March 29, 2024

Ex-Schools Chief Emerges as Unlikely Murdoch Ally

Joel I. Klein, the former New York City schools chancellor, was in a tricky position. Three weeks ago, Rupert Murdoch asked Mr. Klein, now his trusted deputy, to oversee an investigation into the phone hacking scandal that has deeply wounded the News Corporation and its chairman, something Mr. Klein was eager to avoid.

“I am trying to get as far away from this as I can,” he lamented to a friend.

He has not succeeded. Mr. Klein, who joined the News Corporation as a senior vice president in January, is not only responsible for the investigation that could uncover what company managers knew about the hacking, but he also has become one of Mr. Murdoch’s closest and most visible advisers throughout the crisis.

His seemingly contradictory roles — de facto chief of internal affairs officer and ascendant executive with Mr. Murdoch’s ear — are raising questions about how robust and objective the internal inquiry can be. When Mr. Murdoch summoned a team of top deputies and outside consultants to London to help him manage the fallout from the hacking, Mr. Klein was one of the first to arrive, moving into a temporary office 20 feet from the chairman’s.

When Mr. Murdoch and his closest advisers debated whether to accept the resignation of Rebekah Brooks, a newspaper executive at the center of the controversy, Mr. Klein pushed for her exit. When Mr. Murdoch wrote a statement to deliver to Parliament last week, Mr. Klein weighed in on the drafts.

And while the world watched Mr. Murdoch and his son James testify, Mr. Klein sat directly behind them for three hours, occasionally cleaning his rimless glasses with his tie as he looked on in support.

Mr. Klein’s dizzying journey, in under a year, from one of the nation’s foremost education reformers to the corporate consigliere for a media titan whose politics are far to the right of his own, has surprised and unsettled many friends and colleagues, who fear that he will be unable to extricate himself from a scandal that shows no sign of abating or, they say, ending well. “This was nothing he could have ever expected,” said Barbara Walters, a longtime friend of Mr. Klein’s.

But in many ways, interviews suggest, his emergence as a dominant figure within the News Corporation is consistent with a biography that combines high-minded legal and social aims — antitrust law and education — with a driving, sometimes overwhelming competitive fire.

“He has a take-no-prisoners attitude,” said Randi Weingarten, who battled Mr. Klein when she was head of the New York City teachers union. “He is a litigator. He is about winning.”

It is a sign of how delicate Mr. Klein’s position inside the News Corporation has become that he was initially against the idea of an internal review. In April, after London’s Metropolitan Police arrested three News of the World journalists on suspicion of hacking, some executives pushed for an investigation that would have the full backing of the company’s board and senior management, according to two people with knowledge of the discussions taking place at the time.

Mr. Murdoch opposed the idea outright. Standing firmly in his corner was Mr. Klein.

“There was a clear message,” said one of the people who knew of Mr. Klein’s role and requested anonymity to divulge private conversations. “Stay out. And let Joel handle it.”

Top lawyers and experts in corporate governance said the News Corporation should have hired outside legal counsel to oversee the inquiry, as dozens of companies like the American International Group and Fannie Mae have done in the past, rather than rely on an insider.

“That is not standard practice,” said Charles M. Elson, an expert on corporate governance at the University of Delaware. “You cannot be seen as objective if you are inside.”

The News Corporation says the investigative body will have true independence and the power to compel employees to cooperate. The company points to the appointment of Lord Anthony Grabiner, a prominent British lawyer who also sat behind the Murdochs during their testimony before lawmakers last week, as the body’s independent chairman. Lord Grabiner will report to Mr. Klein. Mr. Klein, in turn, will report to Viet Dinh, an independent director on the News Corporation board.

Mr. Klein declined to be interviewed for this article.

“We’ve been given a free hand,” said Lord Grabiner, who added that he and Mr. Klein never would have agreed to take on the job if they felt the committee was a sham.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=a5e8aedcf466570c5aa4bffb5ed0d85b

Pressure Rises on Cameron as Hacking Draws Wide Outcry

For the first time, Rupert Murdoch, the chief executive of News Corporation, released a statement on the scandal. “Recent allegations of phone hacking and making payments to police with respect to the News of the World are deplorable and unacceptable,” he said.

While promising full cooperation with police investigations, he strongly defended the head of the company’s Britain operations, Rebekah Brooks, who has become a focus of the scandal and was urged to resign on the Parliament floor on Wednesday. “I have made clear that our company must fully and proactively cooperate with the police in all investigations and that is exactly what News International has been doing and will continue to do under Rebekah Brooks’ leadership,” he said. “We are committed to addressing these issues fully and have taken a number of important steps to prevent them from happening again.”

Mr. Murdoch said that Joel Klein, the former New York City schools chancellor and current head of the News Corporation’s education unit, would “provide important oversight and guidance” in the investigations while Viet Dinh, a former assistant attorney general in the George W. Bush administration and non-executive director of the company, would keep the company’s board informed of all developments.

Mr. Cameron, facing a potential minefield from the scandal’s fallout, resisted immediately ordering a full inquiry into the workings of the often adversarial, scoop-driven British press, saying that such a step would have to wait for the outcome of the current police investigation, which was ordered after the police initially got nowhere.

“We do need to have an inquiry, possibly inquiries, into what has happened,” the prime minister, David Cameron, told Parliament after days of disclosures that have horrified Britons. There were reports that hackers working for News of the World, owned by News Corporation, listened to the voice-mail messages left on the phones of murder and terrorism victims. One was a 13-year-old girl who was abducted and murdered in 2002. Additionally, Scotland Yard detectives are also investigating whether the voicemail accounts of relatives of victims of the bombings of three London subway trains and a double-decker bus on July 7, 2005, had also been hacked, according to some of the relatives.

“We are no longer talking here about politicians and celebrities, we are talking about murder victims, potentially terrorist victims, having their phones hacked into,” Mr. Cameron said. “It is absolutely disgusting, what has taken place, and I think everyone in this House and indeed this country will be revolted by what they have heard and what they have seen on their television screens.”

A furor has been building in England for months after disclosures that journalists from News of the World, a mass-circulation gossip-laden Sunday tabloid, hacked into the voice-mail messages of celebrities and other prominent people. But, this week, the extent of the alleged hacking has broadened dramatically with reports that the newspaper hacked the cellphone of the slain 13-year-old girl nine years ago, deleting some messages to make room for more in a move that added to vain hopes that she was still alive.

The disclosures have focused on two people in particular — Rebekah Brooks, the chief executive of News International, which runs the British newspaper operations of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, and Andy Coulson, a former News International editor, who went on to become Mr. Cameron’s director of communications before he was forced to quit in January, months after the phone-hacking scandal erupted with new vigor.

In his resignation statement, Mr. Coulson reiterated that he had been unaware of the hacking when it took place, but said that the scandal had proved too distracting for him to do his job.

As the catalog of allegations widened on Wednesday, the BBC reported that News International had passed material to the police relating to e-mails that seemed to show that payments authorized by Mr. Coulson had been made to the police for information.

Sarah Lyall reported from London, and Alan Cowell from Paris. Eric Pfanner contributed reporting from Paris.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: July 6, 2011

An earlier version of this article contained a caption that referred incorrectly to the day the photo was taken. It was from Wednesday, not Thursday.

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