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British Reporter Says He’ll Name Names in Phone Hacking Scandal

October 1, 2011 by Leave a Comment

The reporter, Neville Thurlbeck, 49, who was the chief reporter for the now-defunct tabloid The News of the World, gave the warning in a statement issued through his lawyers in connection with his wrongful-dismissal lawsuit against News International, the British newspaper arm of Mr. Murdoch’s News Corporation. Mr. Thurlbeck was one of the first people arrested by Scotland Yard in a renewed investigation of the phone hacking this year, but he has denied publicly having played any part in the illegal interception of cellphone voicemails.

Mr. Thurlbeck remained on the News International payroll into September, when he was fired. He has accused the company of having unfairly dismissed him for being a whistleblower. In his statement on Friday, he suggested that both sides “retain a dignified silence until we meet face to face in a public tribunal,” a hearing on his suit.

“There is so much I could have said publicly to the detriment of News International but so far have chosen not to,” he said. “At the length, truth will out.”

News International declined to comment on Mr. Thurlbeck’s statement.

With his statement, Mr. Thurlbeck appeared to have joined other current or former News International employees who have shown a readiness to contradict one another in public about newsroom wrongdoing at The News of the World — in particular, who authorized the phone hacking, who at the newspaper and at News International knew about it, and when.

The discrepancies apparently in accounts given this summer by Murdoch executives to a parliamentary committee investigating the scandal will be explored further in additional hearings called by the committee this fall.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=f231f1789ff06b9eb23ce83b03ee2758

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: , ,

James Murdoch to Be Called Before Parliament Again

September 14, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Committee officials said they expected to schedule the hearing for November, and a spokeswoman for Mr. Murdoch said he would comply. “James Murdoch is happy to appear in front of the committee again to answer any further questions members might have,” she said.

The committee’s decision seemed likely to bring further drama to an unfolding story that has reached deep into British society, raising questions about the behavior and power of the press and the once-intimate cross-ties between the media, the political elite and the police.

John Whittingdale, chairman of the House of Commons select committee investigating the scandal, told Sky News that Mr. Murdoch, 38, would be recalled after the committee had heard testimony from Les Hinton, a former top executive at The News Corporation, and Mark Lewis, a lawyer representing individuals who were targets of the phone hacking.

Mr. Hinton, who became the chairman of Dow Jones and publisher of The Wall Street Journal after the paper was acquired by the News Corporation, was the most senior Murdoch executive to quit as the hacking scandal unfolded this summer. Mr. Whittingdale said he expected James Murdoch to appear at the inquiry for a second hearing as part of the committee’s efforts to tie up “one or two loose ends” left after earlier testimony. In testimony last week, former News Corporation executives disputed Mr. Murdoch’s claims that he was unaware of widespread phone hacking at his papers.

Another major figure in the investigation, Andy Coulson, a former editor of the Murdoch-owned tabloid The News of the World who later served as Prime Minister David Cameron’s media director, told the committee through his lawyers last week that he would not accept an invitation to testify again because of concerns about the potential impact on a police investigation into the scandal and a separate judge-led inquiry appointed by the government. Mr. Coulson, who resigned from the prime minister’s staff in January, is one of more than a dozen former editors, reporters, lawyers and executives from the Murdoch newspapers in Britain who have been arrested in recent months. All were released on bail after hours of intensive questioning, pending decisions by prosecutors on whether to bring charges.

In another development, The Guardian newspaper reported that lawyers for the News Corporation’s British newspaper group, News International, had told a court hearing on Tuesday that the company had discovered “two very large new caches” of documents and e-mails in its archive that could contain evidence of the scale of phone hacking by The News of the World. A judge preparing to hear civil cases arising from the phone hacking told a high court hearing that there was “some important material” in the new archive, whose discovery followed on a previous instance in which a huge tranche of e-mails potentially relevant to the investigations were found by the Murdoch papers after initially being reported lost.

The scandal over unlawful intercepts of voice mail has been rumbling for several years, but it built to crisis pitch this summer with reports that The News of the World ordered the hacking of the phone of Milly Dowler, an abducted teenager who was found murdered in an outer London suburb in 2002. As the scandal exploded this summer, News International closed down the newspaper after 168 years of publication, causing dozens of reporters, editors and other staff members to lose their jobs.

