I'm not joking... see for yourself before they fix it....

Murdoch website hacked by Iranian Cyber Army

Revolutionary Guard thought to be behind Eid festival hacking of Farsi1’s website

By Eliot Sefton
The website of the popular Iranian satellite channel Farsi1, co-owned by Robert Murdoch, was reportedly hacked this Wednesday by a group calling itself the Iranian Cyber Army, which is thought to operate under the aegis of the all-powerful Revolutionary Guard.
The hacking was timed for the start of the Muslim festival of Eid - otherwise known as the festival of sacrifice.

The screenshot, which has been widely shown on Iranian news sites, shows Farsi1's website successfully hijacked and emblazoned with the message 'Happy Eid Ghorban'.

The hackers then write: "Rupert Murdoch, the Moby company, the Mohseni family, and the Zionists' partners should know that they will take the wish to destroy the structure of Iranian families with them to the grave."

The 'Moby company' referred to is the Moby Media Group, run by Saad Mohseni, an Afghan-Australian who returned to Kabul in 2002 to set up what is now the country's most high-profile media group. He was described in a New Yorker profile earlier this year as "Afghanistan's first media mogul".

Moby runs Farsi1 in partnership with Star TV, the Hong Kong-based TV service owned by Murdoch's News Corp.

Farsi1 has been constantly criticised by the Iranian regime, which sees its mix of comedy, soap opera and US-born programming as corrupting and destructive of family life.

Tonight at 10pm, for instance, the channel is showing the latest episode in its Farsi-language version of 24, with Keifer Sutherland as Jack Bauer - a man not shy about torturing the bad guys, who, as often as not, come from the Middle East.

As for the Iranian Cyber Army, according to the Persian Letters blog on Radio Free Europe's website, it is almost certain that it is run by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.



Read more: http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/71740,news-comment,technology,murdoch-tv-website-hacked-by-iranian-cyber-army#ixzz15rQWoOj8

Of course one of the more weird way our Aussie/American Uncle Rupe is having educational fun is by letting his rogue dogs loose on parts of his own body — with body armour, of course, and ulterior motive — like a dog trainer would train dogs to attack, wearing a defensive body suit and recompensing the dog with a slab of meat for an attack well done... The process can be titillatingly entertaining in itself — Glenn, the soft spoken terrier, the confusionist of "entertaiment and enlightement" swift barking-yapper attacking his master's other produce, such as poopoo-ing movies like Titanic and Avatar. And blasting the director James Cameron mostly on the subject of global warming — a thorn in the side of capitalism... What a hoot! Such rabid critic from Beck — I would of course suggest Uncle Rupe knows gambling on reverse psychology — would be like a "you-gotta-see-that-frickin'-movie invitation" to half of the population of the world... In Australia, Ms Devine, now working for the Murdoch press, was doing the same confusionism of bile and opinion about Avatar — confusionism which in the end was doing Murdoch big favors, in the Fairfax SMH... Uncle Rupe must be smiling all the way to the bank...

http://video.foxnews.com/v/4122597/james-cameron-attacks-beck

In the letter, the Jewish coalition calls on Murdoch to take action against Roger Ailes, the bombastic president of Fox News, as well as against Glenn Beck, the channel's most notorious rightwing commentator. "We share a belief that the Holocaust, of course, can and should be discussed appropriately in the media. But that is not what we have seen at Fox News," the letter says.

"You diminish the memory and meaning of the Holocaust when you use it to discredit any individual or organisation you disagree with. That is what Fox News has done in recent weeks."

Last November Ailes called executives of the public radio network NPR "Nazis" for having sacked a news analyst, Juan Williams, who also worked for Fox News, after Williams said he felt nervous flying on the same plane as passengers in Muslim dress. Ailes apologised to a Jewish group for the expression, though not to NPR.

Beck has made innumerable references to Nazis and the Holocaust, most starkly in his hounding of Jewish financier George Soros, whom he has accused of sending Jews to the "death camps". Soros was a teenager in Nazi-occupied Hungary and survived by hiding with a Christian family.

The advert is signed by the heads of the Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist affiliations within Judaism, as well as by several Orthodox Jews. It was organised by the Jewish Funds for Justice, which earlier this month demanded the dismissal of Beck.

A Fox News executive dismissed the letter, telling Reuters it was the work of a "George Soros-backed leftwing political organisation"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jan/27/rabbis-murdoch-fox-glenn-beck-holocaust

see toon at top...

letter by the rabbis:

Dear Mr Murdoch

We are rabbis of diverse political views. As part of our work we are devoted to preserving the memory of the Shoah, and to passing its lessons on to our future generations and to all humankind. All of us have vigorously defended the Holocaust's legacy. We have worked to encourage the responsible invocation of its symbols as a powerful lesson for the future.

We were therefore deeply offended by Roger Ailes' recent statement attributing the outrage over Glenn Beck's use of Holocaust and Nazi images to "leftwing rabbis who basically don't think that anybody can ever use the word, Holocaust, on the air."

In the charged political climate in the current civic debate, much is tolerated, and much is ignored or dismissed. But you diminish the memory and meaning of the Holocaust when you use it to discredit any individual or organization you disagree with. That is what Fox News has done in recent weeks, and it is not only "leftwing rabbis" who think so.

