You may or may not know the name "NewsCorp", as in
News Corporation, the international media conglomerate founded by Rupert Murdoch. NewsCorp is most famous in America as the parent corporation of
20th Century FOX and everything under it, the
New York Post, the
Wall Street Journal, and other outlets. As big and famous for being big as NewsCorp is in America, it's basically
the broadcast news agency in the United Kingdom, and owner of a wide host of newspapers and tabloids. Any member of the British government will tell you that Murdoch can make and break political campaigns there, and until recently, NewsCorp was set to become the de facto media company of Britain by buying out
British Sky Broadcasting. But now the deal and possibly the company itself are falling apart under serious government inquiry into a possible of illegal actions by one of the company's tabloids. The story has a disparate elements and moving parts, but the core is what's really breaking out.
The original heart of NewsCorp's trouble began in 2002: Police were searching for 13-year-old Milly Dowler who went missing, and relaunched their search when they noticed someone had been deleting messages from her cell-phone's voicemail account. As an investigation turned out, the voicemail account was
surreptiously accessed by reporters, who deleted messages they had left. Specifically, reporters from
News of the World, a tabloid owned by
News International, a subset of
NewsCorp (Murdoch's entities are not known for their creative naming). As the story goes, the tabloid had taken to hiring private investigators, namely a one Jonathan Rees, to use their essentially illegal skills to obtain personal information for the paper to print in scoops; in exchange,
World used it's resources as journalists to
keep tabs on a police investigation of Rees, helping him evade prosecution. Police have been investigating the paper for years now, and keep turning up new cases of phone-hacking long after the original connection to Rees and others ended, including
celebrities and politicians, and now
recently dead British soldiers, as well as other crimes such as bribing police officers for confidential information.
The editor in chief of
News of the World at the time was Andy Coulson,
resigned from the paper in 2007 after one of the journalists was convicted of the original hacking charges. He went on to become Prime Minister David Cameron's press secretary before resigning in February amid the ongoing investigation. The Parliament has been in an uproar over the appointment before and since, especially in light of the new information. Cameron is doing his best to
stay on the right side of the charges. After Coulson, Murdoch appointed one of his long-time star executives, Rebekah Brooks, to head
World. She was already involved with NewsCorp's British print companies, and is now legally alleged to
have known something about the company's systematic record of breaking the law as early as 2002.
The crux of the legal storm now surrounding NewsCorp boils down to: employees of the company repeatedly and knowingly broke the law in the service of their business; the upper echelon of NewsCorp, especially
World's chief editors, could not have been unaware of these activities, and if they weren't encouraging the illegal activity, they certainly weren't trying to stop it; and that these managers have since the start been uncooperative, and have deliberately waylaid the government's investigations. Each successive inquiry turns up more hanging threads of illegal activity in other areas - British police are now pretty well convinced that
World may not have been the
only arm of company breaking the law, and may not be
limited to the British group.
In the next few days, Scotland Yard will announce who the government intends to file charges against in their
new round of inquiries; Brooks is already on the list, and some members of Parliament are calling for charges on James Murdoch, Rupert's son and head of NewsCorp's overall British division. Depending on what comes out in testimony, Rupert Murdoch himself could be indited, as his fast and furious shell game with NewsCorp's management over the last few years could be construed as a further interference with the legal process. Whatever happens,
News of the World is already closing this week, and investors and advertisers around the world are rapidly breaking from NewsCorp's other media outlets. Maybe most hilariously (to me), is the special legal team Murdoch assembled to defend the company and conduct an "internal investigation". Leading NewsCorp's answer to charges of unlawfully obtaining private communication is American attorney Viet Dinh, George Bush's chief legal architect of the Patriot Act.
This certainly isn't the "end of Fox News" or some such, but is an earthquake in British media and politics. I don't know a damn thing about British politics or law, so I'm hoping somebody over there knows more than I do.
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Topic: Clash of Empires: Britain vs NewsCorp (Read 6498 times)