Saturday 24 September 2011

Phone hacking: Andy Coulson sues newspaper group

Former News of the World editor and Downing Street aide Andy Coulson is suing a division of News International after it stopped paying his legal fees over the phone-hacking scandal.
David Cameron's former adviser is taking action against News Group Newspapers, the publishing arm of the media giant and his former employer.
Papers were served at the High Court on Thursday "regarding the termination of the payment for his legal action".

A spokesman for law firm DLA Piper, which represents Mr Coulson, said: "We can confirm that proceedings have been issued."
News International declined to comment. It had been reported earlier this month that News International was paying DLA Piper for their legal advice to Mr Coulson following his arrest.
Mr Coulson resigned from his Downing Street position in January and was later arrested on suspicion of corruption and phone hacking. He is on police bail.
It has also emerged that the family of Jade Goody fear the late celebrity could have had her phone hacked and are reportedly set to contact Scotland Yard. The police force said it would not comment on individual cases.
Publicist Max Clifford told The Guardian that Ms Goody's mother Jackiey Budden also believes she was targeted.
He said: "She will be going to the police. She believes her phone was hacked by the News of the World, and Jade's. Jade told me, 'I'm convinced my phone is being hacked'."
News International also declined to comment on the allegations.

In addition, it has been alleged last night that Neil Wallis, the former deputy editor of News of the World was paid more than £25,000 by News International while working at Scotland Yard as a police consultant.
A Scotland Yard spokesman said that Mr Wallis's contract with the police force included confidentiality, data protection and conflict of interest clauses, all of which would have prohibited him from selling on any information while employed by them.
He added: "Neil Wallis was not provided access to the Metropolitan Police Service's IT systems."
Phil Smith of Tuckers Solicitors, who represent Mr Wallis told the Daily Telegraph they had complained formally to the Met about leaking information about the case.
The Scotland Yard spokesman added: "On Friday, the Met received a letter of complaint from solicitors acting for Neil Wallis. This is being considered."

Earlier yesterday, it was disclosed that action is also set to be launched against News Corporation by American lawyers over phone hacking at News of the World.
Proceedings will be lodged in New York next week in a bid to seek statements from the media giant, according to Mark Lewis, the lawyer for the family of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler.
Mr Lewis, who negotiated a multimillion-pound payout for the Dowler family from News International over hacking claims, said its parent company could also be held responsible for activities at the paper.
"Potentially it has very serious ramifications for News Corporation because the American damages for civil claims are far higher than anything in an English court," Mr Lewis said.
Mr Lewis, of Taylor Hampton, is understood to have instructed Norman Siegel, a New York-based lawyer who represents about 20 families of 9/11 victims.
"The action will be looking at News Corp's liability for action as far as its subsidiaries," Mr Lewis added. "It will raise issues of corporate governance."
The announcement comes days after News International confirmed it was in advanced settlement talks with the parents of Milly over police claims that the 13-year-old's mobile phone was hacked after she went missing.
A total package of around £3 million is being finalised, including a £1 million donation from Rupert Murdoch to charity.
So far 16 people have been arrested on suspicion of phone hacking at the axed tabloid.

By Alastair Jamieson, The Telegraph

Murdoch’s journalists spied on British intelligence chief

London, Sep 24 (IANS) - Journalists from Rupert Murdoch’s News International group spied on the woman chief of Britain’s intelligence agency MI5 to uncover her personal life, a media report said Saturday.
Stella Rimington became director-general of the MI5 in 1992 and retired in 1996. She was the first chief to be named publicly and to have her official photographs released, the Daily Express reported.

The MI5, established in 1909, works for national security, particularly against threats from espionage, terrorism and sabotage, from activities of agents of foreign powers and from actions intended to overthrow parliamentary democracy.
The journalists from The Sunday Times discovered where Rimington shopped and where she held her bank account, she said.
“They’d found out which branch of Marks & Spencer I bought my food at, and they’d even found where my bank account was, too,” Rimington told The Lady magazine.

