine the impact of multiculturalism in Scandinavia – is simply to play their self-important game. 

I think BJ is only partly right about this. I am not sure about Breivik, but I certainly don't think Al Qaeda is best conceived of as a collection of mad, psychotic individuals who just happen to have gathered under the same banner. Neither, in fact, does Johnson, who concedes that ideology is what "potentiates the poison" but then goes on to suggest that terrorists are best seen as damaged individuals who "don't need an ideology". Clearly, many such people do need an ideology to kill, as well as the sense of being part of a special group, an elect. It's what turns their bitterness and anger into destructive and self-destructive action. It's what spurs them on to break the most fundamental morals and taboos of mainstream society. Suicide bombers surrender everything to the group of which they're a part. In the case of organised terrorism you can't, in the end, separate individual from ideology.

That's why, to combat terrorism, it helps to understand something of its ideology, even if the ideology is nihilistic and evil, as is the case with Al Qaeda. To suggest otherwise is to see only half the problem.

lying on a beach

If you are one of the few people in the country who don't watch BookTalk on BBC Parliament, then here is a treat especially for you. Last week's edition featured the political commentator John Rentoul, historian Kate Williams and Tory MP Keith Simpson, discussing their summer reads. First up: Born Liars.

utoya: a clarification

 
Marbury has just received this message from Andrew Craze,  senior fellow at the Institute for the Defence of Freedom, and author of Eurabian Nights; The Darkening of Western Civilisation:

When I first heard the news of the massacre at Utoya, I knew immediately what to think: the Islamists had struck again. To anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of terrorist tactics, the hallmarks of Al Qaeda attack were glaringly obvious. Yet the cowardly ostriches of the mainstream media, terrified of offending the sensibilities of their liberal masters, refused to acknowledge the obvious signs of jihadist activity. They turned a blind eye to the ideological context of the shooting, and focused only on an individual they naively suggested may have acted alone.

Since then it has transpired that the attacks were carried out, not by an Islamist, but by an enthusiastic supporter of far right groups, particularly those who campaign against the "Islamification" of Europe. 

I should now like to emphasise that it is absurdly premature to draw conclusions about the motivations of the man behind this terrible act. In all likelihood this was the act of a crazed lone individual. Certainly, his political views and ideological affiliations are utterly irrelevant to what happened. I urge all those in the media to resist the urge to score cheap political points at a time like this.

larry summers on the winklevi

Photograph: Brian Snyder/Reuters

In The Social Network, Aaron Sorkin included a scene in which former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, then president of Harvard, peremptorily dismissed the Winklevoss twins' complaint against Mark Zuckerberg. At a recent conference Summers discussed his real life meeting with the duo. "Rarely have I seen such swagger," he said. It evidently didn't impress him:

"One of the things you learn as a college president is that if an undergraduate is wearing a tie and jacket on Thursday afternoon at three o'clock, there are two possibilities. One is that they're looking for a job and have an interview; the other is that they are an asshole. This was the latter case."

mensch vs morgan

 

There are people with high hopes for Louise Mensch, not least Louise Mensch herself. Other than being more glamorous than most MPs, she's clever, confident, a very good communicator, and not your average Tory. Whether she has other attributes required to rise to the top, like good judgement, remains to be seen. On the basis of this incident, you'd have to say she has a steep learning curve. This clip is self-explanatory (it's not often one feels sympathy for Piers Morgan but...). Mensch still hasn't commented on it as far as I'm aware.

What seems to have happened is that she read something on Guido Fawkes and then used it as the basis of a question in the House of Commons, before the biggest audience any select committee meeting has ever had, without checking the source. It's not like Morgan's book is hard to access. Deeply erratic behaviour.

Putting that aside, her questioning of the Murdochs wasn't very good. She had a vague idea of where she wanted to go with it - she wanted to establish that the NOTW's hacking took place in a wider Fleet Street culture of casual criminality. But I'm not sure the Murdochs were the best people to confirm or deny that. Worst of all, she fell into the poor interrogator's trap of asking very long, rambling questions that ended with an invitation to waffle rather than with a hook.

