Category Archives: Media 📷

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Rupert Murdoch at the Leveson Inquiry

26 Thursday Apr 2012

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ANALYSIS

Yesterday, he described Gordon Brown as ‘unbalanced’, someone who had declared war on News Corporation in reponse to The Sun switching its support from Labour to David Cameron’s Conservatives.

Today, Rupert Murdoch admitted that he had missed the ‘cover-up’ at the News of the World, a newspaper he also said should have been closed down long ago.

When asked who the buck stopped with at all his newspapers, he replied the Editor, he, Rupert Murdoch, had of course overall responsibility, however he had delegated.

If the 81-year-old the standing of the media mogul had suffered from the phone hacking scandal, then his appearance today and yesterday at the Royal Courts of Justice may have gone someway to recovering any lost ground.

Great power is best exercised when it is understated, especially when it is exposed before the glare of the media spotlight.

And that is exactly what the world saw, as arguably one of the most powerful men in the world explained how he did not intefere in the running of his newspapers, content or welfare of staff and how he closed the NoW after revelations that the phone of tragic schoolgirl Milly Dowler had been hacked. He said he “could feel the blast coming in the window, almost”, as soon as the story broke.

All this will of course make the headlines, however what was perhaps more telling was how he viewed the future of the newspaper industry in the midst of the current electronic revolution.

He gave newspapers another ten years, this from a man for whom running a newspaper is clearly a passion.

How would the new media make money, well the Huffington Post was getting millions of hits but was struggling to make anything.

There are bloggers out there whose work can reach any where.

Work can be pilfered and then put out there with little or no respect for intellectual property rights.

If this was some else talking, then it could be dismissed as yet another world view, however here is the owner of The Sun (as well as Sunday), The Times and The Sunday Times admitting that he could not see a long term future for the newspaper industry.

https://nayabchohan.com/2012/02/29/1366/

https://nayabchohan.com/2011/07/15/the-murdoch-saga-continues/

https://nayabchohan.com/2011/07/12/gordon-brown-and-the-sun-newspaper/

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E-Mails between Jeremy Hunt and News Corp over BSkyB bid

24 Tuesday Apr 2012

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Frederic Michel, was head of public affairs at News Corp.

 A June 2010 email said that Mr Michel had had a call from Mr Hunt’s adviser, Adam Smith, who said he believed that “the UK government would be supportive throughout the process”.

In an email sent on 15 November 2010, Mr Michel told Mr Murdoch “Jeremy” had tried to call him but had received “very strong legal advice not to meet us today as the current process is treated as a judicial one”. “My advice would be not to meet him today as it would be counter-productive for everyone, but you could have a chat with him on his mobile which is completely fine, and I will liaise with his team privately as well,” he wrote.

In another email – on 23 January 2011 – Mr Michel said: “He wants us to take the heat, with him, in the next 2 weeks”. He continued: “He very specifically said that he was keen to get to the same outcome and wanted JRM to understand he needs to build some political cover on the process.”

The next day Mr Michel told Mr Murdoch he had managed to get some information on Mr Hunt’s statement on the BSkyB bid to Parliament due the next day “although absolutely illegal..>!”.

Mr Murdoch told the inquiry that the reference had been a “joke”. “I think the ‘greater than’ and the exclamation point there are a wink – it’s a joke,” he said. Mr Michel’s written submissions to the inquiry suggested that he never had direct contact with Mr Hunt, despite giving the impressions in emails that he had. He explained that the “JH” or “he” in his emails were shorthand for Jeremy Hunt’s team. Mr Jay suggested that liaising with Mr Hunt via Mr Michel was a way of avoiding the appearance of inappropriate informal contact over the bid.

But Mr Murdoch said that it was “acceptable and part of the process”.

Click to access Witness-Statement-of-Frederic-Michel1.pdf

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James Murdoch at the Leveson Inquiry

24 Tuesday Apr 2012

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ANALYSIS

James Murdoch – and his father as a consequence – has come in for a barrage of criticism over his handling of the whole phone hacking saga which at one point appeared to be on the verge of bringing to an end the British operation of the Murdoch Media Empire.

So, as the young Murdoch sat in front of a white screen  today to answer questions about the affair which began in the publics eyes with the hacking of the voice mails of the missing school girl, the hauntingly tragic  Milly Dowler, he cut a rather apologetic figure.

Clearly not at ease with the line of questioning or even being called to account for his actions, he denied any knowledge of an e-mail which claimed phone hacking was rife at the News of the World, the Sunday Tabloid that was closed down as a result of the public fury about that intrusion into the grief of the Dowler family.

He did this on oath before Lord Justice Leveson.

James Murdoch also denied he was involved in a corporate cover-up, blaming senior executives for not  telling him of what was really going in the newsroom of the News of the World.

On that last part, at the very least, he is right – the Murdochs do not interfere in the content of their publications or how they find their stories, they don’t need to – every executive is hired for how similar they are to the way in which they think to the head of this global media empire, namely Rupert Murdoch.

