Politicians use parliamentary privilege to attack police inquiry and target News International figures over claims

Rupert Murdoch found himself under fire for the first time in the phone-hacking scandal today when his judgment was called into question during a parliamentary debate.

As Conservative MPs raised concerns about News International, Murdoch was criticised for promoting Rebekah Brooks after she admitted illegal payments were made to police by the News of the World.

Labour MPs used parliamentary privilege in the commons debate to criticise the chairman and CEO of News Corporation, which owns the newspaper publisher, and his senior executives, who are battling claims that the NoW endorsed the illegal hacking of mobile phones.

Tom Watson, a Labour member of the Commons culture select committee, placed Murdoch in the line of fire by accusing him of appointing Brooks as chief executive of News International knowing that she had admitted that illegal payments had been made to police.

The former minister cited evidence by Brooks to the culture committee in 2003 in which she admitted that the News of the World had paid police officers in the past for stories. This was condemned by the committee and by the Met as illegal.

"When Murdoch appointed Brooks he did so in that knowledge," Watson said of the ruling from the Commons committee. Les Hinton, then chair of News International, later told the committee that Brooks subsequently told him she had "not authorised payments to policemen"; he said her evidence was meant to suggest "there had been payments in the past".

Watson was speaking as MPs debated whether to refer the phone-hacking allegations to the powerful Commons standards and privileges committee. The standards committee is to examine whether the News of the World breached ancient parliamentary privilege by endorsing the hacking of MPs' phones.

Watson recommended the media mogul be summoned to give evidence. "I doubt Rupert Murdoch knows about these incidents, but he is responsible for appointing to positions of great power people who should know about them," he said. "For that reason, he too should explain his actions to the committee." He accused Brooks of refusing three invitations to give evidence to the culture committee, which examined the claims in the last parliament. "We gave up."

Paul Farrelly, a former journalist who is another Labour member of the committee, used parliamentary privilege to make allegations about Andy Coulson and Tom Crone, legal manager of News Group Newspapers (part of NI). Coulson, now No 10 director of communications, resigned as NoW editor in 2007 after the paper's royal editor, Clive Goodman, and a private investigator, Glenn Mulcaire, were jailed for phone-hacking. Coulson denies any knowledge of the hacking.

Farrelly said people had wrongly assumed that his committee had cleared Coulson because it could find no evidence linking him to the hacking. "We were incredulous of the notion that such a hands-on editor would not have had the slightest inkling about what his staff, and what private investigators employed by the paper, were up to."

Farrelly alleged that Coulson personally spiked a News of the World story about Gordon Taylor, then chief executive of the Professional Footballers' Association. Coulson reportedly did this after a conversation with Crone, who had had a denial from Taylor's lawyers. A £700,000 payout by News International to Taylor, revealed by the Guardian in July 2009, prompted the latest round of allegations.

"We thought it would be highly unusual for an editor to accept a denial at face value," Farrelly said. "We'd expect an editor to ask, 'How can we stand this story up?' The answer, we thought, would inevitably involve some discussion of the source of the story. We suspected, although we could not prove it, that the story was spiked, in part at least, because any libel suit would have exposed the phone hacking that was going on."

Farrelly alleged that Crone misled his committee. "He denied admitting a pay-off to Clive Goodman, after he got out of jail. He also misled our committee on the identity of the junior reporter involved in transcribing phone hacking messages."

Watson was highly critical of people who refused to appear before the committee. These included Greg Miskiw, former assistant news editor at the paper, who said he was too ill to attend; Mulcaire, who said through an intermediary he would not give evidence; and Goodman, who said he was unavailable.

Farrelly also criticised Andy Hayman, former head of the Met's special operations unit, now a Times columnist, who had been in charge of the Mulcaire inquiry. He also criticised Hayman's successor, assistant commissioner John Yates. "Had Mr Hayman been in charge of the Watergate inquiry, President Nixon would have safely served a full term. His line is one which … John Yates is finding increasingly difficult to maintain … We were very critical of the evasiveness displayed by Mr Yates in the police evidence to us."

