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Andy Coulson Denies Hacking Charges

June 6, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Mr. Coulson’s appearance at Southwark Crown Court in London came a day after Rebekah Brooks, the former chief executive of Mr. Murdoch’s newspaper operations in Britain, appeared in the same court and denied five charges relating to the scandal.

The two former editors were among several ex-employees of Mr. Murdoch’s News International, a subsidiary of the giant News Corporation, based in New York, who have been formally arraigned over the past two days pending trials expected to start later in the year. All have denied wrongdoing.

Mr. Coulson, 45, a former editor of the now-shuttered News of the World who went on to become Mr. Cameron’s communications director, faced one charge on Thursday of conspiring to intercept voice mails between 2000 and 2006, and two other charges relating to payments to public officials in return for information at various dates between 2002 and 2005.

On Wednesday Ms. Brooks, 45, entered a plea of not guilty to five charges, including conspiracies to hack phones, to commit misconduct in public office and to pervert the course of justice. Five other former employees of News International, the British subsidiary of Mr. Murdoch’s News Corporation, as well as Ms. Brooks’s husband, Charlie, also appeared in court and entered pleas of not guilty to various charges.

The court appearances represented the latest chapter in an unfolding drama that led to the closing of Mr. Murdoch’s News of the World tabloid in July 2011 after accusations that its reporters had hacked into the voice mail of a kidnapped teenager, Milly Dowler, who was later found murdered.

The scandal mushroomed into bribery investigations involving police officers and public officials. A panel of inquiry set up by Parliament urged that British press regulations be enshrined into law to prevent a recurrence of the scandal.

Ms. Brooks, with her connections to the political elite, including Prime Minister Cameron, has been closely watched throughout the scandal. A former editor of The News of the World and The Sun, Ms. Brooks has been accused of conspiracy to hack phones between 2000 and 2006 and conspiracy to commit misconduct in public office between 2004 and 2012. She is also accused of seeking to pervert the course of justice by conspiring with her personal assistant to spirit material away from police investigators in July 2011.

Ms. Brooks, Mr. Brooks and four other former News International employees were accused of seeking to pervert the course of justice. Separately, Clive Goodman, the former royal reporter for The News of the World, was accused of conspiracy to commit misconduct.

All of the defendants have been freed on bail pending trial.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/07/world/europe/andy-coulson-denies-hacking-charges.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Tabloid Scandal a Fresh Threat to Cameron’s Survival

July 19, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Mr. Cameron, the leader of the Conservative Party, agreed to return hurriedly Monday from Africa to hold a special session of Parliament on Wednesday. He did so after coming under renewed assault from a reinvigorated Labour Party, which has repeatedly pressed him to explain in more detail his decision to hire Andy Coulson, the former editor of the now-defunct News of the World, as his communications director.

His close personal ties to Rebekah Brooks, the former head of News International and a confidante of Mr. Murdoch, are also under scrutiny. Both Mr. Coulson and Ms. Brooks have been arrested in a widening probe into hacking the phones of British celebrities, government officials, members of the royal family and victims of high-profile crimes and terrorist attacks.

Beyond the immediate politics, there was a growing sense across the country that the crisis had raised fundamental questions about the culture of collusion between politicians and the press and revealed a deeper malaise in British life that could dominate the national political scene for months or years to come.

Ed Miliband, leader of the Labour opposition, delivered a broadside against Mr. Cameron on Monday that sought to tap into the public outrage over the scandal by linking it to a series of crises in recent years — the role of the banks in the financial crisis that hit in 2008, the furor over lawmakers’ expense abuses in 2009 and now the tabloid scandal. Commentators said his goal was to weaken Mr. Cameron’s coalition government if the scandal continues to escalate, and to cast himself as a credible alternate prime minister should Mr. Cameron fall.

Mr. Miliband said the prime minister “hasn’t even apologized for hiring Mr. Coulson” and that he was “hamstrung” by his association with his former media chief and Ms. Brooks, who were among the Murdoch executives that Mr. Cameron has admitted to meeting almost twice a month during his 15 months in office. He said the country “needs leadership to get to the bottom of what happened” — a code, as some commentators saw it, for suggesting that Mr. Cameron may have to quit before the scandal has run its course.

