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New Arrest in British Phone Hacking Scandal

December 8, 2011 by Leave a Comment

The arrest, the 18th since a renewed police operation began in January, suggested that investigators may have reached a crucial phase in a case that has raised disturbing questions about Britain’s freewheeling tabloid press and its relationships with the police, top politicians and even intelligence services.

In 2007, Mr. Mulcaire was jailed for hacking the phones of the British royal family at the behest of a reporter at Mr. Murdoch’s News of the World tabloid. The company insisted that the illegal acts were the work of the investigator and just “one rogue reporter.”

But in July, the scandal exploded after The Guardian disclosed that the tabloid had hacked into the phone of a murdered teenager in 2002, before her body was found. A wave of public outrage prompted three police investigations, a parliamentary panel and a public inquiry centering on accusations that the tabloid sought scoops by intercepting voice mails of newsworthy figures. How much top Murdoch executives knew, and when, remains a central question.

Investigators who have examined the 11,000 pages of Mr. Mulcaire’s meticulous notes on his work for the tabloid that were seized in 2006 say there is evidence that he had received 2,266 requests for interceptions from 28 journalists. The police have said that as many as 5,795 people may have been targeted between 2001 and 2009.

A statement from Scotland Yard said the 41-year-old man, who remained unidentified by the police on Wednesday, was arrested in London at 7 a.m. “on suspicion of conspiring to intercept voice mail messages” and of perverting the course of justice. Mr. Mulcaire’s lawyer, Sarah Webb, declined to comment when reached by telephone shortly after the reports identifying him as the suspect emerged.

The police and government inquiries have uncovered not only widespread phone hacking, but also police bribery and political connections all the way to the prime minister’s office. Two top police officers have been forced to resign. Mr. Murdoch and his son James closed the 168-year-old News of the World, were called before Parliament, and withdrew their $12 billion bid for a British satellite company under public pressure. Prime Minister David Cameron has been questioned over his hiring of a former News of the World editor, Andy Coulson, as his spokesman. Mr. Coulson is among those arrested.

So far, suspects have been released on bail after being questioned, but some, including Mr. Coulson, will face further questioning and perhaps charges.

The arrest came a week after a 31-year-old woman was detained in the same inquiry in the northeast of England. Scotland Yard declined to identify her, but the BBC and other British media identified her as Bethany Usher, a former News of the World reporter who is a lecturer in journalism at Teesside University. In a statement, she denied the hacking allegations.

“I worked for national newspapers between 2005 and 2008, spending two of those years at The News of the World, working largely on the road in the north of England,” Ms. Usher said. “At no time did I work in the Wapping office and I had little contact with other colleagues.” The newspaper’s head office was in Wapping.

“I have never been involved in the interception of telecommunications in any way and strictly adhered to the Press Complaints Commission code of practice,” she added, referring to the regulations of British journalism. “However, I became disillusioned through working with some who saw human suffering simply as fodder to fill pages. As such, I made the decision to find an alternative career.”

In late November, the police announced the arrest of a 52-year-old man, the first in a related investigation into computer hacking. He has not been identified by name, but was granted bail until December.

According to Britain’s Press Association news agency, Scotland Yard detectives are combing through 300 million e-mails from News International, a British media subsidiary of Mr. Murdoch’s News Corporation global empire.

Ravi Somaiya reported from London, and Alan Cowell from Paris.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=b7889569cef3733aa256478d5b8c59aa

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Dow Jones Chief, Who Led Tabloid, Quits Over Hacking

July 16, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Les Hinton, the publisher of The Wall Street Journal since 2007, who oversaw Mr. Murdoch’s British newspaper subsidiary when voice mail hacking by journalists was rampant, and Rebekah Brooks, who has run the British papers since 2009 and become the target of unrelenting public outrage, both resigned in the latest blow to the News Corporation and its besieged chairman.

