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MPs debate horsemeat scandal: Politics live blog
The Guardian: Politics Live Blog - Tue, 02/12/2013 - 12:45
Andrew Sparrow's rolling coverage of all the day's political developments as they happen, including MPs debating the horsemeat scandal
Andrew Sparrow100 people arrested for hacking and corruption
NOTW: UK Telegraph Live Blog - Tue, 02/12/2013 - 07:01
The arrest of a police officer has brought to 100 the number of people arrested by detectives investigating hacking and corrupt payments to public officials.
Hunt statement on adult social care cap: Politics live blog
The Guardian: Politics Live Blog - Mon, 02/11/2013 - 13:38
Andrew Sparrow's rolling coverage of all the day's political developments as they happen, including Jeremy Hunt's statement on adult social care
Andrew SparrowSun defence editor to stand trial over alleged payments to police
NOTW: UK Telegraph Live Blog - Mon, 02/11/2013 - 10:46
The Sun's defence editor, Virginia Wheeler, will stand trial at the Old Bailey over allegedly paying a former Met cop £6,450 for stories.
Murdoch won't dare to kill off Page 3 with the Sun's sales in decline
News Corporation: Live Updates from The Guardian - Mon, 02/11/2013 - 07:30
So Rupert Murdoch finally hints in public at what he has been saying in private for 30 years or more: does the Sun really need Page 3?
His tweet is anything but definitive. He uses the word "considering" and I recall him saying much the same when I was present in discussions about the paper back in the 1980s.
On several occasions he hovered over the idea of ditching it. Incidentally, the editor responsible for launching the phenomenon, Larry Lamb, later wished he had never started publishing the pictures. "I will be remembered only for that", he lamented. His obituaries proved him correct.
To be frank, Page 3 has been an embarrassment for several editors and many of the journalists down the years. How do reporters and sub-editors explain to their young children that the paper they work for carries pictures of topless women for no other reason than to titillate men? Some have refused to take it home.
When the current editor, Dominic Mohan, gave evidence to the Leveson inquiry last year, he spoke of Page 3 representing "the youth and freshness" of "natural beauty" and it being "an innocuous British institution." It sounded as if he was parroting a PR briefing.
But Murdoch's sensibilities - oh yes, he has them - have always been overshadowed by his unshakeable belief in market forces. He will have nothing to do with elitism. If that's what the public want, then give it to them.
And "the public" - meaning, of course, the Sun's regular audience - have appeared happy enough to see the pictures. At odd moments when Page 3 has been dropped, during tragic news events for example, many readers have protested about the pictures being omitted.
The other problem for Murdoch is the fear of the Sun losing many thousands of sales to the rival Daily Star should he blink first and banish them from the paper.
Since its launch in 1978 as a crude (and briefly left-wing) Sun-style red-top, the Star has always carried pictures of topless models on a daily basis. Indeed, it's fair to say that the Star's USP has more to do with sex and trivia than the Sun's, despite its invention of Page 3.
Murdoch is aware that, should he dare to follow his anti-Page 3 instincts, he may jeopardise the Sun's circulation. And that is already in steady decline, as the latest ABC figures illustrate. The Sun sold a daily average of 2.4 million in January, but that was 350,000 fewer than in January last year, a fall of more than 12%.
The News Corporation chairman also knows, as his company prepares to create a publishing-only division, that the Sun remains a major cash cow.
To imperil its sales at this time, prompting the obvious consequent reduction in advertising revenue, would be foolish. He is, to be frank, caught between his desire to "do the right thing" and commercial reality.
He must also take account of the galling truth that much of the online traffic to the Sun's website involves the consumption of Page 3. To pull it would threaten that audience.
Murdoch might also reflect on the fact that the Sun, which held the newsprint grip for so long on celebrity scandals and assorted gossip, allowed the Daily Mail to steal a march by winning a huge website audience by running content that was traditionally the Sun's preserve.
The Mail, not the Sun, is the go-to site for people across the world, most notably the United States, who want to see pictures of "famous" scantily-clad women and read stories about their exploits.
