Murdoch shocked the country by shutting down the newspaper at the center of the scandal, the News of the World, Britain’s biggest selling Sunday newspaper. The paper was founded in 1843. Its final edition will be this weekend. Earlier today, one of the former journalist at the paper, Andy Coulson, was arrested on corruption and phone hacking charges. Coulson’s arrest has put the British Prime Minister, David Cameron, in the spotlight. Up until January, Coulson was Cameron’s director of communications. Cameron hired him despite allegations that he played a key role in the phone hacking for Murdoch.
Details about the phone hacking scandal have been known for years, but public outcry intensified earlier this week when the guardian newspaper revealed that in 2002, journalists working for Murdoch hacked the voice-mail of a missing teenage girl named Milly Dowler while police were looking for her. She was later found murdered. An investigator from News of the World reportedly listened in to and deleted messages for the cellphone of this 13-year-old girl. The actions of the journalist hampered the police investigation of the girl’s death and gave false hope to her family that she was alive. The investigative journalist Nick Davies of the Guardian has broken several of the key stories on the scandal.
Nick Davies talking:
We at the guardian got hold of two separate sources who told us independently that one of the victims of this illegal voice-mail hacking was the 13-year-old, Surrey schoolgirl, Milly Dowler who we now know was abducted and murdered. We discovered that during the time when she was missing and there was no explanation for what had happened to her, the News of the World were using a private investigator to listen to her voice mail. Now, that in itself was horrid, because you’re talking about a period when her friends and family are calling her on her mobile phone and are terribly worried about her and they’re imploring her to come home — and they’re crying on the phone and it’s deeply personal stuff. And here the News of the World is listening to it. That feels wrong, but where it then got worse was the voice-mail box on Milly’s phone filled up. The news of the world were hungry for more information, for more stories, so they intervened and deleted the messages. Well of course, for the family and friends who were calling in and had heard the voice mailbox was full, suddenly, it wasn’t full anymore. So naturally enough, they concluded that Milly herself had deleted her messages. Therefore, she was still alive — and she wasn’t.
The Milly Dowler story changed the politics of the whole saga. It made it really impossible for anybody to defend at the News of the World, and that included the Prime Minister and the Tory leadership. So, they’ve, so to speak, switched sides. They’ve switched sides specifically on the question of whether or not there should be a public inquiry. David Cameron, in fact, announced not one but two public inquiries. One into the long term and shocking failure of the Metropolitan Police to get anywhere close to telling the truth about this until very recently, and the second is into the misbehavior of the News of the World and the media generally.
I think it is reasonable for any of us to observe the Murdoch Corp. has too much power. It is evident from the way in which the police, the press complaints commission, and some politicians automatically backed off and said — let’s not cause trouble they might hurt us. But they already had too much power when all this was going on. It seems to me highly unlikely it could be in the interest of our society as a whole to give that too powerful group yet more power.
Rupert Murdoch’s media empire is being shaken at a time when he is attempting to pull off a $12 billion takeover of the TV network British Sky Broadcasting. Earlier today, Britain’s Culture Secretary announced that the decision on the Sky deal will be delayed because of the ongoing scandal. It’s unclear what impact the British scandal will have on Murdoch’s U.S. media holdings, which include the Fox TV network, the New York Post, The Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones and Company, HarperCollins, and the 20th Century Fox film studio.
It has been unfolding for years and involves everything including a guy being paid off who, the talk about corrupt police officials, who in fact was a suspected axe murderer, to hack these phone mails.
Ryan Chittum talking:
This has been unfolding for years. It really became a big story in 2009 when Nick Davies, who we just heard, broke the news that News Corporation had paid off some of the victims of the phone hacking in order to keep them from pressing charges and investigating further what had gone on. He broke that and it still was not a big story in the British press, the other tabloid papers did not follow it, it’s kind of been a lonely journey for Nick Davies and the Guardian over the past two years. They have had some help from papers like The Independent and the BBC and then, you know, the New York Times in the U.S., but the Milly Dowler thing is what really took this to another level. It exploded it into a huge store that nobody could ignore, including the Murdoch papers like The Times of London, the Sun, The Wall Street Journal.
Andy Coulson was the editor of the News of the World, not during the Milly Dowler case, he was deputy then, but during most of the hacking allegations. David Cameron knew when he hired him that news of the world had some sort of trouble. He clearly did not know the extent of the trouble, but the editor of the Guardian sent word that Coulson was involved in some of these other things and Cameron just denied that this morning. I think the big story here beyond the criminality of this newsroom and what it says about the culture of News Corporation, which is the biggest and most important media company in the world, it is what it says about the power of that company and media consolidation. Murdoch owns some one-third of the newspapers in Britain, like the second biggest TV proprietor, so he has a huge impact on that society. What this scandal has exposed is police corruption, government corruption, Media cooperation — you know, it is really kind of a revealing story about how media consolidation can be a corrupting factor in society.
Funny thing is that Andy Coulson was the former spokesperson for Cameron, the prime minister of Britain.
James Murdoch defends his colleague Rebekah Brooks, chief executive of News International. He also blames the scandal on a few rogue actors.