Nick Soames, a former defence minister and a friend of the Prince of Wales, whose views often reflect those of the royal household, highlighted a report by the information commissioner. This revealed that 305 journalists from across Fleet Street had secured "illegal information". Soames said: "If the Press Complaints Commission had any gumption or mettle … we would not need to refer this matter to the select committee."

Paul McMullan, the former NoW executive who spoke on the record to the Guardian yesterday, was deputy features editor at the NoW when Coulson arrived as deputy editor in May 2000. They worked together for 18 months. A Channel 4 website report last night incorrectly suggested McMullan worked with Coulson for just a few months, casting doubt on his claims Coulson must have known of the hacking.

It was a cast-iron certainty that at least one MP would go off at a diversion during yesterday's News of the World phone-hacking debate in the Commons.

But Simon Hughes, the Lib-Dems' deputy leader, managed to do even better - by which I mean, worse - by offering two detours.

He called for a royal commission on the media. And he launched yet another knee-jerk attack on the Press Complaints Commission.

A commission on the media, even with a narrow remit to consider its regulatory machinery, is the last thing anyone needs - with the exception of the News of the World and its owner, News International.

They would like nothing more than to see the whole matter kicked into the long grass or, more appositely, the rain forest.

Hughes rightly told the Commons: "There is a whole sea of illegal and undesirable activity here". But setting up a commission to delve into that undesirable activity would be completely irrelevant.

What is required is a very specific inquiry into the the activities at the News and the World and News Int in relation to hacking in particular and its news-gathering techniques in general.

There are many very important questions about the hacking affair that require answers as, day by day, evidence mounts of the widespread use of unethical, and possibly illegal, methods used in the paper's newsroom.

No longer can News Int lift its nose and claim that allegations do not amount to evidence. Former NoW staffers, such as Paul McMullan, Sean Hoare and Ross Hall, have come forward to paint a disturbing picture of an editorial culture.

Their recollections totally contradict the story told by Andy Coulson to the Commons media, culture and sport select committee.

Their evidence calls into question statements made by former chief executive Les Hinton, ex-managing editor Stuart Kuttner and the paper's lawyer Tom Crone.

Aside from the named trio, the New York Times also referred to "interviews with more than a dozen former reporters and editors" who "described a frantic, sometimes degrading atmosphere in which some reporters openly pursued hacking or other improper tactics to satisfy demanding editors".

Then there is the matter of the Scotland Yard's role in the whole shoddy affair. A commission confined to looking at the media would not be able to consider this other serious matter of police failures and mistakes.

So what about the PCC? Well, what about it? However much people might complain about its inadequacies, and I have often enough, I cannot see that a political attack on that body advances us very far.

Hughes's point was that the PCC "has not done a robust job" and has failed to offer adequate protection to the public.

I understand Hughes's anger. He is one of the victims of phone hacking, after all. But the PCC is not invested with legal investigatory powers and it's impossible to conceive of it having them.

Without such powers it had no hope of getting at the truth of the hacking claims following the trial that resulted in the NoW's royal editor Clive Goodman and the private investigator Glenn Mulcaire going to jail.

Admittedly, the commission made itself look silly and ineffective by saying that it could not question Coulson once he had resigned. It appeared as if it was relieved to have found a way out of needing to take the matter further. That was a piece of poor PR.

But just imagine for a moment that it had persuaded Coulson to speak. Given his subsequent denials, we can guess what he would have said, and the PCC could not have forced him to say more.

Similarly, faced with stonewalling from all the News Int executives, it is unlikely to have uncovered anything of real merit. It could not, for instance, have demanded documents. It could not have asked members of staff - or former staffers - to come forward.

Let's be honest: the PCC took the heat for the Yard's failure to pursue its investigation with anything like enough rigour.

The moment the paper moved into illegal territory - as it did with Goodman and Mulcaire - it was a matter for the police.

