I’m Alright Jack!
Do you remember the Leveson inquiry into press standards, which cost the UK taxpayer almost £4 million? The inquiry was divided into two parts and the final report of Part One, which investigated whether the existing Press Complaints Commission was fit for purpose, decided a new, independent, statutory complaints procedure should be set up to replace it.
Tory PM David Cameron, who had set up the inquiry, refused to implement the recommendations and the British press continues to be both judge and jury of its own behaviour.
The second part of the Leveson inquiry was to investigate “"the extent of unlawful or improper conduct within News International, other media organisations, and whether the police received corrupt payments or were otherwise complicit in misconduct."
David Cameron cancelled the second part of the inquiry and News International was never investigated.
The Murdock family owns news International, now known as News Corporation. The Murdock family also own Fox Corporation in the USA and were recently in the headlines when they made a $787.5m payout to Dominion for deliberately and knowingly spreading false information about the company after the 2020 US election.
Dominion, by paying an out of court settlement, allowed the Murdock’s to avoid an in-depth scrutiny of their libellous actions.
The Guardian (19/04/23) had this to say:
“…while Fox doled out an unprecedented sum, they were able to avoid something priceless: the public humiliation of a trial and an apology.”
Today we learn that something very similar has happened here in England. Prince William has apparently settled a phone-hacking claim against the Murdock group, for a "very large sum" of money.
If this is true it tells us as much about Prince William as it does the about the unsavoury behaviour of the Murdock news empire. I would have hoped that Prince William, our future king, would have had the moral backbone to take Murdock’s News Group Newspapers to court so that if they had been behaving illegally their actions could be publicly exposed. Alas, it seems Prince William lacked the moral courage necessary and preferred instead to take the money and run. A future king should have the well being of his subjects uppermost in his mind but in this instance monetary self-interest seems to have won out over moral responsibility.
As one newspaper said about the Dominion settlement, the multimillion-dollar pay-out for the Murdock’s was just the price for doing business. Much in the same way British water companies illegally dump sewage into our rivers and seas because it is cheaper to do this than pay for modernising treatment plants, so unscrupulous newspapers and media outlets will continue to engage in illegal practices and peddle half-truths and lies until they are brought to public account in the British courts.
