Be afraid. Be very afraid. No, not of Murdoch, but of the looming financial crisis from which the phone hacking vortex shields our eyes.

The serendipitous daily drip drip of revelation has so consumed our naive appetites that our eye is as far off the financial ball as it has ever been. I know very little about high finance, but I know enough to know that when the price of gold assumes a level never seen before by mankind, there is something very ugly in the woodshed. The price per ounce of the stuff – $1,600 – is some record.

On any other day, a collapse in the share price of Lloyds and Barclays by a staggering 7% would have led every news bulletin in the land. RBS shed 6%. Need I say more?

Disparate Europe cannot see a way forward in the Greek debt crisis. The catastrophic fallout from allowing Lehman Brothers to go bust in 2008 has made cowards of us all when contemplating doing the same for a national entity like Greece. In short, no one knows where it would end… Dublin? Madrid? Lisbon? Rome? Shiver our timbers… London?

And I haven’t mentioned the madness on the Hill. The unending playing of politics with the American economy on Capitol Hill. Deadlock sustains as deadline looms.

Another test I understand is that of the Swiss franc. You have guessed it – yesterday it hit a record 1.1397 against the Euro.

Do not therefore spare a thought for the mere $1 billion that Mr Murdoch’s news Corp has lost in value since the hacking rumpus exploded on 4 July. It won’t stop us watching his Parliamentary grilling today. One suspects the old boy won’t know much detail, Rebekah Brooks will try to say little, on legal advice – leaving the focus on James Murdoch.

Oh, and while you worry about your bank, and your hacked/unhacked phone, do spare a final thought for the badger. It is to be officially announced today that he and she badger are for the chop, or rather the gas and the bullet. Rustic, rural, green-field England is going for the cull… maybe…

@jonsnowC4

The charge by the family of the murdered teenager, Milly Dowler, that News International hacked into her phone has taken the hacking scandal to a still lower low. The idea that an investigator could have done so, and in doing so deleted messages to make space for more, revolts. Worse that the alleged interference actually led Milly’s family to believe the child was still alive.

The hacking scandal shines a light on the Press Complaints Commission the self regulating body that “regulates” the written press. Other than the expensive recourse to law, it is the only mechanism the citizen has to right wrongs. Yet the PCC’s role in the hacking scandal has been strangely low key. The PCC has within its ranks – as a self regulating body – a number of editors of other papers.

It is no secret amongst those journalists investigating the hacking allegations swirling around News International, that the practice of hacking was not restricted to that stable. Today, News International said a top level team had been appointed to investigate the claims and promised “justice will be done”.

But there has been a political dimension to this issue brought by the ill-timed debate over whether the Murdoch empire should be allowed to take full possession of BSkyB. As a matter of fact the hacking issue appears to have made no dent in the desire by the authorities to allow the take-over to happen.

Both the Tory and Labour parties have enjoyed “close” relations with Rupert Murdoch. Neither has sought to make too much fuss of the hacking issue until Ed Miliband’s overnight statement condemning the Dowler incident. Have old alliances to some extent protected News International from the full force of political outrage? In the Commons it has been left largely to backbench MPs like Gordon Brown’s former bag carrier, Tom Watson.

I believe there are three themes in play. Political compromise, police incompetence, and journalistic “team work”.

The political is as above. The police role is more intriguing. How hard have they investigated? How was it that Tom Watson knew about the Dowler phone hack BEFORE John Yates – the policeman leading the Scotland yard Investigation? Watson spoke of it in the Commons in March and asked Yates what he knew. The policeman knew nothing. Yet the eleven hundred pages of notes made by the News Internernational hired hand, Glen Mulcaire, have been in the hands of the Yard for many months – the Dowler information is contained in those notes. Has the police “incompetence” suited the politicians?

Finally, the role of the media. I know from my own sources that a number of journalists believe that other newspaper stables were hacking the phones of celebrities and others. But it has suited them to keep the focus on the stable that unites all other media operations in rivalry, News International.

This may be seen as a story that fits my “news that bores” category. Beware, this is a matter which touches many aspects of our public life – politics, policing, and media ethics – and potential conspiracies between several of them. We ignore it at our peril.

Not much of a posting this morning – I have to give a lecture to the Westminster Media Forum and am still thinking about what I need to say…but Europe is on my mind.

Wow is that Eurozone unravelling fast? Germany in the eye of the Greek storm. Who amongst us in UKPLC would vote to bail Greece out?

I am intrigued by yesterday’s thread on Iran. 

Adrian Clarke and I have had our differences but he’s on the spot on sanctions – there is no evidence whatever that they work.

