In a morning when many stories demand attention, I think it is important to note the victory the Duke of Sussex and Tom (Lord) Watson shared in court yesterday in their battle with Murdoch's Sun newspaper.<\/p>\n
As the Guardian noted<\/a>, the settlement read in court said:<\/p>\n \u201cNGN offers a full and unequivocal apology to the Duke of Sussex for the serious intrusion by the Sun between 1996 and 2011 into his private life,\u201d it stated. But it was the half line that followed that carried the punch, as the publisher acknowledged that these intrusions included \u201cincidents of unlawful activities carried out by private investigators working for the Sun\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n As they added:<\/p>\n The Murdoch-owned publisher batted away each new legal claim with the full force of News Corp\u2019s multibillion-dollar empire. It was a matter of record that unlawful activities had taken place at the shuttered News of the World, it said. But that was not \u2013 it insisted, repeatedly \u2013 true of the Sun. In 2014, giving evidence\u00a0during the phone-hacking trial<\/a> Rebekah Brooks, the former Sun editor who is now chief executive of News UK, insisted that \u201cwhen I was editor of the Sun we ran a clean ship\u201d.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n This is now very obviously untrue.<\/p>\n So were representations made to the Leveson inquiry by Murdoch newspaper executives on this issue very likely to have been untrue.<\/p>\n This toxic rag has spread filth and falsehoods into the UK media for decades. Now we know it willingly and persistently undertook illegal activity in pursuit of doing so. Those who previously denied that should be brought to account. In particular, they should be tried for perjury. Those in its senior management who lied on oath to courts or inquiries should pay the price for that, whatever their age.<\/p>\n In a world where truths are increasingly debased, ignored and abused by the actions of the ultra-wealthy, who are intent on building their own realities that are disconnected from the world in which we actually live, it is vital that the importance of telling the truth be upheld, and those who have not, and deliberately done so to protect themselves, should be held to account for what they have done.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"