The Murdoch family was drawn personally into the inquiry in mid-July when the House of Commons committee on culture, media and sport questioned both Rupert and James Murdoch, with both men expressing regret over the phone hacking but denying any knowledge that it had been a widespread pattern before the rush of revelations this year.. The hearings resumed last week when two former senior employees of News International appeared before the committee to challenge James Murdoch’s version of events.

Their testimony centered on a 15-minute meeting in London in 2008 when, they said, James Murdoch, chief of the News Corporation’s European and Asian operations, was told that the hacking of voice mail was more widespread than the company had acknowledged. It was on this basis, they said, that Mr. Murdoch approved an out-of-court settlement with Gordon Taylor, a leading soccer executive whose voice mail had been hacked, that eventually ran to $1.4 million, including legal costs. But that account has been disputed by Mr. Murdoch, who has denied that he was told at the 2008 meeting that there was a wider pattern of hacking involved.

The News Corporation has maintained for years that the hacking was an isolated affair carried out by a “rogue” reporter, Clive Goodman, and a private investigator, Glenn Mulcaire. Both men served jail terms in 2007 related to phone hacking. But some members of the parliamentary committee have focused on the payout to Mr. Taylor as evidence of an attempt to “cover up” the affair.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/14/world/europe/14hacking.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Global Business Tagged With: , ,

Media Decoder Blog: News Corp. Board Undergoes a Shuffle

September 2, 2011 by Leave a Comment

The board of directors at News Corporation, considered to be highly deferential to its chairman, Rupert Murdoch, is experiencing some turnover that will bring a new independent voice to its ranks.

James W. Breyer, a prominent venture capitalist and member of Facebook’s board, will be nominated for election to News Corporation’s board when shareholders gather for their annual meeting in October, the company said Friday.

At the same time, the company said that two longtime board members, Kenneth E. Cowley and Thomas J. Perkins, were leaving the board.

The shuffling comes as the company, under investigation on two continents for improper business and journalism practices, faces growing questions about the independence of its board of directors.

While News Corporation complies with Nasdaq guidelines for the number of directors who lack direct ties to the company, many of the directors who are considered independent for practical purposes have long histories with Mr. Murdoch.

Mr. Perkins, a leading Silicon Valley entrepreneur whose ties to the company were minimal before joining the board in 1996, and Mr. Cowley, a former executive at Mr. Murdoch’s Australian media arm, were both considered independent directors.

Mr. Breyer appears to have no direct links to News Corporation. His experience on corporate boards is deep. In addition to Facebook, he also serves on the boards of Wal-Mart, where he is the presiding independent director, and Dell.

Given his experience in the technology, Mr. Breyer’s nomination is in step with News Corporation’s strategy to make digital businesses a focal point of its growth strategy.

In a statement, Mr. Murdoch said: “Jim has a remarkable track record in the investment community and his background in media and technology will enable him to make significant contributions to News Corporation’s board.”

Just last month, the board was expected to add Elisabeth Murdoch, Mr. Murdoch’s daughter. But she and the company decided it was best to delay her nomination. Not only is News Corporation facing questions about hacking voice-mails of private citizens in Britain and anticompetitive practices in the United States, but a lawsuit over its acquisition of Ms. Murdoch’s production company, Shine.

The purchase spawned a lawsuit last spring on behalf of some shareholders. The suit, filed by Amalgamated Bank, asserted that Mr. Murdoch ran his company “as his own private fiefdom with little or no effective oversight from the board.”

News Corporation has moved to dismiss the suit.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=b924884a3b804b1f0f91ba85f6623769

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Market Ills Give CNBC a Bounce

August 15, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Having left The Journal in 2010 for CNBC, Mr. Deogun is now in charge of the network’s coverage of the gyrating global markets, a fresh crisis that has restored CNBC to prominence among retail investors who temporarily tune into business news in turbulent times.

This time, however, there is stiffer competition from the Fox Business Network and Bloomberg Television, both of which are hoping to take advantage of what they perceive as CNBC’s vulnerabilities.

