International
Evil Genius? Do you reap all that you sow?
The News of the World is to close, James Murdoch has announced. It follows a series of revelations that the paper illegally hacked into phones, and amid calls for Rebekah Brooks to resign. The News International chief executive is said to retain the support of Rupert Murdoch.
12.01am: Former home secretary Alan Johnson has suggested that James Murdoch could face jail over the phone hacking scandal.
Speaking on the BBC1’s This Week, the former Labour minister said Murdoch’s statement yesterday in which he admitted that the News of the World and News International failed to get to the bottom of the issue could lead to a prosecution under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa) 2000.
Johnson pointed to Murdoch’s comment that he personally (and, he admits, wrongly) approved out-of-court settlements to victims of phone hacking, including a payment to Gordon Taylor of the Professional Football Association believed to be worth around £700,000. The MP raised the prospect this could place the News International chairman in breach of section 79 of Ripa. This states:
Where an offence under any provision of this Act (…) is committed by a body corporate and is proved to have been committed with the consent or connivance of, or to be attributable to any neglect on the part of a director, manager, secretary or other similar officer of the body he (as well as the body corporate) shall be guilty of that offence and liable to be proceeded against and punished accordingly.
The News of the World’s royal editor Clive Goodman and private investigator Glenn Mulcaire were jailed in January 2007 after they admit intercepting voicemail messages on royal aides’ phones in breach of the Ripa.
But a criminal lawyer has told the Financial Times that Murdoch was “a million miles” from being prosecuted because the payment of reasonable compensation to victims was allowed under the law. The lawyer told the paper: “You would have to show that he had knowledge at the time rather than after the fact.”
11.00pm: The phone hacking scandal has finally made the front page of the Sun, leading with the closure of its sister title.
10.34pm: The Guardian’s editor-in-chief, Alan Rusbridger, has told Newsnight that Murdoch’s closure of the News of the World was “baffling”.
I think it’s baffling. No-one called for the News of the World to be closed. It seems perverse to be closing down the newspaper.
Rusbridger said it was clear that phone hacking was “systematic” at the paper. He said he spoke to a reporter from the tabloid yesterday who said that every time a journalist presented a story they were asked, “Where are the [phone] messages?”
The programme also heard from Sean Cassidy, whose son Ciaran died in the Russell Square explosion, says Cameron surely knew what was going on when he hired Coulson.
10.20pm: The closure of the News of the World could be a cunning ploy to legally shred any incriminating evidence linked to the phone hacking scandal, according to a prominent media lawyer.
Mark Stephens, head of media with Finers Stephens Innocent lawyer, said under British law the paper “may not be obliged to retain documents that could be relevant to civil and criminal claims against the newspaper—even in cases that are already underway.”
If News of the World is to be liquidated, Stephens told Reuters, it “is a stroke of genius—perhaps evil genius.”
All of the assets of the shuttered newspaper, including its records, will be transferred to a professional liquidator (such as a global accounting firm). The liquidator’s obligation is to maximize the estate’s assets and minimize its liabilities. So the liquidator could be well within its discretion to decide News of the World would be best served by defaulting on pending claims rather than defending them. That way, the paper could simply destroy its documents to avoid the cost of warehousing them—and to preclude any other time bombs contained in News of the World’s records from exploding.
YouTube: News Of The World: Der Untergang (slightly NSFW)
thestar.com: All about Rebekah:
LONDON—It was March 2003, and Rebekah Wade, then the editor of The Sun newspaper, was being interrogated by the House of Commons select committee on culture and the media. The topic: dubious tabloid practices.
Asked whether she had ever paid the police for information, Wade, a supremely confident and striking figure with her shock of wild red hair, looked unabashed and unperturbed.
“We have paid the police for information in the past,” she declared.
She was, in fact, admitting to breaking the law, which was pointed out to her soon afterward. But Wade backtracked as fluently as she had come forward, declaring that she could not remember any examples and then proceeding, it seemed, to brush off the whole thing as another cheeky, walking-the-line incident in a career full of them.
Now 43 and known by her new married name of Rebekah Brooks, she has used a winning combination of charm, effrontery, audacity and tenacity to thrive in the brutal, male-dominated world of the British tabloids. She has risen to become chief executive of News International, Rupert Murdoch’s British newspaper subsidiary.
more online …
What News Ltd Chairman and Chief Executive John Hartigan told his colleagues
Dear Colleague,
The behaviour that has been uncovered at the News Of The World is an affront to all of us who value the integrity and credibility of good journalism, the reputation of the company and our own reputations as professionals.