There will, of course, be people who think this proves that the PCC is hopelessly ineffective and no more than a fig leaf for the industry that funds it.

I agree it is a fig leaf, but only to an extent. I happen to know that its paymasters have, down the years, realised that they have created a creature they cannot entirely control.

It has responded to the public will and its administering of a code of practice - drawn up by editors, remember - has been immensely beneficial. It is not perfect, of course, and it could be improved, but it has been effective in all sorts of areas.

MPs such as Hughes who damn it should think more clearly about the dangers to press freedom if they persist in trying to turn self-regulation into mandatory regulation.

Forget the PCC. Forget any idea of a royal commission. It's a matter or proportion and focus. It is time for a proper inquiry into the News of the World's misbehaviour and the police's shortcomings.

Writer says he feels the need to follow up The Special Relationship as he and Michael Sheen 'haven't nailed Blair yet'

The award-winning writer Peter Morgan has revealed he wants to make a fourth and final film about Tony Blair, admitting that he feels he still hasn't "nailed him".

Morgan, speaking at a preview of his third Blair drama, The Special Relationship, said he felt the need to write one more screenplay about how Blair fell from his peak of popularity before the 2003 Iraq war.

"We're just beginning to create the monster," he said on Wednesday evening after a British Film Institute screening of the The Special Relationship, the third in his trilogy about the former prime minister, following The Deal and the Oscar-nominated The Queen. "I keep feeling that we've left without the story being complete. There's still a way to go – we still haven't nailed him."

The Special Relationship, again starring Michael Sheen as Blair, was screened earlier this year in America and was nominated for five Emmy Awards.

It will be broadcast on BBC2 later this month and tells the behind-the-scenes story of Blair's political relationship with President Bill Clinton, including the struggle for peace in Northern Ireland, Kosovo and the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

The drama ends with Blair on a high ahead of his new relationship with incoming President George Bush and the later invasion of Iraq. "After this one I said, 'Never, never again.' But there may be another one at some point."

Morgan said he was yet to read Blair's memoirs, A Journey, and denied he was obsessed with him. "I haven't quite worked this out and maybe that's why I have to keep writing them. The reason why I keep saying, 'Michael, if you could bear to come with me on one more go,' is because we still haven't nailed him," he added.

"The anger towards these people is absolutely extraordinary. I looked on The Guardian website and it was just talking about Mandelson. Within an hour there were 450 comments. I scrolled through the comments and the rage ... I was like, 'Somebody has to protect these people from reading these comments.' What would that do to you?

"And it's the same with Blair. Within a minute, the anger. And we haven't actually yet engaged with the rage because we're still 10 years behind. Even with this, we're just beginning – how did Blair stretch from Clinton to Bush? We're just beginning to create the monster."

He added: "The compromises, the disappointments, the bartering, the realisation, the inevitable disappointment, the inevitable heartbreak, the betrayals, the fighting, the rivalry, the hatred, the anger. We haven't done that bit yet."

Sheen, who has played Blair in all three films, sat next to Morgan at the BFI event. Turning to him, Morgan reflected: "That's not a journey I want to go on unless a friend is prepared to do it. I don't want to spring this on him on stage."

Asked directly if he would play Blair again, Sheen echoed the reply sought by US Senator Joe McCarthy in his 1950s inquiry into un-American activities: "I have not ever been nor ever will be a member of the Communist Party." He said recently: "I can't really see it. I know he's like the proverbial bad penny who just won't go away. So never say never. But I think three is enough."

Sheen also told the BFI audience he was still intrigued by the elusive nature of Blair. "I would love to talk to him about the religion area and how that has affected certain things. It would be really difficult because that's the one area he really doesn't want to go into that much. And it's the one area that we've not really explored that much."

• The Special Relationship. BBC2 9.30pm Saturday September 18.

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On this week's Media Talk, Matt Wells welcomes Stephen Brook and TalkSport programme director Moz Dee to the pod.

We start by discussing the media story that just won't go away: the News of the World phone-hacking scandal. Labour MP Tom Watson tells us why he hopes a new inquiry will lead to a clampdown on the press.

Also in the podcast, we give our verdict on Daybreak, ITV's revamped morning sofa show.

Plus, we reflect on the line-up for the new series of Strictly Come Dancing, and wonder why the Top Gear/Stig affair needed to go to the high court.

Finally, we ask, will another station take a punt on Sarah Kennedy after the veteran DJ called time on her 17 years at Radio 2?

Give us your feedback on the blog below, or follow us on Twitter and Facebook. And for more from our sponsor, please click here to learn all about the Best Awards.

Founder of European newspaper group says he will leave in January, after news breaks of shareholder pressure for change

David Montgomery, chief executive of the pan-European newspaper group Mecom, has bowed to shareholder pressure to leave the company he founded a decade ago.

Montgomery said that the move was a "planned retirement" and that he would leave when Mecom reports its pre-close trading statement in January.

It emerged yesterday that Aviva Investors, Legal & General and Invesco, which collectively own more than 50% of Mecom's shares, were seeking to replace Montgomery and introduce a new business strategy.

The board rejected the plan, which included installing Patrick Tillieux, a former senior executive at broadcasters SBS and ProSiebenSat.1, as chief executive.

Montgomery said that he still has the "complete confidence" of the Mecom board but had nevertheless decided to stand down "following pressure from certain shareholders".

"The business has weathered the recession well and is transforming into a broader content business with accelerating on-line revenues," he said. "This transformation process will continue for the rest of this year and beyond given the commitment and energy of all Mecom management and staff."

The rebel shareholders had threatened to call an extraordinary general meeting to force a vote over the proposed changes.

They are understood to want to break the company up and focus on the Netherlands – Mecom's biggest operation – as well as ousting Keith Allen, the chief operating officer.

However, the plan to instal Tillieux and break up the company has been abandoned now that Montgomery has agreed to leave, according to senior insiders.

"The Aviva-led group was attempting to impose a new CEO whom the board found totally unsuitable and whose strategic plan would have been disastrous for the company," said a Mecom source. "Shareholders were fully prepared to launch an EGM that would have been messy and value destructive. David has taken a brutally unsentimental and unselfish step to ensure the strategy remains in place and an orderly succession is established with the board fully in control of the process."

Mecom said today that the management team "all enjoy the absolute support and active encouragement of the board". The company added that it intends to launch a process to "find the person best qualified to succeed Mr Montgomery".

Montgomery, the former chief executive of Mirror Group, founded Mecom in 2000 and expanded into a number of continental European countries through a series of acquisitions.

However, in the past couple of years the company, which still owns newspapers in countries including the Netherlands, Denmark and Poland, has struggled with a combination of the downturn and getting to grips with a debt pile that in April last year stood at £500m.

Mecom moved to deal with its debt problem by selling off its German and north-west Norwegian businesses, cutting more than 1,000 staff and raising £140m in extra funding from shareholders.

In January last year Montgomery survived a board revolt thanks to the backing of shareholders, although six directors resigned.

In Mecom's most recent results, for the first six months of the year, the company showed signs of an improved financial performance, beating analyst expectations with pre-tax profits of £24.6m.

The company's share price was up by nearly 5% on last night's close to 225p by about 1.30pm today, following the announcement that Montgomery will be departing.

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BBC Worldwide international production supremo moves to similar role at super-indie that makes Skins and Hollyoaks

Wayne Garvie, the executive responsible for growing BBC Worldwide's international production business, is leaving to join the super indie All3Media.

Garvie will become managing director of international production at All3Media, which owns the independent producers responsible for shows including Skins, Hollyoaks, Midsomer Murders, Shameless, Saturday Kitchen and Fifth Gear.

Last month All3Media added to its roster of production subsidiaries by buying Optomen and One Potato Two Potato, which make Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares and The F Word.