The markets’ wild swings are not necessarily profit-generating for TV news outlets because most advertisers buy airtime far in advance, meaning that the prices do not rise in tandem with the ratings. But coverage of crises can burnish reputations, as the networks attract worried viewers who sample news and stock-picking shows for the first time — or at least for the first time in a long while.

So far, CNBC — not its smaller rivals — seems to be benefiting the most from interest this month in the last-minute agreement on the United States debt ceiling, the Standard Poor’s downgrade of America’s debt rating and concern over the stability of European banks.

Through the first two weeks of August, CNBC, a unit of NBC Universal, had on average 378,000 at-home viewers during the New York market hours of 9:30 a.m. and 4 p.m., up sharply from 224,000 in July.

Fox Business, a unit of the News Corporation, had an average of 107,000 viewers at those hours, up from 76,000 in July. Bloomberg Television is not publicly rated; private ratings indicate that it too had a surge in recent weeks, though its audience is smaller than that of Fox Business.

It is exceedingly hard to estimate the reach of the business networks. CNBC, despite being dominant, flatly declines to talk about ratings because it says Nielsen’s sample does not count out-of-home viewing or affluent viewers, exactly the kinds of viewers it says it attracts.

The Nielsen ratings nonetheless serve as a barometer of sorts in good business times and bad. CNBC’s at-home audience has not been this big since the so-called flash crash of May 2010, reaffirming that people are once again paying attention to the ups and downs of the markets.

Kevin Magee, the executive in charge of the Fox Business Network, said that periods of big financial news usually helped “the new guy.” Fox Business started in October 2007, and Mr. Magee is quick to point out that CNBC has both a 20-year head start and enviable distribution. (CNBC is available in about 100 million households, while Fox Business is in about 57 million.)

Still, he said that once viewers found his network, “they have a tendency to stay with us after that.”

Fox Business broke even for the first time in the fiscal year that ended June 30.

“It’s a better channel today than it was 12 months ago,” the News Corporation chief operating officer, Chase Carey, said on a conference call with reporters last week. Among other changes, it has added a program featuring Lou Dobbs at 7 p.m. and a libertarian-oriented talk show, “Freedom Watch,” at 8. Those two hours occasionally outperform CNBC, but during market hours, CNBC is always on top.

Some at CNBC have said they regard Fox Business as another political flavor of Fox News, though Mr. Magee said that notion “has no credibility in the industry other than in the hallways of Englewood Cliffs,” the New Jersey town where CNBC is based.

Nielsen data shows 81 percent of Fox Business viewers also watch Fox News, while 31 percent of CNBC viewers also watch Fox News.

Of course, as the third-biggest channel on all of cable, Fox News is an asset for its little brother — which is why it simulcast Fox Business for two hours on Aug. 7.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=45daf4a455c96225a6264d65e7a560eb

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BSkyB Board Backs James R. Murdoch to Stay as Chairman

July 28, 2011 by Leave a Comment

The board of British Sky Broadcasting, a satellite television company known as BSkyB, discussed James Murdoch’s role “at length” and decided he should keep the job, said a person with direct knowledge of the decision. The board planned to closely monitor developments linked to the phone hacking scandal, said the person, who declined to be identified because the meeting was private.

It was the first time BSkyB’s 14-member board had met since a public and political outcry over phone hacking at The News of the World, the now shuttered tabloid, forced News Corporation, the global media company controlled by James Murdoch’s father, Rupert Murdoch, to withdraw its offer for the rest of BSkyB.

News Corporation owns a 39 percent stake in BSkyB.

The board meeting had been initially scheduled to discuss BSkyB’s annual earnings, which are to be released on Friday, but the phone hacking scandal had obliged it to also address the question of whether James Murdoch should stay on as chairman. James and Rupert Murdoch faced angry questions from British lawmakers this month about how much they knew about phone hacking practices at The News of the World.

Keeping James Murdoch on the board of BSkyB, one of the best-performing and most important parts of News Corporation’s British business, is essential to the Murdoch family’s media empire, some analysts said. James Murdoch runs News Corporation’s European operations, which include the BSkyB stake and News International, the newspaper group that published The News of the World. He is also News Corporation’s deputy chief operating officer.