Phone hacking is the antithesis of everything we stand for. It is a terrible slur on our craft.
As the Times of London editorialised yesterday:
“Journalism has a responsibility and an ethic. Its claims to public credibility rests on conducting it’s work in a way that is defensible to a reasonable person, known in the trade as a reader.”
I know, and I believe everyone here at News Limited knows that the events in the UK in no way reflect who we are, what we do and what we believe in as a media organisation.
We have obligations to do the right thing by ourselves, our colleagues, our readers and advertisers, and, more broadly, to the communities we serve in an ethical and moral way.
The decision to close the News of The World acknowledges that once the contract of trust between the newspaper and its readers had been breached it was damaged beyond repair.
It is appropriate to remind everyone at News Limited that unethical and immoral behaviour is not tolerated. We have a Code of Professional Conduct in addition to the MEAA code.
My personal belief is that adherence to these codes is the guiding principle to everything we do.
I am confident that the practices that have been uncovered in the UK do not exist in Australia, at News or any other respectable media outlet.
Given the wider reputational impact on all journalists as a result of the events in the UK I want to remind everyone that adherence to our ethical code is fundamental to our right to publish and a fundamental requirement of our work, every day.
Regrettably, a line has been crossed and it’s important at times like this that if we care about the power, value and relevance of responsible journalism then we must express in the strongest terms our distress and dismay at such a breach of faith.
John Hartigan
Chairman and Chief Executive
Earlier on Tasmanian Times: How to be a Murdoch man …
First published: 2011-07-08 09:56 AM
For updates on this continually breaking story, use the TT News Dropdown menu (top navigation bar) …
Start with The Guardian, who have been all over this story for years.
Business Spectator has a weekend special: Papering over Murdoch mistakes, HERE
Excerpt:
With James having recently relocated to New York as an obvious positioning of him as Rupert’s heir apparent, the scandal was threatening Rupert’s succession planning. He had to try to distance James from it and limit his reputational damage.
In the scheme of News Corp, closing News of the World is a minor price for the Murdochs to pay to try to protect the group’s larger corporate and personal ambitions. Newspapers are now a very modest contributor to the fortunes of a group dominated by film and television.
Moreover, there are suggestions in the UK that News was already considering, as a cost-cutting measure, integrating News of the World and The Sun into a seven-day operation, and will now simply re-label its Sunday newspaper The Sun. If that is the case, then the closure would be a rather cynical piece of spin.
The problem for News, and the Murdochs, is that the decision to close the paper, while dramatic, has probably come too late to douse the outrage that the torrent of revelations of the paper’s actions over years has ignited.
With two major police investigations under way, the government considering a formal inquiry and the potential for further damaging exposes to emerge, the scandal is going to be a running sore that will continue to infect the group’s reputation and maintain pressure on all the News executives with even the remotest connection to the paper and News’ responses to the scandal as it developed.
• Stephen Brook, Media Editor, The Australian: The tabloid that hacked itself to death
Excerpt:
THE News of the World bestrode Britain like a colossus. Every Sunday, its 2.66 million copies were read by more than seven million Britons who regarded its mix of sex and showbiz, titillation and expose as part of their Sunday pleasure, along with bacon and eggs and a cup of tea.
It was the paper readers affectionately called the Screws and people from all walks of life turned to it to discover which television presenters had been snorting cocaine, which footballers had been caught playing away from home, which politicians had been caught with which rent boy. But between the pages of sex and sport they discovered Pakistani cricketers had been taking bungs and that some of their boys in uniform had abused Iraqi civilians.
The mass circulating title, killed off this week, was a journalistic supertanker. Uniquely, it was produced by two rival departments from its East London offices in the suburb of Wapping at the heart of News International, the British division of News Corporation, publisher of The Australian. The newsroom was behind locked doors so “colleagues” (in fact, bitter rivals) from its sister paper The Sun couldn’t access it. There the features department would set out its stall each week in the Tuesday editorial conference, pitted against the news department. Each would aim to produce the front page “splash” and an annual tally was kept. The pressure to get scoops, to get stories bigger and better than the competition, was immense.
Inner Circle: The fascinating Friends of Rebekah …
Channel 4 News
Phone hack scandal: who are Rebekah Brooks’ friends?
Friday 08 July 2011
Riding in Oxfordshire or crisis in Wapping? Channel 4 News maps the circles of power around News International CEO Rebekah Brooks, as the News of the World prepares to go to print for the last time.
• TUESDAY LATEST: News targetted Gordon Brown, Royals. BSkyB, News shares fall, HERE