Abe Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, a child survivor of the Holocaust, described Beck's attack on George Soros as "not only offensive, but horrific, over-the-top, and out-of-line". Commentary magazine said that "Beck's denunciation of him [Soros] is marred by ignorance and offensive innuendo." Elan Steinberg, vice president of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, called Mr Beck's accusations "monstrous". Rev Welton Gaddy, president of the Interfaith Alliance, called them "beyond repugnant". And Deborah Lipstadt, professor of Holocaust Studies at Emory University, says Beck is using traditional antisemitic imagery.

"I haven't heard anything like this on television or radio – and I've been following this kind of stuff," Lipstadt said. "I've been in the sewers of antisemitism and Holocaust denial more often than I've wanted."

We share a belief that the Holocaust, of course, can and should be discussed appropriately in the media. But that is not what we have seen at Fox News. It is not appropriate to accuse a 14-year-old Jew hiding with a Christian family in Nazi-occupied Hungary of sending his people to death camps. It is not appropriate to call executives of another news agency "Nazis". And it is not appropriate to make literally hundreds of on-air references to the Holocaust and Nazis when characterising people with whom you disagree.

It is because this issue has a profound impact on each of us, our families and our communities that we are calling on Fox News to meet the standard it has set for itself: "to exercise the ultimate sensitivity when referencing the Holocaust".

We respectfully request that Glenn Beck be sanctioned by Fox News for his completely unacceptable attacks on a survivor of the Holocaust and Roger Ailes apologise for his dismissive remarks about rabbis' sensitivity to how the Holocaust is used on the air.

Lead supporters (organisational affiliation listed for purposes of identification only):

Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson, Vice President, American Jewish University, Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies
Rabbi Dan Ehrenkrantz, President, Reconstructionist Rabbinical College
Rabbi Daniel Nevins, Dean, Jewish Theological Seminary Rabbinical School
Rabbi Yael Ridberg, President, Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association
Rabbi Ellen Weinberg Dreyfus, President, Central Conference of American Rabbis
Rabbi Steven Wernick, Executive Vice President, United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism
Rabbi Eric Yoffie, President, Union for Reform Judaism

The possibility that Glenn Beck will exit the Fox News Channel at the end of the year has prompted a big question in media circles: if he leaves, how will he bring his considerable audience with him?

Two of the options Mr. Beck has contemplated, according to people who have spoken about it with him, are a partial or wholesale takeover of a cable channel, or an expansion of his subscription video service on the Web.

Reports this week that Joel Cheatwood, a senior Fox News executive, would soon join Mr. Beck’s growing media company, Mercury Radio Arts, were the latest indication that Mr. Beck intended to leave Fox, a unit of the News Corporation, when his contract expired at the end of this year.

Notably, Mr. Beck’s company has been staffing up — making Web shows, some of which have little or nothing to do with Mr. Beck, and charging a monthly subscription for access to the shows.

Were Mr. Beck to set off on his own, it would be a landmark moment for the media industry, reflecting a shift in the balance of power between media institutions and the personal brands of people they employ.

Mr. Beck, a conservative who often comes under criticism for his attacks on progressives and apocalyptic predictions, hosts a syndicated radio show in the morning and a Fox News show in the afternoon.

He has a “passionate media brand with a clear point of view,” said Larry Kramer, a media consultant and the author of “C-Scape: Conquer the Forces Changing Business Today.” Mr. Kramer compared Mr. Beck to Arianna Huffington and Howard Stern, two people who have spun their personalities into media empires.

It is possible that Mr. Beck and Fox could agree to a new contract. But his relationship with the channel has been fraught from its earliest days in 2009, and lately both sides have been anonymously sniping at the other.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/23/business/media/23beck.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=print

Arianna Huffington, her website and AOL were on the receiving end of a $105m (£64.5m) lawsuit by a group of angry bloggers unhappy that she sold the Huffington Post for $315m without them being paid a penny.

The class action is led by Jonathan Tasini, a writer and trade unionist, who wrote more than 250 posts for Huffington Post on an unpaid basis until he dropped out shortly after the news and comment site was sold to AOL earlier this year.

Tasini complained that "Huffington bloggers have essentially been turned into modern day slaves on Arianna Huffington's plantation" and said he was bringing the action because "people who create content ... have to be compensated" for their efforts.

The complainant and his lawyers estimate about 9,000 people wrote for the Huffington Post on an unpaid basis – and argue that their writings helped contribute about a third of the sale value of the site, the basis of their $105m claim for compensation.

Tasini was behind a successful lawsuit on behalf of freelance journalists against the New York Times a decade ago. He won a 2001 supreme court judgment that concluded copyright for print and online versions of an article were separate – meaning writers have to assign permission for a publisher to use both.

Huffington Post was founded in 2005 by Huffington and Ken Lerer – initially recruiting some high-profile writers such as Alec Baldwin and Larry David. But their ranks were swelled by a team of less well-known unpaid bloggers to boost output.

Their combined efforts helped improve traffic and revenues – which totalled $31m last year – until the site became a takeover target for AOL. Huffington and Lerer are thought to have taken the lion's share of the $315m payout, although the exact amounts has not been disclosed.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/apr/12/arianna-huffington-post-sale