Sporting cut-offs helped with South Africa but did not clinch the death of apartheid. Indeed there is a huge case for lifting them against Zimbabwe – which, largely unnoticed, despite continuing political repression is beginning to move economically.

Bahramerad I take issue with you on Iran/Pakistan…maybe ‘age old’ adversaries was pushing it a bit, but I can tell you that the Mullocracy in Qom and Tehran fear nuclear Pakistan at least as much as anyone else does.

It suits us to back the Israeli view that Iran’s bomb is designed to hit Tel-Aviv. Frankly when you sit in Tehran – as I did at Christmas – it is Islamabad they fear…that Sunni hardmen will grab the things and fire them into Shia Iran.

That’s what Iranian officials hint at every time they talk about it. Oh, and of course Uncle Sam wouldn’t hit Iran if she had a nuclear bomb – they tell you that too.

So what am I going to say today? Well 2010 tells us TV ain’t dead – that the web won’t replace it, but use it and compliment it…that we are headed into the golden age of interactive democratising journalism.

Goodbye to ‘one way street’ media that ‘tell it like it is’ – TV, newspapers, radio are no longer God – the citizen has been liberated to strike back.

Look at the political rebellion sweeping the English speaking world – from Arkansas and Kentucky to Brighton and Bristol – there is change in the air!

Crumbs I’m late – going to have pedal hard!

What is it with golf? I thought it was supposed to be a sedentary game played by dull men old before their time. Much of the game appeared to be spent in golf carts with underplayed caddies carrying the sticks.

Not a bit of it. If Tiger’s splendid work for the game is to be believed (senior golfers have today come out praising him for all he’s done after suggestions he might quit) then the sport is altogether racier. TV only picks him up as he’s about to plonk the ball into another hole.

But it seems whilst others cruise about in their buggies, the greatest golfer in the world races off for another assignation in the woods. If that’s why he is called Woods, why is he called Tiger? Well I guess it is obvious, because he clearly IS a bit of a tiger.

How much of a tiger seems to be in dispute. But no wonder his commercial backers and those for whom he toils, are so reluctant to let him go.

Now they have not only an African American who has transformed the game of golf, but a golfer who has finally proved that the sport is very far from being second only to motor racing as the dullest sport in the world.

The Sun’s associate editor, Trevor Kavanagh has confirmed that Rupert Murdoch was central to the Sun’s decision to switch horses in British politics.

Should we care?

It might be worth considering what New Labour ever got out of supping with the old media war horse. Tony Blair flew all the way to Hayman Island off Australia’s Great Barrier reef to secure his backing in 1997.

Since when Rupert has been seen scurrying in and out of Downing street on a very much more than annual basis. Surprisingly this has continued under Gordon Brown’s leadership.

Freedom of Information revelations have spelt out some of the ways in which Murdoch’s interest have benefited from Downing Street’s assistance. But a full inventory will never be established despite FOI.

It was after Hurricane Katrina had devastated New Orleans and revealed failings in the Bush administration’s response that Blair is quoted as telling Murdoch “the BBC is full of hatred of America”.

It quite simply cannot be good for democracy that one man can so play with the interests of a land of 61 million souls.

It is now being said that Mr Cameron’s Tories now themselves have a ‘deal’ with Murdoch whose Sun newspaper has come out in their support. What is it and how will the electorate be kept informed of its influence and antics?

It is fair to say the Sun doesn’t have quite the traction it once did. But News Corp and its parent News International is a multi-platform entity with influences that reach every corner of the world.

When the Sun shines, Murdoch has switched the light on – what’s the charge for the power source?

Block yer ears. Shut yer eyes. Krishnan and I and our able friend Mara Carlyle, are in preparation for tonight’s Newsroom’s Got Talent competition (no danger of any of us winning – we’re just ensuring that we can actually appear at all at Vinopolis in the Borough Market).

It’s a contest between the BBC, Sky, al-Jazeera, ITV, Channel 4 and Uncle Tom Cobbley, in which every one of us is going to make an idiot of ourselves – wait till you see my wig! All in the cause of Leonard Cheshire Homes and Helen House Hospice.

There will be video of the performance on our website, come Friday. Beyond what you see, we’ll be performing with our band, Fourplay.

So Terry Wogan considers newscasters as “self-important” and the job a “piece of cake“.

He’s quite right.. or nearly right. It’s a piece of cake so long as you can absent yourself from any involvement in generating the material that you are reading. The moment you combine newsreading with actual journalism, going after stories, trying to find out stuff, and the rest, it becomes much harder.

Newsreading is easy so long as you don’t think too hard about what you are reading. The moment you have some involvement in the content, you are thinking about it all the time you are reading.

You suddenly find yourself asking: “Is this right?”

Your own knowledge starts getting in the way and hey presto! You have tripped on a word, and this “piece of cake” turns into a banana skin.

As for “self-important”, probably true except has anyone out there got time to remember how self important they are?

I keep forgetting to remember that I’m not just a piece of cake, I’m the most self-important slice on earth!

Soon after arriving on holiday in the States, I was standing in a friend’s kitchen in which the telly happened to be on. Suddenly an expensive-looking ad came on sporting a British cancer specialist, Karol Sikora. His message was simple: Britain’s NHS is a failure that the United States should not attempt to emulate.

I found myself wondering what the NHS had done to upset him. But more importantly I wondered why America’s current debate on President Obama’s desire to introduce a healthcare system that will care for all, was going so wrong.

The last time I had been in the States, Obama’s mastery of the message and of its distribution was all but unchallenged. Not any more.

I suppose Hollywood has told us down the years that Americans love being scared witless. Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News understands this. There is now a veritable baseball team’s worth of highly paid libertarian and right-wing “shock jocks” who spend their days scaring viewers in almost hypnotic ways. Healthcare and race have become their causes.

The current scare champion on Fox is the multi-million-dollar remunerated Glenn Beck, whose output has helped many Americans to come to believe that Obama’s health plans include “death panels” that will sit and decide which elderly patients live or die under his scheme.

Mr Beck adds of Obama: “This guy is, I believe, a racist.” He says Obama has “exposed himself over and over again who has a deep-seated hatred of white people”.

Add to all this the remarkable war that continues between Fox News and the rival news station, MSNBC. Beck’s colleague on Fox, Bill O’Reilly, spends his time exposing issues surrounding General Electric, the defence conglomerate, who own the NBC TV mother ship. MSNBC’s rival anchor, Chris Matthews, harangues the doings of the Murdoch empire that owns Fox.

So destructive had this war become during the summer (embarrassing truths uttered by both sides) that the two owner corporations negotiated a truce. The anchors of both sides have now broken the deal and restarted their war. But they are proving too valuable to sack as ratings go through the roof.

The only cloud (or is it a silver lining?) is that advertisers have been deserting Mr Beck in particular – according to the FT, 46 companies, “including Proctor & Gamble, Wal-Mart, and Geico”.

Could any of this happen here, as beleaguered media groups desperately search for viewers and listeners? Or is this the most expensive media suicide note in history?

I was intrigued to hear BBC Radio News this morning using its own airwaves to “report” its decision to supply video content to a number of newspapers for free.

Not a corporate announcement, of course, but a news story of sufficient importance to warrant its place midway through the main bulletin during the peak period of listening on Radio Four’s Today programme.

This is a service which is currently undertaken on a commercial basis by ITN (which makes Channel 4 News). Good old BBC, you may very well say, for making a similar service freely available to the newspaper groups which have been increasingly vociferous critics of its online expansionism.

In the same spirit of fair and impartial reporting that was in evidence in the BBC’s reporting of this news this morning, it’s worth posing a number of questions the BBC may wish to address.

1. Is it a good use of licence-fee-payers money to supply a service for free that newspapers are happy to pay for?

2. Why should the licence-fee-payer then, by implication, subsidise a commercial news outlet?

3. Why should licence-fee money be used to undercut and thereby undermine the viability of a commercial rival?

4. Does this activity increase or reduce the diversity of digital/video news provision in the UK?

5. Given all the above, what exactly is the BBC for, and whose decision was it that the information above should be presented as a BBC Radio news item?

Answers on a post card please.

PS I have the obvious interest to declare: I work in the private sector in direct competition to the BBC making programmes for ITN, which some might feel disqualifies me from reporting on this issue, but I’m not sure that that neutralises my capacity to ask the above questions.

I have had the delightful experience of visiting the piston-less, wire-less, valve-less, transistor-less headquarters of Google UK.

Yes, I’ve been right inside www.google.co.uk. And it is a quite extraordinary experience, verging on cultish. But very benign.

My natural instincts are to be suspicious of large influential organisations. However, Google does not feel suspicious. It is very white. The walls are white, the canteen is white, the crockery is white, the food (of exceptionally high quality and free to every employee) is colourful and delicious.

But the people working there are from every conceivable ethnicity and country in the world. I did not see anybody who even began to approach my own age echelon. Indeed, I think the oldest man I saw might have been 42.

I was there to talk about the changes in the media. It was a daunting challenge because, of course, one knew one was speaking to people who knew far more about new media than I will ever know.

But in a funny sort of way, they were charmed by the primitivity of “life on the road” that I was able to describe. And I think, judging from the considerable reaction I’ve had on email from my new-found friends at Google, they were themselves surprised at the unbelievable pace of change in the last 30 years.