Helen Jackson, director of BBC Worldwide's indies unit, will take over Garvie's responsibilities as managing director of content and production until a permanent replacement is appointed.

Garvie is leaving the BBC after more than a decade. He joined the corporation as BBC Manchester head of entertainment and features from Granada in 1998. Three years later he became the London-based head of the BBC entertainment group.

He moved to the corporation's commercial arm, BBC Worldwide, in 2006 in his current role, with responsibility for content investment strategy, international production network and talent and brand ventures.

John Smith, BBC Worldwide chief executive, said: "Wayne has had an exemplary career at the BBC, including the last four years at BBC Worldwide. He goes with our gratitude for all he has done, particularly in establishing our international production base and taking fantastic shows such as Dancing with the Stars to the world."

Garvie added: "I feel especially proud and privileged to have been at Worldwide these last few years, and have been inspired by the leadership and challenge given to me by John. Our content and production business is in excellent shape and in very safe hands. However, All3Media represents a terrific opportunity for new challenges and experiences."

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Once the darlings of the UK startup scene, Dopplr has dwindled inexorably ever since it was bought by Nokia a year ago

Founded in Finland early in 2007, Dopplr was the great white, beautiful hope of the UK startup scene; a well-respected design and development team, and a service that imaginatively and stylishly captured the zeitgeist of business, travel and location services.

It published annual travel summaries for users and included their carbon output. It boosted the profile of money-spinning conferences. And – of most interest to potential investors – it attracted a wealthy, technophile and evangelical base of "upscale" business users. Backers included Esther Dyson, Tyler Brule, Joshua Schachter, Lars Hinrichs and Reid Hoffman. So what could go wrong?

In a word: Nokia.

The Finnish mobile manufacturer, which sells more phones than any other company, paid a rumoured $20m (give or take a few million) for the service almost exactly a year ago, with a deal that closed on 28 September, 2009.

Since then, Dopplr has fallen completely out of the web's view. Its blog has not been updated since two days after the acquisition. While Dopplr was too young to have grown a large user base, the Nokia acquisition could, with some imagination, have given it scale. Instead, comScore shows its monthly unique user numbers falling from 39,000 in September 2009 to 29,000 in July this year.

While the Guardian has been told that Dopplr's back-end system is still being maintained, its front-of-house appears woefully neglected, with no sign of the much-admired annual travel reports. Even if this was purely a talent acquisition, with the company bought for its staff, why allow the site to wither on the vine?

Dopplr's design chief Matt Jones had already left, joining Schulze & Webb (reincarnated as Berg) but still tied to Dopplr one day a month as a design advisor. Jones already had close to ties with Nokia as a former director of UX design there. Not only that, chief executive Marko Ahtisaari became senior vice president for design at Nokia, chief tech officer Matt Biddulph and developer Tom Insam both moved to Nokia's base in Berlin as strategist and developer respectively and are still there, working out lock-in periods.

At the time of the acquisition, people only saw possibility. "I'm guardedly optimistic that Nokia is smart enough to know not screw up a truly elegant service," wrote Dopplr user Chad in response to the news. Duncan Semple added: "I just hope the service won't get neglected or changed too much to fit with Nokia's other services." Trickles of comments this year have variously asked if anyone is still listening — and, echoing in an empty blog, talked of transferring to rival service TripIt.

Despite numerous requests over a number of weeks for comment about its plans for Dopplr, Nokia has not responded.

Since the launch of its Ovi internet services brand in August 2007 – soon after Apple's game-changing iPhone went on sale – Nokia has made a series of acquisitions to try and offer more social media and location features for its mobile phones. The results, however, are far from compelling.

In June 2008, Nokia acquired social activity service Plazes, saying the "visionary team" and "key assets" would allow it to extend its context-based services. The service is still operational — but has not been integrated with Ovi.