The journalists told her they could also access her medical records, she said.
News International has declined to comment on her allegations.

by IANS, Thaindian News

Friday 23 September 2011

Phone hacking: Milly Dowler family set for £3 million News International payout

The family of the murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler have been offered £3 million in damages from News International after the publisher of the News of the World admitted her phone had been hacked.
The payout will include a personal £1 million donation to charity from Rupert Murdoch, the News Corporation chief executive and chairman, as well a £2 million settlement directly to the Dowler family.
James Murdoch, the chairman of News International, is understood to have personally approved the offer as the company tries to rebuild its reputation following the scandal which led to the closure of the Sunday tabloid.

Sources close to the negotiations said an initial offer of £1m to the Dowler family and a further £1m to a charity in memory of Milly had been rejected by the Dowlers, and that the final sum would now be £3m, of which £2m will go to the family.
The offer is currently being considered by the family and has yet to be accepted after they had hoped for a payout closer to £3.5m.
Sources also said the £1 million donation will come from Rupert Murdoch personally. It is not yet known which charities are set to benefit.
The settlement is three times the biggest payout to any other victim of phone hacking, but reflects the gravity of the actions of News of the World journalists in accessing the murder victim’s voicemails.
The 13 year-old was still being treated as a missing person when the News of the World arranged for her messages to be intercepted in 2002.
In July, Rupert Murdoch, the head of News International’s parent company, met the Dowler family to make a personal apology to them.
James Murdoch shut down the News of the World as a direct result of the discovery that Milly Dowler’s phone had been hacked. Rebekah Brooks, the chief executive of News International, later resigned.
A News International spokeswoman confirmed on Monday night that it was in “advanced negotiations” with the family about a compensation settlement.
She added: “No final agreement has yet been reached, but we hope to conclude the discussions as quickly as possible.”
Mark Lewis, the solicitor representing the Dowler family, declined to comment on the negotiations, saying only that the final figure would be “substantial”.
By Gordon Rayner, and Andrew Hough, The Telegraph

Wednesday 21 September 2011

Phone Hacking: Met admits it was wrong to use Official Secrets Act against Guardian

The Metropolitan Police has admitted it was wrong when it tried to use the Official Secrets Act to force a national newspaper reporter to reveal their journalistic sources.

Deputy Assistant Commissioner Mark Simmons said today its decision to use the act to demand Guardian journalist Amelia Hill hand over information which would have revealed the source of many of the newspaper’s phone hacking stories was "inappropriate" and "wrong".
"Did we get it right in relation to the Official Secrets Act? No, I admit that," he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme. "After an assessment, we decided the act was not an appropriate element of the application."
When asked whether the force had been heavy-handed in its treatment of the paper, which played a key role in revealing the scandal, he said: "I absolutely acknowledge the role the Guardian played in uncovering the phone-hacking and the Met's response to that, but the more glare on our relationship with the media, the more we do to ensure that public confidence is maintained.
"There is a tension between trying to police our own staff, internally, and their relationship with the media while recognising they have a different set of rules," he said today.
Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger described the Met's climbdown as "the right decision and a huge relief": "I think most people were baffled that the act, which is about espionage and spying, should be used on a reporter going about her daily business," he said.

"However, it is still worrying that Scotland Yard used the word 'gratuitous' to describe the Milly Dowler story, trying to say it was not in the public interest. I think this shows up an odd mindset. To me it's a story that almost defines public interest journalism.
"I just hope that in our effort to clean up some of the worst practices we don't completely overreact and try and clamp down on perfectly normal and applaudable reporting," he said today.
Scotland Yard had intended to take the newspaper to court on Friday in an attempt to force the newspaper into revealing how it obtained information that missing schoolgirl Milly Dowler’s mobile phone had been hacked.
However, following discussions with the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), the force has abandoned its application for production orders against the newspaper.
Various MPs, including the shadow culture secretary Ivan Lewis, questioned the Yard’s attempt. While many national newspapers carried leading articles condemning the Metropolitan Police’s apparent attack on press freedom.

And today the former Attorney General Lord Goldsmith told the Daily Telegraph that the force’s decision to invoke the Official Secrets Act was “unusual” and could threaten press freedom.
The force made the application, which would force the newspaper to hand over material which would identify the source of several phone hacking stories the paper has revealed, on Friday.
But advice from Keir Starmer, the Director of Public Prosecutions, was not sought until Monday afternoon, three days after the application was made. The consent of the DPP is required for most prosecutions under the Official Secrets Act.