All future select committee questioners should watch the tape of Tom Watson's opening interrogation of Rupert Murdoch again and again, until they learn that the best way to approach a tricky session like that is to (a) Have a clear strategy, (b) Stick to it, especially when there are attempts to throw you off, (c) Keep your questions short and pointed. It was a masterful performance. Given the enormity of the occasion, the fame of the key witness, and the knowledge that millions were watching, it must have taken balls of steel for Watson to pursue his questioning in the calm, clinical and gently persistent way that he did. Murdoch didn't have much to say but at the very least Watson proved that there was a void at the top of the company.

(Mensch's Yiddish-inflected name, in case you were wondering, comes from her marriage to a Jewish-American called Peter Mensch, a rock music impresario who manages Metallica. Like I said, not your average Tory).

the murdoch factor

What a day yesterday was. The Murdoch double act was quite something, wasn't it? I'm not sure we learned anything new of substance. But we did get to examine the Murdochs. The curtain was pulled aside and a doddery hobbit stepped out, accompanied by his replicant sidekick.

The first thing to note is that, to put it clinically, Rupert Murdoch was revealed as a man whose social and cognitive abilities are severely degraded; a man to whom the listening and processing of explicit information was an effort, let alone the subtleties of tone and demeanour; a man who had lost the appetite for, ability to retain, detail. Well, you know, it happens - it's happening - to all of us. But the point is, this is no longer the man truly in charge of News Corporation. Or if it is, they're in more trouble than we thought.

It was particularly poignant to watch Rupert in action after having viewed an extraordinary collection of videos gathered by Adam Curtis at his blog. There you can see a young and then a middle-aged Murdoch doing interviews back when he still thought it worth trying to win over the British (I don't know when he gave up but it may have been after an excruciating Wogan interview posted by Curtis, in which the host invites him on only to smugly berate him for ten minutes). You can see a man who, while not a natural charmer, does have a kind of charm - who can laugh at himself, who is alert to his interlocutor's implications as well has his words (and when he's being interviewed by the epitome of English smoothery, David Dimbleby, he has to be alert), and conveys above all a driving sense of purpose and dynamism. He had gravitas, even if it wasn't the English kind.

You can also see in the first clip an interview with his first wife, a devastatingly sexy woman, beautiful, smart, witty and steely (at one point she rather winningly accuses Dimbleby of being "terribly pretentious"). Judging by that and by yesterday we can at least applaud Murdoch's choice of romantic partners. And actually, in contrast to the British establishment he felt himself at odds with for so long, he does seem to be at ease with strong-minded women, personally and professionally. Perhaps this is because his mother was - is - something of a force of nature herself.

Next to him yesterday was a man who displayed many of the qualities of the young Rupert. James was fast, fluent, alert to the dynamics of the room, and on top of the detail (at least, those details he chose to be on top of). And yet he's not as impressive as his father once was. There's something tinny and insubstantial about him, and oddly affectless. He's like someone who has learned all the mannerisms of a human being without quite inhabiting one. His most striking attribute is the ability to talk coherently and at length without actually saying anything. As he bored on it became clear that the meeting was only really alive when the focus was on the old man. Despite the ravages of age, Rupert still has...something. He is too old to be media trained, and in sharp contrast to James you felt, whenever it was Rupert's turn, that he might say something interesting, revealing, unscripted (like his flat "No" when asked if he felt it was his responsibility, or his regretful musings on Gordon Brown). It was like listening to a penny whistle occasionally interrupted by a double bass.

Perhaps what we were really watching was a dramatisation of two different eras of corporate power. Rupert, though never a flamboyant man, is from an era when big companies were often embodied by leaders who treated their companies like fiefdoms and who made decisions based on gut instinct even if it meant overriding or ignoring the views of other shareholders. These were men at ease, too, with wielding political influence, based on their personal views and relationships with politicians. James has grown up in an era where shareholders exercise their rights more vociferously, and in which the rise of modern media has put an increased emphasis on public image and corporate transparency. You can see this reflected in the men's contrasting personal styles. It was all Rupert could do yesterday to stop himself saying to the committee, "Just shut up and leave this to me". James, attuned to the need to balance interests and nurture consensus, was all courtesy and supplication and eagerness to discuss ethics.

