The Murdoch hacking scandal has metastasized twenty-four hours after The Guardian’s bombshell that News Corporation’s News of the World tabloid had hacked into a missing 13 year old girl’s voicemail, deleted messages, interfering with the police investigation, while giving Milly Dowler’s parents false hope that she was still alive.
The drip drip drip of increasingly damning news has become a gusher, which may be part of a new News Corp. strategy to stop the Chinese water torture. Its executives are telling BBC Business Editor Robert Peston that “there may have been worse examples of NOTW hacking than that of Milly Dowler’s phone.” And they’re handing over damning documents to police now, rather than stuffing “reams of documents into trash bags… and haul(ing) them away.”
Here’s a roundup of the latest news. There’s so much I’m pretty sure I won’t catch it all:
— My former Wall Street Journal colleague Sarah Ellison, author of an excellent book on Murdoch’s takeover of our old paper, reports for Vanity Fair that former News of the World editor Andy Coulson, who would go on to become Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron’s top flack for a while, approved bribes to Scotland Yard police. It’s documented in emails that News International, a division of News Corporation, just turned over to police.
— The Guardian, which has dug this scandal up virtually alone, reports that “Detectives to examine every case involving attacks on children since 2001 in response to Milly Dowler phone hacking.”
— The Independent reports that soon-to-be-fired News International CEO Rebekah Brooks, who was News of the World editor at the time of the Milly Dowler murder and phone hacking, personally asked the private investigator who hacked and deleted Dowler’s voicemails for cellphone numbers on other stories, and those may have been obtained illegally.
— The Telegraph reports that “Bereaved relatives of the July 7 bombings had their phones hacked by journalists at the News of the World, police believe.” Imagine an American newspaper hacking into the voicemail of 9/11 widows in the days and weeks after those attacks.
— Channel 4 airs a somewhat sketchily sourced package reporting that in 2002 News of the World put a tail on a Scotland Yard detective who was reopening a murder investigation that had implicated Jonathan Rees, one of the private investigators the paper paid to hack phones:
This is a story about a claim that Brooks was confronted by the police over allegations of her journalists targetting a murder detective. An astonishing story which at one point, we’ve been told, had the police secretly watching the News of the World watching the police.
— Another famous British case, the so-called Soham murders of two girls, is being looked at by police, The Guardian reports. “There was evidence to suggest they were targeted by Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator who was formerly employed by the paper.”
— The BBC reports that calls for a public inquiry into the hacking scandal are growing louder in the wake of the Milly Dowler revelations, and the House of Commons will take up debate over whether to open one tomorrow.
It’s long been clear to those paying attention (and it hasn’t seemed very crowded until now) that News Corporation has done its best to cover up this story, as have police investigators, politicians, and the rest of the press.
That’s failed, and we’re now to at the “what did they know and when did they know it” phase of this scandal. Murdoch’s people are finally starting to cooperate with official inquiries, though this is surely not out of genuine concern about finding the truth and fixing things, but part of a PR strategy to stop those drips mentioned above.
Please, be serious. It appears that you hate Murdoch, but it'll take more than a single out-of-control tabloid to condemn the man. He takes some responsibility for being at the very top, but one would have to show similar abuses at a significant majority of his papers in order to indict Murdoch himself.
And all this hand-wringing about his media "stranglehold" is just poppycock, as the Brits might say. :) The internet has opened the field wide open for anyone. If Murdoch thinks he can salvage a former monopoly like BSkyB, let him try his hand at it, who cares. None of the News Corp stable, made up of former monopoly newspapers and TV channels, will survive the rabid competition from the internet. In the meantime, your hyperventilating about his control of these dying monopolies is just silly.
#1 Posted by Ajay, CJR on Wed 6 Jul 2011 at 09:38 AM
The vast majority still get their news from trusted sources, such as newspapers and television (about 67%). No web site is going to have the marketing resources of News International and most people haven't got the time to flirt from one web site to another. I point out that it was the Guardian who were able to break this story, not a lone blogger (and News International managed to keep a lid on it for sometime, using its strength in controlling the conversation in the UK).
#2 Posted by Paul Guinnessy, CJR on Wed 6 Jul 2011 at 01:45 PM
Got a source for that 67% figure, Paul? A lot more people read the NYT online than read the physical paper, new online sites shouldn't have much trouble hiving off those readers in droves. Marketing doesn't matter as much online, it's all about links. If people don't have time to flirt, they'll use online news aggregators like the Drudge report: that's what they do already. Yes, the Guardian broke this story, but many more have already been broken by bloggers. I wouldn't say News International "kept a lid" on it as much as the other papers and bloggers probably thought it was over with a couple of celebrity hackings.
I'll be the first to admit bloggers are not strong enough to take over the reporting job yet, largely because they still use dumb advertising models, but as paid subscription models take off, the bloggers will be all, as the Guardian and every other old newspaper won't survive the transition.
#3 Posted by Ajay, CJR on Fri 8 Jul 2011 at 05:54 PM