Pressure on James Murdoch intensified last week when two former News International executives contradicted testimony he had given to a parliamentary committee. The executives said that in 2008 they had made Mr. Murdoch aware of evidence that suggested phone hacking at The News of the World was more widespread. Mr. Murdoch denied he had ever been told that underlying evidence in the case implicated more than one reporter at the tabloid.

James Murdoch became chairman of BSkyB’s board, which also includes three other members who are on the News Corporation’s payroll, at the end of 2007, amid opposition from some institutional investors and pension funds. Some shareholders criticized the election process and said they would have preferred a chairman who was not linked to BSkyB’s biggest shareholder.

Lorna Tilbian, an analyst at Numis Securities in London, said James Murdoch’s support among BSkyB’s board members did not come as a surprise. “He’s done a good job as BSkyB’s chairman, and it’s innocent until proven guilty,” Ms. Tilbian said.

The phone hacking scandal might affect BSkyB in other ways. Ofcom, the British broadcasting regulator, is proceeding with inquiries into whether BSkyB remains “fit and proper” to hold a broadcasting license because of the hacking scandal still unfolding at the News Corporation.

The scandal took a toll on BSkyB’s share price because some investors were concerned that new investigations into phone hacking and bribery allegations could distract management. BSkyB’s shares slumped 16 percent from their peak this month. The shares remained unchanged at 7.2 pounds in London on Thursday.

BSkyB’s board also discussed whether  to either  pay a special dividend or buy back its own shares to compensate BSkyB shareholders, which include News Corporation, for the recent drop in the share price.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/29/world/europe/29bskyb.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Is Hulu Boxed In?

July 23, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Every sitcom. Every drama, documentary, reality show.

All of it — everything — Right Here Now.

This is the radical potential of the Internet. And this is the implicit promise of Hulu, the innovative Web site that drew the original borders of online television — the TV of tomorrow.

Hulu’s stated mission: “Help people find and enjoy the world’s premium video content when, where and how they want it.”

In the space of just four years, Hulu has done just that — to a point. Only now, with its industry in flux and the company up for sale, the divide between what is and what might be seems as daunting as ever.

This is the future of TV? Really? Today you can watch some shows on Hulu in their entirety. But others you can’t watch at all. Most fall somewhere in between — bound by contractual handcuffs that hamper prospective viewers. Making it even more baffling, some episodes are free while others require an $8-a-month subscription.

“It makes catching up on a show or starting a new show very difficult,” complains Marta Garczarczyk, a fund-raiser for a science museum in Minnesota who tried to watch the ABC’s “Cougar Town” and Fox’s “Glee” through the site last season.

Hulu executives largely have their hands tied. Viewers want more shows on more screens. But Hulu’s partners — the big networks — want steady profits. And, for the moment, the networks seem to have the upper hand.

Hulu is a joint venture of NBC Universal, part of Comcast; Fox Entertainment, part of the News Corporation; and ABC, part of Disney. An investment firm, Providence Equity Partners, owns about 10 percent.

Partnerships of rivals rarely last. And so Hulu finds itself on the block this summer. Representatives of Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Apple and others have kicked the tires, although no clear buyer has yet emerged and Hulu has steadfastly declined to comment.

But no matter who ends up spending billions to buy Hulu, the trick will be satisfying viewers. As Jason Kilar, Hulu’s visionary chief executive, put it in a blog post last February, “History has shown that incumbents tend to fight trends that challenge established ways and, in the process, lose focus on what matters most: customers.”

But — through no fault of Mr. Kilar — further limitations on the site’s bounty of free video may be on the horizon. For all the innovation that Hulu represents, the site also lays bare the gulf between what online viewers want and what TV companies are willing to give them.

“Customers always win,” Mr. Kilar has been known to tell his staff.

Maybe. But not always without a fight.

EVEN critics of Hulu concede that this company has accomplished something astonishing. It has helped to free television from the tyranny of the TV set.

For decades, people watched television one way: through a boxy contraption, tied to a schedule set by broadcasters. It was all supported by advertisers and beamed free over the airwaves.

As cable and satellite choices proliferated in the 1980s and 1990s, the business model changed: shows and channels were financed both by advertisers and subscribers. But the TV set and its TV Guide-era schedules still reigned. Not until 2006, when ABC became the first network to stream shows like “Lost” and “Grey’s Anatomy” on the Internet, did television programming truly roam free. A year after that, Hulu began taking mainstream the idea of streaming on TV, computers and cellphones.

