Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal, unsurprisingly, hasn’t done a whole lot of digging on the News Corp. hacking scandal. Or perhaps it has dug, but it’s been so far behind on the story that it hasn’t been able to advance it.
But today it has a scoop on the hacking scandal—one that implicates a non-News Corp. paper, suggests in the lede that bribing cops may not have been unusual, and raises questions about a man who will help determine the professional and, possibly, the legal fate of James Murdoch, Son of Rupert.
What’s the scoop that “suggests that the practice may not have been unusual,” as the WSJ writes in its lede? That twelve years ago, a Sunday Mirror reporter testified in a libel case that he paid a cop £50 (about $82 at current exchange rates) for a story tip.
To put that in context, which the Journal utterly fails to do, recall that Murdoch’s News of the World paid a minimum £100,000 ($163,000) in bribes to police officials, according to The Guardian. That, of course, and perhaps 4,000 cases of phone hacking—crimes, folks—plus the payment of hush-money settlements and other cover-ups involving figures at the highest levels of News Corp., the Journal’s owner.
(Read my post for a roundup of the known News International sins and crimes as of July 20.)
More problematically, the Journal’s sourcing for this piece is awfully thin. It’s based on the twelve-year-old notes of the plaintiff’s attorney in the libel case and another plaintiff’s attorney’s recollection:
Another attorney for Mr. Blackstone, Christopher Stewart-Moore, added, “Everyone in court looked at each other and said, “Isn’t that odd?’”
You’d think if everyone in court noticed this, that the Journal could have tracked down someone else who remembers it, like, say, the judge or members of the jury.
I’d want to do that before I ran something, since the WSJ says there is no court transcript nor any contemporary media coverage, and the lawyers who represented the Mirror say they “do not recall” it and that it isn’t in their records.
The paper also went with this dicey story despite the fact that Tim Luckett, the reporter the Journal accuses of bribery, didn’t respond to questions by press time. He did after publication, and it’s clear he’s not happy:
Mr. Luckett, who is now a crisis manager for the public-relations firm Hill & Knowlton in London, didn’t respond to requests for comment prior to publication of this article. After it was published, he said, “I can state categorically that during my time as a journalist I have never ever paid a police officer for a story. At the time of the trial I was not prepared to disclose my source but can confirm categorically that it was not someone within the police service.”
The Journal had better hope Mr. Luckett really did bribe a cop or it may find itself with a big libel suit.
But that’s not all. What makes this smell even worse is that in The Wall Street Journal Europe, this is what was put way up in the third paragraph:
At the time, the editor of the Sunday Mirror was Colin Myler, who later became editor of News Corp.’s News of the World. He was hired in 2007 to replace editor Andy Coulson, who resigned after the paper’s royals correspondent was imprisoned for illegally intercepting cellphone voice-mail messages.
Who’s Colin Myler? He’s the guy, along with former News International top lawyer Tom Crone, who says James Murdoch misled Parliament when he said he never knew about prima facie evidence of criminality when Murdoch settled the Gordon Taylor case for more than a million bucks (it’s implausible that Murdoch would sign off on such an enormous sum without such knowledge, in any event, but obviously Myler and Crone’s testimony would help any future case against Rupert Murdoch’s son).
Not only is Colin Myler strangely inserted in the third paragraph of that WSJE story, but The Guardian reports that the paper ran an accompanying picture of him.
It is curious. It is as if there are two Wall Street Journals. Journal A, with its oblivious little committee, goes about its business, apparently unaware that Journal B is playing a different game, including but perhaps not limited to tenaciously targeting the enemies. I noted strange patterns after News Corp. had a rating problem, but of course I didn't say anything.
I have seen enough to say that I think there should be an investigation of The Wall Street Journal to see exactly what the games are. If Murdoch were smart--it is never too late to act smart anyway--he would hire away the Public Editor of The New York Times to work over all his American media properties.
Last week, The NYT Public Editor did outstanding work on redacted e-mails. Just outstanding. His assistant is good too. America should have a national media council with the power to initiate investigations and compel testimony. All of the rackets are getting too big and too subtle for the meager resources that exist to cope.
#1 Posted by Clayton Burns, CJR on Wed 3 Aug 2011 at 11:27 AM
Ryan, The correction at the end of The WSJ story online reinforces the fact that lawyer Jane has precise contemporaneous notes. From her firm's site: "Jane [Phillips] has been consistently recommended as a "Leading Junior" in Defamation/Privacy in Chambers and Partners Guide to the Legal Profession and in the Legal 500 Directory and Legal Experts. [...]
Blackstone v. MGN Limited (2000) – represented the successful Claimant who obtained £50,000 damages against the Sunday Mirror arising out an article concerning a marital dispute."
WSJ: Corrections & Amplifications
Lawyer Jane Phillips says that in her closing argument, she told the jury, "It appears from Mr. Luckett's evidence that it is the police source, who he refused to identify, who is responsible for this information leaking into the public domain in the first place. This policeman or woman sold false information to the Sunday Mirror for about £50." An earlier version of this article incorrectly quoted her as saying, "It appears from Mr. Luckett's evidence that it is the police force, who he refused to identify, who is responsible for this information leaking into the public domain in the first place. This policeman or woman sold forth information to the Sunday Mirror for about £50."
#2 Posted by Clayton Burns, CJR on Wed 3 Aug 2011 at 02:46 PM
As I read that, she doesn't have notes of a police bribe, just notes that she told a jury she suspected a policeman had been bribed.
Not enough to write a news story about. If I had a nickel for every time I've heard a defense lawyer suggest pure poppycock to jurors, I wouldn't have to work for a living any more.
#3 Posted by Harry Eagar, CJR on Thu 11 Aug 2011 at 12:35 AM