BBC have known about phone hacking for years
Filed Under Communications
The BBC was fully aware that hacking into people’s answerphone messages was a widespread journalistic practice as long ago as 1997.
If proof is needed, just watch this clip from the pilot episode of Jonathan Creek called ‘The Wrestler’s Tomb’ – produced by the BBC’s own in-house entertainment department, and aired on 10th May 1997.
In the episode, Caroline Quentin plays the role of a freelance investigative journalist called Maddie Magellan. In one scene she taps into the answerphone of a character she is investigating, by entering combinations of the possible message retrieval code until she gets the right one.
For activities such as this to make it to a drama series, it has to have been pretty widespread and well-known. Hacking into phone messages (albeit mobile ones) is at the heart of the current furore. Which makes all the denials we are hearing during the Leveson Inquiry seem like complete hypocrisy. It seems to me that it’s time for the BBC – and David Renwick (who conceived and wrote the series) - to explain where they got the idea from and how widespread the practice was. After all, we’re talking 14 years ago.
I wonder how many of the 9.31 million* people viewing the episode thought they were watching something that was wrong, let alone that would lead to the demise of The News of the World.
(*and that’s just the first airing of this episode, which has also been aired on several PBS stations in the U.S. and on BBC America, as well as countless repeats on Watch in the UK. Which begs the question as to whether there isn’t a touch of hypocrisy in the public’s surprise and outrage at such practices.)
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How to solve the sovereign debt crisis
Filed Under Thinking laterally
It’s time for some radical thinking now that it’s quite clear that the world is in a perilous place.
The domino effect of the European debt crisis will first cascade across Europe, and this in turn will affect other countries outside the eurozone.
Affected countries can no longer service their debt as their credit rating falls and their economies falter. Yet the world cannot afford some of the major economies to stagnate, let alone fail, but nor cannot the global system afford to cancel the debt.
What we need to do is press the reset button and kick start all economies across the world. And maybe we can, with some radical thinking and a modicum of courage.
Why not consolidate all sovereign debt (including Africa and the developing world) and net this out? Consolidate all this debt in a global ‘bank’ that issues credit notes to all creditors.
Each country would then pay this debt off to the global bank at a specified rate (say 1% over the next 100 years, or 2% over the next 50 years). They would also pay an interest rate of 1% of the initial sum for the lifetime of the debt repayment (in other words, as the debt decreases, the relative interest rate increases – so when they have paid back ½ their debt, they are paying the equivalent of 2% and so on).
This debt itself then has both a yield and a repayment schedule – and becomes a tradable commodity. Creditors would be able to trade their debt, rather than seeing parts of their portfolio becoming toxic.
We are removing part of the debt burden from economies, allowing them to invest for growth. We are giving total predictability to the impact on their financial planning>
Perhaps most importantly, we are lessening the impact on future generations on whose backs we have been building the prosperity we have been enjoying until now.
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