The first hint of television’s unbundling actually came back in the 1980s, when viewers snapped up videocassette recorders. For the first time, they could record shows and watch them when they wanted. Once that happened, there was no going back. VCRs paved the way for TiVo and DVD box sets.

Each generation of technology met resistance from some in the television industry, a fact that Mr. Kilar knew at first hand before joining Hulu. While working at Amazon.com in the late 1990s, he wrote the business plan for the company’s VHS and DVD businesses. He witnessed skirmishes with TV studio chiefs who worried that direct sales of shows would damage the Blockbuster rental model. Over time, the studios came to embrace the sales model.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/business/media/hulu-billed-as-tomorrows-tv-looks-boxed-in-today.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Cozy Ties Mark Newspaper’s Dealings With Scotland Yard

July 11, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Detective Cook said the police had evidence that one of The News of the World’s senior editors, Alex Marunchak, had ordered the illegal surveillance as a favor to two suspects in the case: Sid Fillery and Jonathan Rees, private investigators whose firm had done work for the paper. The lawyer for Mr. Cook, Mark Lewis, said in an interview that the detective believed that Mr. Fillery and Mr. Rees were seeking help in gathering evidence about Detective Cook to derail the murder inquiry.

What happened at the meeting, a less detailed account of which appeared in The Guardian, provides a window into the extraordinary coziness that long existed between the British police and The News of The World, as well as the relationship between the paper and unsavory characters in the criminal world.

None of the parties to this alliance have escaped the stain. The paper, at the center of a widening scandal over phone hacking and corruption, was shut last week by News International, its parent company, in an effort to limit the already extensive damage done to the reputation and business interests of Rupert Murdoch, the chairman of News Corporation.

Scotland Yard has admitted that it accepted News International’s explanation that the hacking was the work of one rogue reporter, and that some police officers had accepted substantial payments in exchange for confidential information.

The News of the World remains the target of several criminal investigations. A number of its former editors and reporters have been arrested, including Andy Coulson, who most recently worked as the chief spokesman for Prime Minister David Cameron, but no one has yet been formally charged. And Mr. Cameron has announced he will appoint a judge to examine both the tabloid’s hacking and its close relationship with the police.

Also present for the meeting that day in 2003, said a spokesman for Scotland Yard, were Cmdr. Andy Baker, who was Detective Cook’s boss, and Dick Fedorcio, Scotland Yard’s chief public relations officer. According to an account that Detective Cook provided to Mr. Lewis and others, Ms. Wade excused the surveillance by saying that the paper’s action had been “in the public interest” — the argument British newspapers typically make to justify using underhanded or illegal methods to, say, expose affairs by public officials.

Ms. Wade said that the paper was tailing Detective Cook because it suspected him of having an affair with Jackie Haines, host of the Crimewatch television program on which he had recently appeared. In fact, the two were married to each other, as had been mentioned prominently in an article about them in the popular gossip magazine “Hello!”

Scotland Yard seems to have been satisfied with the explanation of Ms. Wade, now Rebekah Brooks and the chief executive of News International. Her paper’s editors and reporters had a long history with the police — paying for tips and sometimes even serving as quasi-police investigators themselves, in return for confidential information (many News of the World stories about criminal matters used to include a reference to the paper’s handing “a dossier” of its findings to Scotland Yard).

It is the closeness between the paper and the police that, it seems, led Scotland Yard to what officials have retrospectively admitted was a major misstep: the decision not to pursue the initial phone-hacking investigation adequately in 2006 and again in 2009. It was in 2006 that members of the royal household notified the police that they believed their cellphone messages were being intercepted by The News of the World.

The subsequent police “raid” at the paper consisted of rummaging through a single reporter’s desk and failing to question any other reporters or editors. Two people were subsequently jailed: Clive Goodman, The News of the World’s royal reporter, and Glenn Mulcaire, a private investigator hired by the paper. Even when The Guardian reported that the hacking had extended far beyond the pair, and that thousands of victims might be involved, the police and the newspaper insisted repeatedly that the wrongdoing had been limited to a single “rogue” reporter.