The parade of casualties from the scandal continued to lengthen one day after the head of Scotland Yard resigned, when one of his deputies, John Yates, also stepped down. The investigation also took a grim turn when Sean Hoare, a former reporter in his mid-40s who was the first to say publicly that Mr. Coulson was aware of the widespread “phone hacking” at News of the World when he was the paper’s editor, was found dead in his north London home. The police said they did not initially regard the death as suspicious.

Mr. Hoare’s interview implicating Mr. Coulson in a New York Times magazine article last fall was one of the factors, the police have said, that prompted them to reopen an investigation into The News of the World after the probe had brought convictions and jail sentences for two men then faltered, with Scotland Yard officers saying there was nothing more to pursue.

Top police officials and senior executives of News Corporation, including Rupert and James Murdoch and Ms. Brooks, are scheduled to appear before parliamentary committee hearings on Tuesday that many expect to be part of a lengthy and open-ended inquiry into the origins of the phone hacking, the legal culpability of News Corporation officials, the failure of the police to uncover the full extent of the hacking and the connections between Mr. Murdoch’s empire and senior British politicians.

Mr. Miliband, widely viewed as a weak rival to Mr. Cameron until the recent revelations about the extent of phone hacking emerged this month, appeared to view the matters as weighty enough to form a new platform for Labour, issuing a sonorous call that sounded like a promising election plank.

“We have to ask ourselves deeper questions,” he said. “What does it say about our country? How did we let this happen? And how do we change to ensure that this does not happen again?” He said all the recent scandals in British life were caused by a lack of accountability among those in high places. “All are about the irresponsibility of the powerful, people who believed they were untouchable,” like the Murdoch executives who ran the company’s newspapers in Britain, he said.

Sarah Lyall, Jo Becker and Alan Cowell contributed reporting.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/19/world/europe/19hacking.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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The Media Equation: Troubles That Money Can’t Dispel

July 18, 2011 by Leave a Comment

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.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/18/business/media/for-news-corporation-troubles-that-money-cant-dispel.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Scotland Yard Chief Quits Over Hacking

July 17, 2011 by Leave a Comment

In a news conference, Sir Paul said his position was “in danger of being eclipsed by the ongoing debate by senior officers and the media. And this can never be right,” according to a report by The Guardian.

The Metropolitan Police, commonly referred to as Scotland Yard, has come under harsh scrutiny in recent days, accused in the press and by British politicians of currying too close a relationship with tabloid executives.

According to news reports, Sir Paul hired a former News of the World executive, Neil Wallis, as a public relations adviser. Mr. Wallis was arrested for questioning last week.

Mr. Wallis also worked for a spa where Sir Paul was treated for five weeks while recovering from a fractured leg this year, the Press Association news agency said. But Scotland Yard said Sir Paul did not know that Mr. Wallis worked there. Indeed, Scotland Yard said, Sir Paul’s stay at the spa, which totaled about $17,000, was arranged by a friend who was the managing director of the establishment.

Scotland Yard said the police paid for Sir Paul’s “intensive physiotherapy” to hasten his return to work.

Earlier Sunday, the British police took Ms. Brooks, 43, into custody after she arrived at a London police station by appointment. The timing, two days before a separate parliamentary inquiry into the crisis, drew a skeptical response from opposition lawmakers who said the arrest might inhibit Ms. Brooks’s ability or readiness to testify before the panel while she is the subject of police inquiries.

David Wilson, a lawyer representing Ms. Brooks, said she “maintains her innocence, absolutely.”

It was the latest twist in a series of events that has transformed Mr. Murdoch from a virtually untouchable force in the British media landscape to a mogul fighting for the survival of his power and influence.

Earlier on Sunday, the leader of the opposition Labour Party, Ed Miliband, who has taken a lead in criticizing Mr. Murdoch’s operations, called for the breakup of News International, his British newspaper subsidiary. Mr. Miliband said the group’s influence was “dangerous.”

Mr. Wilson said the arrest came as a complete surprise to Ms. Brooks, who had believed she was attending a prearranged and voluntary sit-down session to aid police in their inquiries. When she showed up, she was arrested, he said.

News International executives expected Ms. Brooks would be answering police questions as a witness. “It was a surprise to all of us here that she was arrested today,” said a senior company official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “When she resigned on Friday, we were not aware that she would be arrested by the police. And we did not know on Friday that she had made voluntary arrangements to go in and see the police.”

Daisy Dunlop, a News International spokeswoman, declined to say whether News International was paying for Ms. Brooks’s legal and public relations teams.

The arrest came two days after Ms. Brooks quit as chief executive at News International, as the Murdoch family struggled to contain the fallout. And it came two days before Ms. Brooks was to join Rupert Murdoch and his son James in testifying before an parliamentary investigative panel. That committee is focusing on the phone-hacking scandal that has erupted in the two weeks since reports emerged that The News of the World, once the top-selling Sunday tabloid and a central part of the Murdoch operations in Britain, had ordered the hacking of the phone of a 13-year-old girl, Milly Dowler, who was abducted and murdered. The case provoked huge public outrage.

The arrest brought police scrutiny ever closer to the family that controls News International.

“The water is now lapping around the ankles of the Murdoch family,” said Chris Bryant, a Labour parliamentarian who has taken legal action against The News of the World because he suspects his phone has been hacked. On Sunday, for the second day in a row, News International placed full-page advertisements in major newspapers promising full cooperation with the police. “There are no excuses and should be no place to hide,” the advertisements said.

Jo Becker and Don Van Natta contributed reporting.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/18/world/europe/18hacking.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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The Murdoch Style, Under Pressure

July 7, 2011 by Leave a Comment

But the widening voice-mail hacking scandal at the British tabloid News of the World threatens to stain the company’s image in a way that other embarrassing incidents at News Corporation’s far-flung media properties — which also include the Fox networks and The New York Post — have not.

In the past, Mr. Murdoch has either outlasted his critics or acted swiftly to limit the fallout. And on Wednesday he was in damage-control mode again. The company moved quickly to denounce the hacking and announce its intention to cooperate with the police, but the damage was proving difficult to contain.

There is a growing consensus within the company that Rebekah Brooks, the chief executive of News International and onetime editor who has become the focus of much of the outrage over the hacking, will be forced out of her job, according to people with knowledge of discussions inside News Corporation.

The possibility of firing Ms. Brooks is one that several people close to Mr. Murdoch said he was fiercely resisting because he was loyal to her and viewed the campaign against her as a vendetta by the company’s political enemies.

One of these people, who did not want to be identified discussing internal matters, said there was also a belief within the company that Andy Coulson, the former News of the World editor who was forced to quit as communications director to the British prime minister, will also come under increasing scrutiny.

So far the harm has been limited to the company’s reputation. The News Corporation does not yet face heavy financial losses, even as the advertiser boycott of The News of the World grows. Still, the company’s shares dropped 3.6 percent on Wednesday to $17.47, after rising for most of the year. The episode could threaten the biggest deal on the News Corporation’s plate: British approval of its complete takeover of BSkyB, the satellite television company.

David Bank, a media analyst for RBC Capital Markets, said the hacking scandal had so far been a blip in the company’s vast business holdings.

“It feels like a lot more noise than substance,” he said, noting how little the newspapers contributed to the company’s bottom line. The News of the World is just a piece of News International’s large footprint in Britain. The company also publishes The Times of London and The Sun.

Over all, revenue from the publishing division of News Corporation accounted for only 17 percent of its revenue in the last nine months. In that time, cable network programming accounted for 61 percent, and film, which includes the 20th Century Fox studio, was 20 percent.

Still, Mr. Murdoch was evidently worried enough about the fallout from the hacking scandal that he convened what someone close to him described as a “war council” in Sun Valley, Idaho, where he was attending a media conference. Mr. Murdoch was there on Wednesday with his wife, Wendi, and his son Lachlan. Ms. Murdoch was seen by a reporter at the conference, but Mr. Murdoch was not.

Mr. Murdoch, weighing into the controversy for the first time since some of Britain’s leading politicians called for an investigation into the News Corporation’s news-gathering practices, called the accusations of hacking “deplorable and unacceptable” and vowed to cooperate with any police inquiries.

