Murdoch update


The people involved in the Murdoch phone hacking scandal keep falling faster and harder and, as is often the case in such situations, are turning on each other.

  • As I expected, the head of Scotland Yard Sir Paul Stephenson has resigned because of charges that he accepted gifts from Murdoch’s cronies and did not aggressively pursue the hacking case. In his resignation letter he aimed a parting shot at prime minister David Cameron’s close association with former News of the World editor Andy Coulson. Cameron has hit back.
  • The assistant commissioner of Scotland Yard David Yates, who had effectively shut down the original investigation into the hacking claims, has also resigned.
  • Stephenson and Yates and other senior Scotland Yard officers are to be the subjects of yet another inquiry.
  • One of the other senior police officers to be investigated is another former assistant commissioner Andy Hayman who led the original phone hacking investigation in 2006 and later became a columnist for Murdoch’s The Times, another example of the incestuous relationship between the police and News Corp.
  • Sean Hoare, a former News of the World employee who first blew the whistle about rampant phone hacking at that paper and alleged that Andy Coulson, former editor of News of the World and later a close aide and confidante to David Cameron, knew about it all along, has been found dead at his home.
  • News International’s former head Rebekah Brooks has been arrested and is out on bail but will apparently still appear with Rupert and James Murdoch before a parliamentary committee on Tuesday.
  • Prime minister David Cameron has cut short a trip to Africa to return home to help plan the judicial inquiry that he was forced to initiate into the phone hacking.
  • Cameron also said that parliament, which had been due to go on a six-week recess at the end of Tuesday, will likely now come back on Wednesday to debate the scandal.
  • Now in major damage control mode, News Corp has initiated its own internal inquiry into what happened at the News of the World. This is one inquiry we can probably safely ignore.
  • Murdoch is ‘lawyering up’ with some heavy hitters in the US, following reports that the FBI has opened an investigation. The hacking of actor Jude Law’s phone in the US could be a key issue but merely the one that gets the ball rolling. As Felix Salmon points out, there are plenty of other odious News Corp practices in the US that will emerge once the spotlight is turned on them.
  • What is going to really hurt Murdoch is that the stock price of News Corp is sliding globally. Ultimately this is what he really cares about since a low price makes him vulnerable to shareholder anger and the possible ouster of him and his family members.

Things are moving really fast.

Comments

  1. says

    And now with the introduction of Clive Goodman’s explosive letter the phone hacking enquiry begins to take on all the hallmarks of a major scandal, one one perhaps sustantial enough to bring down not just News International (as it undoubtedly should) but the Coalition government as well (as it hopefully might). It seems when Cameron said “We’re all in this together”, he really wasn’t kidding, was he? They’re ALL of them crooked! LOL!

  2. says

    For Murdoch, the most important thing is not the question of whether he should sell the papers he still owns in Britain: the tabloid The Sun, the broadsheet The Times and the Sunday Times. The papers only make up about 5 percent of his company’s total revenues.

    What Murdoch is concerned about is preventing the fire from spreading across the Atlantic from London to the group’s headquarters in New York. What is really at stake is the company Murdoch built, starting with the two local Australian newspapers he inherited from his father almost 60 years ago.He owned $32billion in annual sales.

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