As for how the stories are found, the buck stops with the Editor.

By common consent, the 39-year-old James Murdoch is no longer the force he once was, his star is no longer on the rise, he has suffered from a lack of experience on the ground floor.

Perhaps, he should have been thrown into the newspaper world doing the rounds before rising so quickly to be head of News International, a position he resigned from in February.

There’s nothing like the school of hard knocks, to toughen up anyone who wants to make it in this often harsh world.

James Murdoch also said that it was News Corporation’s long-held ambition to get hold of the remaining shares of BSkyB, what the Murdoch’s intend to do with newspapers they own he did not say, although another thing that has also emerged from the Leveson Inquiry is the decline of the newspaper industry as a whole, something that frankly can be seen by the content that passes off as political, international or general reporting in newspapers generally.

Here is an arena where to show intelligence is frowned upon, and where too much time – in terms of hours allocated to reporters – is spent on gossip and side issues with the result that coverage is generally superficial.

Newspapers should be here to inform their readers, especially now when major reforms are occurring in education, health and welfare at a time when the government is warning that austerity cuts have not even begun. And on the world stage, major confrontations are looming with Iran and China, as well as a financial crisis in Europe which has engulfed every member of the Euro-zone and whose long-term consequence could affect this country’s standing in the world.

If, and when this is covered in newspapers over here, it is through the peculiar prism of a very narrow news agenda in a language that few actually understand.

What’s more newspapers have shown themselves to be very resistant to changes that are clearly occurring in front of them, namely people as they become more confident in their use of the internet can ignore them as a source of news.

Perhaps, Murdoch was in part responsible for this decline.

However, that eighty-one-year-old Australian did not own all of the publications whose daily headlines remind us how out of touch they are with events over here and further.

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Labour Peer denies ‘Obama bounty’ claims

16 Monday Apr 2012

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Suspended Labour Peer Lord Nazir Ahmed has told The Template that he did not call for a £10m bounty for the capture of US Presidents Barack Obama and George Bush.

He was reported to have made the remark by a Pakistani newspaper.

But Lord Ahmed said the story was “lies” and that he had never mentioned a bounty for President Obama or Bush.

The Express Tribune said the comments were a response to a US reward being offered for the capture of a Pakistani radical, Hafiz Muhammad Saeed who founded Lashkar-e-Taiba, the group which is blamed by India for the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks in which 166 people were killed.

Lord Ahmed is said to have made the remarks at a reception in Haripur on Friday.

Labour has suspend the peer, pending an investigation.

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George Galloway – one million lives lost in Iraq ANALYSIS

03 Tuesday Apr 2012

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ANALYSIS

George Galloway’s stunning victory at Bradford West has been treated with awe and adulation by his supporters and dismay and disgust by those who are not.

It is the nature of the man that he has polarised opinion in this way.

For on one hand, there is the George Galloway who champions causes such as the Mariam appeal that highlighted the devastating effect a decade-long sanctions were having on the children of Iraq, whilst on the other, there are many who are left wondering exactly why he is doing this.

One subscriber has asked me, what my impressions of him have been.

So, here goes.

The first time I met George Galloway, he was the Labour MP for Glasgow Kelvin, a maverick but highly confident about his position within New Labour.

He was so confident that he attempted to launch a newspaper aimed at the Asian community, for which I worked.

In one interview he gave me for the newspaper, he informed me that the Taliban were a creation of the CIA and that the Americans were aiming to use them against China some time in the future.

That interview was conducted some four years before 9/11.

Of course, the majority of his work at this stage was about Iraq and what sanctions were doing to this country, a country that was also being bombed by US-UK  aircraft, who had set up no fly zones.

The daily grind which eventually cost half a million lives of small children received little or no attention here, as did the deaths of civilians from the bombing raids.

Iraq continued to be in a state of war during this decade, and yet newspapers over here, were more interested in George’s business dealings with Saddam and then later with the Benazir Bhutto-backed East newspaper.

There was even a story of a fling with a Cuban maid, something he denied.

No doubt, little Mariam who he brought back from Iraq for treatment in Scotland, and her mother will probably have nothing but good things to say about someone who in highlighting a great crime against humanity also saved a life.

Having said all this, I remember being asked to stop writing Amnesty International sourced stories about the Algerian government killing its own people during that country’s brutal civil which had begun because the military would not accept the outcome of an election that put the Islamists into power.

George had even written a piece questioning the legitimacy of Amnesty and its claims.

The last time, I saw him at this stage was during a speech where he presented the back to health Mariam to the world.  He was clearly angry with the media at the time, who were opening many lines of inquiry into him, and decided to accuse me of being part of the enemy, or as he put it, ‘my old friend at the back.’ (of the crowd, where I was struck by the ferocity of his verbal attack)

The second time I encountered George Galloway, was at Press TV where he is a star. Then, he had been expelled from the Labour party, and had also lost his parliamentary seat due to boundary changes at Bethnal Green.

