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Rupert's "flame-haired" one-time editor

Rupert Murdoch - he who presides over sleazy newspapers, publishes so-called newspapers which are singularly partisan and, in effect, heads up Fox News - looked upon Rebekah Brooks as almost one of his family.   Remember Brooks?    Editor of the News of the World - #1 sleaze newspaper before its demise.

She was recently acquitted in what has become known as the hacking trial.       Mick Carlton, writing his weekly op-ed piece in The Sydney Morning Herald, comments on her acquittal....

"To the surprise of many people –  perhaps even herself – Rebekah Brooks beat the rap. On Tuesday the flame-haired siren of Rupert Murdoch's British media empire walked free from London's phone-hacking trial, along with her husband Charlie and a few other odds and sods. It was her one-time lover and former editor at the now extinct News of The World newspaper, Andy Coulson, who took the fall. He will go to jail. She will not. 

An old friend of mine in London who knows this stuff intimately tells me that Scotland Yard and the prosecution simply did not have the goods on her. There was no hard evidence that linked her to the hacking. And recognising that he was in effect on trial as well, Murdoch (ever so 'umbled, m'lud) threw millions at her defence, with serried ranks of silks and solicitors stretching as far as the eye could see. It worked.


Yet one fact remains. Ironclad. Brooks presided over a "newspaper" which cynically trawled the sewers for no other reason than to make money for Rupert. Even as she and Coulson were bonking their bums off they were hypocritically "exposing" the sexual antics of politicians and pop stars or wallowing in the private agony of the family of a missing schoolgirl, Millie Dowler. They wrecked lives and careers without compunction.


It was not journalism. It was filth. And Rebekah Brooks remains covered in it."

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