Anyone in government was put there either by the people, or indirectly by those chosen by the people.

Private actors choose themselves.

Thus the people allow government powers that are denied to private actors.

Now, such governments may argue, perhaps rightly, that they are acting in the public interest, and that News of the World hacks chasing after celebrity tittle-tattle are not. But who gets to decide here?

I’m going to guess

goverments

. Do I win five pounds ???

Interestingly, I heard the UKUCNUT’s name, together with his sick tweet, on Talk Sport in the car, but when I got home and checked the beeb website, he was namless and not apparantly associated with any organisation. Tim Blair in Australia has more info on his blog than our national broadcaster.

(Notice how I refrained from mentioniong the jerk’s organisation again in case my dylexia got the better of me.)

I thought the last Inquisitor of the Murdochs this afternoon (I forget her name, but the one who was interrupted by the nut with the pie) made a good point: it’s likely that the NOTW staff didn’t consider their behaviour worth reporting “upstream” to News Group and News Corp. (assuming they didn’t) because it simply wasn’t anything out of the ordinary for the British press. James Murdoch disagreed, I imagine because it might imply that he, too, knew that it was “normal”. But it needn’t, necessarily, and does ring true.

I’d say it was very arguable myself JP. The hacking of phones has been known about for years. Nobody gave a piss about it as long as it was confined to Celebs and politicians, but as soon as it was known that “ordinary” people were being hacked, the Guardian managed to whip it up into an hysteria of almost Death of Diana proportions.

The Guardian kept going with this with one malicious idea in mind, and one only… Smash Murdoch and News International. They may sanctimoniously posture that they care that the Police are corrupt (they have been since Robert Peel was a lad) or they want to “Clean up” the media, but it’s a lie. Their sole purpose was to take down any supposed right wing opposition to their, and their symbiotic broadcasting arm, the BBC, which has 10 times the power, reach and influence that News International has now, or ever will have, left wing agenda.

The Guardian was perfectly comfortable with publishing the Wikileaks revelations, even though they had the potential to get people killed, rather than just getting people a bit pissed off about invasion of privacy.

They went out an bought the Palin emails, not with the intention of revealing something in the public interest, but to smash her too, a woman who is neither in Office or currently running for one. 27,000 pages of emails later and all they have got is egg on their faces. They turned up nothing, but it wasn’t for the want of trying was it?

So no, the Guardian are the sort of shits that some in News International are.. they just use different methods.