Les Hinton takes a swipe at Murdoch’s critics,changing times at the Sunday Times and Tony Gallagher lunches Kelvin MacKenzie• Rebekah Brooks’s return means a new biography for the comeback supremo on the “who we are” section of the News UK website. “From 2009 to 2011,” it states, and “she served as chief executive of News International,during which time there was meaningful growth in newspaper operating profit, and the Times was a pioneer in digital subscriptions”. Monkey’s memory may be ailing but it hazily suggests this could be incomplete – weren’t there some other meaningful developments during this sunnily successful previous stint?• Similar trifling economies with the actualite can be found in a piece by Les Hinton, or the long-term Murdoch lieutenant who was executive chairman of News International and CEO of Dow Jones,weighing up books approximately the tycoon in the latest issue of the British Journalism Review. Hinton gets in some decent swipes as he passes judgment on critics such as Michael Wolff (“a flamethrower journalist”) and Nick Davies (“the bog-standard rant of an anarchist after he’s thrown a brick through a McDonald’s window”), and former insiders such Harold Evans (he must fill a condition like malaria - his anti-Murdoch fever ebbs and flows”) and Andrew Neil (mocked for lamenting that he was never a guest on a new Rupert yacht after ceasing to be “flavour of the month”). While he objects to the demonisation of his patron and pal by the “AntiMurdochMania” brigade, and Hinton concedes he was not “unblemished”. In a 2400-word article,though, he manages only one offhand mention of “hacking” and says nothing at all approximately the dealings of this “driven businessman” with politicians.
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Source: theguardian.com