British Phone Hacking Scandal: Indictments Handed Down!

Dear Commons Community,

As a follow-up to the phone hacking scandal involving Rupert Murdoch and his New Corporation-owned tabloids in the United Kingdom, eight senior level News Corporation employees including former editors Andy Coulson and Rebekah Brooks, were indicted on criminal charges for their participation in the hacking activities.  The New York Times is reporting that:

“The indictments did not surprise executives at News Corporation, the New York media conglomerate that owns the British papers, who are readying the split of the company’s newspapers from its more lucrative entertainment assets. The charges, in part, played into the timing of Mr. Murdoch’s finally agreeing to the split, which his top lieutenants had proposed for years, a person familiar with the thinking at the company said.

“You don’t get an indictment like this without a lot of preliminary discussions,” said this person, who could not comment on the record about private discussions. “They knew exactly, exactly what was coming and how bad it would look.”

“Alison Levitt, chief legal adviser at the Crown Prosecution Service, traced the scope of what lies ahead with a broad account on Tuesday of the number of confirmed victims of the phone hacking — more than 600, by the prosecutors’ count.

Sue Akers, the senior Scotland Yard officer overseeing the police investigations, told the Leveson inquiry on Monday that the police had notified 2,615 people that they may have been targets of the voice-mail interceptions.

In addition to Milly Dowler, a 13-year-old schoolgirl who disappeared in 2002 and was found murdered and who police said her cellphone was hacked, a number of prominent people in government and the entertainment industry are among the victims.

The article also commented that:

“Besides shaking Mr. Murdoch’s global empire to its core, the British scandal has forced News Corporation to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in legal costs, out-of-court settlements and payoffs to employees who have been laid off, Mr. Murdoch testified this year…And that price, analysts say, is likely to exceed a billion dollars as lawsuits and settlements proliferate.”

What is most troublesome, is that phone hacking was not the work of a rogue individual or two but was the basic mode of the operation of the newspapers involved.  Murdoch and his cohorts deserve the shame that have been heaped upon them and their companies.

Tony

 

 

 

 

Joel Klein’s New Education Venture – Amplify!

Dear Commons Community,

Joel Klein, former chancellor of the New York City School System, recently announced that he would be heading Amplfy, a new education venture for the News Corporation.  The New York  Times reported that:

Amplify is teaming up with AT&T to deliver digital learning products through 4G tablets for schools.  In an interview, Mr. Klein said Amplify’s products would use educational games aligned with the Common Core learning standards and customized so teachers can pinpoint a student’s individual strengths and weaknesses.

“So that if one child is having trouble with fractions and another child is already in the middle of algebra, even if they’re in the same class they can move forward and progress,” Mr. Klein said.

Education publishers, including CTB/McGraw-Hill and Pearson, and software companies are racing to develop similar digital products for iPads and other tablets that can customize instruction and analyze classroom data. When asked how Amplify would distinguish itself in a crowded landscape, Mr. Klein, the company’s chief executive officer, said: “This is not digitizing textbooks. This is really creating a very interactive curriculum.”

This venture will not be without problems.  As the article mentions:

“Whether schools will be impressed enough by the product and comfortable enough with the News Corp. name to switch to Amplify is a whole other story…also Mr. Klein — who frequently clashed with the city’s powerful teachers’ union when he was chancellor — may be associated with an ideology that could cause discomfort for some school leaders.  [This is an understatement]

Amplify’s products will be made by Wireless Generation, the Brooklyn-based education technology company that was bought by News Corporation in 2010. Wireless Generation also helped design ARIS, the web-based platform for tracking information about student achievement and teachers in the New York City public schools. Mr. Klein spearheaded the project, which came under scrutiny when it didn’t live up to expectations.  Wireless Generation also lost its effort to build a statewide data system when its contract was rejected by the state comptroller.”

Surely gaming has a place in our curricula and should be part of our efforts to improve education.  And I would like to say that I wish Mr. Klein, Amplify, Wireless Generation and the News Corporation well but all of them have too much baggage to be a part of these efforts.

Tony