Mr. Hinton and Ms. Brooks were two of Mr. Murdoch’s closest and most loyal deputies. He was said to be loath to lose either of them, and became convinced that they had to leave only over the last several days, as executives and outside advisers flew in to help manage the crisis from their gleaming granite and glass offices in Wapping, East London.

In arriving at the final decision, Mr. Murdoch was joined by his two sons, James and Lachlan, and Joel I. Klein, a senior News Corporation executive and former New York City Schools chancellor.

The resignations came on a day when Mr. Murdoch made a series of public mea culpas. He wrote a letter to be published in all British newspapers over the weekend acknowledging that the company did not address its problems soon enough. “We are sorry,” it begins.

He also visited the family of a murdered 13-year-old girl, Milly Dowler, whose voice mail was hacked by reporters at The News of the World while she was still listed as missing. According to the Dowler family’s lawyer, Mark Lewis, Mr. Murdoch held his head in his hands and apologized for the actions of his employees, who deleted phone messages after the girl’s mailbox had been filled so they could collect more messages from concerned family members.

Mr. Lewis said that Mr. Murdoch apologized “many times,” and that he was “very humbled, he was very shaken and he was very sincere.”

Whether these actions will do anything to quiet the backlash against the News Corporation is unclear. Mr. Murdoch, Ms. Brooks and James Murdoch, the company’s deputy chief operating officer and Rupert’s younger son, are set to testify next week before Parliament, where they will face questions from politicians who have become suddenly unafraid to publicly condemn the man whose favor they once saw as a key to political victory.

Mr. Murdoch has become an increasingly isolated figure, not only in Britain but within his own company. The departure in recent years of top executives who often provided a counterweight to his famous irascibility and stubbornness has left him surrounded by fewer people who can effectively question his decisions. He initially rejected Ms. Brooks’s offer to resign from News International, his British subsidiary, despite advice to accept it from senior News Corporation executives, said people briefed on the company’s discussions.

Ms. Brooks, who was editor of The News of the World when the abuses began in 2002, repeatedly told the Murdochs that she knew nothing of the hacking and that she would be exonerated when all the facts came out.

In her farewell message, Ms. Brooks acknowledged that she had become a distraction. “The reputation of the company we love so much, as well as the press freedoms we value so highly, are all at risk,” she wrote. “As chief executive of the company, I feel a deep sense of responsibility for the people we have hurt and I want to reiterate how sorry I am for what we now know to have taken place.”

On Friday, former staff members at The News of the World questioned why Ms. Brooks did not resign earlier. “Our paper was sacrificed to save her career, and now she’s gone as well,” one former employee said, requesting anonymity because he did not want to jeopardize his position in severance negotiations following the newspaper’s closing. “Who knows why they’ve chosen to do it now, as she’ll have to appear before the select committee anyway.”

Until Friday, Mr. Hinton had been largely an offstage figure in the scandal. But questions grew about what he knew about the improper practices going on at the newspapers under his watch, even though he has testified twice before Parliament saying that he believed the hacking was limited to one rogue journalist.

Letting Mr. Hinton go was an especially fraught decision for Mr. Murdoch. The two had worked together for 52 years, since Mr. Hinton joined Mr. Murdoch’s first paper, The News of Adelaide in South Australia, when he was 15. Moreover, Mr. Hinton ran The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Murdoch’s most cherished American newspaper.

In a note to his employees, Mr. Hinton said Friday was “a deeply, deeply sad day for me.”

John F. Burns reported from London, and Jeremy W. Peters from New York. Alan Cowell contributed reporting from Paris, and Ravi Somaiya from London.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=e3a6dccab8e830cad56e8cd8dc1be839

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Labour Party Vows to Fight Murdoch’s Bid to Take Over Satellite Company

July 11, 2011 by Leave a Comment

The News Corporation effort to buy the 61 percent of the company it does not already own had been in peril because of the phone-hacking scandal that led to the shutdown this weekend of The News of the World, the tabloid that was one of Mr. Murdoch’s biggest newspapers. Many commentators in Britain saw the closing of the paper as a move to cauterize the phone-hacking crisis and save the bid for the much more profitable company, known as BSkyB.

