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The jury's finding in the phone-hacking trial were established today. Andy Coulson is guilty and his punishment will be revealed in due course, but Rebekah Brooks is apparently completely innocent. This I find odd, she was the boss of the newspaper but apparently knew nothing about what was going on there. You'll always find that people like that DO know what is going on when things go right, this is evident by the fact they take credit when things go corrently, take a large salary, pension and perks because they're so involved in the issue when things go positively - but when things go wrong it is always "nothing to do with me guv!".

Someone said today, who used to work at the News Of The World, that "even the office cat knew that we hacked the phones of celebrities and of people getting coverage in the media". But apparently the newspaper's Editor Rebekah Brooks, with her massive salary, perks, and so on, knew nothing about this... Rather bizarre isn't it? It is quite obvious that she DID know all about her newspaper's practice of hacking phones and somehow managed to wrongly be found not-guilty today.

Rebekah Brooks is as guilty as sin. Unfortunately I knew she'd get off. I would have loved to have seen that smug look wiped off her face. A truly loathsome and despicable person if ever there was one.

The Murdoch media has admitted that they hacked phones. How can she not have possibly known? Plus they were caught getting rid of files and computers. What a pathetic excuse it is to say that they didn't want their wife finding out that they'd watched porn. What's even more pathetic is that the jury accepted this!

Something's not right and I hope some sort of appeal can happen.

Coulson is an obious twat but Brooks had to be in on the hacking. If not she was not much cop at knowing what her staff were up to.

If ever I get caught with my trousers down, I want her lawyer. What a guy!

Of course Rebekah Brooks was found innocent. Think of her as the ginger Cinderella with those two Ugly Sisters, Andy Coulson and Glenn Mulcaire. How could such a sweet person have anything to do with this?

Obviously as Chief Executive of News International with overall responsibility for papers such as the Sun and the News of the World she wouldn't have known anything at all about phone hacking. As for Glenn Mulcaire, he was getting ?100,000 sobs a year for, I dunno, making the tea wasn't he?

In the unlikely event of Murdoch not giving her another job, expect Rebekah Brooks to have a glittering career in panto.

Course, our great leader, David Cameron doesn't come out of this very well. All political parties have been guilty of trying to suck up to Murdoch.

But Cameron has been different class. He ignored the fact that Coulson had resigned from his job at News International when the phone hacking scandal blew up. He ignored all the advice given to him by all the major parties that he should not bring Coulson into the heart of the government. He ignored all the advice to do some thorough security clearance checking on Coulson.

And then on top of all that, when the phone hacking scandal went mega, he had to be dragged kicking and screaming by Ed Miliband to have an inquiry led by Leveson into this whole issue.

And then to cap it all, having said that unless Leveson came up with some bonkers ideas for press regulation, which he didn't Cameron promised to implement the recommendations.

Cameron went back on his promises and stabbed the likes of Millie Dowler's parents in the back.

You can smell Cameron from Downing Street. What a scumbag!

The shock in the office today was palpable. We all thought (hoped) she'd go down...

Well a very common thread in La Wade/Brooks life has been the perception of everyone who worked with her that she was an Olympic class schmoozer who could charm the pants off a corpse.

Apparently, she was so good that you would be too busy looking at her smile to feel the stiletto going in between your shoulder blades.

Mind you, her defence, paid for by Murdoch I think, was brilliant. I loved the bit about her being "bullied" in her early days in journalism and how tough it was for her!! Yeah, Rebekah, just like some of the NOW's victims.

"Rebekah Brooks is apparently completely innocent."

That's juries for you. You don't always get the result you want.

David Johnson wrote:

> Well a very common thread in La Wade/Brooks life has been the
> perception of everyone who worked with her that she was an
> Olympic class schmoozer who could charm the pants off a corpse.
>
The reality is if she thought you could be helpful then she'd be flirty, funny, charming... if you couldn't help her she didn't want to know.

Funny how when this was all kicking off News Int said when Labour was baying for blood, "You can have Andy but you can't have Rebekah" ? looks like the court made the same offer.

After this fiasco and the Harry Redknapp affair, is it time to introduce an intelligence test before you're allowed to sit on a jury?

Well one factor in getting a conviction is the jury, but the other factor is the strength of the case.

With regard to Coulson there was a smoking gun in terms of "do his phone" etc. etc.

With Brooks there was a feeling that she MUST have known what was going on, paying out as she did hundreds of thousands of pounds to people who were phone hackers on a unbelievably industrial scale.

But her argument was NOT that phone hacking didn't go on, but that she didn't know anything about it and it looks as if the case wasn't strong enough to prove beyond reasonable doubt that she actually did know about it, as unlikely as this might appear.