MCN Blogs
Ray Pride

By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com

Posted Tuesday, July 19th, 2011 - Comments Off on The Hack: Piecing the Pie
Be Sociable, Share!

The Hack: Piecing the Pie

HAVE A SLICE: Tick-tocks of the proceedings in committee from the New York Times and the Guardian. ProPublica runs the stats on the hacking-spying scandal. Poynter offers a five-minute “explainer” of what’s at stake. The Guardian empaneled writers Zoe Williams, Brian Cathcart, Eamonn Butler, Henry Porter, Richard Peppiatt, Heather Brooke, Alan Travis, and Hugh Muir to offer insta-insight from the NewsInt bake-off in Parliament. Williams on Wendi Deng’s reaction to the Secret Flan: “You could fake a lot, maritally, but I don’t think you could fake the rawness of that defence.” Cathcart: “There is meat here in the detail. Roll on the public inquiry – assuming the government gets the terms of reference right.” Butler, of the Adam Smith Institute, “a UK policy institute supporting free market economy,” works the “as we all know” style of assertions hard: “Rupert Murdoch came over as a person who wanted his newspapers to be a force for good… Murdoch always ran his company on trust–as a good business leader has to do. You can’t know every detail of what goes on in a vast international business… delegation is the only way to run such a company. Murdoch senior looked like a man in despair: not just about the breach of trust with the hacking victims, but the breach of his trust, and of his readers, by his managers and their subordinates.” The NY Times’ Ravi Somaiya tweets: “Summary of today’s #notw testimony: we weren’t involved, weren’t there, didn’t know, nobody told us, sorry.”

HEAR, HEARING: NYTimes’ Graham Bowley and Alan Cowell think Scotland Yard did not come off well. ANONYMOUS CLAIMS it has News of the World and Sun emails that will be released shortly.

MEANWHILE: FoxNews.com reports “exclusively” that a dozen alleged members of Anonymous have been arrested by the FBI.

FLAN-FLINGER FLUFFS: “I’m sure you’ll appreciate the irony, but I cannot comment on an ongoing police investigation.” (Vid below.)

The Guardian has a rough-‘n’-ready profile of comedian-activist “Jonnie Marbles.”

A Wikipedia list of people who have been pied. (Via @brianstelter.)

MURDOCH STYLIN’: Journalist Sarah Ellison talked to director Andrew Rossi and producer Kate Novack about Murdoch’s style during the production of Page One: Inside the New York Times. (3’09” vid) Simon Dumenco offers nine further  “lowlights and highlights” of the Murdoch testimony.

A camera operator finds an unfortunate framing for Rupert Murdoch in his post-flan testimony.

WENDI DENG’s FIRST FILM as a producer, Snow Flower And The Secret Fan, just opened from Fox Searchlight. The Wall Street Journal “has tea” with its cast.

THE JOURNAL PROFILED DENG IN NOVEMBER 2000 in a 2,700-word piece by John Lippman, Leslie Chang and Robert Frank.

NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: SF Weekly’s Dan Mitchell wants his Twitter feed back; he thinks it’s all too much: “[L]et’s get a grip. Must every detail of the parliamentary hearings be broadcasted in real time by hundreds of people, basically hijacking the news… I’ll give media reporters a pass, I suppose (and yet, even there, what’s the point?)… The technology site AllThingsD (run by Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal) is live-blogging the hearings, as if they were on a par with John Dean revealing the crimes committed by the Nixon Administration… Still. All that’s happening here is that a couple of execs are lying and covering their asses. It’s news, but it’s not earth-shattering news.”

Wendy Bacon at Australia’s New Matilda sees things differently from Down Under. “The key point in this saga for Australia—there is no competition here… The Australian arm of News Corporation controls almost 70 per cent of the newspaper market, the only newspaper in four capital cities, a big chunk of the suburban market and key regional papers. Tabloid journalism in Australia is controlled by News Ltd, each paper having its own city market to itself. The company also has radio interests, a share of Sky TV (which is closely integrated with its international partner in the UK), Foxtel and part of the book and magazine markets. It is seeking to take over cable TV Austar and partly owns the National Rugby League. It also owns Melbourne Storm which was involved in salary cap scandal last year.”

“The Hack” is an occasional column of media commentary.

Be Sociable, Share!

Comments Off on The Hack: Piecing the Pie

Comments are closed.

Movie City Indie

Comments Most Recent Archives

Quote Unquotesee all »

It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon