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