Vidize Blog

Murdoch’s empire is under pressure more than ever. His attempt to start clean by closing News of the World, the 100+ year old newspaper doesn’t seem to appease angry lawmakers.

Britain’s deputy prime minister urged Rupert Murdoch Thursday to face questioning by lawmakers over the phone hacking scandal, as pressure grew on his media empire in Australia and the United States.
Police in Britain made a ninth arrest in the case as the furore which has led to the closure of the News of the World tabloid and forced Murdoch to drop a takeover bid for satellite broadcaster BSkyB raged on.
Murdoch, his son James and Rebekah Brooks, the chief executive of Murdoch’s British newspaper arm News International faced a deadline Thursday to reply to an invitation by a parliamentary committee to answer questions on the row.

12.36pm: The press conference to hand over the Swiss banking data – containing the offshore account details of 2,000 prominent people and companies – is now over, but here is a summary of some of Assange’s later answers.

Latest update on the latest from Wikileaks on the issue of 2000 Swiss bank accounts of wealthy individuals and offshore corporations.

• Assange says he wants to go the “safe route” and have professionals look at the Elmer CDs; he also says WikiLeaks has found “sources need to be protected before the information is passed out to others.”

• He says some journalists can be opportunists who “twist and hype up the material and distort the historical record” so WikiLeaks makes “primary source documents available so honest journalists rise high and dishonest journalists struggle.”

• He is also asked about the embassy cables release. Assange says 2.3% has been released and the process will continue over the coming months.

• Assange says WikiLeaks has had more legal threats from banks “than any other organisations”. (Update Elmer said of the Swiss banking system: “I started pulling on the tail of a mouse and it became a fire-breathing dragon.”)

Riftstalker writes about Activision’s PR tactics. It seems they’re successful every time in attracting media coverage.

It begs the question if the guys in CNN (and other media) are journalists or just hacks.

Nassim Taleb, a professor at New York University and author of “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable,” talks with Bloomberg’s Erik Schatzker about the May 6 stock market selloff and his investment strategy.

An interesting article appears on BBC – End of the news romantics.

Says Andrew Marr:

I am on the edge of replacing paper newspapers with electronic versions for my iPad and phone; of accepting that I hardly ever wait for a conventional news bulletin; and of actually reading full-length books, with pleasure, as downloads.

The black statistics from Russia continue:

The AP quotes Oleg Orlov, head of the Memorial rights group where Natalya Estermirova worked, as saying that witnesses saw four men force her into a car in the Chechen capital of Grozny on Wednesday. She was later found lying on a road with two bullet wounds in her head, Russian police and activists say, the AP reports.

RIA Novosti, a Russian news service, reports that Estemirova had been investigating kidnappings and disappearances in Chechnya for Memorial. She had earlier worked with journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who was shot to death in Moscow in 2006 and human rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov, who was killed in the Russian capital earlier this year, the news agency reports.

It looks like misheard lyrics are bigger on Gootube than all the shows combined (like Ask a Ninja). Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the humor – especially when it comes at the expense of Scandinavian metal bands!

Russia remains in the spotlight as one of the most dangerous places for journalists.

Anastasiya Baburova (only 25) was shot on January 19 – minutes after a press conference at the Independent Press Center. She was walking towards the Metro station with a laywer, Stanislav Markelov.

Baburova apparently tried to stop the killer, who had walked past her after shooting Markelov; the man then shot her in the head, Kommersant reported, citing unnamed witnesses of the scene.

Markelov died immediately; Baburova died several hours later in a Moscow hospital. “It appears that Markelov was the main target,” Sergei Sokolov, deputy editor of Novaya Gazeta, told CPJ. He added that the paper is waiting for the official results of the investigation to determine whether Baburova was also targeted.

Two hours before his assassination, Markelov had given a press conference criticizing the early release on Thursday of former Russian Colonel Yuri Budanov, a tank commander convicted and imprisoned in 2003 on charges of murdering a young Chechen girl named Elza Kungayeva in 2000, Sokolov told CPJ. Markelov represented the Kungayeva family and was planning to appeal Budanov’s early release.

If you’ve never seen the Argument Clinic sketch, brace yourself. Monty Python have decided to wage war on low-quality versions of their sketches and they are creating a whole new channel with high-quality versions!