That’s completely false and you can’t believe a word these people say at this point, if you ever could. This story came out because of reporting by the guardian almost exclusively in Nick Davis, and the push for investigations by victims of the hacking scandal did not come about because of News Corporation, who tried to cover it up at every point. It is just ridiculous. Rebekah Brooks, when she was editor of the News of the World — think about this, she that ax murderer suspect on her payroll. Rupert Murdoch did, hacking the phones of people, violating their privacy. She will say she did not know that they were doing these illegal activities, but as anybody who’s worked in journalism knows, especially somebody who’s had power, you do not let something in the paper, sensitive things, unless you know where it came from. So, it’s implausible that she did not know this stuff. The same with Andy Coulson, who is now under arrest, I suspect Brooks will be before too long.
And the fact that this investigator was on the payroll? I think at 100,000 pounds a year. You would think that some editor would at least question, hey, what’s this, what are we paying this guy to do? It seems completely inconceivable that the editors would not know what was going on in this situation. And if they didn’t know they should be fired for not knowing that there was a criminal operation in the newsroom.
Another fascinating thing that’s come out this week about Rebekah Brooks is that back in 2002, they had News of the World resources, a van, a couple journalists tail the lead detective on that ax murder case. It was a 15-year-old case. They reopened it. He went on the TV and then the News of the World had him followed. They were caught following him after the detective called Scotland Yard. They said, we are investigating whether he is having an affair with a news anchor. He had been married to her for five or six years and had a couple of kids, so, totally bogus. Scotland Yard went to Rebekah Brooks, complained. She fought them back. They never did anything about it. She never did anything about it, continued to employ this guy. So, the idea that they are saying that she did not know what was going on is, it’s ludicrous. She may have not known all the details, but she knew. She created the culture that was going on.
the police involvement in this and that the newspaper was paying police for internal documents or records. The degree to which police officials and the investigation that needs to be conducted within law-enforcement, on this cozy relationship — of actually getting paid bribes to release documents to a particular newspaper.
this is part of that corruption of society with the media consolidation I was talking about earlier. The police were not only had the people on the take from News Corp., but they were afraid of Murdoch. They had this symbiotic relationship with the News of the World where they would leak things to it and the News of the World would drum up sympathy for police cases and against alleged criminals. They did not want to damage that relationship. So you had that going on, and probably they knew that some of their people were on the take. They did not want that exposed, so between those two factors and lord knows what else, they covered it up. The investigation that they had in to this was a joke. With this widespread criminality going on — and the news of the world did not even hide this. It’s competitors did some of it, it was more systematic, but you know, you can read the paper and see that there was no other way that they could have gotten these messages than hacking in to them illegally.
I used to work for The Wall Street Journal. I left there a couple months before Murdoch took over. Nobody at that paper, which I think was a great paper, one of the best in the world, not including its editorial page, was fearful of Murdoch taking over. For me at the time, it was not even, mostly because that Murdoch would interfere with the news product, I did not think he’d put naked women on page 3, but that this kind of, you’d be associated with this kind of person. This is the culture of News Corp. it’s well known. This is a particularly sick manifestation of it, but we were afraid of being associated with a guy like Murdoch who has papers like News of the World that do things like this. That never happened at The Wall Street Journal.
There are now reports that Murdoch has appointed Joel Klein, the former chancellor of the New York school system, who went to work as a vice president at News Corporation, to conduct the internal investigation that the company is going to continue now into what happened here.
Joel Klein is on the News Corp. payroll. He is in line for a $5 million payday. You know, this is not the type of guy who is going to lead an independent investigation he answers to Murdoch. So, the only thing they could do is to hire some respected outside law firm or kind of special prosecutor type person to do this. They do not want to do that because they do not want anything to come out that they do not want to come out.
the number of people whose phones have been hacked from Prince William to the actor Hugh Grant, who by the way, has led an advertiser boycott of Murdoch’s empire, which has had a tremendous effect, also those who died in the 7/7 attacks, the head of the National Footballers Association who sued and had some mum deal where he got something close to a $1 million
about 4000 people they think we’re hacked, just systematic criminality. This is not something that happens — this is not a rogue reporter, which News Corp. tried to say for years. It is not a consultant they hired that went off. Clearly, they knew these guys background one was convicted of planting cocaine on a woman in a divorce dispute. This is a culture created by management they’re responsible for it, even if they did not get their hands dirty in it. This was a cutthroat newsroom and they got what they wanted.
now the newspaper is closed, News of the World. Given the number of publications that Murdoch owns, he’s essentially re-branding himself, eliminating the damaged brand and probably will move some of those reporters over now to one of his other papers and there is already talk that The Sun will now have a Sunday edition, so, that basically, he is trying to ditch the bad apple, as he calls it, right now, to save the rest of his empire and also to save his deal to be able to get complete ownership of Sky Broadcasting.
He is crafty, that one. He bought some domain names for The Sun on Sunday, two days before he announced that he was closing the News of the World. You can guess his intentions.
Discussion with Ryan Chittum.
Ryan Chittum, writes about the business press for Columbia Journalism Review’s “The Audit”. He has been closely following Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World hacking scandal.
– from democracynow.org