Hair, There, and Everywhere!

I’m watching Parliament query Rebekah Brooks. All I can think about is “Wow! That’s a lot of hair going on there!” She needs to be accompanied by an Irish Cocker Spaniel to complete the picture. And what a lovely duo would they would make, too! That’s all that Rebekah needs right now to soften her drowning image. A furry friend. She probably has one somewhere hiding-out by a phone line hoping to hear the woof’s of the Queen’s Corgis.

From what I understand, Rebekah Brooks has not been known to be warm and fuzzy, but then, one doesn’t get to the position of "Editor" of a newspaper of any ilk, then into the elevated position of CEO of Rupert Murdoch’s News International empire, with a smile and a wink, eh?

Oh, what a crafty little thing she is! Just now she explained to her executioners, er, her questioners, that while she was editor of NOTW, many tragic stories were to be covered, one of which involved the 2000 murder of eight-year-old Sarah Payne by a known sex offender, which Rebekah reminded the group NOTW had campaigned Parliament to enact what is now known as “Sarah’s Law.” *

(Meaning, well, you know, we were so very concerned about bringing accurate news and justice to the fore that we had to nudge all of you to do something about the at-the-time legal barriers to sex offender information, if you will. Ahem.)

Oh, all right, Rebekah! NOTW did something noble – once.

In the interim, there is this problem over hacking a murder victim’s voicemail, erasing messages to provide room for other callers’ messages to be heard just in case something juicy and new would be discovered to splash across the tabloid pages, never considering how the activity might give false hope to the victim’s family that she was still alive and checking her phone. Oh dear. That wasn’t a very decent idea now, was it?

But, Rebekah may not have known about this. By then she was no longer the editor and was sitting in her lofty CEO perch where, as written the other day, one is way too busy to pay attention to silly little details of what the underlings are doing. Perhaps once not involved exclusively with NOTW, details of what the run-amok journalists were doing to snag a story no longer sat at the top of her desk In-Box; however, between 2000 – 2003 Brooks was the Editor and not immune from knowledge of budgetary concerns.

According to numerous reports, NOTW monies paid to private investigators, Scotland Yard connections and such, could not have gone unnoticed in what is considered to be an almost hawk-like monitoring-of-expenses and general annual budget environment.

As the NOTW scandal is an “on-going investigation” I won’t ramble on about the guilt (or lack thereof) of one individual in this sorry mess beyond the side-eye jabs.

One life has been lost thus far in association with NOTW, although the cause of death of Sean Hoare, a former News of the World employee and the debacle’s initial “whistle-blower" has not yet been disclosed (murder/ suicide/coincidental “natural causes”? Cough.), the toll it is taking on all concerned is tangible.

Just ask Prime Minister David Cameron, now-former good pal of Rebekah Brooks, and former employer of former NOTW editor-now-arrested-along-with-the-rest, Andy Coulson.

My, my, my. What a cozy, claustrophobic web they weaved. 

Stay tuned….


*The point of the campaign was for the government to allow controlled access to the “Sex Offender’s Registry” so that parents with young children could know if a child sex-offender was living in their area. Sarah Payne's mother has claimed that had such a law been in effect in 2000 it could have saved her daughter's life.