How did Liverpool get into this state.

Liverpool City Council is currently partially controlled by central government-appointed commissioners. However, some known crooks still hold senior positions, while Merseyside Police should be under external investigation for endemic corruption.

In London, Boris Johnson is under intense scrutiny by the press, as are the Metropolitan Police for not investigating, despite the wealth of evidence. In Liverpool, there is near silence from the local newspaper, regional media and the national press.

The press prides itself on holding the powerful to account. It thinks it deserves special privileges to allow it to do this, but now it often fails to have any impact. At a local level, the failing is even more apparent and no more so than in the Liverpool Echo, part of Reach Plc, formerly Trinity Mirror. Trinity Mirror resulted from the merger of the Mirror Group, former proprietor Robert Maxwell and Trinity International Holdings, a product of rearranging the Liverpool Echo's substantial holdings. This merger wasn't good news for Liverpool. What had once been a successful local company became a minor part. 

The merger had successfully placed the head office in Chester for several years at the first opportunity it moved to London.

In 1995 Alastair Machray joined the group as editor of the Daily Post, which was Liverpool's morning paper. In 2005, he became the editor of the Echo. Previous Liverpool Echo editors had had strong associations with the city, but Machray is a newcomer. He has no knowledge of the city beyond what he would have picked up from generic sources, both good and bad.

The local newspaper market has gone into a steep decline. The falling sales attributed to the rise of new media being the cause. Machray, whether of his own volition or under instruction from management, started making the paper relevant. He did this by firing a large portion of the local-born staff, whose views of the city were based on personal experience and leaving those remaining to peddle the myth of Liverpool.

With Machray as editor, the Echo ran ghost stories and hagiographies for dead gangsters while cultivating scouse exceptionalism. All for its end of making money. Not content with that, Machray has been keen to cosy up to any group he sees as influential, all at the expense of journalistic standards.

The Mirror group was the group of Bouncing Bob Maxwell, Telephone hacking and faked pictures. Machray has taken this Mirror group brand and happily cut and pasted its ethics into the Liverpool Echo.

Out of all this, the city gets a corrupt council and a corrupt police force while he gets an OBE. Even Thatcher and Boris did more for Liverpool than Machray ever did.

 

IOPC, the ICO & SAR

Finally, after six months of waiting, the IOPC has delivered all its data about me. The most notable thing is the amount of redacted stuff.
 
Some of the redactions are in emails that I sent!!
 
I've already sent off a copy of emails with extracted items to various lawyers regarding the claims made, as they don't tally with events or even what was said when the lawyers were involved. I'm less than 20% of the way through.
 
If there was any doubt about the IPCC & IOPC's lack of interest in tackling police corruption, they are no longer suspicions.

Journalists

There are many things that journalists do that I find unacceptable. It seems they also find them unacceptable, but only when done to them.

Can you imagine the fuss a journalist would make if you went to their homes and knocked on their door to ask them questions early in the morning or perhaps just set up camp outside?

Can you imagine the fuss a journalist would make if you called them on their home phone number, which they hadn't given you?

Can you imagine what would happen if you phoned up a newspaper and used the services of their PABX to call random numbers to get some information about the paper by talking to staff who aren't customer-facing?

I have never been doorstepped and haven't doorstepped anyone. Journos are happy to admit they doorstep people and will post videos. Their excuse is the public interest, which seems to be a valid excuse anyone could use.

I never actually called a journalist at home, but I have been called up by one from the Liverpool Echo. Who abused me by trotting out a whole collection of allegations angrily and aggressively. When the journo realised that they'd been fed lies, they apologised and explained who had fed them the nonsense. They then wrote a story of someone suffering harassment. Oh, wait, no they didn't. Instead, they became more and more uncertain and then hung up without explaining anything. The paper now denies the phone call ever happened. They claim to have searched their records for the call, but they never asked for the number I'd been on at the time. I'd changed my number several times since then.

When I worked for various companies in a technical capacity, we would often work late. Between 6:30 and 7, also at weekends, we'd quite regularly get phone calls from industry journos, who knew full well that all the marketing and PR staff had gone home. They'd spend a fair bit of time trying to get unguarded comments from staff to sell. However, the Echo regards doing this kind of research on it as beyond the pale.

Never forget, journos are in it for money, as are their employers. They think they provide a valuable service, talk truth to power, and are the fourth estate. Judging by the state of the world, they aren't very good at it. Perhaps we should ask for our money back. They haven't done much recently to earn the privileges that they have endowed themselves with.

The Liverpool Echo is a stable-mate of The Mirror, whose former editor, Piers Moron, was not just fired like Boris Johnson, for lying but faking photos. He and the Mirror, and quite likely some of its Trinity Mirror stable mates, engaged in and benefited from phone hacking. It is difficult to believe that information obtained by the Mirror that didn't warrant a national news story but would sell a few local rags didn't make its way to local editors.

Then there is the little matter of contempt of court. Contempt is a serious matter, potentially landing papers and editors with a fine. I tried to get the numbers for contempt cases faced by editors, but there is no record. When I posted the details of an Echo contempt case, journalists were happily dismissing contempt as being part of the job. Can you imagine the fuss the Echo and co would make if someone else considered criminal behaviour as just part of the job?

Alastair Machray. You are a habitual journalist who accepts contempt as an occupational hazard and presumable accepts imprisonment in the same casual manner.