Nokia bought Canada's Oz Communications in November 2008 to improve social messaging services, German map technology firm bit-side GmbH in February 2009 and Hamburg-based Cellity in July 2009. Like many of the other deals, Cellity appeared to be a straightforward talent acquisition; Nokia said at the time the deal would "accelerate service development in some areas" and immediately closed the service. A month later it bought Plum, a 'private' social network from the US. And last week Nokia completed its acquisition of Motally, a US mobile metrics tool, saying it would continue to serve Motally's existing customer base.

However on the same day, to Motally users' dismay, it sent them a termination notice for the service.

All these firms, like Dopplr, have joined Nokia's services division. Fred Destin, a prominent venture capitalist, told the Guardian that the Dopplr deal was a straightforward talent acquisition, and that Dopplr was never that powerful. For Nokia and its vast, mainstream consumer base, there was little incentive in maintaining a niche service.

"My sense is that they were going to try and look at Dopplr as a horizontal piece of technology they could use on phones," he said. "Nokia doesn't have a great track record of maintaining innovation internally, and they are in soul-searching mode. It's a classic case of a large company acquiring a small company and not being entirely sure what to do with it."

He added: "There's a bunch of reasons it was a weird acquisition and it's difficult for a small company to flourish inside a company like that."

Comparable services Yapta and TripIt had 104,000 unique users in September 2009, according to comScore. Yapta shrank to 29,000 by July 2010 but TripIt grew to 190,000.

One UK startup told the Guardian how his startup pulled back from a partnership with Nokia. "The experience in the app store and Ovi Maps is just too poor. I don't think there's anything they could have done with Dopplr. They aren't used to a partnership world."

One other entrepreneur said that the deal could be valued in terms of its staff, and cited a common startup valuation formula of $500,000 per high-profile developer. At that rate, Biddulph, Jones and the team should be very pleased with the price put on their head. As for Dopplr – perhaps it was only ever a beautiful experiment, and one that ended in a modest but well-earned exit for its creators.

But Nokia needs something to start going right for it. Though it sells more smartphones than any other company, including Apple and BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion (RIM), in 2009 its revenues fell by 20% compared with 2008, from €50bn to €41bn, but its profits crashed from €3.7bn to just €270m – and its first-quarter figures for 2010 were more like 2009 than 2008.

Its efforts to launch the Ovi app store to compete with Apple's iPhone app store and the Android Marketplace run by Google have impressed few so far – and if the lesson of Dopplr is repeated, then it may be shunned by exactly the innovative people it needs to attract.

One source close to Dopplr said he wasn't surprised Dopplr was being allowed to deflate. "Nokia," he said. "Where good ideas go to die ..."

Plus app price infographics, Silverlight's uncertain future, will Bing benefit from Microsoft? and more

The Seneca virus: harmless to normal human cells, apparently. Photo by Argonne National Laboratory on Flickr. Some rights reserved

A quick burst of 8 links for you to chew over, as picked by the Technology team

Here's Why Microsoft Needs To Make Office Apps For The iPad >> Business Insider
Because it's leaving money on the tablet by not.

Apple products are a mutant virus, but PC brands will eventually find a cure, says Acer founder >> Digitimes
Stan Shih has the metaphor of the week, or possibly month. "Acer founder Stan Shih, in a talks with reporters on September 8, commented that Apple's strong popularity is mainly due to its products such as iPad and iPhone, and these products are like mutant viruses, which are difficult to find a cure for in the short-term, but he believes that PC vendors will eventually find a way to isolate Apple and become immune."

10 Surprising App Platform Facts [Infographic] >> AllFacebook.com
And they are quite surprising. Includes average prices of apps on Facebook, Apple and Android.

CouchOne — Your Data. Anywhere >> CouchOne
An application development program based on CouchDB: "It is fast, reliable and keeps the data on all of your devices synchronized with the cloud. CouchOne Mobile doesn't depend on a constant Internet connection, so users can access their data anytime, anywhere. As more and more people work in geographically distributed environments and on the go, their data needs to stay with them and always be up-to-date. Because, face it, offline happens."

