Daughter Myspace Comments

News Corp. Board Offers Trash In, Trash Out: Susan Antilla

A thriving, sex-and-gossip newspaper has been shuttered, big shots in media, politics and law enforcement have resigned, and arrests have been made. It has resulted in a lot of headlines, but considering how old the real news is, I wonder what all the fuss is about.

The worst-kept secret in recent business history is that News Corp. (NWS) is an underachiever when it comes to matters of corporate governance . Long before hacked phone messages and bribed London cops replaced Dominique Strauss-Kahn as the hot global story, the people who analyze how well public companies manage themselves were holding their noses whenever they perused regulatory filings from Rupert Murdoch’s media empire. Now, shares of the company are themselves a scandal, losing 19 percent since the scandal heated up July 4.

Garbage in -- that is, a board encumbered with conflicts of interest -- turns out to be a reliable predictor of garbage out.

To recap: It has been five years since newspapers reported that a journalist at Murdoch’s now-defunct News of the World had hired an investigator to hack the phones of Prince William and others. Armed with the royals’ messages, the paper imparted to readers an international scoop of history-making proportion: The prince had hurt his knee.

The reporter, Clive Goodman , and the investigator, Glenn Mulcaire , both did time in prison for that and other hacking crimes in 2007. News Corp. portrayed the matter as an example of isolated rogue reporting. Then on July 4 of this year the Guardian published a story detailing how News of the World staffers had also hacked into the mobile phone of missing teenager Milly Dowler in 2002, deleting some of the girl’s messages to make room for new voicemails in hopes of getting an exclusive. The girl’s distraught parents thought Milly herself must be deleting the messages, and thus was still alive. She wasn’t.

It’s one thing to mess with public figures like a prince, but it’s another to hack the mobile phone of a murdered teenager, providing hope to her traumatized parents and sidetracking police on the case -- all in the name of breaking a story that has no public-policy value. The Guardian article marked the start of a deluge of news coverage that put to rest the implausible rogue-reporter theory. On July 31, News Corp. (NWSA) ’s Wall Street Journal reported that U.K. police had expanded their criminal investigations of the company to add possible computer hacking to what was initially a probe of phone hacking and police payoffs. Jack Horner , a spokesman for the company, declined to comment.

Daughter's friends mother added me on facebook and keeps adding my ...

You’re probably going to think I am a bit petty but something is really bugging me.

In my life, I have several penpals overseas and several real-life pals who live out of the area and 3 pals who live near me, and about 10 extended family members; mostly who live out of the area. (I also have my hubby and daughter.) I have most of the afore mentioned on facebook … I also have about 40 ‘friends’ who I have never met and just play Farmville with, and I also have 3 or 4 ex work colleagues on facebook.

All has been OK since I joined facebook 2 years ago, and then a couple of months ago, my daughter started hanging around with a girl called Sarah, and I realised quickly that I recognised her mother, as someone I knew when our kids were babies, but only from the ‘under ones’ club in our borough. So she isn’t an old friend or anything and I only met her 4 or 5 times. The woman (Jane) is nice but a bit OTT. Sarah asked my daughter if her mother could add me on facebook and I said ‘ok.’ And we became Farmville friends. She is OK and fairly harmless.

Well, thing is, in the two months since then, I have had to put my status to ‘offline’ permanently, because she keeps chatting to me EVERY time I go on, and also, she has added four of my friends! Two ‘real life’ ones who are ex work colleagues, and two penpals who live in America and London.

You see, when one of them comments about anything, it appears on a filter or ‘feed,’ and other people on my friends list, (but not necessarily on the friends list of the one who made the comments,) can see the comments, and respond to them. Well, she is on facebook 6 or 7 hours a day, and keeps on chatting to my pals, and lo and behold, she has added four of my friends.

I’m not jealous at all; I have friends who know each other and are friends too, but in this instance, I have an issue, because for one, she doesn’t KNOW them at all, and secondly, my daughter doesn’t have much luck keeping friends, and has fallen out with 3 or 4 in the last 3 years who have really turned against her, and their mothers have turned against me, and they’ve kind of ‘banded together,’ and bitched left, right and centre about me and my daughter. So if it happens AGAIN, and our daughters fall out, and this Jane turns on me, then it’s going to compromise the friendships of the four people she has added. I will find it hard to continue the friendships with the four people if someone who has fallen out with me and my daughter has them on their ‘friends’ list.

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