YOU CAN’T BLAME ME, I WAS ONLY GIVING ORDERS

“I am far too gorgeous to the be thrown to the wolves and lesbians have crushes on me.”

On Tuesday I was gleeful. Murdoch and son, Rebekah the Red, and all the bent coppers and thralls of New Corp’s media Mordor were being held to account. The euphoria lasted for maybe 48 hours, and then I started asking myself what exactly had happened. The Murdochs had wafted in on a private plane, their black SUV motorcade had charged through London with arrogance of the untouchable, and they had faced a parliamentary inquisition. But the inquisition was one without rack or retribution. Tuesday was no day for an auto de fe, just a lone custard pie that the media treated like a crime against humanity. When it was all over they wafted out again and that was that.
And, in the course of their testimony, the Murdochs and Ms Brooks managed to do something that I found quite flabbergasting. They turned around the old Nazi Nuremburg defense – “You can’t blame me, I was only obeying orders.” Their scarcely believable excuse for wholesale corporate corruption and criminality was that it was all the work of underlings and they were too elevated in the ivory-power command structure of News Corp to know anything about it. – “You can’t blame me, I was only giving orders.” Even the devious Rebekah – while editor of both The Sun and The News of the World – had no idea of what was going on, and having just been arrested, was also taking the Brit equivalent of the 5th. “I want to be absolutely clear that as editor of News of the World I had no knowledge whatsoever of phone hacking in the case of Milly Dowler and her family, or in any other cases during my tenure.” She claimed had such unshakable trust in her reporters that she never asked for their sources. Which was arrant bullshit. You don’t have to have been a professional journalist to know that every editor wants to know every source on every story. You only have to have seen Jason Robards as Ben Bradlee in All The President’s Men. Remember this exchange?

Ben Bradlee: Bernstein, are you sure on this story?
Carl Bernstein: Absolutely.
Ben Bradlee: Woodward?
Carl Bernstein: I'm sure.
Ben Bradlee: I'm not. It still seems thin.
Howard Simons: Get another source.

I can only conclude that the bastards were lying in their teeth and no one has so far seriously called them on it.

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The secret word is Slither