Here's the first irony for Murdoch to reflect on: the purveyor of Page 3 has seen the Mail, quite literally, steal its clothes.
He has been, in many ways, a great media visionary. But he has always been one step behind, sometimes two, since the arrival of the internet. The failure to develop the Sun online is yet another example of his failure.
And the second irony? Online, the Page 3 brand, with 1.4m unique monthly visitors last month, has to be seen against the fact that the Sun site enjoyed a record 30m uniques. So the Page 3 "brand" is not as big a draw as might be thought.
Oh yes, and let's not forget the overarching third irony. Murdoch's claim to be a hands-off proprietor has been exposed by his own tweets. They reveal that he calls the shots at his papers and editors can no longer rely on taking their orders via discreet phone calls.
His tweet on the Gerald Scarfe cartoon affair undermined the initial response to complaints by the Sunday Times's temporary acting editor, Martin Ivens.
Now his Page 3 tweet suggests that he disagrees with Mohan's upbeat Page 3 defence. Who would be a Murdoch editor nowadays?
*This blog posting was amended to correct the original claim that, in terms of online hits, the Page 3 site is a bigger draw than the Sun site. The figures show it isn't so. Sorry for the error.
- Page 3
- Rupert Murdoch
- The Sun
- Daily Star
- Daily Mail
- Sunday Times
- National newspapers
- Newspapers
- News Corporation
- ABCs
- Dominic Mohan
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Rupert Murdoch hints at ending Page 3
News Corporation: Live Updates from The Guardian - Sun, 02/10/2013 - 20:43
Topless models have featured in the Sun for 40 years but the media mogul tweeted that they may belong in the past
For more than 40 years, campaigners have tried to kill off the Sun's practice of printing photographs of topless women on Page 3 – but to no avail.
Yet in a single, apparently off-the-cuff remark on the internet, Rupert Murdoch hinted that he may at last be ready to grant the wishes of generations of opponents whose ranks have included, most famously, the veteran Labour MP Clare Short.
Responding to a fellow user of Twitter who described Page 3 as "so last century", News Corp's chairman and chief executive said that he was "considering" whether he was of the same view.
Murdoch, whose tweets are closely scrutinised for clues to the future direction of his global media empire, commented: "page three so last century! You maybe right, don't know but considering. Perhaps halfway house with glamorous fashionistas."
A News International spokesperson said the company was making no comment in relation to whether the Sun's topless Page 3 could be for the axe.
Suspicion that the upper echelons of News International could have reached a tipping point was fuelled by another tweet from a lifelong Murdoch confidant who was asked what he made of Murdoch's comment.
Les Hinton, a former chairman of News International who resigned from his job running Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal at the height of the phone-hacking scandal on the News of the World, replied: "@TheSunNewspaper great but Page 3 has jarred for ages."
In the most recent campaign against Page 3, supermarkets across Britain have been targeted by activists as they stepped up their campaign for an advertising boycott of the tabloid.
Members of the campaign group No More Page 3 said it was a sexist relic of an unhealthy 1970s culture that was at odds with the family values promoted by supermarkets.
The campaign, which has attracted more than 64,310 signatures of support on a change.org petition, posted a video on YouTube of interviews about Page 3 with male Sun readers, many of whom said it was degrading and sexist. The group has also held weekly protests outside News International.
Beyond activist circles, the view that Page 3 has had its day has been gaining ground for some time. Ross Brown, a former editor of FHM magazine, said last year : "One of my best friends is the editor of Nuts and we spend much of our time arguing. I think it's just reached a point where it's readily accessible porn, from Page 3 to Nuts. And we're past that."
According to Fleet Street lore, Murdoch is said to have been unhappy when topless Page 3s were introduced by the then Sun editor Larry Lamb in November 1970. However, any latent opposition the proprietor harboured at the time appears to have vanished as the newspaper's circulation rose and the topless Page 3s become closely associated with the brand.
In 1986, Clare Short raised the issue in the House of Commons, leading to supportive letters from women and attacks by the paper.
At the Leveson Inquiry, Sun editor Dominic Mohan said a particularly nasty piece headlined "Fat, jealous Clare brands Page 3 porn", published before he became editor, was "not probably something I would run now".
Forced to give evidence for the second time after the inquiry heard criticisms of the newspaper from a coalition of women's groups, Mohan insisted that Page 3 of the Sun was an innocent staple of British life and its daily pictures of topless models celebrate natural beauty.
• This article was amended on 11 February 2013 to include the full Twitter response from former News International chairman Les Hinton to a question about Rupert Murdoch's tweet.
- Page 3
- Newspapers & magazines
- Newspapers
- The Sun
- National newspapers
- Rupert Murdoch
- News International
- News Corporation
- Clare Short
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As hacking-gate drags on, who can blame Lewis for heading to New York?
News Corporation: Live Updates from The Guardian - Sat, 02/09/2013 - 20:05
With Scotland Yard plodding slowly through phone-hacking and bribery evidence, as handed over by the former Telegraph editor, many journalists' lives are on hold
Only three years ago, Will Lewis was a hero, the editor of the year for his Daily Telegraph role in bringing greedy MPs down. And now, as something called "chief creative officer" for News Corp, he's off to New York to sit at his old friend Robert Thomson's right hand – and keep his head down. Good or bad Will hunting? The bad was carving out a creative job at the Telegraph and finding it didn't work out. What seemed to be good – getting headhunted by Rebekah Brooks – turned out bad again almost immediately. And bad turned worse when Lewis was landed with non-journalism's lousiest role: shovelling all News International's incriminating emails and memos over to a finally enthused Scotland Yard.
Lewis took a lot of stick over that, but orders were orders. Maybe he'll find fresh peace of mind in the canyons of Manhattan. But the central point of his promotion resounds much closer to home. Scotland Yard has every jot of paper, every scrap of dodgy digital evidence, it will ever need. The great clearout is over, with 144 more claimants settling last week.
Lewis can go. But meanwhile, for once, the Daily Mail's Richard Littlejohn has something to say that should make anyone who believes in press freedom shift uneasily at their desk. Arrest has followed arrest as the Met's finest have ploughed through the paperwork. Two, three, four dozen and counting. Britain has almost as many journalists living under the shadow of trial and punishment as Turkey.
But where, asks Littlejohn, is the liberal chorus of outrage and shame that you might expect at this late, long-winded stage? Don't Sun and News of the World journalists and their managers count? Are the dawn raids and arrests without specific details appropriate here?
The dismal answer is nobody knows. We don't know if there were bribes in the public interest for £20 or £20,000. We don't know who sanctioned what, or in what circumstances. There's merely a big, full basket of lives on hold while the legions of the Met plod away, and those who followed orders can start a new life. Don't blame Lewis. Wish him well. But wish, too, that the mills of what we like to call justice could work a damned sight faster at sorting the wheat from the chaff.
Peter Prestonguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Sarah Ferguson's phone was hacked for six years by News of the World, court hears.
NOTW: UK Telegraph Live Blog - Fri, 02/08/2013 - 07:46
The Duchess of York's mobile phone was hacked for six years by the News of the World, a court was told today, as she and 143 other hacking victims accepted damages from News International.
Sarah Ferguson among 144 phone-hacking victims to settle claims with News International
NOTW: UK Telegraph Live Blog - Fri, 02/08/2013 - 07:46
The Duchess of York and the actor Hugh Grant are among 144 victims of phone-hacking who have accepted damages from News International in the latest batch of claims to be settled at the High Court.
Politics live: readers' edition - Friday 8 February
The Guardian: Politics Live Blog - Fri, 02/08/2013 - 05:52
Share breaking news, leave links to interesting articles online and chat about the week's events and BBC question time
I'm not writing my usual Politics Live blog today, but, as an alternative, here's Politics Live: readers' edition. It's intended to be a place where you can catch up with the latest news and find links to good politics blogs and articles on the web.
Please feel free to use this as somewhere you can comment on any of the day's political stories - just as you do when I'm writing the daily blog.
It would be particularly useful for readers to flag up new material in the comments - breaking news or blogposts or tweets that are worth passing on because someone is going to find them interesting. A lot of what I do on my blog is aggregation - finding the good stuff and passing it on - and you can do this, too (as I know, because it happens every day when I'm blogging).
All of Friday's Guardian politics stories are here, and all the politics stories filed on Thursday, including some in today's paper, are here.
Andrew SparrowGuardian readersguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Gove statement on GCSE U-turn: Politics live blog
The Guardian: Politics Live Blog - Thu, 02/07/2013 - 05:03
Andrew Sparrow's rolling coverage of all the day's political developments as they happen, including Michael Gove's statement on abandoning plans to replace GCSEs with an English Baccalaureate certificate (EBC)
Andrew SparrowNews Corporation's quarterly profits double
News Corporation: Live Updates from The Guardian - Wed, 02/06/2013 - 19:55
Increase related to acquisition of Fox Sports Australia and Fox Star Sports Asia and 'improvements' in publishing operations
Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation has reported a doubling of quarterly profits but paid out a further $56m (£35.8m) in costs related to the News of the World phone-hacking scandal.
News Corp reported net profits of $2.4bn in the three months to the end of December, compared to $1.1bn in the same period a year earlier, on sales up 5% to $9.4bn. Most of the increased profits were related to the acquisition of the 50% stakes in Fox Sports Australia and Fox Star Sports Asia that News Corp didn't already own.
Murdoch said the increase in profits was due to "double-digit gains" in News Corp's cable TV businesses and "improvements" in its publishing operations, which includes the Sun, the Times, the Sunday Times and the Wall Street Journal.
The company said its publishing division, which reported a $16m increase in profits to $234m, benefited from the launch of the Sun on Sunday in February 2012.
The $56m in compensation payments and costs related to the News of the World take the total payout related to the phone-hacking scandal to more than $340m. News International, the division which controls the UK newspapers, is making a concerted effort to close down the hacking saga, agreeing out-of-court settlements on 143 of 165 outstanding civil damages cases it is facing in the high court before a key hearing before a judge on Friday.
Murdoch said News Corp was making progress in its plan to split the $54bn global empire into two separate publicly listed companies – a newspaper, book publishing and education division and a media and entertainment company. Work on splitting up the company cost the company $23m in the latest quarter.
Last week, News Corp said Will Lewis, one of the executives running News Corporation's controversial management and standards committee dealing with the phone–hacking scandal, is moving to a new senior role with in the newspaper division's headquarters in New York.
James Murdoch, Rupert Murdoch's son and News Corp's deputy chief operating officer, said he did not expect Liberty Global's $23.3bn takeover of Virgin Media to effect the competitiveness of the cable TV market.
Rupert Neateguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Virgin Media buyout creates £18bn company with no tax to pay
News Corporation: Live Updates from The Guardian - Wed, 02/06/2013 - 16:45
• Virgin Media boss will walk away with shares worth $78m
• Sector braced for battle as Liberty Global takes on BSkyB
John Malone's takeover of Virgin Media will create a $28bn (£18bn) company headquartered in Britain, but the world's largest cable group by customers will pay no UK tax for the foreseeable future.
Malone's Liberty Global, which owns 11 cable companies in Europe, has confirmed an agreed cash and shares bid that allows Virgin chief executive Neil Berkett to walk away with shares worth $78m and gives 2,500 fellow staff nearly £16,000 each from an employee share scheme.
The combined company, which will retain the Virgin brand in Britain but not its boss, would have more customers than America's largest group, Comcast, and the muscle to challenge Rupert Murdoch's UK dominance of pay TV.
But the losses accumulated by Virgin Media after two decades of investment in the country's cable network mean the new company would be exempt from tax for at least 15 years, according to analysts at Espirito Santo bank. Bernstein bank said Liberty would pay no UK taxes for "the foreseeable future".
Virgin was formed in 2006 from the alliance of Virgin Mobile, NTL and Telewest, which were assembled by merging regional cable networks. After investing £13bn in laying fibre optic cables to half of UK homes, the industry was loss-making until Virgin began to turn a profit in 2010.
Because it has been profitable for three years, it can declare how much of its historic losses it will offset against profits. On Wednesday, Virgin put that number at £2.6bn – allowing significant leeway on its balance sheet before it needs to pay corporation tax in Britain. In effect, Virgin needs to accumulate profits far in excess of £2.6bn before it starts paying corporation tax. The company made £261m in pre-tax profit in 2012, which is forecast to rise to £500m after 2014. On that basis, Virgin would have been paying £100m a year into the public purse if it was a regular payer of corporation tax at a rate of 21% of profits.
"You're looking at probably 15 years for them to work their way through, but this is a company that over the last 20 years has invested billions in network infrastructure," said Espirito analyst Andrew Hogley. "This is a very different situation to a Starbucks or an Amazon, that is offshoring profits to avoid paying UK taxes."
Malone's entry into the UK cable market marks the culmination of a decade long ambition. In 2002, the man known in the US as the "King of Cable" after his creation of the company that became Comcast, attempted to use his 24% holding in Telewest to force its merger with NTL.
The bond holders of the heavily indebted companies resisted then, but are unlikely to do so this time around. Virgin still has £5.7bn of debt, and a majority of its lenders must agree to the takeover by a deadline currently set for 14 February.
The transaction is partly debt fuelled – Liberty plans to fund its cash offer by adding nearly £2bn to Virgin borrowings. The combined Virgin and Liberty Global will owe a total of $39bn, more than twice its annual revenues of $17bn, and more than its stock market value of $28bn. Speaking on Wednesday
Malone, who is now 71, said he had no intention to topple his 81-year-old sometime adversary Rupert Murdoch's UK pay TV business BSkyB, which has nearly 11 million customers compared with Virgin's 5 million. "Our relations with Sky are going to be very important for us," he said. "We've had a long history of cooperation with News Corporation in its various configurations and we are looking forward to this."
Liberty said it would continue to invest in Virgin's network, improving its speed and capacity to carry data – the top speed offered to retail customers is currently 120 megabits a second. But Liberty also hopes to use its expertise to improve take-up of television and mobile phone subscriptions at its businesses on the continent.
Malone's European broadband and cable companies have 18 million pay-TV subscribers, almost on a par with Murdoch's 19 million in Britain and Europe. "Liberty is an 800-pound gorilla and Murdoch is another 800-pound gorilla," said Ovum analyst Adrian Drury. "The reality is this will be a straight bloodbath because the UK is an incredibly competitive market."Fries stressed he had no plans to compete with Sky for sports rights, where BT is already presenting the best funded challenge yet to the satellite broadcaster's dominance.
The deal is expected to be finalised in June, at which point Berkett intends to step down. "I'm not a very good number two," he said. The deal is worth an estimated $78m to Berkett, who took the reins as acting chief executive in 2007 and overseen a dramatic recovery in its fortunes. He has accumulated $56m in stock options which have not yet been exercised. He fully owns $8m in shares and the value of shares yet to be granted under his incentive plan stands at $13 under the terms of the offer.
- Virgin Media
- BSkyB
- Media business
- News Corporation
- Neil Berkett
- Rupert Murdoch
- BSkyB
- Mergers and acquisitions
- Liberty Global
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John Malone – 'Darth Vader' prepares to resume battle with Rupert Murdoch
News Corporation: Live Updates from The Guardian - Wed, 02/06/2013 - 14:16
Liberty Global's purchase of Virgin Media is just the latest in a long series of bold business moves by the US billionaire
US billionaire John Malone's penchant for stitching together multi-billion pound deals in the byzantine world of the US cable industry led former US vice president Al Gore to nickname him "Darth Vader". Wall Street traders impressed with his cut-throat tactics prefer the moniker "swamp alligator".
Rupert Murdoch may have a few choice words of his own to add, after Malone on Wednesday reignited a rivalry – sometimes fierce, at other times frenemy-like – to dominate the US and UK pay-TV market stretching back decades, by creating the world's largest cable TV company with Liberty Global's $23.3bn (£15bn) acquisition of Virgin Media.
The 71-year-old last crossed swords with Murdoch in the middle of the last decade and is one of the few media moguls who can claim to have got the better of the wily octogenarian and News Corporation founder.
Malone built up a stake of about 18% in News Corp, becoming its second largest shareholder and threatening the Murdoch family's cast-iron grip on the global media giant. After a two-year stand-off, in 2007 Malone used this stake as leverage in an asset swap that won him Murdoch's controlling stake in DirecTV, the largest satellite business in the US.
He had a chance to strike again in 2011 when a weakened Murdoch was forced to pull his $8bn offer to take full control of BSkyB as the phone-hacking scandal engulfed News Corp.
However, Malone passed up the opportunity, saying that in previous deals Murdoch had acted with the "greatest integrity" and he did not want to give him a "hard time".
Challenge to BSkyBNevertheless, Malone has wanted to become a major player in the UK pay-TV market for more than a decade. He was thwarted in his attempt to parlay a 25% shareholding in Telewest into the UK's biggest cable company by snapping up NTL. A merger of the two eventually formed Virgin Media in 2006 and Malone attempted to hide his true ambitions when it came up for auction a year later.
"The bottom line issue is can anything flourish under the Death Star?," he said at the time, using the Star Wars analogy to question BSkyB's market dominance.
Over the past few years, while he waited for his chance to re-enter the UK market, Malone has astutely used Liberty Global to build a cable empire in 13 countries, clearly targeting western Europe with sell-offs in other countries, including Japan and Australia, a strategy that would always lead to a showdown with Murdoch in the UK.
"We have a long history of co-operative relations with News Corp in its various configurations," Malone told City analysts, sensing media mogul blood on Wednesday after the Virgin Media deal was confirmed, in a bid to downplay the expectation of a battle of the pay-TV titans.
Malone is a deal junkie who has built up a fearsome reputation building, dismantling and selling several business empires in a 40-year career.
His eclectic range of current investments include bookseller Barnes & Noble, the world's largest live event company Live Nation, US digital radio giant Sirius, the Atlanta Braves baseball team, TripAdvisor, and shopping channel QVC.
"He is a prolific dealmaker, known for taking advantage of tax structures and making very complex arrangements often where he negotiates voting control well in excess of his equity investment," said one industry insider. "He is a deal junkie with roots as the 'King of Cable'."
Malone was born in 1941 in the New England town of Milford, Connecticut, attended Yale University and took a Phd from Johns Hopkins University in 1967 in operations research.
Early beginningsAfter starting out at Bell Telephone Laboratories/AT&T, he went on to McKinsey. But it was his gamble in 1972, uprooting his family and moving to Denver to run a small cable company called TCI, that marked the start of the career of the "Cable Cowboy", the title of a 2002 biography charting his domination of the industry.
Over the next two and a half decades, Malone knitted together cable networks across the US – and bought and sold UK assets including a stake in Flextech, at the time owner of channels including UK Gold – on the way to building America's largest operator. He was chief executive of TCI for 24 years until 1996, with the company eventually sold to AT&T for $48bn near the height of the tech and telecom boom in 1999.
He has used part of his estimated $5.6bn fortune to become a "conservation activist" and is the largest private landowner in the US. His 2.2m acres puts him just ahead of old friend and business partner Ted Turner, the founder of CNN.
He likes to keep a close eye on his cable and pay-TV rivals, and occasional partners, with minority investments in Time Warner, MTV-owner Viacom and Discovery, which was spun off from Malone's Liberty Media in 2005.
Malone is an intensely private man whose supposed aversion to flying means his holiday of choice is said to be a family vacation alongside long-time friends in a super-sized Winnebago.
However, holidays are likely to be in short supply if Malone is serious about taking on Murdoch in the UK, particularly if he sets out to make further British acquisitions.
City investors are already salivating at the possibility that Malone might look to acquire ITV, revisiting NTL's ill-fated attempt to acquire the UK's largest advertiser-funded broadcaster to bolster its position in the market in 2006.
It was James Murdoch, then chief executive of BSkyB, who thwarted the bid with an audacious move to take a 17.9% blocking stake in ITV, preventing its then biggest pay-TV rival from making a flanking manoeuvre into free-to-air TV. BSkyB was eventually forced to sell down its ITV stake, but still retains a stake of 7.5%.
"What Murdoch has done in satellite [Malone] has done in cable," said one City source. "If anyone can give Murdoch a run for his money in the pay-TV market, it is Malone, the battle will be priceless."
- John Malone
- Rupert Murdoch
- News Corporation
- Media business
- Virgin Media
- Television industry
- Liberty Global
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MPs vote in favour of gay marriage: Politics live blog
The Guardian: Politics Live Blog - Wed, 02/06/2013 - 07:34
Andrew Sparrow's rolling coverage of today's debate in the House of Commons on gay marriage
Andrew SparrowPMQs and gay marriage vote reaction: Politics live blog
The Guardian: Politics Live Blog - Wed, 02/06/2013 - 05:03
Andrew Sparrow's rolling coverage of all the day's political developments as they happen, including David Cameron and Ed Miliband at PMQs and reaction to the gay marriage vote
Andrew SparrowMedia mogul lies in wait for Malone
News Corporation: Live Updates from The Guardian - Tue, 02/05/2013 - 18:57
Rupert Murdoch stands waiting in the ring should the Liberty Global boss be successful in his Virgin Media bid
If John Malone is successful in his $20bn-plus pursuit of Virgin Media, it will renew a fierce rivalry, and occasional friendship, he has had with Rupert Murdoch over the decades in the battle for global dominance of the pay-TV market.
Malone, known as the King of Cable, rattled Murdoch in the middle of last decade, building up a stake of nearly 20% in News Corporation, which made him its second largest shareholder.
The 71-year-old forced Murdoch – a decade his senior – to buy him out in a 2007 deal which saw Malone acquire News Corp's stake in DirecTV, the largest satellite broadcaster in the US. Malone was also considered a prime candidate to swoop for full control of BSkyB in 2011 after Murdoch was forced to pull his $8bn (£5bn) offer as the phonehacking scandal engulfed News Corp, the UK satellite broadcaster's largest shareholder with a 39.1% stake. However, Malone demurred, saying Murdoch, below, had shown the "greatest integrity" in previous deals and he didn't want to give him a "hard time", although he admitted he desperately wanted to return to the UK pay-TV market.
Malone, who has been building Liberty Global's cable TV presence across Europe, has a reputation as a private individual who shuns the glamorous billionaire lifestyle. He gives generously to charity and holidays in a camper van.
He first looked at snapping up Virgin Media more than five years ago. Before the 2006 merger of NTL and Telewest, which created the UK's largest cable TV company, Malone made two unsuccessful attempts to control NTL and held a significant stake in Telewest. He has been a senior player in the US cable TV industry since the early 1970s and has owned interests in the UK cable sector for much of a career characterised by complex dealmaking and asset swaps.
Mark Sweneyguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Chris Huhne pleads guilty: Politics live blog
The Guardian: Politics Live Blog - Mon, 02/04/2013 - 08:10
Andrew Sparrow's rolling coverage of all the day's political developments as they happen, including George Osborne's speech threatening to break up the banks
Andrew SparrowRupert Murdoch's back – and this time he's tweeting orders
News Corporation: Live Updates from The Guardian - Sat, 02/02/2013 - 20:05
Not content with rearranging his editors at Times Newspapers, the resurgent tycoon now seems to be guiding their actions and responses via his Twitter account
Time for an unreality check. Only a few months ago, remember, a humbled Rupert Murdoch was the last tycoon on earth politicians wanted to dine or chat with. His giant company and its overarching boss-cum-effective-owner – him – had been caught standing dozily by while hackers and bribers reigned just off stage. His closest confidants had been hustled into retirement or worse. His family was split, bruised, distraught. And News Corp, his greatest achievement, was carved into two at the behest of a cheesed-off board and shareholders.
Worse, Rupert, the great print lover, was pushed to the non-executive sidelines as far as the papers were concerned. He was out of the action, a pariah. Who on earth wanted his endorsement at election time? But baby, look at him now.
Who's that grand old man openly calling one of his editors an "ineffective manager"? Why, Rupert, of course. And encountering problems with his directors after ushering the allegedly ineffective one (James Harding at the Times) out of the door? And, nonetheless, brusquely appointing temporary, acting editors at his quality papers in Britain? Plus noshing with Boris Johnson and George Osborne in time-honoured fashion? It's as though nothing had happened: slates not merely wiped clean but forgotten entirely. The status quo ante with added tweets.
Now, let's be as calm as possible about Gerald Scarfe and last Sunday Times's suddenly notorious cartoon of Binyamin Netanyahu. Scarfe doesn't do cuddly: never has, never will. Cartoons aren't sober, responsible statements of an editorial view. Ask the Danes. Somebody should certainly have twigged that it was Holocaust Memorial Day. But the acting, temporary etc editor of the paper, Martin Ivens, was wholly within his rights to defend Scarfe's "typically robust" drawing and to emphasise "the last thing I or anyone connected with the Sunday Times would countenance would be insulting the memory of the Shoah or invoking the blood libel".
The Board of Deputies of British Jews protests. Israel's ambassador goes on Newsnight to point out that Netanyahu didn't build the supposedly bloodstained wall. Here we go round yet another difficult mulberry bush about "taste" – one made all the more impenetrable because the argument is about images, not words. Who wants the taste police out and about in situations like this? Ask the Danes again.
But then the old tweeter wades bluntly in. "Gerald Scarfe has never reflected the opinions of the Sunday Times. Nevertheless, we owe major apology for a grotesque, offensive cartoon". Thank you and good night, Rupert. What Ivens said is brushed aside. The oracle has settled matters, somewhat humiliatingly, in 140 characters or less. Ivens has peace-making meetings and expresses contrition. Scarfe pulls back a notch. This small episode comes to seem like the UK re-negotiating EU membership. And the reality of last year slides into oblivion.
Yet, surely, it isn't the job of a chairman, or even a CEO, to second-guess his editors or express top-of-the-head views on the cartoons they publish – any more than, for example, it's his job to canvass the Times's editorial support for Romney over Obama. It certainly isn't his role to blithely downgrade the editors he half-promotes.
Murdoch has gone of out his way, and way out of pocket, to keep the papers in being. He is doing that even now, using Australian TV cash to bulwark their balance sheets. He doesn't deserve knee-jerk denunciation. But the hacking and humbling remain raw in the memory. Absolutely the last thing that John Witherow at the Times or Ivens needs is to be labelled as some kind of puppet while the Great Leader tweets away. That's a lethal mistake.
One acknowledged strength of the Times is its comment section, where Matthew Parris, David Aaronovitch, Hugo Rifkind, Philip Collins, Danny Finkelstein and more offer varied opinions, by no means all of them predictable from one week to the next. They seem to enjoy the gift of independence. But the section editor who delivers that freedom – Anne Spackman – let it be known the other day that she's moving on. Trouble with the new regime? It's said not. Enough orchestrating the thundering is enough, apparently.
But that still presents a problem for Witherow. He'll need to keep the team together and recruit fresh, flexible voices. He'll need to be flexible and free-thinking himself. He doesn't need a back-of-the-orchestra job playing second fiddle to the Voice of Twitter.
Witherow, on his record, is a very capable, experienced operator. He and Ivens surely want to be left alone to build their own futures, refresh their own papers and make their own mistakes. How do you say that in 140 characters and expect it to stick?
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British Antiterrorism Official Sentenced in Hacking Scandal
NOTW: Live Updates from the New York Times - Sat, 02/02/2013 - 01:00
April Casburn, a senior police officer, was sentenced for seeking cash payments from Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World tabloid.