This is how corporate power works these days. It doesn't flaunt itself. It is bland, anonymous, air-conditioned, politically correct. It is boring. And that makes it harder than ever to monitor and corral.

on not being mother teresa

Photo: Phil Noble/Reuters

The New York Times - which played a significant role in making hackgate the story it is - has a terrific account of the whole affair, which includes these priceless paragraphs:

Mr. Dacre, The Daily Mail editor, told his senior managers that he had received several reports from businesspeople, soccer stars and public relations agencies that the News International executives Will Lewis and Simon Greenberg had encouraged them to investigate whether their phones had been hacked by Daily Mail newspapers . “They thought it was unfair that all the focus was on The News of the World,” said one News International official with knowledge of the effort. The two men have told colleagues they did not make such calls, but two company officials disputed that.

Mr. Dacre confronted Ms. Brooks over breakfast at the plush Brown’s hotel. “You are trying to tear down the entire industry,” Mr. Dacre told her, according to an account he relayed to his management team. Ms. Brooks, whose tenacity is legendary, was not deterred. At a dinner party, Lady Claudia Rothermere, the wife of the billionaire owner of The Daily Mail, overheard Ms. Brooks saying that The Mail was just as culpable as The News of the World. “We didn’t break the law,” Lady Rothermere said, according to two sources with knowledge of the exchange. Ms. Brooks asked who Lady Rothermere thought she was, “Mother Teresa?”

Link to NYT report.

PIGGLY-WIGGLY UPDATE: The same paper also carries a brilliant piece about a relatively small part of the News Corps business: its US in-store marketing arm, News America. That company has a reputation for playing dirty and has been frequently sued, including for...phone hacking:

In 2009, a federal case in New Jersey brought by a company called Floorgraphics went to trial, accusing News America of, wait for it, hacking its way into Floorgraphics’s password protected computer system...The complaint stated that the breach was traced to an I.P. address registered to News America and that after the break-in, Floorgraphics lost contracts from Safeway, Winn-Dixie and Piggly Wiggly.

Much of the lawsuit was based on the testimony of Robert Emmel, a former News America executive who had become a whistle-blower. After a few days of testimony, the News Corporation had heard enough. It settled with Floorgraphics for $29.5 million and then, days later, bought it, even though it reportedly had sales of less than $1 million.

But the problems continued, and keeping a lid on News America turned out to be a busy and expensive exercise. At the beginning of this year, it paid out $125 million to Insignia Systems to settle allegations of anticompetitive behavior and violations of antitrust laws. And in the most costly payout, it spent half a billion dollars in 2010 on another settlement...The plaintiff, Valassis Communications, had already won a $300 million verdict in Michigan, but dropped the lawsuit in exchange for $500 million and an agreement to cooperate on certain ventures going forward.

The News Corporation is a very large, well-capitalized company, but that single payout to Valassis represented one-fifth of the company’s net income in 2010 and matched the earnings of the entire newspaper and information division that News America was a part of.

As the NYT says, it's an instructive glimpse into the broader culture at News Corporation:

News America was led by Paul V. Carlucci, who, according to Forbes, used to show the sales staff the scene in “The Untouchables” in which Al Capone beats a man to death with a baseball bat. Mr. Emmel testified that Mr. Carlucci was clear about the guiding corporate philosophy.

According to Mr. Emmel’s testimony, Mr. Carlucci said that if there were employees uncomfortable with the company’s philosophy — “bed-wetting liberals in particular was the description he used” Mr. Emmel testified — then he could arrange to have those employees “outplaced from the company.”

Read the whole thing.

is obama defying gravity?

Photo: White House/Flickr.

Normally, a president's popularity closely tracks perception of the job he's doing on the economy. So far, this isn't true of Obama. ABC's Amy Walter notes an historically unusual disjunction between Obama's overall approval rating and his rating for economic management:

In the ABC /Washington Post poll, his overall approval rating was seven points higher than his approval rating on the economy. In the CBS/New York Times poll, the gap between his overall approval rating and his handling of the economy was 8 points.
 