The DPP was engaged in discussions with officers from the Metropolitan Police’s professional standards department, the team which made the application for the production order.
Last night a spokesman for the Metropolitan Police said: “The CPS has asked that more information be provided to its lawyers and for appropriate time to consider the matter.
“In addition the Metropolitan Police has taken further legal advice this afternoon and as a result has decided not to pursue, at this time, the application for production orders.”
The order against the Guardian was sought under the police and criminal evidence act, but the application said that potential offences may have been committed under the Official Secrets Act.
A serving detective on Operation Weeting, the Yard’s phone hacking investigation has been arrested on suspicion of leaking information to the newspaper, including the revelation that the missing schoolgirl Milly Dowler’s phone was hacked.
Scotland Yard believe the 51-year-old officer may have breached the Official Secrets Act.
The application for a production order asked that the Guardian, and its reporter Amelia Hill, hand over material which would disclose its sources for the Milly Dowler story and also who provided them with information which allowed it to reveal almost immediately the identities of those arrested in the hacking scandal.
The Scotland yard statement explained that “there was no intention to target journalists or disregard journalists’ obligations to protect their sources.”
But it adds: “It is not acceptable for police officers to leak information about any investigation, let alone one as sensitive and high profile as Operation Weeting.”
The force also did not rule out applying for production orders against the newspaper in the future, saying: “This decision does not mean that the investigation has been concluded. This investigation has always been about establishing whether a police officer has leaked information, and gathering any evidence that proves or disproves that.”
By Josie Ensor and Mark Hughes, The Telegraph

Sunday 18 September 2011

Fox Cuts Murdoch Joke from Emmys

Alec Baldwin has pulled out of Sunday night's Emmy telecast after a joke about News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch and the phone hacking scandal was cut from a segment that he had recorded to open the broadcast. The show is being broadcast by Murdoch's Fox network. "I did a short Emmy pretape a few days ago," Baldwin posted on Twitter. "Now they tell me NewsCorp may cut the funniest line."

Harold Evans: 'Rupert Murdoch is the stiletto, a man of method, a cold-eyed manipulator'

In a new preface to his book, Good Times, Bad Times, the former Sunday Times editor connects the phone-hacking crisis to earlier events at News International.

There is a clear connecting thread between the events I describe in Good Times, Bad Times and the dramas that led so many years later to Rupert Murdoch's "most humble day of my life". I was seated within a few feet of him in London on 19 July 2011, during his testimony to a select committee of MPs with his son James at his side. Not many more than a score of observers were allowed into the small room at parliament's Portcullis House, across the road from the House of Commons and Big Ben. A portcullis is a defensive latticed iron grating hung over the entrance to a fortified castle, the perfect metaphor for News International, which perpetually sees itself as beset by enemies.
Murdoch, as chairman and only begetter of the giant multimedia enterprise News International (NI), was called on to defend his castle and himself as best he could for the outrages of hacking and police bribery inflicted on the British public by his News of the World and the coverup that he and his company conducted over nearly five years. The paper Murdoch most affects to despise, the Guardian, was the instrument of his undoing.
It persisted with the unravelling story almost alone in the face of repeated denials, defamation and threats and the sloppy exonerations of News International by Scotland Yard and the Press Complaints Commission. Among those waiting patiently – one might say humbly – for admission to the Portcullis House committee room was Nick Davies, the backpacking Guardian reporter, who led the paper's investigation courageously sustained by his editor Alan Rusbridger. It was cheering to think of the impetus for good contained in Davies's little notebook as he assiduously scribbled away during the hearing.
Murdoch had begun badly on jetting into London, all smiles in a jaunty panama hat and embracing his ex-editor and CEO Rebekah Brooks whom he called his "first priority"; she was arrested days later. He made his first humbling visit, this one to apologise to the family of Milly Dowler, a missing schoolgirl. They were given brief hope she might be alive when messages on her cell phone were erased. Alas, the erasures were not by Milly, who had been murdered, but by an obscene hacker employed by Murdoch's News of the World to make room for more messages the paper could milk for despicable "exclusives". Murdoch hoped to expunge the memory of that obscenity by expunging the News of the World itself. In 1969 it had been his first acquisition in Britain but the immediate end of 168 years of publication was left to his son James, its chairman.
Observers in the Portcullis room were divided on the efficacy of Murdoch's testimony. Some thought his answers revealed a doddery, amnesiac, jetlagged octogenarian. He cupped his ear occasionally to ask for a question to be repeated; at one moment he referred to the prime minister, David Cameron, when he meant Alastair Campbell, former prime minister Tony Blair's press adviser. Others saw the testimony as a guileful imitation of "junior", the ageing mentor to Tony, the capo in the Sopranos, who feigned slippered incompetence to escape retribution. I thought, on the contrary, that Murdoch was a good witness, more direct than his son James, who unnervingly sported a buzz cut reminiscent of Nixon's chief of staff, Bob Haldeman. His father was as taciturn as James was loquacious. Murdoch père paused to run each answer through his shrewd mental calculations of the legal implications of his own words, occasionally smiting the tabletop in front in a kind of brutal authoritarian emphasis that began to make his wife Wendi Deng distinctly nervous. She leant forward to restrain the militancy.
But Murdoch senior's bluntness had the effect of rendering James's testimony inconsequential. His father's testimony in the Portcullis room had flashes of mordant directness, one of his more engaging qualities. When a committee member referred to the "collective amnesia" of his executives, he riposted, "you mean lying" and he was right. James, the eager mollifier, was too ready to seek refuge in convoluted references to "distinguished outside learned counsel" mixed with patronising explanations for the plebs on how large corporations delegate small details like paying off villains.
In fact, the only telling evidentiary moment in the hearing was the extraction of an admission that News International was still paying said villains. Murdoch père murmured they had to do it by "contract" – hush money to you and me though nobody thought to call it that and nobody, alas, asked to hear the details. Next day, NI announced they would stop the payments. The concession to decency lost impact because on its heels the former editor of the defunct News of the World, and its legal adviser, united to say James was in error when he testified they had never told him that more than one reporter had offended. They persisted in so accusing James when recalled to the committee on 6 September. That was brave, but it would have been wiser to come clean the first time they were questioned instead of sticking to the party line. My own guess is that James, who had been an able leader at BSB, got lost in the intricacies of the coverup.
It was a pity that all the forensic wordplay at the main hearing on 19 July was interrupted by a young anarchist loon behind me with a plastic bag containing a paper plate he'd surreptitiously filled with Burma shave foaming cream just a moment before he bore down to deposit it on Murdoch. The foamer proclaimed his victim to be a "greedy billionaire". Everyone marvelled at the elegant Wendi Murdoch uncoiling with ferocious speed to land a left hook on the assailant. I was impressed, too, but more so by the curious fact that we'd all jumped to our feet while PC Plod lumbered in ("hello, hello, what have we here?"), but Murdoch himself stirred not at all. He sat still, staring straight ahead throughout the assault and the eviction of the press.