The Labour Party’s new move against the takeover came as the 80-year-old Mr. Murdoch landed at an airport outside London to take direct control of the crisis that has enveloped his company from executives of News International, News Corporation’s London-based subsidiary.

Apparently keen to emphasize his support for his management team in Britain, officials of News International arranged later in the day for news photographs to be taken of a smiling Mr. Murdoch with his son James, News International’s chairman, and Rebekah Brooks, a former News of the World editor who is the subsidiary’s chief executive. The two have been the focus of much of the public outrage that has been directed at the Murdoch empire in Britain since the long-smoldering phone-hacking scandal re-erupted last week.

Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, announced his intention to force a Commons vote on the takeover on a BBC Sunday morning talk show, saying that he regretted having to take the step but believed that Prime Minister David Cameron had left no other option to bid opponents with his refusal to take steps to halt the takeover. Mr. Cameron has said that his governing coalition of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats is bound by law not to interfere in the regulatory review of the British Sky Broadcasting bid, which has already moved close to clearing the deal.

Under questioning by Andrew Marr, the BBC host, Mr. Miliband denied that he had “declared war on Rupert Murdoch” — who is already Britain’s most powerful media magnate, with a daunting political influence over decades that has led governments in Britain, Labour and Conservative, to seek his favor.

The reluctance of politicians to alienate powerful media barons was acknowledged with unusual candor on Friday by Mr. Cameron, who told a news conference that The News of the World scandal showed the importance of curbing what he called the “cozy” relationship in Britain between the media, politicians and the police. At a news conference, he announced plans for new regulatory controls to eliminate a pattern of unhealthy and potentially unlawful collaboration among them.

Mr. Miliband minced no words in demanding that Mr. Cameron reverse course on the British Sky Broadcasting takeover and instruct the cabinet minister responsible, Jeremy Hunt, the culture secretary, to refer the bid to Britain’s Competition Commission, which has the power to kill the bid by ruling that it would lead to excessive concentration of ownership in Britain’s media.

This spring, Mr. Hunt issued an initial ruling that would spare the bid from scrutiny by the commission, but delayed a final decision pending a mandatory delay to allow for public submissions. On Friday, Mr. Hunt announced that he had received 156,000 submissions and a collective protest with another 100,000 signatures.

Mr. Cameron, Mr. Miliband said, “has got to understand that when the public have seen the disgusting revelations that we have seen this week, the idea that this organization, which has engaged in these terrible practices, should be allowed to take over BSkyB, to get that 100 percent stake, without the criminal investigation having being completed and on the basis of assurances from that self-same organization — frankly, that just won’t wash with the public.”

The Cameron government, with a majority in the Commons and the power to set the chamber’s agenda, could seek to block the Miliband move for a vote on the proposed takeover. But with the phone-hacking scandal roiling the political landscape in Britain like no other event in years, blocking a vote would be a risky move. Signaling a keen sense of the public fury over the phone-hacking and the political price for failing to engage with it, Mr. Cameron has announced plans for two public inquiries into the scandal: one into the hacking itself, and what the prime minister has called the “abysmal failure” of Scotland Yard to investigate it effectively over a five-year period until this year, and another into the “culture, practices and ethics” of British newspapers.

The prime minister’s calculations may be influenced by his coalition partners, the Liberal Democrats, who have declared their own opposition to the takeover, at least until the criminal cases arising from the phone-hacking have been completed.

Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrats’ leader, who is deputy prime minister, and Vince Cable, the Liberal Democrat who is business secretary in the Cameron cabinet, are said to have made their opposition to the bid known to Mr. Cameron in strong terms, and allowing it to go ahead would most likely add to the severe strains between the coalition partners on other issues that have raised doubts as to how long the coalition can survive.

Ravi Somaiya contributed reporting.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=31e5874900ffb308afd8fde79aede744

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