Obama’s job approval ratings defy political gravity. The only question now, is if they can do so for much longer. Psychologists talk about “cognitive dissonance,” the tension that people feel when their thoughts are inconsistent with one another.  In this case, it’s feeling as if the president is doing a pretty lousy job on the economy, but still giving him decent (though not glowing) marks when it comes to his overall presidency.

I'm not sure this a case of cognitive dissonance, actually. I think what it tells us is that voters have longer memories than we sometimes give them credit for. Although voters are frustrated with the president for not being able to lift the country out of its malaise - and although they may actually blame him for it, when asked - I think at some level they remember that he didn't make this mess; he inherited it.

the republican party's secret weapon

In the US, politicians of both parties like to drape themselves in the flag, as do voters of all persuasions - it's on display in the windows, front porches and gardens of Americans everywhere. It's a non-partisan symbol, of course. But a recent study by psychologists at Chicago and Cornell suggests that one party gains disproportionately from the flag's exposure:

We report that a brief exposure to the American flag led to a shift toward Republican beliefs, attitudes, and voting behavior among both Republican and Democratic participants, despite their overwhelming belief that exposure to the flag would not influence their behavior. In Experiment 1, which was conducted online during the 2008 U.S. presidential election, a single exposure to an American flag resulted in a significant increase in participants' Republican voting intentions, voting behavior, political beliefs, and implicit and explicit attitudes, with some effects lasting 8 months after the exposure to the prime. In Experiment 2, we replicated the findings more than a year into the current Democratic presidential term. These results constitute the first evidence that nonconscious priming effects from exposure to a national flag can bias the citizenry toward one political party and can have considerable durability.

Flag Fact: the current US flag was designed by a 17-year-old high school student (as the vexillologists amongst you will doubtless already know).

a few (more) thoughts on murdochgate

Photo: Indigo/Getty

• Goodbye NOTW. I'm sorry for the people employed by it and I hope they find new employment either within NI or beyond it. It won't be missed, however. I know it's a venerable British brand and all that, and I know it was hugely popular. But my strong impression is that, despite this, it wasn't loved or even liked, even by the many people who bought it regularly. There was fascination, but no warmth. At the end of the day, as someone remarked to a friend of mine, it's simply "one less shitty thing in the world."
• I'd be surprised if Brooks and (James) Murdoch don't volunteer to appear in front of the select committee. First, to avoid the appearance of having been dragged there (and Murdoch can be compelled, as he lives in the UK). Second, because it's usually harder to hate someone when you see them talking rather than crossing the street being flashbulbed and refusing comment. Having said that, James is a fairly charmless guy. But they are in the dock of public opinion, so they might as well make their case as best they can. Even if it means facing a panel of self-righteous MPs determined to show off by beating them up.
• My assessment of last week, that this was the moment James took control of the business, is looking both correct and short-sighted. He may, with the ditching of NOTW, have moved into the driving seat, but News Corp. shareholders may well be on the verge of forcing all the Murdochs into the back seat (it will be a squash). Certainly, James's internal credibility has taken a massive hit. About time too; everything I've ever heard or read about him suggests that the judgement pronounced by a senior Wapping executive (to Andrew Neil) is the right one: "Always decisive, usually wrong." He's also tone-deaf, as anyone who read his grotesquely misjudged speech at Edinburgh a couple of years ago will have noted.
• Gordon Brown's speech yesterday was extraordinary. It was a reminder of the exceptionally wide gap between his own self-image and reality. In Gordon's mind, there's a Gordon Brown who opposed the Iraq war, doughtily fought Murdoch, and governed according to his famous moral compass. Then there's...the real Gordon Brown. It would be funny if it weren't infuriating. On Monday he confessed to deep anger and upset at what Rebekah Brooks did to his family, somehow squaring this, in his own mind, with his later attendance at her wedding and his wife's hosting of her at Chequers. Yesterday he had the gall to stand up and say, effectively, I wanted to take on Murdoch but the head of the civil service stopped me. Hmm, if only you'd been powerful enough to overrule him. Like, if you'd been Prime Minister or something. (Matthew Norman says much more on Brown's posturing here).
• As for domestic politics, I retain my initial view: it won't have a big impact. Last night, Newsnight invited members of the public into the studio for what Mrs Merton used to describe as a 'heated debate'. It was about as heated as iced tea. Paxman, ploughing through embarrassing silences, had to drag opinions out of people. Quite a contrast to the debates on MPs expenses. If this is another great crisis of trust, it seems to be one few people really care about. As ever, they care about jobs, crime, immigration, health and education. David Cameron, after his wobble, seemed to regain his political balance yesterday, sailing through an extended PMQs. Labour will find it as hard to pin the blame for this on him as the Tories did the other way, over expenses. Ed Miliband has done very well, seizing his moment as opposition leaders must. But once this is over he faces the same old problem of making Labour electable. That's not as simple as going round smiting the wealthy and the powerful, as some over-excited and naive analyses seem to suggest; Ed Miliband's problem is not that he hasn't been left-wing enough. Having said that, this whole affair may help him a little if it gives him more confidence. Having said that, I don't think he's lacked confidence, even at his lowest points. What he lacks is a clue about where to take his party.