He was angry with me the first time, because I had not opened the door to him – I was actually lost in my work at the time, though he didn’t seem to want to know. The next day, he said hello, and I later discovered why – I had given my showreel to the head of documentaries who proceeded to use my ideas from there as well as from my website. I remember George claiming on Sky that he was the first to predict that Libya would descend into post Soviet Union Afghanistan-style chaos with the fall of Gaddafi. Actually, I beg to differ and so does my twitter entry dated 20 March, 2011!

This, and his behaviour in public,  all of course pointed to someone who was a spent force, someone in the twilight of their career.

Well, events in Bradford have proved everyone wrong – although I did notice that he used a number of my lines during his victory speech, especially the one about one million lives being lost in Iraq which I used at City University’s own version of Question Time.

Having said this, you would be a hard man to not applaud his return.

The question is now, will he deliver to the people who have put their faith in him?

Protected: 📺 JOURNALIST NAYAB CHOHAN APPEARS ON QUESTION TIME AT CITY UNIVERSITY LONDON, February 2011

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Empire Builders

20 Tuesday Mar 2012

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ANALYSIS

Before the Nazis, there were the Colonialists, and it is very rare to hear anyone say that the colonising nations, of which Great Britain was the most successful, were worse.

Last night’s Empire, Making a Fortune, made a contribution to altering this.

England was the empire on which the sun never set, perhaps it wasn’t the sun that propelled this tiny nation into becoming a world power.

After beginning as pirates – Somali pirates may have something to say about that today – some of the worst and most selfish of human beings on earth set up sugar plantations in the West Indies where slaves shipped in from Africa – we all know how they came here, and a third would die within  the first three years – were then treated as property with arbitrary punishments meted out because the man in charge could.

Jeremy Paxman read an account written by one slave owner, Thomas Thislewood of how he spent the day inflicting punishments on his property during three months in 1756.

Darwin, he wrote, had to punished for eating sugar cane so he was flogged, pickled and then Hector was told to shit in his mouth.

Thislewood was proud about the numbers of female slaves he raped, over a thousand by his own admission.

Then, every Sunday, he and his other plantation owners would meet to thank the Lord, for they were good Christian folk.

Exactly who were these people and how they came to be like this, is something that I suppose you could never understand.

This is what the word RAW truly means, that is raw greed, envy, superiority – all the basest instincts known to man.

And they are of course the very cold emotions that created and drove the Nazis.

BRISTOL, 7-6-20, STATUE OF SLAVE OWNER EDWARD COLSTON IS DUMPED INTO THE SEA (ABOVE AND BELOW)

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📺 How the 1980 Iranian Embassy Siege Changed my life as an ITN News Producer 🇮🇷

15 Thursday Mar 2012

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TEMPLATE EXCLUSIVE

Stewart Purvis was a news producer at ITN when the SAS were about to storm the Iranian embassy. He explains the decisions he took that resulted in those iconic pictures being broadcast on British television and how they changed his life. Watch it here

Background

The Iranian Embassy siege took place from 30 April to 5 May 1980, after a group of six armed men stormed the Iranian embassy in South Kensington, London.

The gunmen took 26 people hostage—mostly embassy staff, but several visitors and a police officer, who had been guarding the embassy, were also held. The hostage-takers, members of a group campaigning for the autonomy of Iran’s Khūzestān Province, demanded the release of Arab prisoners from jails in Khūzestān and their own safe passage out of the United Kingdom. The British government quickly resolved that safe passage would not be granted, and a siege ensued. Over the following days, police negotiators secured the release of five hostages in exchange for minor concessions, such as the broadcasting of the hostage-takers’ demands on British television.

By the sixth day of the siege the gunmen had become increasingly frustrated at the lack of progress in meeting their demands. That evening, they killed one of the hostages and threw his body out of the embassy. As a result, the British government ordered the Special Air Service (SAS), a special forces regiment of the British Army, to conduct an assault to rescue the remaining hostages. Shortly afterwards, soldiers abseiled from the roof of the building and forced entry through the windows. During the 17-minute raid, the SAS rescued all but one of the remaining hostages, and killed five of the six terrorists.

 

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JOURNALIST NAYAB CHOHAN INTERVIEWS STEWART PURVIS in TEMPLATE EXCLUSIVE – Why OFCOM took Press TV off the Airwaves

15 Thursday Mar 2012

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LONDON – Press TV could be back on the UK airwaves, Professor Stewart Purvis who was on the OFCOM board that made the decision to take the Iranian-owned broadcaster off air said today in an exclusive Template interview.

Prof Purvis said Press TV had not been able to meet European standards and regulations, highlighting the interview broadcast with a man who later said he had been under duress from the Iranian authorities as an example of this.

He did not however rule out a time when OFCOM and Press TV could meet and iron out the problems, that mean that viewers can only see the channel on the deregulated web.

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