But with damaging revelations about the extent of the hacking emerging each day — the latest were reports that The News of the World had accessed voice mails belonging to family members of dead soldiers — Mr. Murdoch’s regretful expressions of disapproval could go only so far.

“Depending on where the investigation goes, how widespread it goes and who knew what when, this is something that could tarnish him seriously,” said Rem Rieder, the editor and a senior vice president for the American Journalism Review. “This seems institutional.”

The News Corporation is no stranger to scandal. Fines for indecency, lawsuits charging anticompetitive business practices and libel claims are a fact of life for the company, which has been able to easily absorb the financial inconvenience.

Tim Arango and Evelyn M. Rusli contributed reporting.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/07/business/media/hacking-scandal-poses-new-threat-to-news-corporations-image.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Executive Under Pressure Over Hacking Allegations

July 6, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Prominent politicians chastised the company and Ms. Brooks, and Ford Motor Company suspended advertising in News of the World, the tabloid that has faced a long-running scandal over the widespread interception of voice mail messages of celebrities and other public figures.

Ed Miliband, leader of the opposition Labour Party, said Tuesday that Ms. Brooks should “consider her conscience and consider her position” after the disclosures.

“It wasn’t a rogue reporter,” Mr. Miliband said. “It wasn’t just one individual. This was a systematic series of things that happened and what I want from executives at News International is people to start taking responsibility for this.” News International is the News Corporation’s British newspaper division, and Ms. Brooks is now its chief executive.

Prime Minister David Cameron took time out from a visit to British troops in Afghanistan to lament what he called a “truly dreadful situation.” The police, he added, “should investigate this without any fear, without any favor, without any worry about where the evidence should lead them.”

Adding to the pressure, Ford Motor Company said it was suspending advertising until the newspaper concluded its investigation into the episode. “We are awaiting an outcome from the News of the World investigation and expect a speedy and decisive response,” Ford said in a statement released to news agencies. Under an onslaught of Twitter messages demanding a boycott of the paper, several other companies said they were reviewing their advertising policies.

Late Tuesday, the Guardian reported that the police would review every highly publicized murder, kidnapping or assault involving a child since 2001 for evidence of phone hacking. That would include the notorious case of Madeleine McCann, the 3-year-old who disappeared while her family was on vacation in Portugal in 2007.

In another development, Channel 4 reported on Tuesday that Ms. Brooks met with the police in 2002 over accusations that the tabloid had placed a senior Metropolitan police detective under surveillance.

The detective was investigating the murder of a private investigator who had been found dead with an axe buried in the back of his head. The chief suspect at the time was the dead man’s business partner, a private investigator who earned a six-figure salary supplying The News of the World with confidential information. Nothing apparently came of the inquiry into the News of the World’s surveillance.

In his remarks, Mr. Cameron did not mention Ms. Brooks, but his comments were notable because, like other British politicians, he has cultivated social connections with News Corporation executives like Ms. Brooks and Rupert Murdoch, the chief executive of the company. Mr. Cameron, along with Gordon Brown, the Labour prime minister at the time, was a guest at the reception following Ms. Brooks’s marriage to her second husband, Charlie Brooks, in 2009.

Ms. Brooks vowed to “pursue the facts with vigor and integrity,” saying she had no intention of quitting.

“I am aware of the speculation about my position,” she said in a memo to News International employees. “Therefore it is important you all know that as chief executive, I am determined to lead the company to ensure we do the right thing and resolve these serious issues.”

The allegations center on one of the most sensational Fleet Street stories of the last decade, the disappearance of Milly Dowler in 2002. The case was the subject of many tabloid front pages over the last decade, culminating last month in the conviction of Levi Bellfield, a former nightclub doorman, on charges of kidnapping and murder.

The allegation that investigators working for the News of the World may have had ordinary people like the Dowlers, not just celebrities, in their sights has raised the level of alarm in Britain over tabloid newspaper excesses.

“The Milly Dowler story has taken this from an issue for people who are concerned about media ethics to one that is of broader concern to the general public,” said Tim Luckhurst, a journalism professor at the University of Kent. “News Corporation thought they could put a lid on this, and this has blown the lid right off.”

Sarah Lyall reported from London and Eric Pfanner from Paris.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=9f42dcd0aa43b56547ae84872b99403f

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