black on murdoch: a great bad man

 
The FT has secured the marvellous coup of getting Conrad Black to write a column on Rupert Murdoch. Despite having nothing to do with it, Black comes out rather well from this scandal. He was a media tycoon of the old school: swaggering, colourful, extravagant. Corrupt too, assuming he has been rightfully convicted. But he ran his newspapers, including the Daily Telegraph, very well, without interference and with respect for the instincts and integrity of his journalists. All his flaws were on the surface, rather than in the shadows. He didn't have much of a record of bullying and intimidation. He didn't stoop to anything so crude as tabloids.

He is also just a more interesting character than Murdoch. Murdoch fascinates because of how he operates and what he's achieved. But in dramatic or novelistic terms, he's somewhat thin, because so one-dimensional: all business. And which would you rather read - Murdoch on Black or Black on Murdoch? No contest. In this magisterial, pretentious, grandiloquent, utterly brilliant piece, Black doesn't disappoint us.

He begins by crooking an ironic eyebrow at the terrible fuss we're making about what he clearly thinks a trivial affair (he may be in a prison cell but he writes like it's at the top of Mount Olympus):

No one should begrudge the Guardian, the BBC, CNN, the New York Times and others their fun at his expense, nor take it too seriously. He is, as Clarendon said of Cromwell and the British historian David Chandler updated to Napoleon “a great bad man”. It is as wrong to dispute his greatness as his badness.

He continues to make a fairly devastating assessment of said badness:

Although his personality is generally quite agreeable, Mr Murdoch has no loyalty to anyone or anything except his company. He has difficulty keeping friendships; rarely keeps his word for long; is an exploiter of the discomfort of others; and has betrayed every political leader who ever helped him in any country, except Ronald Reagan and perhaps Tony Blair. All his instincts are downmarket; he is not only a tabloid sensationalist; he is a malicious myth-maker, an assassin of the dignity of others and of respected institutions, all in the guise of anti-elitism. He masquerades as a pillar of contemporary, enlightened populism in Britain and sensible conservatism in the US, though he has been assiduously kissing the undercarriage of the rulers of Beijing for years. His notions of public entertainment and civic values are enshrined in the cartoon television series The Simpsons: all public officials are crooks and the public is an ignorant lumpenproletariat. There is nothing illegal in this, and it has amusing aspects, but it is unbecoming someone who has been the subject of such widespread deference and official preferments.

You can always count on a fraudster for a fancy prose style. Anyway - read the whole thing.

Free the Crossharbour One!

seven days that shook the country

One week ago today the Guardian put Milly Dowler's face on its front page. Things are moving so fast in this story you have to remind yourself to take a breath now and again. The only real hero of it all is the Guardian's Nick Davies, who has led the Guardian's investigation into hacking. Here he gives an update on where we are after yesterday's hearing: