UK > History > 2011 > Journalism / media (I)
News
International offers
Milly
Dowler's family £3m settlement
Negotiations continuing on settlement understood
to include personal £1m donation to charity
by Rupert Murdoch
Tuesday 20
September 2011
The Guardian
Dan Sabbagh
This article appeared on p1 of the Main section section of the Guardian on
Tuesday 20 September 2011.
It was published on guardian.co.uk at 02.15 BST
on
Tuesday 20 September 2011.
It was last modified at 02.15 BST
on Tuesday 20
September 2011.
It was first published at 20.42 BST
on Monday 19 September 2011.
Milly
Dowler's family have been made a £3m offer by Rupert Murdoch's News
International in an attempt to settle the phone-hacking case that led to the
closure of the News of the World and the resignation of the company's chief
executive, Rebekah Brooks.
The money on the table is understood to include a personal £1m donation to
charity by Murdoch himself as well as contributions to the family's legal costs.
But the publisher has not yet reached final agreement with the Dowler family,
whose lawyers were thought to be seeking a settlement figure closer to £3.5m.
The seven-figure sums under negotiation are far larger than other phone-hacking
settlements reached – and amount to one of the largest payouts ever made by a
newspaper owner – reflecting the fact that the phone-hacking case affected a
family who were victims of crime.
Milly Dowler went missing aged 13 in March 2002 and was later found murdered.
The terms of any final settlement are not expected to be confidential. It is
less clear, however, whether more detail will emerge about how and when the
phone was targeted. The family and their lawyers declined to comment on Monday.
The hacking of Milly Dowler's mobile phone after her death emerged in July.
Voicemails were accessed on behalf of the News of the World and messages left
for her were deleted to make room for more recordings. This gave the family
false hope that she was still alive.
On Monday afternoon there was growing speculation that a deal was close, with
some involved in the negotiations suggesting a deal could come as soon as this
week. However, other sources familiar with the negotiations indicated there were
still enough matters unresolved to mean a final settlement would be delayed
further.
The actor Sienna Miller accepted £100,000 from News International after the
publisher accepted unconditional liability for her phone hacking and other
privacy and harassment claims in May. A month later, football pundit Andy Gray
accepted £20,000 plus undisclosed costs.
Other lawyers bringing phone-hacking cases have privately indicated that they
would be advising many of those bringing actions to try to reach a settlement
rather than take their cases to lengthy and expensive trials. A handful of cases
have been taken forward as lead actions by Mr Justice Vos, to establish a
benchmark for settlements in future lawsuits. However, with the amount of
damages alone offered to the Dowler family expected to amount to well over £1m,
the settlement easily exceeds other high-profile payout made by newspapers by
way of apology.
In 2008, Kate and Gerry McCann, the parents of the missing Madeleine McCann,
accepted £550,000 in damages over more than 100 "seriously defamatory" articles
published by Richard Desmond's Express newspapers.
This year, eight newspapers paid an unspecified six-figure sum to Chris
Jefferies, the landlord of the murdered Joanna Yeates over allegations made
against him over the her death. The titles made public apologies to him. Another
man, Vincent Tabak, has been charged with her murder, with a trial due next
month.
Rupert Murdoch personally met the Dowler family in July, shortly after the story
about hacking into her phone broke, making what the family's lawyer, Mark Lewis,
said was a "full and humble" apology. The News Corporation chairman and chief
executive "held his head in his hands" and repeatedly told the family he was
"very, very sorry".
On Monday night, News International confimed it was "in advanced negotiations
with the Dowler family regarding their compensation settlement. No final
agreement has yet been reached, but we hope to conclude the discussions as
quickly as possible."
Sources close to News International said the publisher had initiated the offer
of compensation, although at a level lower than the £3m settlement.
News International offers Milly Dowler's family £3m
settlement, NYT, 20.9.2011,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/sep/19/news-international-milly-dowler-settlement
Phone
hacking:
News of
the World reporter's letter reveals cover-up
Disgraced royal correspondent Clive Goodman's letter
says phone hacking was 'widely discussed' at NoW meetings
•
Read Clive Goodman's letter to News International
Tuesday 16
August 2011
12.34 BST
Guardian.co.uk
Nick Davies
This article was published on guardian.co.uk at 12.34 BST on Tuesday 16 August
2011. It was last modified at 15.12 BST on Tuesday 16 August 2011. It was first
published at 12.15 BST on Tuesday 16 August 2011.
Rupert
Murdoch, James Murdoch and their former editor Andy Coulson all face
embarrassing new allegations of dishonesty and cover-up after the publication of
an explosive letter written by the News of the World's disgraced royal
correspondent, Clive Goodman.
In the letter, which was written four years ago but published only on Tuesday,
Goodman claims that phone hacking was "widely discussed" at editorial meetings
at the paper until Coulson himself banned further references to it; that Coulson
offered to let him keep his job if he agreed not to implicate the paper in
hacking when he came to court; and that his own hacking was carried out with
"the full knowledge and support" of other senior journalists, whom he named.
The claims are acutely troubling for the prime minister, David Cameron, who
hired Coulson as his media adviser on the basis that he knew nothing about phone
hacking. And they confront Rupert and James Murdoch with the humiliating
prospect of being recalled to parliament to justify the evidence which they gave
last month on the aftermath of Goodman's allegations. In a separate letter, one
of the Murdochs' own law firms claim that parts of that evidence were variously
"hard to credit", "self-serving" and "inaccurate and misleading".
Goodman's claims also raise serious questions about Rupert Murdoch's close
friend and adviser, Les Hinton, who was sent a copy of the letter but failed to
pass it to police and who then led a cast of senior Murdoch personnel in telling
parliament that they believed Coulson knew nothing about the interception of the
voicemail of public figures and that Goodman was the only journalist involved.
The letters from Goodman and from the London law firm Harbottle & Lewis are
among a cache of paperwork published by the Commons culture, media and sport
select committee. One committee member, the Labour MP Tom Watson, said Goodman's
letter was "absolutely devastating". He said: "Clive Goodman's letter is the
most significant piece of evidence that has been revealed so far. It completely
removes News International's defence. This is one of the largest cover-ups I
have seen in my lifetime."
Goodman's letter is dated 2 March 2007, soon after he was released from a
four-month prison sentence. It is addressed to News International's director of
human resources, Daniel Cloke, and registers his appeal against the decision of
Hinton, the company's then chairman, to sack him for gross misconduct after he
admitted intercepting the voicemail of three members of the royal household.
Goodman lists five grounds for his appeal.
He argues that the decision is perverse because he acted "with the full
knowledge and support" of named senior journalists and that payments for the
private investigator who assisted him, Glenn Mulcaire, were arranged by another
senior journalist. The names of the journalists have been redacted from the
published letter at the request of Scotland Yard, who are investigating the
affair.
Goodman then claims that other members of staff at the News of the World were
also hacking phones. Crucially, he adds: "This practice was widely discussed in
the daily editorial conference, until explicit reference to it was banned by the
editor." He reveals that the paper continued to consult him on stories even
though they knew he was going to plead guilty to phone hacking and that the
paper's then lawyer, Tom Crone, knew all the details of the case against him.
In a particularly embarrassing allegation, he adds: "Tom Crone and the editor
promised on many occasions that I could come back to a job at the newspaper if I
did not implicate the paper or any of its staff in my mitigation plea. I did
not, and I expect the paper to honour its promise to me." In the event, Goodman
lost his appeal. But the claim that the paper induced him to mislead the court
is one that may cause further problems for News International.
Two versions of his letter were provided to the committee. One which was
supplied by Harbottle & Lewis has been redacted to remove the names of
journalists, at the request of police. The other, which was supplied by News
International, has been redacted to remove not only the names but also all
references to hacking being discussed in Coulson's editorial meetings and to
Coulson's offer to keep Goodman on staff if he agreed not to implicate the
paper.
The company also faces a new claim that it misled parliament. In earlier
evidence to the select committee, in answer to questions about whether it had
bought Goodman's silence, it had said he was paid off with a period of notice
plus compensation of no more than £60,000. The new paperwork, however, reveals
that Goodman was paid a full year's salary, worth £90,502.08, plus a further
£140,000 in compensation as well as £13,000 to cover his lawyer's bill. Watson
said: "It's hush money. I think they tried to buy his silence." Murdoch's
executives have always denied this.
When Goodman's letter reached News International four years ago, it set off a
chain reaction which now threatens embarrassment for Rupert and James Murdoch
personally. The company resisted Goodman's appeal, and he requested disclosure
of emails sent to and from six named senior journalists on the paper. The
company collected 2,500 emails and sent them to Harbottle & Lewis and asked the
law firm to examine them.
Harbottle & Lewis then produced a letter, which has previously been published by
the select committee in a non-redacted form: "I can confirm that we did not find
anything in those emails which appeared to us to be reasonable evidence that
Clive Goodman's illegal actions were known about and supported by both or either
of Andy Coulson, the editor, and Neil Wallis, the deputy editor, and/or that Ian
Edmondson, the news editor, and others were carrying out similar illegal
procedures."
In their evidence to the select committee last month, the Murdochs presented
this letter as evidence that the company had been given a clean bill of health.
However, the Metropolitan police have since said that the emails contained
evidence of "alleged payments by corrupt journalists to corrupt police
officers". And the former director of public prosecutions, Ken Macdonald, who
examined a small sample of the emails, said they contained evidence of indirect
hacking, breaches of national security and serious crime.
In a lengthy reply, Harbottle & Lewis say it was never asked to investigate
whether crimes generally had been committed at the News of the World but had
been instructed only to say whether the emails contained evidence that Goodman
had hacked phones with "the full knowledge and support" of the named senior
journalists. The law firm reveals that the letter was the result of a detailed
negotiation with News International's senior lawyer, Jon Chapman, and it refused
to include a line which he suggested, that, having seen a copy of Goodman's
letter of 2 March: "We did not find anything that we consider to be directly
relevant to the grounds of appeal put forward by him."
In a lengthy criticism of the Murdochs' evidence to the select committee last
month, Harbottle & Lewis says it finds it "hard to credit" James Murdoch's
repeated claim that News International "rested on" its letter as part of their
grounds for believing that Goodman was a "rogue reporter". It says News
International's view of the law firm's role is "self-serving" and that Rupert
Murdoch's claim that it was hired "to find out what the hell was going on" was
"inaccurate and misleading", although it adds that he may have been confused or
misinformed about its role.
Harbottle & Lewis writes: "There was absolutely no question of the firm being
asked to provide News International with a clean bill of health which it could
deploy years later in wholly different contexts for wholly different purposes …
The firm was not being asked to provide some sort of 'good conduct certificate'
which News International could show to parliament … Nor was it being given a
general retainer, as Mr Rupert Murdoch asserted it was, 'to find out what the
hell was going on'."
The law firm's challenge to the Murdochs' evidence follows an earlier claim made
jointly by the paper's former editor and former lawyer that a different element
of James Murdoch's evidence to the committee was "mistaken". He had told the
committee that he had paid more than £1m to settle a legal action brought by
Gordon Taylor of the Professional Footballers Association without knowing that
Taylor's lawyers had obtained an email from a junior reporter to the paper's
chief reporter, Neville Thurlbeck, containing 35 transcripts of voicemail
messages. Crone and the former editor, Colin Myler, last month challenged this.
In letters published by the committee, the former News of the World lawyer
repeats his position. He says this email was "the sole reason" for settling
Taylor's case. He says he took it with him to a meeting with James Murdoch in
June 2008 when he explained the need to settle: "I have no doubt that I informed
Mr Murdoch of its existence, of what it was and where it came from."
Myler, in a separate letter also published on Tuesday, endorses Crone's account.
Their evidence raises questions about James Murdoch's failure to tell the police
or his shareholders about the evidence of crime contained in the email.
Watson said that both Murdochs should be recalled to the committee to explain
their evidence. Hinton, who resigned last month, may join them. Four days after
Goodman sent his letter, Hinton gave evidence to the select committee in which
he made no reference to any of the allegations contained in the letter, but told
MPs: "I believe absolutely that Andy [Coulson] did not have knowledge of what
was going on". He added that he had carried out a full, rigorous internal
inquiry and that he believed Goodman was the only person involved.
Commenting on the evidence from the select committee, a News International
spokesperson said: "News Corporation's board has set up a management and
standards committee, chaired by independent chairman Lord Grabiner, which is
co-operating fully with the Metropolitan police and is facilitating their
investigation into illegal voicemail interception at the News of the World and
related issues.
"We recognise the seriousness of materials disclosed to the police and
parliament and are committed to working in a constructive and open way with all
the relevant authorities."
Phone hacking: News of the World reporter's letter reveals
cover-up, G, 16.8.2011,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/aug/16/phone-hacking-now-reporter-letter
News
International 'deliberately' blocked investigation
All-party home affairs committee report into phone hacking
to be published in time for David Cameron's statement
Wednesday
20 July 2011
The Guardian
Vikram Dodd
This article appeared in the Guardian on Wednesday 20 July 2011. It was
published on guardian.co.uk at 05.05 BST on Wednesday 20 July 2011. It was last
modified at 08.53 BST on Wednesday 20 July 2011. It was first published at 01.05
BST on Wednesday 20 July 2011.
Rupert
Murdoch's News International company has been found by a parliamentary committee
to have "deliberately" tried to block a Scotland Yard criminal investigation
into phone hacking at the News of the World.
The report from MPs on the all-party home affairs committee will be released on
Wednesday morning. Its publication has been moved forward in time for a
statement on the scandal by the prime minister, David Cameron.
The report's central finding comes a day after Rupert and James Murdoch
testified before the culture, media and sport committee. The home affairs
committee report marks an official damning judgment on News International's
actions.
It finds the company "deliberately" tried to "thwart" the 2005-2006 Metropolitan
police investigation into phone hacking carried out by the News of the World.
The investigation came at a time when Andy Coulson was editor. Coulson went on
to be chosen by Cameron to be his director of communications, before resigning.
The full report's findings include:
• Police failed to examine a vast amount of material that could have identified
others involved in the phone-hacking conspiracy and victims.
• John Yates made a "serious misjudgment" in deciding in July 2009 that the
Met's criminal investigation should not be reopened. He resigned on Monday.
• The new phone-hacking investigation should receive more money, from government
if necessary, so it can contact potential victims more speedily. A fraction have
been contacted so far.
• The information commissioner should be given new powers to deal with phone
hacking and blagging.
The central conclusion about NI's hampering of the police investigation comes
after the home affairs committee heard evidence from senior Met officers who
were involved in the case that News International obstructed justice.
Last week the man who oversaw the first Metropolitan police investigation into
phone hacking, Peter Clarke, damned News International: "If at any time News
International had offered some meaningful co-operation instead of prevarication
and what we now know to be lies, we would not be here today."
The first police inquiry led to the conviction in January 2007 of one
journalist, Clive Goodman, and the private investigator Glenn Mulcaire.
But subsequent developments, and the handing over of documents by News
International, are alleged to show the practice of phone hacking was much more
widespread than the company ever admitted. NI claimed for years it was the work
of one rogue reporter, a defence the company has now abandoned, at least in part
because of a Guardian investigation that eventually led to the Met reopening its
inquiry.
The committee heard on Tuesday that "blindingly obvious" evidence of corrupt
payments to police officers was found by the former director of public
prosecutions, Lord Macdonald, when he inspected News of the World emails. Lord
Macdonald said that when he inspected the messages from NI it took him between
"three to five minutes" to decide that the material had to be passed to police.
The emails and other material has been in the possession of NI or its lawyers
for years.
MacDonald said: "The material I saw was so blindingly obvious that trying to
argue that it should not be given to the police would have been a hard task. It
was evidence of serious criminal offences."
Ed Llewellyn, David Cameron's chief of staff, was dragged into the phone-hacking
scandal on Tuesday when two of the country's most senior police officers
revealed he had urged them not to brief the prime minister on developments.
Llewellyn sought to stop information about the scandal being passed on to the
prime minister in September, a few days after the New York Times ran an article
that claimed Coulson had been aware of the use of the illegal practice when he
edited the News of the World.
The former Metropolitan police commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson – who resigned
on Sunday – and former assistant commissioner John Yates – who followed him on
Monday – told the House of Commons home affairs select committee that they
believed Llewellyn was keen to avoid "compromising" the prime minister.
Yates told the committee he was offering to discuss only police protocol – not
operational matters.
Committee chair Keith Vaz MP said: "There has been a catalogue of failures by
the Metropolitan police and deliberate attempts by News International to thwart
the various investigations. Police and prosecutors have been arguing over the
interpretation of the law.
"The new inquiry requires additional resources and if these are not forthcoming
it will take years to inform all the potential victims. The victims of hacking
should have come first and I am shocked that this has not happened."
News International 'deliberately' blocked investigation,
G, 20.7.2011,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jul/20/news-international-deliberately-blocked-investigation
Rupert
Murdoch's phone-hacking humble pie
Tycoon expresses regret for News Corporation's involvement in scandal
but insists he was kept in dark
Tuesday 19
July 2011
23.54 BST
Guardian.co.uk
Patrick Wintour, political editor
This article was published on guardian.co.uk at 23.54 BST on Tuesday 19 July
2011. A version appeared on p1 of the Main section section of the Guardian on
Wednesday 20 July 2011. It was last modified at 02.02 BST on Wednesday 20 July
2011.
Rupert
Murdoch defiantly insisted on Tuesday he was not responsible for what he called
"sickening and horrible invasions" of privacy committed by his company, claiming
he had been betrayed by disgraceful unidentified colleagues and had known
nothing of the cover-up of phone hacking.
During a three-hour grilling at the culture select committee, disrupted by a
protester throwing a plate of shaving foam, the once all-powerful News Corp
chairman and chief executive told MPs: "I am not responsible."
In a halting performance, at times pausing, mumbling and mishearing, Murdoch
said those culpable were "the people I hired and trusted, and perhaps then
people who they hired and trusted". But he denied the accusation he had been
"willfully blind" about the scandal.
Flanked by his son James, the chairman of News International, Murdoch said he
and his company had been betrayed in a disgraceful way, but argued he was still
the best person to clean up the company, adding in a rehearsed soundbite that
his day in front of the committee represented "the most humble day of my life".
In a Westminster hearing screened worldwide, he repeatedly tried to avoid
identifying the specific culprits in his company, often blaming earlier legal
counsel for inadequate advice or leaving his son to explain his behaviour.
But in separate testimony to the home affairs select committee, Lord Macdonald,
the former head of the CPS, now on contract with News International, revealed it
had taken him three to five minutes to examine documents kept by the company's
solicitors showing widespread criminality at the company.
Macdonald said in his view the criminality revealed was "completely
unequivocal", adding when he reported his findings to the News International
board recently there was surprise and shock. He said: "I cannot imagine anyone
looking at the file would not say there was criminality," including payments to
police.
The file was kept at the solicitors Harbottle & Lewis, and the police
investigation is now centring on which executives tried to conceal its contents.
In May 2007 Harbottle & Lewis sent a two-paragraph letter to News International
executives claiming their examination of the documents showed there was no
evidence any senior executives knew of illegal activities by the reporter Clive
Goodman, or of any other illegal activities.
The physical assault on Murdoch came near the end of the evidence session,
prompting gasps as his wife, Wendi Deng, leaped up to hit the assailant,
Jonathan May-Bowles, a participant in UK Uncut events.
May-Bowles was detained by police as James Murdoch angrily asked officers why
they had not protected his father. The Commons Speaker, John Bercow, called for
an inquiry.
The culture and home affairs select committees between them took more than eight
hours of evidence about the phone-hacking scandal. Under cover of the drama of
the hearings, the Conservatives revealed that Neil Wallis, a former News of the
World deputy editor, had given "informal unpaid advice" to Andy Coulson when he
was director of communications at the Conservative party.
In a statement the party said: "It has been drawn to our attention that he may
have provided Andy Coulson with some informal advice on a voluntary basis before
the election. We are currently finding out the exact nature of any advice."
Wallis was arrested last week on suspicion of phone hacking, and the furore
surrounding his hiring by the Metropolitan police between October 2008 and
September 2009 has led to the resignation of Sir Paul Stephenson, the
Metropolitan police commissioner, and the Met's assistant commissioner John
Yates, who both gave evidence on Tuesday.
Separately emails were released by Downing Street showing David Cameron's chief
of staff, Ed Llewellyn, had on 20 September 2010 turned down the opportunity of
a briefing by the Metropolitan police on the phone hacking. Labour claimed it
showed an extraordinary dereliction of his duty to find out the scale of
wrong-doing and the potential involvement of Coulson, the former No 10 director
of communications.
Cameron will be pressed on the issue when he makes a statement to MPs on how he
is handling the crisis. He has been summoned to a 1922 backbench committee
meeting to justify his response, including his decision to hire Coulson.
The publication report from the all-party home affairs committee, which has been
brought forward in time for Cameron's statement today, has found that News
International "deliberately" tried to block a Scotland Yard criminal
investigation into phone hacking at the News of the World. The report finds the
company "deliberately" tried to "thwart" the 2005-6 Metropolitan police
investigation into phone hacking carried out by the tabloid.
Much of the cross-examination of the Murdochs was largely designed to locate how
high the apparent cover-up of systematic law-breaking went. James Murdoch was
forced to admit, after much wriggling, that his company was still paying the
legal costs of Glenn Mulcaire, one of the private detectives on the payroll of
News of the World found guilty of hacking phones. James Murdoch said he was
shocked and surprised to learn the payments were continuing, and denied it had
been done to buy silence.
Pressed by the Labour MP Paul Farrelly, Rupert Murdoch said he would stop the
payments if he was contractually free to do so. James Murdoch denied the large
out-of-court settlements to the PFA chief executive, Gordon Taylor (£700,000),
and publicist Max Clifford (£1m including legal costs), authorised by him in
2008, had not been pitched so high to buy their silence. He insisted the
settlement level was based on legal advice, or in the case of Clifford due to
the ending of a wider contract.
James Murdoch also revealed he had authorised the settlements but had not told
his father until 2009 after the case became public, saying the payments were too
small to be reported to a higher board. He refused a request from MP Tom Watson
to release Taylor from his confidentiality agreement.
Both James Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks, the former chief executive of NI who gave
evidence later to the committee, said they had acted as soon as evidence emerged
in civil cases at the end of 2010 that phone hacking had not been confined to
Mulcaire and Goodman.
James Murdoch apologised for the scandal and told MPs: "These actions do not
live up to the standards our company aspires to." The three came under pressure
over a letter in May 2007 prepared by Harbottle & Lewis on the instruction of
Jon Chapman, the former director of legal affairs, and Daniel Cloak, the head of
human resources, suggesting phone hacking had not been widespread. The files on
which the Harbottle & Lewis letter is based were re-examined in April by senior
News International executives including Will Lewis and Lord Macdonald.
In tense opening exchanges Murdoch revealed he had mounted no investigation when
Brooks told parliament seven years ago that the News of the World had paid
police officers for information. He said: "I didn't know of it." He also
admitted he had never heard of the fact that his senior reporter at the News of
the World, Neville Thurlbeck, had been found by a judge to be guilty of
blackmail.
Watson interrupted to prevent Rupert Murdoch's son answering the questions,
saying: "Your father is responsible for corporate governance, and serious
wrongdoing has been brought about in the company. It is revealing in itself what
he does not know and what executives chose not to tell him." Rupert Murdoch
denied he was ignorant about his company, banging the table and saying News of
the World was "less than 1%" of News Corp. He was asked about his connections to
the Conservative party and revealed it had been on the advice of the prime
minister's staff that he had gone through the back door to have a cup of tea
with David Cameron after the election to receive Cameron's personal thanks for
supporting his party in the election.
"I was asked if I would please come through the back door," Murdoch told the
committee.
Rupert Murdoch denied that the closure of the News of the World was motivated by
financial considerations, saying he shut the Sunday tabloid because of the
criminal allegations. In one flash of anger he complained his competitors had
"caught us with dirty hands and created hysteria".
Aware he must prevent the scandal spreading across the Atlantic, he said he had
seen no evidence that victims of the 9/11 attacks and their relatives were
targeted by any of his papers.
Rupert Murdoch's phone-hacking humble pie, G, 19.7.2011,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jul/19/rupert-murdoch-phone-hacking-pie
Why We
Need the Tabloids
July 19,
2011
The New York Times
By RYAN LINKOF
Los Angeles
AS long as we have had tabloids, we have had tabloid scandals.
Weighing in on the spate of scandals plaguing the British tabloid press, one
commentator in 1936 acidly condemned what he called “the almost unbelievable
indecency of the intrusion of the tabloid newspaper into people’s private
lives.” Surely only the most degraded, low-minded people, he claimed, could
produce this kind of news.
The article, from the magazine Fortnightly, was part of an ongoing debate in the
interwar years about the intrusions of certain newspapers — the tabloids chief
among them — into moments of “private grief.” The debate eventually made its way
into the House of Commons, where major news agencies were encouraged to punish
reporters who violated standards of decency in pursuit of a story. Surely, 75
years on, newspapers should have learned their lesson.
As recent events have shown, the tabloids have not lost their grip on indecent
reporting, especially when it comes to breaches of privacy. Yet this is, I
think, for the better.
Rupert Murdoch, in his grilling before a Parliamentary inquiry on Tuesday, said
that he did not support an absolute right to privacy. He should be commended for
that, even though many of the tactics used by journalists at his now-shuttered
News of the World — hacking into the cellphone messages of crime victims, slain
soldiers’ families, government officials and members of the royal family, and
paying police sources for information — were beyond the pale of acceptable
reporting.
One does not have to support illegal activity in order to defend intrusive
reporting. Perhaps intrusiveness is “indecent,” but who’s to say that is reason
enough to tighten restrictions or create new laws to prevent it (or create
another flaccid governmental investigation into the activities of the press, as
Prime Minister David Cameron has ordered)? The concepts of privacy and decency
are so slippery (and class-bound) that they are not really the stuff of
effective (or desirable) legislation when it comes to the press.
Leaving aside the illegal activities of News of the World, part of Mr. Murdoch’s
News Corporation empire, the truth is that the vast majority of the tabloids
carry out their news coverage above board. They are not an external source of
infection, slowly contaminating the mainstream press, but rather an extension,
and often an exaggeration, of the basic logic that animates all news reporting.
Every journalist, not only those working for the tabloids, is called upon to
take risks in the pursuit of truth — usually within agreed-upon limits. And it
is true that, to a remarkable degree, even the most egregious news outlets
adhere to those limits. The tabloids may be sneakier and more persistent than
more respected news sources, but this is a matter of degree, not kind.
The tabloids may test the limits of the ethically or legally acceptable, but
they are often doing so in the service of a popular desire to see behind the
facade of public life. They rely on the appeal (a very human one) of seeing
elements of our societies that are often shamefully hidden away from view.
The tabloids are the newspapers most dutifully dedicated to ideas of exposure,
and are willing to take risks in the service of that goal. It may be the case
that much of what they expose is perhaps of little social import, but this is
more a matter of taste, and the tabloids certainly never claimed to be tasteful.
Certainly the fact that the American tabloids first broke important news
stories, like the extramarital affair of John Edwards, the former United States
senator and Democratic vice-presidential nominee, suggests that they are not
merely peddling insignificant gossip.
Watching the painfully choreographed, and highly policed, red-carpet arrival of
Prince William and Kate Middleton at a recent Los Angeles polo match reminded me
why intrusive journalistic tactics are often called upon. They exist to break
down the barriers of access that keep social elites at a remove from ordinary
people. The tabloids, throughout history, on both sides of the Atlantic, have
been predicated on chipping away at that division. They play a fundamental role
in democratic cultures, especially in societies characterized by the pull
between the demands of a mass society and the persistence of social and economic
inequality.
Of course, not all of the hacking at the center of the News of the World scandal
had to do with social elites. Some very ordinary, private people have been
harmed merely because their lives had been touched by horrible crimes — perhaps
most sensitively, the terrorist bombings of the London transit system on July 7,
2005.
Certainly laws protecting citizens from wiretapping and computer hacking should
apply just as readily to those people, but that does not lead inevitably to the
conclusion that any coverage of ordinary people, even if it might be considered
invasive, should not be allowed, or even that it should be condemned as
indecent.
Within limits, digging into private lives and exposing unsettling information
is, and will most likely remain, a basic feature of popular culture in the West.
The work of the tabloids can be irritating, provocative, ethically questionable
and even (as the scandal spectacularly shows) highly illegal, but when practiced
according to existing laws, tabloid journalism can be an important player in
modern culture, helping to mitigate some of the central tensions in democratic
society. Journalism has always been marked by a battle to define the boundaries
of acceptable investigative behavior. The tabloids — just as they ought —
constantly test those boundaries.
Ryan Linkof, a
lecturer in history at the University of Southern California, wrote a doctoral
dissertation on the origins of tabloid photojournalism in Britain.
Why We Need the Tabloids, NYT, 19.7.2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/20/opinion/20linkof.html
Rebekah
Brooks:
phone-hacking payments were not my responsibility
Former News International chief
says News of the World's managing editor approved payments to private detectives
Tuesday 19 July 2011
19.08 BST
Guardian.co.uk
John Plunkett
This article was published on guardian.co.uk at 19.08 BST on Tuesday 19 July
2011.
