Guido Fawked – No Research, No Result (10)

Following Trinity Mirror’s internal review which concluded that there were no concerns over widespread phone hacking at the group’s titles, the perpetually thirsty Paul Staines and his tame gofer Henry Cole, the Laurel and Hardy of the blogosphere, have decided that this is the wrong answer, and so the Guido Fawkes blog has, as a result, gone after ... the Guardian.

Researching their next blog post

Yes, this home of yet more of those rotten lefties should be investigating Trinity Mirror, according to the latest lame attempt by the less than dynamic duo. But, as I pointed out in August, Nick Davies, who has been at the forefront of unmasking wrongdoing at the Screws, stressed that there has to be investigation and research before the conclusions can be drawn and headlines written.

With the Screws, the arrest of Glenn Mulcaire meant that the Police obtained details of literally hundreds of those whose phones had been hacked in pursuit of information gathering for the paper: the evidence was already there back in 2009 when the Guardian first broke Phonehackgate. No such revelation has yet been made regarding Trinity Mirror.

Much of what Staines and Cole have managed thus far is typified by the letter from the so-called Sunlight Centre for Open Politics, which even got the year of Dave Brown’s dismissal by the People wrong: as I pointed out at the time, this could have been checked by doing a few minutes’ research. Otherwise, it has been quotes culled from Piers “Morgan” Moron’s book The Insider.

Today, their source – yes, someone else did the hard work once again – is Mark Kleinman at Sky News (“first for breaking wind”), who has confirmed that the Brown case did not go to a tribunal hearing, as I suspected, and otherwise repeats Brown’s allegations that People hacks indulged in phone hacking. But none of those hacks are named, and Brown is not about to comment further.

So Staines and Cole have the remedy at their fingertips: they can do some real investigation and research, and see where the evidence takes them. They won’t, of course: starting with an open mind would mean the possibility of their new pals at the Daily Mail, Telegraph and, yes, the Murdoch press being found to be involved in illegal activity, and they aren’t about to go there.

Instead, we’ll get more lame attempts to finger Moron, more equally lame digs at the Guardian, and the less than dynamic duo at the Fawkes blog will continue to do next to zero research. As a consequence, any result will not come from their endeavours, because they aren’t making any.

Another fine mess once again.