Microsoft wrestles with HTML5 vs Silverlight futures >> Tim Anderson's ITWriting
"[Former Microsoft Silverlight product manager Scott] Barnes is a straight-talking guy but clearly this is all speculation. Nevertheless it is obvious that, on the eve of launching IE9 beta with its fast JavaScript engine, hardware accelerated graphics, and pixel-precise bitmap drawing, Microsoft has a tricky job positioning HTML5 vs Silverlight. For that matter, even positioning Silverlight vs desktop Windows Presentation Foundation is not easy."

Why Google Instant Is Good for Microsoft >> Fast Company
"Google Instant plays right into Microsoft's hands -- especially given the company's "Search Overload Syndrome" ad campaign. Everything about Google Instant search screams search overload--the unfortunate side-effect of sifting through millions of results regardless of relevancy.
"It seems likely that this shift in search technology may prove too radical or too overwhelming for many users. But will they just turn off streaming search--or turn off Google?"

Christchurch Quake Map >> Paul Nicholls
An animated Google Map showing a time series of the initial quake and aftershocks that have hit New Zealand's south island.

Spirals (a Flash pattern/tune.. thing) >> wheelof.com
Nice. (Sorry, iOS users.) And where are the HTML5, CSS3 and SVG implementations?

You can follow Guardian Technology's linkbucket on delicious

Terry Jones outplayed the US media with his plan to burn the Qur'an. But the media may not fall for a similar nutcase

Terry Jones, the swivel-eyed pastor who attracted worldwide notoriety for his threat to burn the Qur'an on the anniversary of September 11, may or may not have a deal. But let's hope he has burst the Qur'an-burning bubble for the rest of America.

Based on his bizarre press conference on Thursday, Jones thinks he struck an agreement to move the site of the Park 51 Muslim cultural centre and mosque away from its current location, which is not very close to the site of the World Trade Centre in New York City.

Latest reports suggest that no such thing was agreed but that won't matter to Jones. This way he gets to save face, extend his 15 minutes of fame a little longer, all without actually burning any Qur'ans. No doubt he'll rail against Muslim perfidy when the mosque doesn't move – but so what?

Jones's threats will be subject to the law of diminishing returns. Next time he threatens to do burn a Qur'an – and I fear there will be a next time – he'll be handled with much more caution by the US media, which has made itself look ridiculous in being outfoxed by the crackpot pastor of a miniscule church in the swamps of Florida.

The most significant news yesterday, prior to Jones's decision to scrap the burning, came from Fox News. The Baltimore Sun's TV critic David Zurawik asked the cable news network if it would show the Qur'an burning. Michael Clemente, senior vice president at Fox News, said it would not cover it, either live, in video or still photography, adding:

"He's one guy in the middle of the woods with 50 people in his congregation who's decided to try, I gather, to bring some attention to himself."

CNN also said it wouldn't show any images of the Qur'an being burned. Then the Associated Press set out some strict guidelines for its staff, stating in an internal memo: "Should the event happen on Saturday, the AP will not distribute images or audio that specifically show Qurans being burned, and will not provide detailed text descriptions of the burning."

Then NBC announced it would film the event but not show live coverage, and decide later on what footage it would use.

All in all, an outbreak of common sense.

By now, though, every crackpot and lunatic in America will have seen Jones's success and be ready to ape it. But their very craziness may be their undoing.

One such group that says it plans to burn some Qur'ans is the Westboro Baptist Church of Kansas, easily the most hated church in America. For whatever insane doctrinal reasons, the tiny WBC protests outside funerals of US soldiers killed in battle, holding signs saying "God hates fags". They did the same thing at the funeral of former president Gerald Ford. Where ever one or two TV cameras are gathered together, so the WBC will be among them.

These days the WBC's antics get no coverage. In fact, in announcing it was to burn Qur'ans, the WBC said it had already burned some. No one cared. It says it also plans to burn an American flag at the same time (I'm not making this up). No one cares.

Qur'an burning may have stepped into that small set of things that are too crazy even for America.