It was last modified at 19.56 BST on Tuesday 19 July 2011.
The former
News International chief executive, Rebekah Brooks, has deflected MPs' questions
about the News of the World's payments to private investigators, saying they
were the responsibility of the paper's managing editor.
Brooks admitted using private investigators during her time as editor of the
now-defunct tabloid, which she edited between 2000 and 2003, but said it was for
"purely legitimate" purposes, such as finding out the whereabouts of convicted
paedophiles.
But she said she had never heard of Glenn Mulcaire, the private detective
formerly paid by the News of the World to hack into people's mobile phones,
saying the first time she had heard his name was in 2006 when he was arrested
for this activity.
"The News of the World employed private detectives like most papers in Fleet
Street," said Brooks, appearing before MPs on the Commons culture, media and
sport select committee to answer questions about the News of the World
phone-hacking scandal.
Asked if she had approved payments for the controversial use of private
detectives, Brooks said: "That's not how it works."
Brooks explained that at News International "the editor's job is to acquire an
overall budget from management" and then give this to the managing editor, who
allocates it to a paper's department heads.
"Final payments are authorised by the managing editor, unless there is a
particularly big item, a set of photographs or something that needs to be
discussed on a wider level," she said.
Asked if she had ever discussed individual to payments to private investigators
with Stuart Kuttner, the former News of the World managing editor who left the
paper in 2009, said: "Payments to private investigators would have gone through
the managing editor's office. I can't remember if we ever discussed individual
payments."
Brooks, who did not specifically name Kuttner in her evidence today, said she
had never met or authorised payments to Mulcaire.
"I didn't know Glenn Mulcaire was one of the detectives that was used by the
News of the World, no. I had never heard the name until 2006, I did not know he
was on the payroll. There were other private investigators I did know about, he
was not one of them."
Brooks, who resigned from News International on Friday and was arrested and
questioned by police for several hours on Sunday, admitted News International's
internal investigation had been too slow and described the hacking of murdered
schoolgirl Milly Dowler's mobile phone as "abhorrent".
"The idea that Milly Dowler's phone was accessed by someone being paid for by
the News of the World, or worse being authorised by someone at the News of the
World, is as abhorrent to me as it is to everyone else," she said.
Brooks also said she had never paid a policeman for information despite telling
the select committee in 2003: "We have paid the police for information in the
past."
"Straight after my comment about payment to police it was in fact clarified [by
News International]," Brooks said. "I clarified it again to the home affairs
committee at the end of March. I can say I have never paid a policeman myself, I
have never knowingly sanctioned a payment to a police officer."
She added: "In my experience of dealing with the police, the information they
give to newspapers comes free of charge."
Brooks denied that she was too close to the prime minister, David Cameron, and
said she had not recommended Andy Coulson to be his director of communications.
"I have never been horse riding with the prime minister, I don't know what that
story came from," she said.
"The truth is that he is a neighbour and a friend but I deem the relationship to
be wholly appropriate and at no time have I had any conversation with the prime
minister that you in the room would disapprove of," she told MPs.
Asked if she had recommended Coulson to be Cameron's communications chief,
Brooks said: "The idea came from [chancellor of the exchequer] George Osborne."
Brooks added that the first she had heard that murdered schoolgirl Milly
Dowler's phone had been hacked for a News of the World story was two weeks ago,
when the Guardian broke the story.
"The important thing is we get to the truth ... as quickly as possible. Those
who were culpable of that should face not just opprobrium but also the correct
justice of the legal system."
She said at the time of the publication of the original story in 2002 – she
added that it had run in a single column on page 9 – a number of checks would
have been made by the paper's lawyers, the news editor and the night editor
where the information had come from.
"I would tell you now that it would not have been the case that someone said
'that came from illegal voicemail interception'," Brooks added.
"It seems now that it is inconceivable that people didn't know this was the case
but at the time it wasn't a practice that was condoned or sanctioned at the News
of the World under my editorship."
Rebekah Brooks: phone-hacking payments were not my
responsibility, G, 19.7.2011,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jul/19/rebekah-brooks-phone-hacking-payments
News
Corp board shocked
at
evidence of payments to police, says former DPP
Lord Macdonald tells committee it took him 'three to five minutes' to decide NoW
emails had to be passed to police
Tuesday 19 July 2011
21.26 BST
Guardian.co.uk
Owen Bowcott, legal affairs correspondent
This article was published on guardian.co.uk at 21.26 BST on Tuesday 19 July
2011. A version appeared on p9 of the Main section section of the Guardian on
Wednesday 20 July 2011.
"Blindingly
obvious" evidence of corrupt payments to police officers was found by the former
director of public prosecutions, Lord Macdonald, when he inspected News of the
World emails, the home affairs select committee was told.
Explaining how he had been called in by solicitors acting for Rupert Murdoch's
News Corporation board, Lord Macdonald said that when he inspected the messages
it took him between "three to five minutes" to decide that the material had to
be passed to police.
"The material I saw was so blindingly obvious that trying to argue that it
should not be given to the police would have been a hard task. It was evidence
of serious criminal offences."
He first showed it to the News Corp board in June this year. "There was no
dissent," he recalled. "They were stunned. They were shocked. I said it was my
unequivocal advice that it should be handed to the police. They accepted that."
That board meeting, the former DPP said, was chaired by Rupert Murdoch.
Lord Macdonald shortly afterwards gave the material to Assistant Commissioner
Cressida Dick at the Metropolitan police. The nine or 10 emails passed over led
to the launch of Operation Elveden, the police investigation into corrupt
payments to officers for information.
Lord Macdonald, who had been in charge of the Crown Prosecution Service when the
phone-hacking prosecution of the NoW's royal correspondent took place, said he
had only been alerted to the case due to the convention that the DPP is always
notified of crimes involving the royal family.
Members of the committee were highly critical of the CPS's narrow definition of
what constituted phone hacking, claiming that it was at odds with the Regulation
of Investigatory Powers Act.
Mark Reckless, the Conservative MP for Rochester, said that the original police
investigation was hindered by the advice from the CPS that phone hacking was
only an offence if messages had been intercepted before they were listened to by
the intended recipient. However, Reckless said, a clause in the RIPA makes it an
offence to hack in to messages even if they have already been heard.
Keir Starmer, the current DPP, said that the police had been told that "the RIPA
legislation was untested". Listening to messages before they had been heard by
the intended recipient was illegal, the police were told, but the question of
whether intercepting them afterwards constituted a crime was "untested", he
said.
Mark Lewis, the solicitor who has followed the scandal since its start, said he
was the first person to lose his job over the affair when the firm in which he
was a partner said it no longer wished him to pursue other victims' claims.
Lewis also told MPs that he had been threatened by lawyers acting for John
Yates, the former assistant commissioner at the Metropolitan police, because of
comments he had made about phone hacking.
"I have copies of a letter from Carter Ruck [solicitors] threatening to sue me
on behalf of John Yates," Lewis told the home affairs select committee. He said
the Guardian and the Labour MP Chris Bryant had also received threats of being
sued. "The costs of the action were paid for by the Metropolitan Police, by the
taxpayer," he added.
Lewis said the reason for the investigation taking so long was not due solely to
the police. "The DPP seems to have got it wrong and needs to be helped out," he
said.
News Corp board shocked at evidence of payments to police,
says former DPP, G, 19.7.2011,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jul/19/news-corp-police-payments-macdonald
10
things we learned
from the
Met police at the phone-hacking hearing
Sir Paul Stephenson, John Yates and Dick Fedorcio
provided some illuminating moments in front of the select committee
Peter
Walker
Guardian.co.uk
Tuesday 19 July 2011
16.07 BST
This article was published on guardian.co.uk at 16.07 BST
on Tuesday 19 July 2011.
It was last modified at 16.33 BST on Tuesday 19 July 2011.
1. David
Cameron's chief of staff, Ed Llewellyn, turned down the opportunity for the
prime minister to be briefed on the fact that Neil Wallis was giving PR advice
to the Metropolitan police, according to the force. The outgoing Met
commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson first alluded to an unnamed "No 10 official"
who briefed the force that Cameron should not be "compromised" over the issue.
The outgoing assistant commissioner John Yates subsequently named the official
as Llewellyn.
2. The buck does not always stop at the top in the Met. Stephenson deflected a
number of tough questions by telling MPs this was a matter for Yates, giving
evidence later.
3. No one properly checked Wallis before he began work for Scotland Yard. The
force's head of PR, Dick Fedorcio, told MPs that "due diligence" was carried out
by Yates, even though Yates and Wallis were friends. Not so, said Yates: all he
did was make a single phone call to Wallis to ask whether anything he had done
could "embarrass" the force.
4. Stephenson resigned despite, he believed, still having the full support of
Theresa May, the home secretary, London's mayor, Boris Johnson, and the bulk of
the force. He told MPs: "It was against the advice of many, many colleagues –
and, indeed, my wife." He added: "I'm not leaving because I was pushed or
threatened."
5. Yates passed on the CV of Wallis's daughter within the force, thus possibly
assisting her to get a job with the Met. He insisted he had done nothing wrong
but "simply acted as a postbox".
6. The Metropolitan police has 45 press officers, 10 of whom previously worked
for News International, figures revealed by Stephenson.
7. Corporate PR consultancy can be a lucrative business. The Met received three
tenders for a two-day-a-month contract to advise senior officers on press
matters. The winning bid and "by far the cheapest", came from Wallis's company,
at £1,000 a day.
8. Stephenson is not a fan of ex-colleague Andy Hayman's new career as a
journalist. Asked whether he reads Hayman's Times column, the response was: "No,
I do not."
9. Stephenson was determined to go out with a bang. He began quoting (inexactly)
Macbeth on his resignation – "If it's done then best it's done quickly" – before
vehemently defending his £12,000 free stay at Champneys health spa. He signed
off with a clearly pre-prepared statement of defiance, describing his
resignation as "an act of leadership".
10. We are living in strange times: there have been very few previous select
committee hearings at which a Conservative MP (Mark Reckless) and a commissioner
of the Metropolitan police go out of their way to praise the Guardian.
10 things we learned from the Met police at the
phone-hacking hearing, G, 19.7.2011,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jul/19/phone-hacking-select-committee-met
Special
report: Rupert Murdoch, a hands-on newspaperman
LONDON |
Tue Jul 19, 2011
6:57am EDT
Reuters
By Mark Hosenball and Kate Holton
LONDON
(Reuters) - To illustrate the extent to which Rupert Murdoch used to
micro-manage his newspapers, a one-time Murdoch editor told an anecdote about a
typical board meeting at the mogul's UK newspaper arm in the 1980s.
News International directors, including some of the most powerful newspaper
editors in Britain, would solemnly assemble in a board room within Murdoch's
fortress-like publishing compound at Wapping, not far from the Tower of London.
Once assembled, Kelvin MacKenzie, the editor who ran Murdoch's raucous daily
tabloid the Sun between 1981 and 1994 and made it the most influential newspaper
for much of the Thatcher era, would ask: "Right. Who's going to ring Rupert,
then?"
The anecdote was delivered with a smile. But senior journalists and corporate
officials who have worked at the highest levels of the Murdoch organization in
Britain say it encapsulates a deep truth about the way the Murdoch newspaper
empire has traditionally been run.
Former senior Murdoch employees in Britain, Australia and the United States say
Murdoch is a hands-on media proprietor, as ready with an opinion on a story as
he is to dispose of any editor who regularly takes a different stance from his
own.
Reports of Murdoch pressuring editors until their newspapers reflected his own
political leanings are common -- if more frequent at his tabloids than at his
quality publications. Sometimes, Murdoch does not even have to pick up the
phone.
"When I was last at News I was astonished how some editors would almost factor
in Rupert even though he was 12,000 miles away," Bruce Guthrie, a former editor
at Murdoch's Herald Sun in Melbourne, told Reuters.
"You could almost see them thinking, 'what will Rupert think of this?'"
News International told Reuters it does not comment on Murdoch's level of
involvement in his newspapers. Dow Jones & Company, which owns the Wall Street
Journal, declined to comment. Parent company News Corporation would not comment.
Reuters is a competitor of the Journal and of Dow Jones Newswires, the financial
news agency that News Corp acquired along with the Wall Street Journal in 2007.
ANTICIPATING THE BOSS
To get an idea of how deeply Murdoch sometimes sought to steer what his
newspapers were saying, former Wapping insiders point to his relationship with
one of the more respected of his British media properties, the Sunday Times.
Toward the end of a typical week, says a former senior News International
figure, the owner would routinely ring the paper's editor -- from the mid-1980s
a voluble Scotsman named Andrew Neil but more recently John Witherow, a genial,
low-profile South African -- and grill them about the stories being worked on.
One person who was present at one of these sessions said Murdoch would ask his
editor to run through the list of stories reporters were chasing. He would then
critique them one by one.
Eventually Murdoch would hear a story he liked and make his interest apparent.
That story would then become a main candidate for the front page.
Roy Greenslade, a media commentator for the Guardian who worked as a senior
editor at both Murdoch's Sun tabloid and the quality Sunday Times, said that
from what he saw and heard, Murdoch's personal editorial involvement was much
deeper with his British tabloids than with his two up-market papers, The Times
and the Sunday Times. Current and former employees of the Wall Street Journal
say that's the case at that paper as well.
In his earlier days as a UK media mogul, Murdoch was known for literally
dictating what tabloid editors would put in their papers, Greenslade told
Reuters.
But Greenslade and other News Corp editors also said that as Murdoch's empire
expanded, the Australian-born mogul had less time to micro-manage operations at
individual papers.
At the same time he was still able to exert editorial influence by selecting
editors who would anticipate his editorial views and whims.
"As an editor you were never in any doubt about what pleased him," Greenslade
said.
In 2007, Murdoch himself told a House of Lords committee looking at media
ownership and the news that he was a "traditional proprietor" at the Sun and
News of the World, according to the committee's minutes of a meeting with the
media boss. "He exercises editorial control on major issues -- like which Party
to back in a general election or policy on Europe," the committee noted.
Rebekah Brooks, editor of the News of the World when some of the phone hacking
occurred and head of News International until last week, told the same committee
that she was "very lucky to have a traditional proprietor like Mr Murdoch,
coupled with always having Les Hinton (then head of News International) there as
well, who, as you know, was a journalist. Yes, I do seek advice from them and,
yes, it is a consensus issue."
STEALTH
Murdoch's influence, former News Corp staff say, was not restricted to Britain
and explains why so many of his titles around the world took the same editorial
stance on major issues, such as the Iraq war.
Guthrie told Reuters that Murdoch regularly hosted editorial conferences at
which he would make his feelings known.
"You leave the conference kind of inculcated with a culture," said Guthrie, who
won damages from the company in 2008 for unfair dismissal.
"That's the way it's done, it's almost by stealth, but you leave those
conferences with an almost collective view -- certainly with the knowledge of
what the boss wants."
Another former News Limited journalist in Australia, who asked not to be named,
agreed that Murdoch liked to employ people who could anticipate his next step.
"They know how to think," the former journalist said. "People are put in these
jobs because they understand News Corp and how Rupert thinks so they don't have
to be micro-managed."
Neil, the editor of Britain's Sunday Times for 11 years, told a House of Lords
committee looking into media ownership in 2008 that he was never in any doubt
what Murdoch wanted, even though he could not recall a direct instruction
telling him to take a particular line.
"On every major issue of the time and every major political personality or
business personality, I knew what he thought and you knew, as an editor, that
you did not have a freehold, you had a leasehold ... and that leasehold depended
on accommodating his views," he said.
"Rupert Murdoch is obsessed with what his newspapers say. He picks the editors
that will take the kind of view of these things that he has and these editors
know what is expected of them when the big issues come and they fall into line."
In the 1980s, the Sun's MacKenzie would hear from Murdoch on a daily basis --
not quite to discuss exact headlines, but to make sure the newspaper would
report the major issues as the press baron saw fit.
Greenslade, recalling the relationship between Murdoch and MacKenzie, told the
same House of Lords committee that the editor would regularly come off the phone
"rubbing his backside as if he had been given a good kicking on the phone".
Three former News of the World reporters who spoke to Reuters also remember a
hands-on owner.
"Rupert comes across as quite unassuming," said one. "'The quiet assassin,' we
used to call him. He used to turn up unannounced -- you wouldn't know he was
there. No jacket, sleeves rolled up, at the back bench, quite hands-on."
Another said: "If the Murdochs were in town, there'd be massive pressure to get
some sensational story that weekend."
A third, a correspondent for the News of the World in New York for a period,
agreed that Murdoch liked to get involved. But based on practices in his U.S.
newspapers, this person said, "I think the whole thing (alleged phone hacking
and police bribery) will have horrified Murdoch."
PLEASING
THE BOSS
The pressure from the boss was -- and is -- less intense at Murdoch's quality
papers. Neil told the committee that during his time as editor at the Sunday
Times he would hear from Murdoch perhaps once or twice a week and receive
regular cuttings from Wall Street Journal editorials, sent to show Murdoch's
take on an issue.
"Part of the process of him letting you know his mind, in addition to calls and
conversations, is to clip out editorials from, above all, the Wall Street
Journal," he said. "He loved the Wall Street Journal, and he will love it even
more now that he owns it."
According to current and former employees of Dow Jones, Murdoch chats on a daily
basis with the editor of the Journal, Robert Thomson, both by phone and by
wandering down to the Journal newsroom at News Corp headquarters on Sixth
Avenue. Murdoch enjoys occasionally bantering and gossiping with other editors
and reporters whom he has come to know in the Journal newsroom, these people
say.
A News Corp insider agreed Murdoch occasionally trades gossip with editors and
reporters, but said it never went further than that.
But the experience at the New York Post, at least on one occasion, was
different, according to a former employee at the paper.
"You kind of knew what he wanted and what he didn't want. You knew what kind of
stories to do and what not to do. But the only time I really saw him hands-on in
the newsroom for any sustained period was the seven week Gore-Bush (electoral)
recount. He was there and he wanted to make sure we were on it the way he wanted
us to be on it.
"There is no doubt obviously who they wanted to win the election."
A former veteran New York Post reporter described Murdoch as having had "his
hands all over the Post. I used to see him in the newsroom something like twice
a week sometimes when he was in New York, especially if something big was
happening in politics or business."
While Murdoch "used to give us tips about people he wanted us to go after
especially in business and politics," this reporter said the Post did not use
things like private investigators or phone tapping.
"When he bought the Journal we started to see him a lot less," the former
reporter said. "It seemed the Post had lost its luster and he had this new
plaything. Some people started wondering if the Post was long for this world."
SCHADENFREUDE
In an editorial on July 18, the Wall Street Journal argued that readers should
"see through the commercial and ideological motives of our competitor-critics.
The Schadenfreude is so thick you can't cut it with a chainsaw. Especially
redolent are lectures about journalistic standards from publications" -- a
reference to the Guardian which has led much of the coverage on the hacking
story -- "that give Julian Assange and WikiLeaks their moral imprimatur. They
want their readers to believe, based on no evidence, that the tabloid excesses
of one publication somehow tarnish thousands of other News Corp journalists
across the world."
That may be true. There is no suggestion that hacking took place at the Wall
Street Journal or Murdoch's Times and the papers continue to provide serious,
in-depth coverage of politics and business.
But critics, including some former Murdoch editors, argue there's no getting
around the fact that Murdoch's personality and the pressure he creates have
helped create a culture where reporters felt it was acceptable to hack into
phone messages to get scoops.
"The culture that exists at his newspapers is a culture he has developed,"
Guthrie said. "It's in some ways an amoral culture. Essentially Rupert is this
hard-driving proprietor who pushes all his editors for more sales, bigger
stories, he wants bigger splashes and he puts his editors under enormous
pressure to deliver on that.
"He is not necessarily a bloke who wants to discuss ethics in journalism."
(With
reporting by Georgina Prodhan in London, Michael Perry and Michael Smith in
Sydney, and Yinka Adeogoke and Jennifer Saba in New York; Editing by Simon
Robinson and Sara Ledwith)
Special report: Rupert Murdoch, a hands-on newspaperman, R, 19.7.2011,
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/07/19/us-newscorp-murdoch-papers-idUSTRE76I1IT20110719
Murdoch
Aides Long Tried to Blunt Scandal Over Hacking
July 18,
2011
The New York Times
By JO BECKER and RAVI SOMAIYA
LONDON —
Two days before it emerged that The News of the World had hacked the cellphone
of a murdered schoolgirl, igniting a scandal that has shaken the media empire of
Rupert Murdoch, his son James told friends that he thought the worst of the
troubles were behind him. And he was confident that the News Corporation’s $12
billion bid for the satellite company British Sky Broadcasting would go through,
according to a person present.
Now, with their most trusted lieutenant, Rebekah Brooks, arrested on suspicion
of phone hacking and paying the police for information, the broadcasting bid
abandoned, the 168-year-old News of the World shuttered, and nine others
arrested, Rupert and James Murdoch are scheduled to face an enraged British
Parliament on Tuesday.
It is a spectacle that Rupert Murdoch’s closest associates spent years trying to
avoid.
Interviews with dozens of people involved in the hacking scandal, including
current and former News Corporation employees, provide an inside view of how a
small group of executives pursued strategies for years that had the effect of
obscuring the extent of wrongdoing in the newsroom of The News of the World,
Britain’s best-selling tabloid. And once the hacking scandal escalated, they
scrambled in vain to quarantine the damage.
Evidence indicating that The News of the World paid the police for information
was not handed over to the authorities for four years. Its parent company paid
hefty sums to those who threatened legal action, on condition of silence. The
tabloid continued to pay reporters and editors whose knowledge could prove
embarrassing even after they were fired or arrested for hacking. A key editor’s
computer equipment was destroyed, and e-mail evidence was lost. Internal advice
to accept responsibility was ignored, former executives said.
John Whittingdale, a Conservative member of Parliament who is the chairman of
the committee that will question the Murdochs, said they need to come clean on
the depth of the misdeeds, who authorized them and who knew what, when.
“Parliament was misled,” Mr. Whittingdale said. “It will be a lengthy and
detailed discussion.”
Mr. Murdoch has indicated he wants to cooperate.
“We think it’s important to absolutely establish our integrity in the eyes of
the public,” he said last week. “It’s best just to be as transparent as
possible.”
Ms. Brooks’s representative, David Wilson, said she maintained her innocence and
looked forward to clearing her name, but declined to answer specific questions.
As a trickle of revelations has become a torrent, the company switched from
containment to crisis mode. Ms. Brooks and others first made the case that other
newspapers had also hacked phones, and they sought to dig up evidence to prove
it, interviews show.
At a private meeting, Rupert Murdoch warned Paul Dacre, the editor of the rival
Daily Mail newspaper and one of the most powerful men on Fleet Street, that “we
are not going to be the only bad dog on the street,” according to an account
that Mr. Dacre gave to his management team. Mr. Murdoch’s spokesman did not
respond to questions about his private conversations.
Former company executives and political aides assert that executives at News
International, the News Corporation’s British subsidiary, carried out a campaign
of selective leaks implicating previous management and the police. Company
officials deny that. The Metropolitan Police responded with a statement alleging
a “deliberate campaign to undermine the investigation into the alleged payments
by corrupt journalists to corrupt police officers.”
Mr. Murdoch was attending a conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, early this month
when it became clear that the latest eruption of the hacking scandal was not, as
he first thought, a passing problem. According to a person briefed on the
conversation, he proposed to one senior executive that he “fly commercial to
London,” so he might be seen as a man of the people. He was told that would
hardly do the trick, and he arrived on a Gulfstream G550 private jet.
Evidence
Was There All Along
The storm Mr. Murdoch flew into had been brewing since 2006, when the tabloid’s
royalty reporter and a private investigator were prosecuted for hacking into the
messages of the royal household staff in search of juicy news exclusives. For
years afterward, company executives publicly insisted that the hacking was
limited to that one “rogue reporter.”
Andy Coulson resigned as editor of The News of the World after the prosecution,
but said he knew nothing. “If you’re talking about illegal tapping by a private
investigator,” Rupert Murdoch declared in February 2007, “that is not part of
our culture anywhere in the world, least of all in Britain.”
But it turns out that almost from the beginning, executives of News
International, the British subsidiary that owns the tabloid, had access to
information indicating that other reporters were also engaged in the practice.
During the royal hacking case, Scotland Yard had seized thousands of pages of
records with the names of thousands of possible hacking targets from the home of
the private investigator, Glenn Mulcaire, who worked for the tabloid. While the
police largely limited their investigation to the royalty case, lawyers
representing people believed to be victims of hacking fought for access to Mr.
Mulcaire’s records and made them available to the tabloid executives during the
litigation.
In the initial cases, News International saw documents naming other journalists,
according to details of those cases obtained by The New York Times. Notes in Mr.
Mulcaire’s files include the names “Ian” and “Neville,” apparent references to
the news editor, Ian Edmondson, and the chief reporter, Neville Thurlbeck.
James Murdoch, who oversees Europe and Asia operations for the News Corporation,
signed off on a £700,000 settlement with Gordon Taylor, a soccer union boss who
was the first to sue. One condition of the payment was confidentiality.
This month, James Murdoch acknowledged he was wrong to settle the suit, saying
he did not “have a complete picture of the case” at the time.
Ms. Brooks personally persuaded Max Clifford, a celebrity publicist, to drop his
case in return for even more compensation, Mr. Clifford said. He was paid to
provide story tips to the paper — a deal he said totaled £1 million.
Beyond Mr. Mulcaire’s files, another likely source of information about hacking
by The News of the World is its internal e-mails.
Even as the company faced a flood of claims over the past several years, News
International has acknowledged that it did not take any steps to preserve
e-mails that might contain evidence of hacking until late last fall. When The
News of the World moved offices late last year, the computer used by Mr.
Edmondson was destroyed in what the company describes as a standard procedure.
The company asserted in court that a vast amount of its e-mails from 2005 and
2006 — believed to be the height of the hacking activity — had been lost.
Company officials blamed bungling, not conspiracy, for the erasures.
News International has subsequently acknowledged that some messages might be
recoverable on backup disks, and the police are trying to recover that
information now, said Tom Watson, a Labour Party member of Parliament. Last
year, a forensic computer specialist that the company hired to help it comply
with a court order to turn over documents made a surprising discovery: three
e-mails sent to Mr. Edmondson containing PIN codes that could allow access to
voice mail, as well as names and telephone numbers, one official said.
The paper fired Mr. Edmonson and turned over the e-mails to the police. Those
e-mails were a factor in the decision to open a new Scotland Yard inquiry into
hacking, according to the inquiry’s leader, Sue Akers. Mr. Edmondson referred
questions to his lawyer, who did not respond.
In April, the police arrested Mr. Edmondson, along with Mr. Thurlbeck. A few
days later, News International issued a blanket apology, saying, “It is now
apparent that our previous inquiries failed to uncover important evidence.”
News International has for years said a 2007 internal investigation showed that
hacking was not widespread, but recent interviews with company officials
indicate that the inquiry had a different purpose. It was aimed at defending the
company from a lawsuit filed by Clive Goodman, the paper’s royalty reporter who
had been fired for hacking. He claimed that the dismissal was unfair because
others were hacking as well, according to two company officials with direct
knowledge.
Colin Myler, who succeeded Mr. Coulson as editor of The News of the World, told
Parliament in 2007 that News International had turned over as many as 2,500
e-mails to the law firm of Harbottle & Lewis, which the company had retained in
the matter. In a letter to Parliament at the time, the firm said it did not find
anything in the e-mails linking hacking to three top editors — Mr. Coulson, Neil
Wallis and Mr. Edmondson.
But a company official speaking on the condition of anonymity said that the
2,500 e-mails given to the law firm related only to Mr. Goodman and represented
only a small portion of the company’s e-mail traffic.
Since Scotland Yard began its new investigation in January, with access to more
internal documents, all three of the editors, who are no longer at the paper,
have been arrested.
Two company officials said the 2007 internal inquiry was in fact overseen by Les
Hinton, then executive chairman of News International and who resigned Friday as
chief executive of Dow Jones. Mr. Hinton told Parliament in 2007 that Mr. Myler
“went through thousands of e-mails.” But Mr. Myler was not given direct access
to the e-mails, the company officials said. Mr. Hinton did not respond to a
message, but in a statement announcing his resignation, he said he “was ignorant
of what apparently happened.”
While the e-mails reviewed for the internal inquiry in 2007 showed no direct
evidence of hacking, according to three company officials they did contain
suggestions that Mr. Coulson may have authorized payments to the police for
information. Yet News International turned over those documents to the police in
recent months, prompting yet another investigation, this one into possible
police bribery.
It is not clear who at News International saw the e-mails in question, or
whether the law firm flagged them. The firm, citing client confidentiality
obligations, declined to comment, as did the News Corporation.
More recently, as lawsuits and arrests mounted, dissension grew inside News
International, interviews show.
After Mr. Edmondson was fired and arrested, Ms. Brooks pressed to pay him a
monthly stipend, according to a person with knowledge of the transaction. After
an internal disagreement, the payments were moved from the newsroom budget to
News International’s. The company put other journalists on paid leave after
their arrests, reasoning that they were innocent until proved guilty, a company
spokesperson said.
By the middle of last year, News International’s lawyers and some executives
were urging that the company accept some responsibility, said two officials with
direct knowledge. Ms. Brooks disagreed, according to three people who described
the internal debate. “Her behavior all along has been resist, resist, resist,”
said one company official.
Effort to
Spread the Blame
Over the last several months, Ms. Brooks spearheaded a strategy that seemed
designed to spread the blame across Fleet Street, interviews show. Several
former News of the World journalists said that she asked them to dig up evidence
of hacking. One said in an interview that Ms. Brooks’s target was not her own
newspapers, but her rivals.
Mr. Dacre, the editor of The Daily Mail, told his senior managers that he had
received several reports from businesspeople, soccer stars and public relations
agencies that two News International executives, Will Lewis and Simon Greenberg,
had encouraged them to investigate whether their phones had been hacked by Daily
Mail newspapers.
“They thought it was unfair that all the focus was on The News of the World,”
said one News International official with knowledge of the effort. The two men
have told colleagues they did not make such calls, but two company officials
disputed that.
Mr. Dacre confronted Ms. Brooks over breakfast at the plush Brown’s hotel. “You
are trying to tear down the entire industry,” Mr. Dacre told her, according to
an account he relayed to his management team.
Ms. Brooks, known for her tenacity, was not deterred. At a dinner party, Lady
Rothermere, the wife of the billionaire owner of The Daily Mail, overheard Ms.
Brooks saying that The Mail was just as culpable as The News of the World. “We
didn’t break the law,” Lady Rothermere said, according to two sources with
knowledge of the exchange. Ms. Brooks asked who Lady Rothermere thought she was,
“Mother Teresa?”
The scandal that smoldered for years ignited this month with news reports that
the tabloid had hacked into the messages of Milly Dowler, a missing 13-year-old
girl who was subsequently discovered murdered. Ms. Brooks, who was News of the
World’s editor during the Dowler hacking, issued an apology, saying that she
would be appalled “if the accusations are true.”
In the last two weeks, a series of leaks landed in other British news media that
appeared intended to shift blame from News International’s current leadership
and onto Mr. Coulson and the Metropolitan Police. According to political aides
and News Corporation executives, the leaks most likely came from within the
company.
Leaks to The Sunday Times, the BBC, and outlets like Mr. Greenberg’s former
employer, The London Evening Standard, gave details of Mr. Coulson’s alleged
payments to the police and blamed previous News International management.
Mr. Greenberg did not respond directly to messages seeking comment. But a News
International spokeswoman referred reporters to a statement from Ms. Akers, the
head of the police investigation, praising him and Mr. Lewis for their
cooperation with the police.
The Metropolitan Police said it was “extremely concerned” that the release of
selected information “known by a small number of people” present at meetings
between News International and the police “could have a significant impact on
the corruption investigation.”
Late last week, Rupert Murdoch told The Wall Street Journal that the News
Corporation had handled the situation “extremely well in every way possible,”
except for a few “minor mistakes.”
This weekend, as Mr. Murdoch was coached to face Parliament on Tuesday by a team
of lawyers and public relations experts, a full-page advertisement from the News
Corporation appeared in every major British newspaper. “We are sorry,” it said.
Don Van Natta
Jr. contributed reporting.
Murdoch Aides Long Tried to Blunt Scandal Over Hacking,
NYT, 18.7.2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/19/world/europe/19tactics.html
Sean
Hoare knew
how
destructive the News of the World could be
The courageous whistleblower who claimed Andy Coulson
knew about phone hacking had a powerful motive for speaking out
Monday 18
July 2011
18.46 BST
Guardian.co.uk
Nick Davies
Andy Coulson
This article was published on guardian.co.uk at 18.46 BST on Monday 18 July
2011.
A version appeared on p2 of the Main section section of the Guardian
on Tuesday 19 July 2011. It was last modified at 07.18 BST on Tuesday 19 July
2011.
At a time
when the reputation of News of the World journalists is at rock bottom, it needs
to be said that the paper's former showbusiness correspondent Sean Hoare, who
died on Monday, was a lovely man.
In the saga of the phone-hacking scandal, he distinguished himself by being the
first former NoW journalist to come out on the record, telling the New York
Times last year that his former friend and editor, Andy Coulson, had actively
encouraged him to hack into voicemail.
That took courage. But he had a particularly powerful motive for speaking. He
knew how destructive the News of the World could be, not just for the targets of
its exposés, but also for the ordinary journalists who worked there, who got
caught up in its remorseless drive for headlines.
Explaining why he had spoken out, he told me: "I want to right a wrong, lift the
lid on it, the whole culture. I know, we all know, that the hacking and other
stuff is endemic. Because there is so much intimidation. In the newsroom, you
have people being fired, breaking down in tears, hitting the bottle."
He knew this very well, because he was himself a victim of the News of the
World. As a showbusiness reporter, he had lived what he was happy to call a
privileged life. But the reality had ruined his physical health: "I was paid to
go out and take drugs with rock stars – get drunk with them, take pills with
them, take cocaine with them. It was so competitive. You are going to go beyond
the call of duty. You are going to do things that no sane man would do. You're
in a machine."
While it was happening, he loved it. He came from a working-class background of
solid Arsenal supporters, always voted Labour, defined himself specifically as a
"clause IV" socialist who still believed in public ownership of the means of
production. But, working as a reporter, he suddenly found himself up to his
elbows in drugs and delirium.
He rapidly arrived at the Sun's Bizarre column, then run by Coulson. He
recalled: "There was a system on the Sun. We broke good stories. I had a good
relationship with Andy. He would let me do what I wanted as long as I brought in
a story. The brief was, 'I don't give a fuck'."
He was a born reporter. He could always find stories. And, unlike some of his
nastier tabloid colleagues, he did not play the bully with his sources. He was
naturally a warm, kind man, who could light up a lamp-post with his talk. From
Bizarre, he moved to the Sunday People, under Neil Wallis, and then to the News
of the World, where Andy Coulson had become deputy editor. And, persistently, he
did as he was told and went out on the road with rock stars, befriending them,
bingeing with them, pausing only to file his copy.
He made no secret of his massive ingestion of drugs. He told me how he used to
start the day with "a rock star's breakfast" – a line of cocaine and a Jack
Daniels – usually in the company of a journalist who now occupies a senior
position at the Sun. He reckoned he was using three grammes of cocaine a day,
spending about £1,000 a week. Plus endless alcohol. Looking back, he could see
it had done him enormous damage. But at the time, as he recalled, most of his
colleagues were doing it, too.
"Everyone got overconfident. We thought we could do coke, go to Brown's, sit in
the Red Room with Paula Yates and Michael Hutchence. Everyone got a bit carried
away."
It must have scared the rest of Fleet Street when he started talking – he had
bought, sold and snorted cocaine with some of the most powerful names in tabloid
journalism. One retains a senior position on the Daily Mirror. "I last saw him
in Little Havana," he recalled, "at three in the morning, on his hands and
knees. He had lost his cocaine wrap. I said to him, 'This is not really the
behaviour we expect of a senior journalist from a great Labour paper.' He said,
'Have you got any fucking drugs?'"
And the voicemail hacking was all part of the great game. The idea that it was a
secret, or the work of some "rogue reporter", had him rocking in his chair:
"Everyone was doing it. Everybody got a bit carried away with this power that
they had. No one came close to catching us." He would hack messages and delete
them so the competition could not hear them, or hack messages and swap them with
mates on other papers.
In the end, his body would not take it any more. He said he started to have
fits, that his liver was in such a terrible state that a doctor told him he must
be dead. And, as his health collapsed, he was sacked by the News of the World –
by his old friend Coulson.
When he spoke out about the voicemail hacking, some Conservative MPs were quick
to smear him, spreading tales of his drug use as though that meant he was
dishonest. He was genuinely offended by the lies being told by News
International and always willing to help me and other reporters who were trying
to expose the truth. He was equally offended when Scotland Yard's former
assistant commissioner, John Yates, assigned officers to interview him, not as a
witness but as a suspect. They told him anything he said could be used against
him, and, to his credit, he refused to have anything to do with them.
His health never recovered. He liked to say that he had stopped drinking, but he
would treat himself to some red wine. He liked to say he didn't smoke any more,
but he would stop for a cigarette on his way home. For better and worse, he was
a Fleet Street man.
Sean Hoare knew how destructive the News of the World
could be, G, 18.7.2011,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jul/18/sean-hoare-news-of-the-world
The
Cameron Collapse
July 18,
2011
The New York Times
By ROGER COHEN
NEW YORK —
Peter Oborne, writing in the conservative Daily Telegraph, recently suggested
that the Conservative British prime minister, David Cameron, was not merely in a
mess, he “is in a sewer.”
That seems about right. Cameron lost it over Rupert Murdoch. He showed
staggering lack of judgment in hiring Andy Coulson, the former News of the World
editor, as his first director of communications at Downing Street, a hubristic
decision made against the best advice and apparently with a dual aim: to show he
was not an old Etonian “toff” and to get favorable treatment from the 37 percent
of the British print media owned by Murdoch.
He then spent a fair chunk of time during his first year in office in 26
meetings with various News Corp. honchos, including Rebekah Brooks, who was
arrested by the British police Sunday.
Brooks happened to be part of the Chipping Norton set, well described by Oborne
as “an incestuous collection of louche, affluent, power-hungry and amoral
Londoners, located in and around the prime minister’s Oxfordshire constituency.”
When I was at Oxford University many decades ago, the surrounding countryside
was still just that — countryside and a delight. That was before the masters of
the universe starting acquiring their Cotswold gems as weekend homes and
gentrification went into overdrive, complete with helipads, of course. Brooks
and her husband live a few miles from Cameron’s constituency home. Matthew
Freud, the PR guru married to Elisabeth Murdoch, also has a weekend home in the
area.
Chipping Norton was the limestone British Camelot. Who would have dreamt it?
Cameron’s judgment is in serious question. His coalition’s earlier green light
for News Corp.’s acquisition of the 61 percent of British Sky Broadcasting that
it does not own — a deal now aborted — demands further scrutiny. It is hard to
resist the impression that Cameron was completely in the thrall of Brooks,
Murdoch and his son James Murdoch. I had thought there was more to the prime
minister than slickness.
But it is not only Cameron who is in the sewer. The culture of the United
Kingdom as a whole has been reeking pungently of late — its venal, voyeuristic,
reality-show-obsessed, me-me-me nature thrust under the magnifying glass by
revelations about what the tabloid press would do to satisfy the prurience of
its readers, hacking into phones at any price, even the phone of a 13-year-old
murdered girl.
It may be debated to what degree Murdoch created this culture, or reinforced it,
through his ruthless, no-holds-barred approach to journalism — and its ultimate
deviation into criminal activity.
Certainly he had a significant role. The police and members of Parliament were
compromised. But would Western societies, including the United States, be
betraying these same characteristics — obsession with celebrities (and
especially their sex lives); blurring of the lines between news and
entertainment; extreme self-indulgence (I am my Facebook Wall); a dearth of
political principle and a surfeit of political attraction to money — without
Murdoch?
I suspect they would.
The Murdoch story is a cautionary tale for our times that goes well beyond the
now-compromised fortunes of News Corp.
The United States, after all, has been doing its own good impression of life in
the political sewers recently. Republican ideologues with no notion of the
national interest do their brinkmanship number as the country hovers near an
unthinkable default. The only thought in their heads seems to be: How will all
this play next year in the election and how can we hurt President Obama without
being blamed for it?
Is the calculation of these Republicans that different from Cameron’s? It’s all
about the next news cycle, and spin, and ego, and where the money for political
campaigns is, and a total absence of judgment. What it’s not about is
responsibility and the commonweal.
Murdoch is a flawed genius whose very ruthlessness has now led him to his
comeuppance. He knew, more viscerally than anyone, what postmodern societies
wanted to satisfy their twisted appetites and he provided that material in all
its gaudiness. I don’t think he created those appetites. But he sure fed them.
Something deeply insidious and corrupt is at work that has been on view in both
Britain and the United States. It involves the takeover of politics by money and
spin and massaged images and privileged coteries. It is the death of
statesmanship.
Murdoch’s Fox News has played a big role. But all the major technological and
other forces in Western societies are pushing toward polarization. Google is
profiling you through your searches and directs you to the material most likely
to reinforce your worldview and ideology. Increasingly, we live in our political
comfort zone. Debate and dialogue die.
The sordid dance of Cameron and Murdoch has ended up revealing deep flaws in
British society that are also deep problems in Western societies as a whole.
Will the two men recover? Cameron is much younger and so in theory he should be
able to claw his way out of the sewer. But I’m not sure he will get over this.
Murdoch has more backbone and so a better chance, even at this late stage.
You can follow Roger Cohen on Twitter at twitter.com/nytimescohen
The Cameron Collapse, NYT, 18.7.2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/19/opinion/19iht-edcohen19.html
Timeline: Hacking scandal hits News Corp
Mon Jul 18,
2011
1:06pm EDT
Reuters
(Reuters) -
Here are the main events in the phone-hacking scandal leading to News Corp's
Chairman Rupert Murdoch withdrawing his bid for British broadcaster BSkyB and
closing the 168-year-old News of the World tabloid.
2000 - Rebekah Wade is appointed editor of Britain's best-selling Sunday
tabloid, News of the World. Aged 32 and the youngest national newspaper editor
in the country, she begins a campaign to name and shame suspected pedophiles,
leading to some alleged offenders being terrorized by angry mobs. She also
campaigns for public access to the Sex Offenders' Register, which eventually
comes into law as "Sarah's Law."
2003 - Wade becomes editor of tabloid the Sun, sister paper to the News of the
World and Britain's biggest selling daily. Andy Coulson, her deputy editor since
2000, becomes editor of the Sunday paper. Wade tells a parliamentary committee
her paper paid police for information. News International later says this is not
company practice.
November 2005 - The News of the World publishes a story on a knee injury
suffered by Prince William. Royal court officials complain about voicemail
messages being intercepted. The complaints spark a police inquiry.
January 2007 - News of the World royal affairs editor Clive Goodman and private
investigator Glenn Mulcaire admit conspiring to intercept communications,
Mulcaire also pleads guilty to five other charges of intercepting voicemail
messages. Goodman is jailed for four months, Mulcaire for six months.
-- News of the World editor Coulson resigns, saying he took "ultimate
responsibility" but knew nothing of the offences in advance.
May 2007 - Coulson becomes Conservative Party director of communications under
party leader David Cameron.
June 2009 - Rebekah Wade becomes CEO of News International, grouping Murdoch's
newspapers in Britain. She marries for a second time, becoming Rebekah Brooks.
July 2009 - The Guardian newspaper says News of the World reporters, with the
knowledge of senior staff, illegally accessed messages from the mobile phones of
celebrities and politicians while Coulson was editor from 2003 to 2007.
September 2009 - Les Hinton, chief executive of Dow Jones and former executive
chairman of News International, tells a committee of legislators any problem
with phone hacking was limited to the one case. He says they carried out a wide
review and found no new evidence.
February 2010 - The House of Commons Culture, Media and Sports Committee says in
a report that it is "inconceivable" managers did not know about the practice,
and says it was more widespread than the paper had admitted.
September 2010 - Legislators ask parliament's standards watchdog to begin a new
investigation into the hacking allegations at News of the World and its former
editor Coulson.
January 2011 - British police open a new investigation into allegations of phone
hacking at the tabloid. Police had said in July 2009 there was no need for a
probe into the allegations.
-- The News of the World announces it has sacked senior editor Ian Edmondson
after an internal inquiry.
-- Coulson resigns as Cameron's communications chief.
April 2011 - News of the World chief reporter Neville Thurlbeck and Edmondson
are arrested on suspicion of conspiring to intercept mobile phone messages. They
are released on bail. The News of the World admits it had a role in phone
hacking.
July 4 - A lawyer for the family of schoolgirl Milly Dowler, murdered in 2002,
says he learned from police that her voicemail messages had been hacked,
possibly by a News of the World investigator, while police were searching for
her. Some messages may also have been deleted to make room for more, misleading
her family into thinking she was still alive. Police later say they have also
contacted the parents of two 10-year-old girls killed in the town of Soham in
2002.
July 5 - News International says new information has been given to police. The
BBC says it related to e-mails appearing to show payments were made to police
for information and were authorized by Coulson.
-- The list of those possibly targeted includes victims of the London suicide
bombings of July 7, 2005, and the parents of Madeleine McCann, who disappeared
in Portugal in 2007.
July 6 - PM Cameron says he is "revolted" by the allegations.
-- Murdoch appoints News Corp executive Joel Klein to oversee an investigation
into the hacking allegations.
-- UK's Daily Telegraph says News of the World hacked the phones of families of
soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
July 7 - News Corp announces it will close down the News of the World. The July
10 edition was the last.
July 8 - Cameron announces two inquiries, one to be led by a judge on the
hacking scandal, another to look at new regulations for the British press.
Cameron says he takes full responsibility for employing Coulson as his
spokesman, defending his decision to give him a "second chance."
-- Coulson is arrested on suspicion of conspiring to intercept communications
and suspicion of corruption. He is bailed until October.
-- The News of the World's former royal editor, Goodman, is re-arrested in
connection with a police operation looking at alleged payments to police by
journalists at the paper.
-- Police search the offices of the Daily Star tabloid where Goodman freelanced.
The Star is not connected to News Corp.
July 10 - Rupert Murdoch arrives in London.
July 11 - Murdoch withdraws News Corp's offer to spin off BSkyB's Sky News
channel, previously made to help win approval of its bid for the 61 percent of
BSkyB it does not own. This opens the way for the government to refer the BSkyB
bid to the competition commission which will carry out a long investigation
-- Allegations surface that journalists at News Corp papers targeted former PM
Gordon Brown. Police confirm to Brown that his name was on a list of targets
compiled by Mulcaire.
July 12 - John Yates, assistant commissioner at London's Metropolitan Police,
criticized for deciding in 2009 not to reopen the earlier inquiry, tells the
Home Affairs Committee he probably did only the minimum work required before
taking his decision.
-- In the United States, John Rockefeller, chairman of the Senate's commerce
committee, calls for an investigation to determine if News Corp has broken any
U.S. laws.
July 13 - News Corp withdraws its bid for BSkyB. This pre-empts a planned vote
in parliament, that had all-party support, on a motion for the bid to be
dropped. The company statement leaves the door open to a new offer at some
point.
-- Tom Crone, legal manager at News International, leaves the company, a source
familiar with the situation says.
-- Cameron gives details of a formal public inquiry into the affair, to be
chaired by senior judge Brian Leveson.
-- News Corp's Australian arm launches investigation to see if any wrongdoing
took place at its editorial operations.
July 14 - Rupert Murdoch eventually accepts request by parliament to answer
questions on July 19 over the alleged crimes at the News of the World. His son
James Murdoch also says he will appear. Rebekah Brooks agrees to appear, but
says the police inquiry may restrict what she can say.
-- The FBI says it will investigate allegations News Corp hacked into phone
records of victims of September 11 attacks.
-- Rupert Murdoch tells the Wall Street Journal, part of his empire, that News
Corp handled the crisis "extremely well in every way possible," making only
"minor mistakes." Says his son James acted "as fast as he could, the moment he
could."
July 15 - Brooks resigns as chief executive of News International. Tom
Mockridge, CEO of the company's Italian pay TV arm Sky Italia, will replace her.
-- Les Hinton resigns as chief executive of Murdoch's Dow Jones & Co., which
publishes the Wall Street Journal.
July 16/17 - A direct apology from Rupert Murdoch is carried in all UK national
newspapers under the headline "We are sorry."
July 17 - Detectives arrest Brooks on suspicion of intercepting communications
and corruption. She is released on bail at midnight after about 12 hours in
police custody.
-- Paul Stephenson, London's police commissioner, resigns after coming under
fire over the appointment of Neil Wallis as public relations adviser to the
force. Wallis, a former News of the World deputy editor, was arrested on July
14.
July 18 - Cameron, on a shortened visit to Africa, defends his handling of the
hacking scandal and says parliament will delay its summer recess to let him
address lawmakers on July 20.
-- Yates resigns over his role in phone hacking probe.
July 19 - Rupert and James Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks will appear before
parliament's Culture, Media and Sports committee.
Timeline: Hacking scandal hits News Corp, R, 18.7.2011,
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/07/18/us-newscorp-hacking-events-idUSTRE76H4DB20110718
Troubles
That Money Can’t Dispel
July 17,
2011
The New York Times
By DAVID CARR
“Bury your
mistakes,” Rupert Murdoch is fond of saying. But some mistakes don’t stay
buried, no matter how much money you throw at them.
Time and again in the United States and elsewhere, Mr. Murdoch’s News
Corporation has used blunt force spending to skate past judgment, agreeing to
payments to settle legal cases and, undoubtedly more important, silence its
critics. In the case of News America Marketing, its obscure but profitable
in-store and newspaper insert marketing business, the News Corporation has paid
out about $655 million to make embarrassing charges of corporate espionage and
anticompetitive behavior go away.
That kind of strategy provides a useful window into the larger corporate culture
at a company that is now engulfed by a wildfire burning out of control in
London, sparked by the hacking of a murdered young girl’s phone and fed by a
steady stream of revelations about seedy, unethical and sometimes criminal
behavior at the company’s newspapers.
So far, 10 people have been arrested, including, on Sunday, Rebekah Brooks, the
head of News International. Les Hinton, who ran News International before her
and most recently was the head of Dow Jones, resigned on Friday. Now we are left
to wonder whether Mr. Murdoch will be forced to make an Abraham-like sacrifice
and abandon his son James, the former heir apparent.
The News Corporation may be hoping that it can get back to business now that
some of the responsible parties have been held to account — and that people will
see the incident as an aberrant byproduct of the world of British tabloids. But
that seems like a stretch. The damage is likely to continue to mount, perhaps
because the underlying pathology is hardly restricted to those who have taken
the fall.
As Mark Lewis, the lawyer for the family of the murdered girl, Milly Dowler,
said after Ms. Brooks resigned, “This is not just about one individual but about
the culture of an organization.”
Well put. That organization has used strategic acumen to assemble a vast and
lucrative string of media properties, but there is also a long history of
rounded-off corners. It has skated on regulatory issues, treated an editorial
oversight committee as if it were a potted plant (at The Wall Street Journal),
and made common cause with restrictive governments (China) and suspect
businesses — all in the relentless pursuit of More. In the process, Mr. Murdoch
has always been frank in his impatience with the rules of others.
According to The Guardian, whose bulldog reporting pulled back the curtain on
the phone-hacking scandal, the News Corporation paid out $1.6 million in 2009 to
settle claims related to the scandal. While expedient, and inexpensive — the
company still has gobs of money on hand — it was probably not a good strategy in
the long run. If some of those cases had gone to trial, it would have had the
effect of lancing the wound.
Litigation can have an annealing effect on companies, forcing them to re-examine
the way they do business. But as it was, the full extent and villainy of the
hacking was never known because the News Corporation paid serious money to make
sure it stayed that way.
And the money the company reportedly paid out to hacking victims is chicken feed
compared with what it has spent trying to paper over the tactics of News America
in a series of lawsuits filed by smaller competitors in the United States.
In 2006 the state of Minnesota accused News America of engaging in unfair trade
practices, and the company settled by agreeing to pay costs and not to falsely
disparage its competitors.
In 2009, a federal case in New Jersey brought by a company called Floorgraphics
went to trial, accusing News America of, wait for it, hacking its way into
Floorgraphics’s password protected computer system.
The complaint summed up the ethos of News America nicely, saying it had
“illegally accessed plaintiff’s computer system and obtained proprietary
information” and “disseminated false, misleading and malicious information about
the plaintiff.”
The complaint stated that the breach was traced to an I.P. address registered to
News America and that after the break-in, Floorgraphics lost contracts from
Safeway, Winn-Dixie and Piggly Wiggly.
Much of the lawsuit was based on the testimony of Robert Emmel, a former News
America executive who had become a whistle-blower. After a few days of
testimony, the News Corporation had heard enough. It settled with Floorgraphics
for $29.5 million and then, days later, bought it, even though it reportedly had
sales of less than $1 million.
But the problems continued, and keeping a lid on News America turned out to be a
busy and expensive exercise. At the beginning of this year, it paid out $125
million to Insignia Systems to settle allegations of anticompetitive behavior
and violations of antitrust laws. And in the most costly payout, it spent half a
billion dollars in 2010 on another settlement, just days before the case was
scheduled to go to trial. The plaintiff, Valassis Communications, had already
won a $300 million verdict in Michigan, but dropped the lawsuit in exchange for
$500 million and an agreement to cooperate on certain ventures going forward.
The News Corporation is a very large, well-capitalized company, but that single
payout to Valassis represented one-fifth of the company’s net income in 2010 and
matched the earnings of the entire newspaper and information division that News
America was a part of.
Because consumers (and journalists) don’t much care who owns the coupon machine
in the snack aisle, the cases have not received much attention. But that doesn’t
mean that they aren’t a useful window into the broader culture at the News
Corporation.
News America was led by Paul V. Carlucci, who, according to Forbes, used to show
the sales staff the scene in “The Untouchables” in which Al Capone beats a man
to death with a baseball bat. Mr. Emmel testified that Mr. Carlucci was clear
about the guiding corporate philosophy.
According to Mr. Emmel’s testimony, Mr. Carlucci said that if there were
employees uncomfortable with the company’s philosophy — “bed-wetting liberals in
particular was the description he used” Mr. Emmel testified — then he could
arrange to have those employees “outplaced from the company.”
Clearly, given the size of the payouts, along with the evidence and testimony in
the lawsuits, the News Corporation must have known it had another rogue on its
hands, one who needed to be dealt with. After all, Mr. Carlucci, who became
chairman and chief executive of News America in 1997, had overseen a division
that had drawn the scrutiny of government investigators and set off lawsuits
that chipped away at the bottom line.
And while Mr. Murdoch might reasonably maintain that he did not have knowledge
of the culture of permission created by Mr. Hinton and Ms. Brooks, by now he has
655 million reasons to know that Mr. Carlucci colored outside the lines.
So what became of him? Mr. Carlucci, as it happens, became the publisher of The
New York Post in 2005 and continues to serve as head of News America, which
doesn’t exactly square with Mr. Murdoch’s recently stated desire to “absolutely
establish our integrity in the eyes of the public.”
A representative for the News Corporation did not respond to a request for
comment.
Even as the flames of the scandal begin to edge closer to Mr. Murdoch’s door,
anybody betting against his business survival will most likely come away
disappointed. He has been in deep trouble before and not only survived, but
prospered. The News Corporation’s reputation may be under water, but the company
itself is very liquid, with $11.8 billion in cash on hand and more than $2.5
billion of annual free cash flow.
Still, money will fix a lot of things, but not everything. When you throw money
onto a burning fire, it becomes fuel and nothing more.
Troubles That Money Can’t Dispel, NYT, 17.7.2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/18/business/media/for-news-corporation-troubles-that-money-cant-dispel.html
An
Arrest and Scotland Yard Resignation Roil Britain
July 17,
2011
The New York Times
By SARAH LYALL and DON VAN NATTA Jr.
LONDON —
Britain’s top police official resigned on Sunday, the latest casualty of the
phone-hacking scandal engulfing British public life, just hours after Rebekah
Brooks, the former chief executive of Rupert Murdoch’s News International, was
arrested on suspicion of illegally intercepting phone calls and bribing the
police.
The official, Sir Paul Stephenson, commissioner of the Metropolitan Police
Service, commonly known as the Met or Scotland Yard, said that he had decided to
step down because “the ongoing speculation and accusations relating to the Met’s
links with News International at a senior level” had made it difficult for him
to do his job.
But he said that he had done nothing wrong and that he would not “lose sleep
over my personal integrity.” He also said that because he had not been involved
in the original phone-hacking investigation, he had had no idea that Neil
Wallis, a former News of the World deputy editor who had become a
public-relations consultant for the police after leaving the paper, was himself
suspected of phone hacking.
Mr. Wallis, 60, was arrested last Thursday.
The commissioner’s resignation came as the London political establishment was
still digesting the stunning news about the arrest of Ms. Brooks — who
apparently was surprised herself. A consummate networker who has always been
assiduously courted by politicians and whose friends include Prime Minister
David Cameron, Ms. Brooks, 43, is the 10th and by far the most powerful person
to be arrested so far in the phone-hacking scandal.
Her arrest is bound to be particularly wounding to Mr. Murdoch, who, asked early
last week to identify his chief priority in the affair, pointed to Ms. Brooks
and said, “This one.”
Ms. Brooks has not yet been formally charged, but it is significant that she is
being questioned in connection with two separate investigations. One, called
Operation Weeting, is examining allegations of widespread phone hacking at the
News of the World, the tabloid at the center of the scandal, where Ms. Brooks
was editor from 2000 to 2003. The other is Operation Elveden, which is looking
into more serious charges that News International editors paid police officers
for information.
Ms. Brooks has always maintained that she was unaware of wrongdoing at The News
of the World, which was summarily closed by Mr. Murdoch a week ago in an
unsuccessful damage-control exercise. But the tide rose against her, and on
Friday she resigned, saying in a statement that her presence was “detracting
attention” from the company.
The arrest was a shock to the News Corporation, the parent company of News
International, and the other properties in Mr. Murdoch’s media empire, which is
reeling from the traumas of last week: the forced withdrawal of its cherished
$12 billion takeover bid for British Sky Broadcasting and the resignations not
only of Ms. Brooks but also of Les Hinton, a longtime Murdoch ally and friend
who was the chairman of Dow Jones and the publisher of The Wall Street Journal.
Speaking of Ms. Brooks, an official at News International said: “When she
resigned on Friday, we were not aware that she would be arrested by the police.”
Another person briefed on the News Corporation’s plans said that on Friday, when
the company was preparing to announce her exit and the departure in New York of
Mr. Hinton, the possibility of her arrest was not discussed.
Investor unease about the scandal appeared to be affecting News Corporation
shares, which were down nearly 6 percent in early Monday trading on the
Australian exchange in Sydney.
Until Ms. Brooks arrived at a London police station by prearranged appointment
on Sunday, she believed she would merely be helping the police as a witness, her
spokesman said.
“She was very surprised, I think, to then be arrested,” said the spokesman,
David Wilson, chairman of the Bell Pottinger public relations firm. Mr. Wilson
said it all happened so quickly that both her lawyer and he were brought in to
handle her case over the weekend.
Ms. Brooks was arrested “under caution,” he said, meaning that she was read her
rights and treated as a suspect. “She maintains her innocence, absolutely,” he
said. She was released on bail after about 12 hours in police custody, news
services reported.For months, Ms. Brooks had been willing to talk to the police
but had been rebuffed, Mr. Wilson said. “As recently as last week, she was told
she wasn’t required to do so and she wasn’t on their radar.”
No formal charges have yet been brought against Ms. Brooks, or indeed against
any of the others — mostly former editors and reporters at The News of the World
— arrested in the phone-hacking case so far. These include Andy Coulson, who
resigned as the paper’s editor in in 2007, was then hired by the Conservative
Party, and most recently worked as the chief spokesman for Mr. Cameron’s
government. Under British law, suspects can be detained 24 to 36 hours without
being charged.
Sir Paul, who took over the top police job in 2009, stepped down in large part
because of a furor over his contacts with News International officials. The New
York Times reported over the weekend that he met for meals 18 times with News
International executives and editors during the phone-hacking investigation, and
that other top other police officials had had similar meetings.
These included meeting Mr. Wallis eight times while he was still working at The
News of the World. Both Theresa May, the home secretary, and Boris Johnson, the
London mayor, said they were angry that he had not disclosed these meetings
earlier.
In his statement, Sir Paul explained that he had withheld information about his
contacts with Mr. Wallis, even after Mr. Wallis became a phone-hacking suspect,
because he “did not want to compromise the prime minister in any way by
revealing or discussing a potential suspect who clearly had a close relationship
with Mr. Coulson” — Mr. Cameron’s friend and former employee.
“Unlike Mr. Coulson, Mr. Wallis had not resigned from News of the World or, to
the best of my knowledge, been in any way associated with the original
phone-hacking investigation,” Sir Paul said, in what appeared to be a criticism
of the prime minister.
Mr. Cameron is in the awkward position of counting two of the arrested parties —
Mr. Coulson and Ms. Brooks — as personal friends. As leader of the opposition,
he attended Ms. Brooks’s wedding in 2009 (Rupert Murdoch and Gordon Brown, then
the prime minister, of the Labour Party, were also guests).
Mr. Cameron was friendly enough with Ms. Brooks to socialize with her twice in
December, according to records released by Downing Street last Friday. Once was
at a cozy family dinner at her country house over the Christmas holiday; James
Murdoch, Mr. Murdoch’s son and the head of News Corporation’s European and Asian
divisions, was also present.
The meetings took place while Mr. Cameron’s government was considering,
favorably, the News Corporation’s bid to take over the part of BskyB that it did
not already own.
Oddly enough, both Sir Paul and Ms. Brooks were due to give testimony on Tuesday
to different Parliamentary committees looking into phone hacking. Keith Vaz, the
chairman of the home affairs committee, where Sir Paul was due to be questioned,
said that there was no reason the session should not still proceed.
But Ms. Brooks’s appearance, at the committee on culture, media and sport, is
now in doubt. Before her arrest, she had warned that because of the
investigation, she might be limited in what she could say. Now, it is unclear
whether she will come at all.
Although they will still get to question her former bosses, Rupert and James
Murdoch, committee members seem disappointed at the prospect of losing Ms.
Brooks. Some even said that they wondered if the timing of the arrest was
intended to ensure that she was unavailable to answer their questions.
“Being of a suspicious mind, I do find it odd that they should arrest her now by
appointment,” said Chris Bryant, a Labour member of the committee, who suspects
his phone was hacked by The News of the World. He said the arrest brings the
scandal closer to the top.
“The water is now lapping around the ankles of the Murdoch family,” he said.
Jo Becker and
Ravi Somaiya contributed reporting from London,
and Jeremy W. Peters from New York.
An Arrest and Scotland Yard Resignation Roil Britain, NYT,
17.7.2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/18/world/europe/18hacking.html
Stain
From Tabloids Rubs Off on a Cozy Scotland Yard
July 16,
2011
The New York Times
By DON VAN NATTA Jr.
LONDON —
For nearly four years they lay piled in a Scotland Yard evidence room, six
overstuffed plastic bags gathering dust and little else.
Inside was a treasure-trove of evidence: 11,000 pages of handwritten notes
listing nearly 4,000 celebrities, politicians, sports stars, police officials
and crime victims whose phones may have been hacked by The News of the World, a
now defunct British tabloid newspaper.
Yet from August 2006, when the items were seized, until the autumn of 2010, no
one at the Metropolitan Police Service, commonly referred to as Scotland Yard,
bothered to sort through all the material and catalog every page, said former
and current senior police officials.
During that same time, senior Scotland Yard officials assured Parliament,
judges, lawyers, potential hacking victims, the news media and the public that
there was no evidence of widespread hacking by the tabloid. They steadfastly
maintained that their original inquiry, which led to the conviction of one
reporter and one private investigator, had put an end to what they called an
isolated incident.
After the past week, that assertion has been reduced to tatters, torn apart by a
spectacular avalanche of contradictory evidence, admissions by News
International executives that hacking was more widespread, and a reversal by
police officials who now admit to mishandling the case.
Assistant Commissioner John Yates of the Metropolitan Police Service publicly
acknowledged that he had not actually gone through the evidence. “I’m not going
to go down and look at bin bags,” Mr. Yates said, using the British term for
trash bags.
At best, former Scotland Yard senior officers acknowledged in interviews, the
police have been lazy, incompetent and too cozy with the people they should have
regarded as suspects. At worst, they said, some officers might be guilty of
crimes themselves.
“It’s embarrassing, and it’s tragic,” said a retired Scotland Yard veteran.
“This has badly damaged the reputation of a really good investigative
organization. And there is a major crisis now in the leadership of the Yard.”
The testimony and evidence that emerged last week, as well as interviews with
current and former officials, indicate that the police agency and News
International, the British subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation and
the publisher of The News of the World, became so intertwined that they wound up
sharing the goal of containing the investigation.
Members of Parliament said in interviews that they were troubled by a “revolving
door” between the police and News International, which included a former top
editor at The News of the World at the time of the hacking who went on to work
as a media strategist for Scotland Yard.
On Friday, The New York Times learned that the former editor, Neil Wallis, was
reporting back to News International while he was working for the police on the
hacking case.
Executives and others at the company also enjoyed close social ties to Scotland
Yard’s top officials. Since the hacking scandal began in 2006, Mr. Yates and
others regularly dined with editors from News International papers, records
show. Sir Paul Stephenson, the police commissioner, met for meals 18 times with
company executives and editors during the investigation, including on eight
occasions with Mr. Wallis while he was still working at The News of the World.
Senior police officials declined several requests to be interviewed for this
article.
The police have continually asserted that the original investigation was limited
because the counterterrorism unit, which was in charge of the case, was
preoccupied with more pressing demands. At the parliamentary committee hearing
last week, the three officials said they were working on 70 terrorist
investigations.
Yet the Metropolitan Police unit that deals with special crimes, and which had
more resources and time available, could have taken over the case, said four
former senior investigators. One said it was “utter nonsense” to argue that the
department did not have enough resources.
Another senior investigator said officials saw the inquiry as being in “safe
hands” at the counterterrorism unit.
Interviews with current and former officials show that instead of examining all
the evidence, investigators primarily limited their inquiry to 36 names that the
private investigator, Glenn Mulcaire, mentioned in one list.
As a result, Scotland Yard notified only a small number of the people whose
phones were hacked by The News of the World. Other people who suspected foul
play had to approach the police to see if their names were in Mr. Mulcaire’s
files.
“It’s one thing to decide not to investigate,” said Jeremy Reed, one of the
lawyers who represents numerous phone-hacking victims. “But it’s quite another
thing not to tell the victims. That’s just mind-blowing.”
Among the possible victims was former Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who asked the
police last year to look into suspicions that his phones were hacked. In
response, Scotland Yard sent him a form letter saying it was unclear whether the
tabloid had eavesdropped on his conversations, people with knowledge of the
request said.
The police assigned a new team to the hacking allegations in September after The
New York Times published a magazine article that showed that the practice was
far more widespread and which raised questions about Scotland Yard’s handling of
the case.
Shortly after, the police finally reopened those “bin bags.” Now, the police are
enduring the painstaking and humiliating exercise of notifying nearly 4,000
angry people listed in the documents that they may have been targets of what now
appears to be industrial-strength hacking by The News of the World. The chore is
likely to take years.
A Series of
Inquiries
Scotland Yard’s new inquiry, dubbed Operation Weeting, has led to the arrests of
a total of nine reporters and editors, with more expected. And the police have
opened another inquiry into allegations that some officers were paid for
confidential information by reporters at The News of the World and elsewhere.
The Metropolitan Police itself is now the subject of a judicial inquiry into
what went wrong with their initial case, as well as into the ties between the
department’s top officers and executives and reporters for News International.
At a parliamentary committee hearing last week, three current and former
officials who ran the case were openly mocked. One member of Parliament dubbed
an investigator “more Clouseau than Colombo.”
At the hearing, the senior investigator in charge of the day-to-day inquiry,
Peter Clarke, blamed The News of the World’s “complete lack of cooperation” for
the shortcomings in the department’s initial investigation.
While editors were not sharing any information, they were frequently breaking
bread with police officers. Andy Hayman, who as chief of the counterterrorism
unit was running the investigation, also attended four dinners, lunches and
receptions with News of the World editors, including a dinner on April 25, 2006,
while his officers were gathering evidence in the case, records show. He told
Parliament he never discussed the investigation with editors.
Mr. Hayman left the Metropolitan Police in December 2007 and was soon hired to
write a column for The Times of London, a News International paper. He defended
the inquiry that he led, writing in his column in July 2009 that his detectives
had “left no stone unturned.”
Three months later, Mr. Wallis, the former deputy editor of The News of the
World, was hired by Scotland Yard to provide strategic media advice on
phone-hacking matters to the police commissioner, among others. Scotland Yard
confirmed last week that the commissioner, Sir Paul, had personally approved
nearly $40,000 in payments to Mr. Wallis for his work.
But when Mr. Wallis was interviewed in April by a New York Times reporter
working on a story about the hacking, he did not disclose his new media role at
Scotland Yard. In the interview, Mr. Wallis defended both the newspaper and the
vigor of Scotland Yard’s initial investigation.
A person familiar with the hacking investigation said on Friday that Mr. Wallis
had also informed Rebekah Brooks about The New York Times’s reporting. Ms.
Brooks, who resigned on Friday as chief executive officer of News International,
has maintained that she was unaware of the hacking.
A News International spokeswoman said the company was reviewing whether it had
paid Mr. Wallis at the same time.
It is unclear whether Scotland Yard knew about Mr. Wallis’s activities. While
The New York Times was working on its article last year, Scotland Yard was
refusing to answer most of the detailed questions that The Times submitted to it
in a freedom of information request.
It was not until Thursday night that Scotland Yard revealed that Mr. Wallis had
worked for it for a year. That revelation came about 10 hours after he was
arrested at his west London home in connection with the phone hacking.
“This is stunning,” a senior Scotland Yard official who retired within the past
few years said when informed about Mr. Wallis’s secret dual role. “It appears to
be collusion. It has left a terrible odor around the Yard.”
Sky News raised further questions about a possible link between Sir Paul and Mr.
Wallis on Saturday night. Just after Christmas last year Sir Paul recovered from
surgery at a Champneys Spa in Hertfordshire, and his $19,000 bill was paid by a
friend, the spa’s managing partner, Sky News reported. Sir Paul learned Saturday
that Mr. Wallis had worked as a public-relations consultant for the spa, a
police spokesperson said, adding that “Commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson is not
considering his position.” Mr. Stephenson had declared the stay on a gifts list,
Sky reported.
A lawyer for Mr. Wallis said there was no connection between Sir Paul’s stay at
the spa and Mr. Wallis. Mr. Wallis did not return calls seeking comment.
He had worked as second in command at the tabloid under Andy Coulson, who left
the paper in 2007 after the private investigator and the reporter were found
guilty of hacking into the phones of members of the royal family and their
staff.
Shortly after, Mr. Coulson was hired by the Conservative Party to lead its
communications team. Last year, when David Cameron became prime minister, he
brought Mr. Coulson to 10 Downing Street. But Mr. Coulson could never escape the
hacking controversy. Once Scotland Yard decided to reopen the case, he resigned
and was arrested on July 8.
It was not until last autumn that the police were forced to confront their own
mistakes. By then, they were facing an escalating stream of requests by people
who suspected that their phones might have been hacked. Two dozen people had
also brought civil cases against News International, and that compelled the
police to release information from Mr. Mulcaire’s files.
The documents were seized on Aug. 8, 2006, from Mr. Mulcaire’s home in Cheam,
south of London. Mr. Mulcaire, a 40-year-old former soccer player whose nickname
was “the Trigger,” was nothing if not a meticulous note-keeper. On each page of
the 11,000 documents, in the upper-left-hand corner, he wrote the name of the
reporter or editor whom he was helping to hack phones.
Also seized from his home was “a target list” of the names of a total of eight
members of the royal family and their staff, and 28 others, which Scotland
Yard’s investigators used as their first road map of Mr. Mulcaire’s activities.
‘A Mutual
Trust’
From the beginning, Scotland Yard investigators treated The News of the World
with deference, searching a single desk in its newsroom and counting on the
staff’s future cooperation. “A mutual trust” is how one police investigator
described the relationship.
Leaders of the Metropolitan Police decided not to pursue a wide-ranging “cleanup
of the British media,” as one senior investigator put it. Mr. Hayman, the
investigator in charge, said in testimony before Parliament last Tuesday that
the inquiry was viewed as “not a big deal” at the time.
The police charged only Mr. Mulcaire and the royal affairs reporter, Clive
Goodman. When the case was done, the evidence went into plastic bags in a
storage locker, several officials said. It was occasionally reviewed, but a
complete accounting would not be done until late 2010.
On July 9, 2009, Mr. Yates, the assistant commissioner, said, “It is important
to recognize that our inquires showed that in the vast majority of cases there
was insufficient evidence to show that tapping had actually been achieved.”
And then last year, he told two parliamentary committees that a full accounting
of all the evidence had been done.
Mr. Yates said investigators presumed that the material in the files was for
legitimate purposes since it was the job of both Mr. Mulcaire and Mr. Goodman
“to gather personal data about high-profile figures.”
Yet on numerous occasions Mr. Yates assured the public that all those affected
had been notified.
He said the police had “taken all proper steps to ensure that where we have
evidence that people have been the subject of any form of phone tapping, or that
there is any suspicion that they might have been, that they have been informed.”
The parliamentary committees declined to pursue the matter.
In the fall of 2006, Sir Ian Blair, then the police commissioner, had the option
of assigning the case to the Specialist Crime Directorate, the division that
handles homicides, robberies and the like. It had 3,500 detectives at its
disposal and could have reviewed every document, several former officials said.
The man leading the unit, Tarique Ghaffur, was known among his colleagues for
refusing to toe the line. Mr. Ghaffur had led an internal inquiry into the
police harassment of a prominent black activist and concluded that the man had
been the victim of “unreasonable targeting by police officers.”
It was not until July 2009, three years after the evidence was seized, that Mr.
Yates ordered some of the names in Mr. Mulcaire’s files to be put into a
database, former officials said. But it fell far short of a complete accounting,
they said.
In one instance, the police thwarted a deeper look at their handling of the
evidence.
Last autumn, four people, including John Prescott, the former deputy prime
minister, and Brian Paddick, a former senior police official, sought a judicial
review to determine why Scotland Yard had not notified all the hacking victims.
In response, lawyers for the police claimed that none of the four plaintiffs’
phones had been accessed.
Last February, a judge ruled against going forward with an inquiry. Within days,
several plaintiffs received word from the police that their phones might have
been hacked.
“The court was misled,” said Tamsin Allen, who represents four people who claim
their phones were hacked. “It was pretty outrageous.”
A judge recently decided to open a new review of why Scotland Yard did not
notify everyone in Mr. Mulcaire’s files.
“I still don’t think we know the extent of what the police did and did not do
because we are only about halfway down into the murky pond,” said Chris Bryant,
a Labour member of Parliament who is one of the four plaintiffs who applied for
the judicial review.
A Toxic
Atmosphere
Current and former officials said that shortly after Scotland Yard began looking
into the hacking, five senior police investigators discovered that their own
phones might have been broken into by The News of the World.
At last week’s hearing in Parliament, Mr. Hayman, one of the five, denied
knowing if his phone had been hacked.
So far, only 170 phone-hacking victims have been notified.
A second police operation is now trying to determine how many officers were paid
for information from journalists working at The News of the World and elsewhere.
One of the challenges, a senior officer said, was that the journalists’ records
contained pseudonyms instead of the officers’ names. There is suspicion that
some pseudonyms were made up by reporters to pocket cash from their editors, the
officer said.
The atmosphere at Scotland Yard has become toxic. “Everyone is rowing for the
shore,” said a former senior Scotland Yard official. “Everyone is distancing
themselves from this mess.”
Sue Akers, a deputy assistant commissioner who is leading both police inquiries,
said the department faced a deep challenge to repair its reputation.
“I think it is everybody’s analysis that confidence has been damaged,” Ms. Akers
told Parliament last week. “But I am confident that we have got an excellent
team who are working tirelessly to get this right.”
She added: “I hope that I do not have to come back here in five years’ time to
explain why we failed.”
Jo Becker
contributed reporting.
Stain From Tabloids Rubs Off on a Cozy Scotland Yard, NYT,
16.7.2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/17/world/europe/17police.html
A Day of
Apologies for the Murdochs,
and of
New Questions for Cameron
July 16,
2011
The New York Times
By JOHN F. BURNS
LONDON — As
Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper empire on Saturday published full-page ads in every
national newspaper in Britain under the words “We are sorry,” the government of
Prime Minister David Cameron released information documenting the prime
minister’s close ties to Murdoch company executives that continued even as the
phone-hacking scandal grew.
The apology by Mr. Murdoch’s News Corporation was a U-turn from his previously
defiant handling of the crisis. The banner headline in Saturday’s editions of
The Times of London read “Day of Atonement,” and it was all the more striking
for the fact that it ran in the 226-year-old newspaper that is the flagship of
the print empire that Mr. Murdoch has assembled in Britain over the past 40
years.
At the end of a week that rocked the interwoven worlds of the press, politicians
and the police in Britain, and spread across the Atlantic with the opening of an
F.B.I. investigation into allegations of associated abuses in the United States,
penitence was the buzzword far beyond the London headquarters of Mr. Murdoch’s
British-based newspaper subsidiary, News International.
The crisis seemed far from over for Mr. Murdoch, as the scandal that began over
illegal phone hacking by one of his newspapers, The News of the World, now
defunct, widened to include a second newspaper in his stable, The Sunday Times,
officials said Saturday.
Nor was the crisis abating for Mr. Cameron. As presses rolled Friday night with
the Murdoch bid for redemption in the “sorry” ad, and with front-page stories
telling of his face-to-face, head-hanging apology to the parents of a murdered
girl whose cellphone voice mails were hacked, Mr. Cameron’s aides released a
diary of his meetings with executives and editors of News International.
The diary shed light on what Mr. Cameron acknowledged last week was the “cozy
and comfortable” world in which politicians, the press and the police in Britain
have functioned for decades, one he said had to yield to much greater public
scrutiny. The diary showed that since taking office in May 2010, Mr. Cameron has
met 26 times with Murdoch executives, including Mr. Murdoch; his son James, the
top official of News International; and Rebekah Brooks, the former chief
executive of the British subsidiary and editor of The News of the World, who
resigned on Friday.
Her resignation was quickly followed by that of Les Hinton, the News Corporation
executive and former chief of News International who had been publisher of The
Wall Street Journal, another Murdoch property, since 2007. All four executives
are expected to testify before a parliamentary oversight committee on Tuesday.
Most of the meetings cited in the diary took place at the prime minister’s
London headquarters at 10 Downing Street, or at Chequers, his official country
residence northwest of London. His meetings with the Murdoch officials exceeded
all those with other British media representatives put together. Ms. Brooks was
the only person on the guest list for Chequers who had been invited there twice.
Another guest was Andy Coulson, the former News of the World editor who resigned
as Mr. Cameron’s Downing Street media chief under the pressure of the
phone-hacking scandal in January. That visit occurred in March, two months after
he resigned.
Downing Street officials noted that Ms. Brooks and her husband have a country
home near Chequers. As for Mr. Coulson, they said, he and his family had been
invited for an overnight stay to thank him for his work for the government and
the Conservative Party, where he held a similar post before the election.
The list did nothing to assuage the questions about Mr. Cameron’s judgment in
maintaining close ties with executives of a media enterprise that has been under
a faltering police investigation for years and has come under intense scrutiny.
The ties to Mr. Coulson, in particular, have been assailed by the Labour
opposition leader, Ed Miliband, but have also spread dismay among Mr. Cameron’s
Conservatives.
Foreign Minister William Hague defended those ties on Saturday, telling the BBC
that inviting Mr. Coulson to Chequers was “a normal, human thing to do” and that
it was “not surprising that in a democratic country there is some contact”
between political leaders and media officials. “Personally I’m not embarrassed
by it in any way,” he said.
Mr. Cameron hired Mr. Coulson in 2007, shortly after he resigned at The News of
the World and against the strong urging of some other Conservatives. His defense
has been that Mr. Coulson deserved “a second chance,” and he has said that if
Mr. Coulson’s assurances of guiltlessness in the phone-hacking scandal prove to
have been false, he should be prosecuted.
While the police investigation has largely centered on cellphone hacking by
journalists at The News of the World, it has now spread to the investigative
unit of The Sunday Times, a person familiar with internal News Corporation
discussions said. That person, as well as a person with knowledge of the scope
of the inquiry, said the investigation would expand to include hacking into
e-mail accounts and other online privacy invasions.
One target of the investigation is Jonathan Rees, a private detective employed
by The News of the World with ties to corrupt police officers and a criminal
record. Tom Watson, a Labour member of Parliament who has been briefed on the
inquiry, said the police had evidence that Mr. Rees was paid by News
International and that he had claimed to have met with members of The Sunday
Times investigation unit.
Jo Becker
contributed reporting.
A Day of Apologies for the Murdochs, and of New Questions
for Cameron, NYT, 16.7.2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/17/world/europe/17britain.html
Rupert
Murdoch's bloody Friday
as
Rebekah Brooks and Les Hinton quit
Scandal claims first US News Corp casualty,
while former News of the World editor also resigns
Saturday 16 July 2011
The Guardian,
Jane Martinson and Nicholas Watt
This article appeared on p1 of the Main section section of the Guardian
on Saturday 16 July 2011. It was published on guardian.co.uk at 00.41 BST
on Saturday 16 July 2011. It was last modified at 01.28 BST on Saturday 16 July
2011. It was first published at 20.08 BST on Friday 15 July 2011.
Les Hinton,
the chief executive of Dow Jones and Rupert Murdoch's right-hand man, resigned
from News Corp on Friday night, a statement from the company said.
Hinton, who led Murdoch's News International when the phone-hacking allegations
first arose, quit hours after Rebekah Brooks, News International's chief
executive, also resigned.
Their departures came on the day the phone-hacking scandal engulfing Murdoch's
empire led him to issue a widespread, abject apology for what he described as
"serious wrongdoing".
Less than 24 hours after insisting the company had made only "minor mistakes" in
handling the crisis, a contrite Murdoch arranged a private meeting with the
family of Milly Dowler and issued a full-page apology in every national
newspaper for his company's behaviour.
The dramatic turn of events came 10 days after the Guardian revealed that
private investigators working for the News of the World had hacked into the
phone of the murdered girl during a police investigation into her disappearance.
The subsequent outrage and evidence of further wrongdoing led to the closure of
the 168-year-old Sunday tabloid, the scrapping of the News Corp bid for BSkyB
and the arrest of former NoW employees.
In his resignation statement Hinton said he had watched "with sorrow from New
York as the News of the World saga has unfolded". He added "In September 2009, I
told the [parliamentary] committee there had never been any evidence delivered
to me that suggested the conduct had spread beyond one journalist.
"If others had evidence that wrongdoing went further, I was not told about it."
In a separate development, No 10 admitted that David Cameron hosted Andy Coulson
at Chequers in March, two months after his resignation as the Downing Street
director of communications. Labour accused the prime minister of an
"extraordinary lack of judgment" in extending an invitation to Coulson, who was
arrested last week. The former NoW editor denies any knowledge of phone hacking.
The fallout from the scandal is placing intense pressure on Sir Paul Stephenson,
the Met police commissioner. Cameron is said to be furious that Stephenson did
not tell him he had hired Neil Wallis, the former NoW deputy editor arrested
this week, to advise him on media relations. Stephenson has been asked to
explain himself to Theresa May, the home secretary.
It was unclear what had prompted the Murdochs to accept the resignation of
Brooks, after steadfastly standing by her in the face of calls for her to go
from the leaders of all the main political parties, including the prime
minister.
It is understood, however, that the decision was not made overnight. Her
departure was planned with military precision during a series of family summits
and transatlantic phone calls with shareholders over the last few days. The
resignation comes just four days before she is due to appear before parliament
alongside Rupert and James Murdoch, chairman of News International, to answer
questions about the scandal.
In her resignation statement, Brooks said : "The reputation of the company we
love so much, as well as the press freedoms we value so highly, are all at
risk."
Hours after that statement, Rupert Murdoch met the parents and sister of Dowler
in London. "He was very humbled and very shaken and very sincere," said Mark
Lewis, the Dowler family lawyer. "I think this was something that had hit him on
a very personal level and was something that shouldn't have happened. He
apologised many times. I don't think somebody could have held their head in
their hands so many times and say that they were sorry."
Lewis said Milly's parents, Sally and Bob, and her sister, Gemma, had told
Murdoch his newspapers "should lead the way to set the standard of honesty and
decency in the field and not what had gone on before".
Murdoch had replied that the News of the World's actions were "not the standard
set by his father, a respected journalist, not the standard set by his mother",
Lewis said.
In a full-page apology in the Guardian and other newspapers today, the News Corp
boss says: "We are sorry for the serious wrongdoing that occurred. We are deeply
sorry for the hurt suffered by the individuals affected. We regret not acting
faster to sort things out."
Such an admission represents a volte face after Murdoch praised the company's
handling of the scandal in his first interview on the issue, given to one of his
own newspapers, the Wall Street Journal.
The printed apology also suggests that the company will do more to atone for the
mistakes of the past. "I realise that simply apologising is not enough," he
writes. "In the coming days, as we take further concrete steps to resolve these
issues and make amends for the damage they have caused, you will hear more from
us."
In his own statement to staff at News International, which still owns the Times,
the Sunday Times and the Sun, James Murdoch admitted that the company had made
mistakes but praised "one of the outstanding editors of her generation".
Brooks is to be replaced by the head of Sky Italia, Tom Mockridge.
Downing Street welcomed her resignationbut the prime minister's spokesman said
Brooks should still give evidence to the media select committee next week.
The prime minister's spokesmanHe said of the resignation: "He thinks it's the
right decision. He said the other day he would have accepted her resignation."
No 10 hopes that releasing details of the prime minister's contacts with the
media and setting out the full scope of the judge-led inquiry will help as he
attempts to regain the initiative.
The prime minister hopes to finalise the membership of the inquiry and agree its
terms of reference by the end of next week. But Labour believes that he will
continue to face pressure until Coulson's position is clarified.
Rupert Murdoch's bloody Friday as Rebekah Brooks and Les
Hinton quit, G, 16.7.2011,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jul/15/rupert-murdoch-sorry-rebekah-brooks-out
|