Time to stand up to Murdoch and his crumbling empire

WOULD the UK be a better place if Rupert Murdoch’s News International packed up and left these shores?

Murdoch can shove our government about and use our Prime Minister as his errand boy, so let’s give him a bit of British grit. Don’t purchase anything linked to his companies, don’t forget it was Murdoch’s media group that called our cricketers cheats for licking his Aussies in the Ashes Tests. Why support Murdoch? He needs us more than we need him.

He’s in charge of an empire that is accused of hacking the phones of the dead and the families of soldiers fallen in battle. If it was anyone else who had done that he’d call them “scum”, or worse.

We cannot rely on politicians, as Murdoch uses his empire to put them in his pocket. Let’s give him a dose of his own medicine and let him go back to the place he emigrated to, the US. There he is more or less ignored.

From: Alan Carcas, Cornmill Lane, Liversedge, West Yorkshire.

WHAT a fantastic week for Ed Miliband and Labour MPs. All their Christmases came at once. Their favourite hate figures, Rupert Murdoch, the police, and David Cameron, in whichever order of priority you like, left wide open and vulnerable to be shot at with impunity. What bliss it was to be alive!

Even Gordon Brown turned up to make only his second Commons speech since the General Election.

But didn’t all those distasteful and abhorrent wrongdoings happen around 2006 to 2009? When Gordon Brown and the Labour government were responsible for the country? Not according to his rather callow attempt to re-write history, and blame everybody else for what happened, particularly David Cameron and Andy Coulson.

The level of hypocrisy shown by our MPs, who only two years ago abused their position in the expenses scandal, has to be seen to be believed. And if they think such a show of self-righteous indignation will wipe the slate clean, I suggest they think again.

From: Derek Gledhill, Talbot House, Elland.

THE circulation of the News of the World may well have been maintained by tittle-tattle about celebrities (Yorkshire Post, July 14) but memory tells me it was built on sex.

Court reporters throughout the UK looked out for the juiciest sex stories and sent full details to the NoW, which published them with the most salacious headlines they could justify.

I seem to recall the circulation at one time reached seven million, which suggests that even then there was a taste for the seediness which Mr Wright refers to and, of course, mobile phones had not yet been invented to be hacked into.

From: David T Craggs, Tunstall, East Yorkshire.

AN expression we occasionally hear from our political masters when they think that no one is listening is: “It’s been a good day to bury bad news” – the expression being used when bad news for the Government is pushed off the front page by newly breaking news. What has happened in the press recently was to me a classic example of this, and I suspect the Government breathed a sigh of relief as a result. I refer to the news that the huge train building contract has gone to Siemens of Germany and not to the English-based company Bombardier (Yorkshire Post, July)

This was bad enough news for those workers in this country who will be made redundant as a result of the Government’s decision, but worse was to follow when it was revealed on the BBC’s Newsnight that both Germany and France always give such contracts to companies within their own country, and never consider looking outside.

This was indeed “bad news” and the media should have gone to town over the revelation. Unfortunately this never took place because it was buried when the apparently more important news, that the News of the World was being closed down, hit the headlines. To me this was most unfortunate.