This weekend, Assistant Commissioner John Yates, who was in charge of the initial inquiry and who in 2009 declined to reopen it, said that the police response had been inadequate. “I have regrettably said the initial inquiry was a success,” he told The Sunday Telegraph. “Clearly, now it looks very different.”

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=014f67e3dc9823c4699a7f97cc01a990

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Move to Close Newspaper Is Greeted With Suspicion

July 8, 2011 by Leave a Comment

In fact, it may have only fueled the outrage.

An outpouring of suspicion and condemnation came from all directions on Thursday, and was directed chiefly at the News Corporation’s chairman, Rupert Murdoch, a figure as powerful as he is polarizing.

The British media establishment, Facebook and Twitter users and even Mr. Murdoch’s own employees questioned his move. Some said it was a ploy to salvage government approval of the News Corporation’s potentially lucrative controlling stake in the satellite company British Sky Broadcasting, or BSkyB. Others saw it as merely a rebranding.

There are already indications that The News of the World may be reconstituted in some form. People with ties to the company said Thursday that the News Corporation had for some time been examining whether to start a Sunday edition for its other British tabloid, The Sun.

The demise of The News of the World, which publishes only on Sundays, would seem to create the opportunity for that, these people said, speaking anonymously because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

Mr. Murdoch’s News International is the largest national newspaper publisher in Britain, a status that affords him tremendous economic and political influence. In addition to publishing The News of the World and The Sun, News International owns The Times of London, a smaller but more prestigious paper.

The News of the World has a circulation of 2.7 million, a size that gives News International scale with advertisers and a dominance in the market that analysts say Mr. Murdoch is unlikely to want to see diminished.

“Their significant share of the newspaper market is a very important part of their power base in this country — it is essential to their force and clout,” said Claire Enders of Enders Analysis, a media research firm.

The News Corporation is unlikely to walk away from that much power, Ms. Enders added, and it would be wise to examine whether to start a publication similar to The News of the World under a different brand. Not to do so, she said, “would be a very severe business issue in terms of the existing economics of their newspapers, their revenues.”

But others questioned whether The News of the World’s success could be replicated so easily.

“I think they would be very hard pressed to get the Sunday Sun circulation to that level,” said George Brock, head of journalism at City University in London.

A Sunday Sun, he said, “is not likely to be a complete offset.”

Closing The News of the World is likely to benefit the News Corporation in one major way, Mr. Brock noted: It could help tame any threat to the company’s pending purchase of BSkyB.

The News Corporation is also dealing with a flight of advertisers, something that users of social media hoped they could accelerate by creating an online campaign to encourage a boycott of the company.

One Twitter user, Paul Friend, generated a Google document with e-mail addresses of the chief executives of the companies that advertise in the paper. The document was used by hundreds of people who then sent e-mails to executives with their complaints.

By Thursday morning, more than 20 companies said that they would be suspending or re-evaluating their advertising spending with The News of the World.

As the scandal widened this week, social media became an important vehicle for people to voice their discontent.

“The goal was not to shut down the paper,” said Melissa Harrison, a freelance magazine editor whose efforts on Twitter on Monday helped prompt thousands of people to demand that companies withdraw advertising dollars from The News of the World.

“No one wants people to lose their jobs,” Ms. Harrison said. “I think our goal was to voice public outrage. What really happened is that people have found that they have a voice. And News Corp. heard that people have a voice.”

“There is quite a lot of cynicism about what is really happening here,” she said. “It is looking like The Sun will go seven days a week and that everything stays the same.”

Ms. Harrison and a growing chorus of users on Facebook and Twitter are demanding a full accounting of the allegations that executives from The News of the World paid police officers, lied to members of Parliament and hired investigators to listen to voice mail messages left on the cellphones of a murdered girl and the victims of terrorist attacks.

“The idea that he can close the paper and it will all be forgotten is not going to work,” she said. “What we wanted was someone taking responsibility for this behavior, which means a criminal investigation.”

David Babbs, executive director of 38 Degrees, a grass-roots online advocacy group, said that more than 110,000 signatures had been gathered in recent days demanding a full inquiry and that they would be presented to government officials on Friday as a British regulatory agency formally ended its public comment period on the BSkyB deal.

The group is demanding that the government decline Mr. Murdoch’s request for a controlling stake in the satellite company.

“This latest scandal has generated such an outpouring of disgust because it reflects the sheer scale of power that the Murdoch presses have over us, not just our media but our democratic process,” Mr. Babbs said. “The phone hacking is disgusting and disgraceful, but it also reflects the broader way that he has hacked our democratic process.”

The outrage was not limited to people who see Mr. Murdoch as a political threat. Even people on his payroll objected. Employees of The Sun walked out in protest on Thursday evening.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/08/world/europe/08newscorp.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Hacking Scandal Draws In British Government

July 6, 2011 by Leave a Comment

As new and potentially damaging allegations emerged in the scandal,Mr. Cameron went before Parliament and called the phone-hacking “absolutely disgusting.” But he refrained from responding to a taunt by the Labour opposition leader, Ed Miliband, that his relationship with another former News Corporation figure, Andy Coulson, amounted to a “catastrophic error of judgment.”

But, in a departure from previous reluctance by major British parties to challenge Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation — seen as having huge influence here because of its ownership of leading newspapers — Mr. Cameron declared: “We do need to have an inquiry, possibly inquiries, into what has happened.”

A furor has been building in England for months following disclosures that journalists from the News of the World, a mass-circulation Sunday tabloid, hacked into the voicemail 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 a 13-year-old girl who was abducted and murdered in 2002, when Ms. Brooks was its editor.

Additionally, Scotland Yard detectives were also investigating whether the phones of some families of victims of the bombings of three London subway trains and a double-decker bus in July 2005 had also been hacked, according to relatives of the dead.

“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 told Parliament. “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.”

As the catalog of allegations widened on Wednesday, the BBC reported that News International, the News Corporation’s British newspaper division, of which Ms. Brooks is now chief executive, had passed material to the police relating to e-mails that seemed to show that payments made to the police for information had been authorized by Mr. Coulson, a former editor of the News of the World who later became Mr. Cameron’s head of communications.

Mr. Coulson was Ms. Brooks’s deputy at The News of the World in 2002 and later moved into the top editor’s role.

He then joined Mr. Cameron’s staff but resigned in January as questions over the hacking scandal persisted. In his resignation statement, Mr. Coulson reiterated that he had been unaware of the hacking, but said that the scandal had proved too distracting for him to do his job.

During Parliament’s weekly session called Prime Minister’s Questions, Mr. Miliband assailed Mr. Cameron for what he termed a “catastrophic error of judgment by bringing Andy Coulson into the heart of his Downing Street machine.” Mr. Miliband also repeated demands for Ms. Brooks to “consider her position,” in other words, resign. But Mr. Cameron refused to be drawn on either point, prompting Mr. Miliband to say that the British leader “has not shown the leadership necessary” to handle the affair.

Parliament scheduled an extraordinary three-hour debate later on Wednesday to further discuss the matter.

With the scandal broadening this week, switching focus from celebrities to ordinary people seized by tragedy, the allegations seemed to be threatening ever greater financial consequences for News International, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. Ford Motor Company and other companies have suspended advertising in The News of the World while Mr. Miliband renewed demands on Wednesday for the government to delay News Corporation’s proposed acquisition of British Sky Broadcasting, a pay-TV company in which it is already the largest shareholder. Government officials have indicated that they intend to approve the plan, and, in Parliament on Wednesday, Mr. Cameron insisted that the takeover had been handled according to the correct procedures.

The day before, the prime minister 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.”

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.

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

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=40f7f644ef16d410b008baf616a89d3b

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: , ,

Scandal Grows Over Hacking of Girl’s Cell

July 6, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Prominent politicians chastised the company and Ms. Brooks, and Ford Motor Company suspended advertising in The 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 ax 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.

Scotland Yard detectives were also investigating whether the phones of some families of victims of the bombings of three London subway trains and a double-decker bus in July 2005 had also been hacked, The Telegraph reported.

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.

Sarah Lyall reported from London, and Eric Pfanner from Paris.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/06/world/europe/06britain.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Global Business Tagged With: , ,
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