The Goodman Letter: less a smoking gun, more a Super Soaker

August 17, 2011
waterpistoldiagram

Clive Goodman’s letter to News International‘s director of human resources Daniel Cloke, written one month after he was sacked following his conviction for phone hacking in February 2007, is very interesting. But should it be in the public domain?

The letter was released yesterday by the House of Commons Select Committee. As smoking guns go, it may prove to be more water pistol than Colt .45. We say this in agreement with Dominic Ponsford of the Press Gazette, who notes that Goodman, a convicted criminal, had every reason to allege all manner of nefariousness at the News of the World given that he was bargaining for a hefty unfair dismissal settlement. The letter is thus less evidence of the biggest cover-up in history and more, at this juncture, a case of one man’s word against sundry others’.

The Select Committee’s bid for transparency is laudable and, of course, wholly unconnected with the MPs’ expenses scandal and a perceived need among parliament’s finest to prevent Boris the Broom from being the only kid in town who can sweep things up (rather than under the carpet). But a number of people embroiled in the phone hacking scandal have been arrrested, which, unless we have forgotten our media law, means that legal proceedings are active under the Contempt of Court legislation. On the assumption that some or all of those arrested are subsequently charged and tried, how on earth are they ever going to get a fair trial, given the mass of information published not merely by (just about) all media but also by none other than the Select Committee?

At this rate, any lawyer acting for a News of the World executive who finds himself in the dock in connection with phone hacking will have plenty of evidence by which to contend that his client’s trial has been seriously prejudiced.

But wait, a cynic stands over our shoulder. She says: “Maybe that’s the point? After all, when it comes to phone hacking, behind every smoking gun there are all manner of itchy trigger fingers, in very high places, and with unimaginable loyalties.”

Pictured: a water pistol, with helpful diagram, courtesy of Coolest Gadgets. This Super Soaker – ‘the mother of all water pistols’ – is available to all Select Committee members for just £34.95.

 

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If you’re Joey Barton, attack is not the best form of defence

May 17, 2012

Interesting times, these, in the life of Joey Barton.

If the violence displayed by the QPR captain at Manchester City last Sunday was remarkable, his subsequent conduct on Twitter has been astonishing. Barton appears to have radically reinterpreted the notion that attack is the best form of defence, lashing out at all and sundry via a series of tweets whose ultimate effect is entirely self-destructive.

In the past 24 hours, Barton has accepted one charge of violent conduct at the Etihad Stadium but denied another. The FA seems set to throw the book at him, and his club has declared that it will deal with the matter after the result of the FA investigation. Conspiracy theorists might conclude that QPR’s management team and board hope that the FA ban Barton for so long a period (four months and more) that their reported desire to rip up his contract can only be bolstered.

What, then, should Barton do? Should he:

(a) Keep his head down and say nothing, or

(b) Issue a sensible statement in which he acknowledges that both his conduct at the Etihad and subsequent tweets have brought QPR into disrepute, and

(c) Add an apology to said statement, or

(d) Go to Portugal, log onto Twitter and tweet that the world is against him but that he doesn’t care because everyone is a moron and he’s worked really hard to get where he is and if anyone is nasty to him again he is going to expose their secrets.

The answer is not (d).

The moral of the story is that if you’re a loose cannon, when you turn attack into defence there is a danger that you will blow yourself up.

Gunning foglessly for clarity

May 15, 2012

A fine piece, this, on Winston Churchill’s gift for language and the obscurantism that goes with so much corporate communication.

But wait, what’s this? Could this injunction have been phrased rather more successfully:

Be concrete, not abstract. Use metaphors to get your message across.

Metaphors are, by definition, not exactly concrete. But be that as it may: there is a lot of sound advice in Clare Lynch’s piece and a revelation, too. We had never heard of the Gunning Fog Index.  But it exists, and reveals the age at which someone would have to leave full-time education to understand given text.

We’re pleased to display our own Gunning Fog rating for the above words. That of the Churchill speech cited by Ms Lynch was 9.698.

The Gunning Fog index is 9.585

Spin at the Leveson Inquiry

May 9, 2012
Leveson witch hunt

The idea that Lord Justice Leveson and his Inquiry’s QC, Robert Jay, are in need of PR advice is intriguing.

Surely their respective tasks ought to be immune from spin? Then again, perhaps the way in which they execute them is deserving of some communications advice. Either way, times have changed. A similar inquiry from yesteryear (and such do exist) would surely not have been accompanied, albeit informally, by communications advice.

Pictured courtesy of this Flickr user: a portrait of the Leveson Inquiry.