Charismatic authority

How much Rupert Murdoch knew and when he knew it may not be pinned down because he exercises what the sociologist Max Weber defined as "charismatic authority" where policy derives from how the leader is perceived by others rather than by instructions or traditions. The concept of charismatic authority as applied to the Murdoch empire may be best understood – as a concept, I emphasise, and not a personal comparison – in the use made of Weber's definition by Sir Ian Kershaw, historian of the Third Reich. Kershaw argues that Hitler was not much absorbed by the day-to-day details of Nazi Germany's domestic policy, but was nonetheless a dominant dictator. Kershaw explains the paradox by adopting the phrase of a Prussian civil servant who said the bureaucrats were always "working towards the Fuhrer". They were forever attempting to win favour by guessing what the boss wanted or might applaud but might well not have asked for. Similarly, in all Murdoch's far-flung enterprises, the question is not whether this or that is a good idea, but "What will Rupert think?". He doesn't have to give direct orders. His executives act like courtiers, working towards what they perceive to be his wishes or might be construed as his wishes. A few examples from the Times follow. They act this way out of of fear, certainly, because executions are so brutal but the fear also reflects a more rational appreciation of the fact that his "wild" gambles so often turn out to be triumphs lesser mortals could not even imagine.
The experiences I describe in Good Times, Bad Times have turned out to be eerily emblematic. The dark and vengeful undertow I sensed and then experienced in the last weeks of my relationship with Murdoch correctly reflected something morally out of joint with the way he ran his company. In the decades that followed my year at the Times, the inside rot was matched only by the menace that came to represent to the civil discourse and the whole political establishment. Prime ministers, Tory and Labour alike, were so scared of blackmail by headline they gave him whatever he asked. In the opening pages here, I recount the political manoeuvres by which he secured a big stake in BSkyB – entering Downing Street by the back door to get Mrs Thatcher to waive the competition law just as she had done for his acquisition of Times Newspapers in 1981.
He has chutzpah like nobody else. Even as the hacking scandal started to erupt in 2007, and full control of Sky was within his grasp, Murdoch was protesting that hacking was "not part of our culture anywhere in the world", when it plainly was part of the culture to anyone who bothered to look. In actions settled out of court in the US, he's had to shell out hundreds of millions of dollars to companies who testified, among much malefactions, that their business secrets were stolen by News America hacking into their password-protected websites. According to court testimony, the executive who presided over the theft, Paul Carlucci, explained to the victims: "I work for a man who wants it all, and doesn't understand anybody telling him he can't have it all." Carlucci was subsequently promoted to publisher of the New York Post.
There is tragedy in the life of Rupert Murdoch. Here is a brilliant man with the vision and determination to challenge the somnolent TV networks in the U.S. and to create a fourth, albeit freighted now with political bias. Here is a newspaper romantic with the strategic nerve to do what no other newspaper management had been able to do, free the British press of the stultifying burden of the corrupt and violent press room unions.

Movie buff

Here is a movie buff who saw immediately the force in director Marty Scorsese's plea to preserve the libraries of great movies decaying on old film – and acted at once at his Fox while other studio managements equivocated. Here is a man capable of personal loyalty to trusted courtiers but of remorseless betrayal when impeded.
The story in Good Times, Bad Times is of Rupert Murdoch at the real beginning of his inexorable rise. Since it was first published in the eighties, there have been many changes in the British media. We celebrated the launch of the first new national newspaper in Britain in the twentieth century, the Independent; that emancipation of journalism from the decadent print unions; and a unique enlargement of the power of the central figure of the story, made possibly only with the complicity of Margaret Thatcher who performed as Murdoch's poodle in 1987 and in 1990, as she did in 1981 and as Cameron was prepared to do before engulfed by his closeness to the principal suspects in the hacking scandals. All these developments in 2011 have their seed in the characters and events described in this book. The Independent, launched in 1986, gained its moral ground (and a good number of its staff) when the Times manifestly abandoned its own political independence as part of the Thatcher-Murdoch relationship that I describe. Paradoxically, the Independent was also nourished at birth by Murdoch's redemptive blow for press freedom early in 1986 when he finally defeated the print unions at Wapping. This triumph, fashioned from the original conception of Today by Eddy Shah in 1984, broke the disruptive power of the chapels and altogether transformed the economics of the British press. The carnivore, as Murdoch aptly put it, liberated the herbivores. Of course, if the print unions had behaved a whit less treacherously and corruptly in the seventies and early eighties, when their anarchy forced out the most enlightened commercial ownership a newspaper group has ever known, Murdoch would never have got his chance to take over Times Newspapers from the Thomson Organisation in the first place. And he would never have succeeded in that chance if the print union leaders had stayed faithful to the staff buy-out we planned with them under the aegis of the former prime minister, James Callaghan. They took Murdoch's shilling and he put them to the sword. It was an equitable sequel.
Murdoch's acquisition of Times Newspapers in 1981, and his ability to manipulate the newspapers after 1982, despite all the guarantees to the contrary to Parliament were crucial elements in building his empire. He lies with such consummate ease and conviction, but he is also remarkably prescient about how politicians will swallow the most gigantic with barely a gulp. At the time I did not know what he was saying privately while he was trying to buy Times Newspapers but it turned out to be spot on both about insouciant cynicism and the attention deficit order of political leaders: "You tell these bloody politicians whatever they want to hear," he said to biographer Thomas Kiernan, "and once the deal is done you don't worry about it. They're not going to chase after you later if they suddenly decide what you said wasn't what they wanted to hear. Otherwise they're made to look bad, and they can't abide that. So they just stick their heads up their asses and wait for the blow to pass."
If Prime Minister David Cameron wishes to demonstrate the sincerity of his new aversion to capitulating to Murdoch he could take this opportunity to insist on enforcing the promises Murdoch made to parliament in 1981 when ministers performed exactly the gymnastic feat Murdoch described.
The ministers responsible for enforcing the law, John Biffen in the first case and Lord Young in the second, fully lived up to Murdoch's classification of politicians as invertebrates. They were both, of course, hardly free agents. At their back they could always hear Boadicea's chariot hurrying near. Whatever the anti-monopoly law might enjoin and the public interest in pluralism might require, Thatcher would tolerate no defence of competition when the would-be press monopolist was her faithful flak. And when he appeared in the role of interloper, as he did with satellite television, she would tolerate no defence of monopoly.
In this case the monopoly was one her own government had approved when the Independent Broadcasting Authority awarded British Satellite Broadcasting the licence from among seven competitors, including Murdoch. The groups owning BSB, having risked hundreds of millions of pounds, discovered their exclusive contract was not worth the paper it was written on the moment Murdoch challenged them. He beamed into Britain his pan-European satellite service, Sky, whose satellite was under Luxembourg ownership, and did it before a fumbling BSB was ready with its satellite. The BSB directors protested to Thatcher and had their ankles bitten: competition was good for them.
Once again, Murdoch was to prove above the law. The cross-ownership regulations provided that a national newspaper could not own more than 20% of any British television company. There was never a prayer that Thatcher would force Murdoch to abandon either medium. In 1990, when he negotiated a merger between Sky and the BSB partners with a 50% stake for himself, the cross-ownership rules made the deal plainly illegal. It was also a clear breach of BSB'S contract with the Independent Broadcasting Authority. The home secretary, David Waddington, conceded the unlawful nature of the merger in parliament. But Murdoch had seen Thatcher privately four days before the deal was announced and once again the fix was in. The government washed its hands of the affair. A murmur of regret that the law could be broken with the prior knowledge of the prime minister might have given a touch of decency to the proceedings, but it would have taken a bolder spirit than Waddington. The Independent pinned down the essential hypocrisy: The fact is that Murdoch employs his media power in the direct service of a political party, which now turns a blind eye to what it has itself depicted in parliament as a breach of the law in which Murdoch is involved. So much for Thatcher's lectures on media bias. In other spheres she endorses the principle that accumulations of power are bad for democracy. Why not in this one?

Political ally

Why not? The reasons for Thatcher's perverse interventions on all matters concerning Murdoch may be more diverse than the simple wish to entrench a political ally. Murdoch is the kind of freebooter she admires; she may have been seduced by his dash, and his contempt for the liberal intelligentsia, into thinking that what is good for Murdoch is good for the country. It would be interesting to know her reasoning, but on her elevation to the Lords she took the title of Lady Amnesia: one searches in vain in her 1993 memoir for any explanation of her contradictory actions, or even a mention of Murdoch.
The period when Murdoch flung himself into the battle against BSB demonstrated the force of his concentrated energy and his relish in gambling for high stakes. It also demonstrated his disdain for independent journalism. His five newspapers, including the Times and Sunday Times, blatantly used their news columns to plug their proprietor's satellite programs and undermine the competitor. It was left to the Financial Times to show that a commercial interest need not entail a sacrifice of integrity. Its owners, the Pearson Group, had a stake in BSB, but the readers would never have known it from the FT's treatment of the news. The FT journalists should have petitioned for the canonisation of their chairman, Lord Blakenham, who in 1987-8 had seen off a bid by Murdoch to add that newspaper to his collection.
The British story has parallels in the United States. When Murdoch bought Metromedia's six big city television stations in 1985, the Federal Communications Commission, with a Reagan-appointed chairman, gave him an unprecedented two-year waiver of cross-ownership rules so that in New York, Chicago and Boston he could run television stations and newspapers.
Nobody, however, could waive for him the requirement, on acquiring a television station, of forsaking Australia and taking American citizenship, but arrangements were made to spare him the egalitarian stress associated with it. Instead of sitting it out for an hour or two with the huddled masses in the courtroom, he emerged from the judge's chambers just before the judge herself.
The secret of Murdoch's power over the politicians is, of course, that he is prepared to use his newspapers to reward them for favours given and destroy them for favours denied. The way the cross-ownership struggles worked out provided an intriguing demonstration of this in 1993. Murdoch hoped that the two-year waiver on cross-ownership agreed with the FCC might become permanent, but in 1987 Senator Edward Kennedy slipped a late-night amendment on an appropriations bill resolution that had the effect of killing the deal. Murdoch had to sell the New York Post, a paper he was loathe to lose. He had never been able to make a success of it, but he valued the political base it gave him.
Kennedy's amendment was defended in the press by committee chairman Senator Ernest Hollings on the high ground: "The airwaves belong to the public. Concentration of media ownership threatens free speech. No man is above the law." But Kennedy's tactic was also widely seen as revenge for his years in the Murdoch pillory: he had been regularly savaged in the Post, the Boston Herald and the supermarket tabloid Star. The Herald was pleased to refer to Kennedy as Fatso. The surprising sequel in 1993 was that this war looked to be over. Who should back Murdoch when he offered to save the bankrupt Post if he could also keep New York's WNYW, part of the Fox network? Kennedy.
Kennedy who had forced him to sell the Post in the first place.
But why? The first clue came the day Murdoch took over the Post. He announced that he had secured an option to buy back the television station in Boston WFXT, and not long afterwards that he was ready to give up the Herald, Kennedy's tormentor.
Allan Sloan surely had it right in his Newsday column: "What we've got here is a your typical winking and nodding mutual-back-scratching deal. If you doubt that Kennedy and Murdoch have come to terms, I've got a bridge I'd love to sell you."
Murdoch had bad times as well as good in the past decade. His record of broken promises was much bruited in 1983-4 when he tried to buy Warner Brothers and failed, and did buy the Chicago Sun-Times. The Chicago deal had echoes of the Times Newspapers sale: a consortium headed by the publisher Jim Hoge was betrayed by its owners, the Field family. Murdoch's chameleon charm was brilliantly deployed in appearing square and safe to Marshall Field and maverick to his racier brother Ted. The Sun-Times journalists were not so biddable. Hoge quit and the columnist Mike Royko crossed the street to the Tribune with the Roykism that no self-respecting dead fish would want to be wrapped in a Murdoch newspaper. It was a sour experience for Murdoch. He sold the paper, profitably, in 1986, after moving into television. He had a happier time acquiring a controlling interest in Fox movie studios and using the former Metromedia television stations to build a fourth national television network with the creative genius of Barry Diller. That was a considerable achievement, but he was spending other people's money like a Master of the Universe. In October 1988 he paid just under $3bn for TV Guide and precipitated his worst time. The man so apt to eviscerate a manager for a minor miscalculation took his company into a debt of more than $7bn that it could not service and did it on the advent of a recession and a credit squeeze. By 1990 his international holding company, News Corporation, was on the brink of bankruptcy. At the same time a Channel 4 television exposé and a subsequent book by Richard Belfield, Christopher Hird and Sharon Kelly stripped away some of the mystique. At a critical time the programme demonstrated how News Corporation, headquartering itself in Australia, had for years concealed its true condition. It had exploited the lax accounting and taxation standards of Australia to create a web of intercompany debt and avoid taxation. Murdoch had seemed unstoppable, but in his 60th year he was obliged to go on a humiliating global roadshow, in the words of Australian Business Monthly, exhorting and pleading with bankers to give him breathing space.
It was touch and go. He had to sell assets, including New York magazine and Premiere in America, he had to launch even more draconian cost-cutting programmes, and he had to dilute his equity below 40%. But Murdoch is no Maxwell, though at that time it was natural to regard the two as tabloid twins.
Maxwell was the meat axe, a muddler, a volatile sentimentalist, a bully and a crook. Murdoch is the stiletto, a man of method, a cold-eyed manipulator. Using all his persuasive talents and powers of concentration, he held on to his newspaper holdings in Britain and to Sky, and to Fox and Channel 5 in the United States, and by 1993 he had bounced back. He was again one of the world's most powerful media barons, and certainly the dominant force in British communications. He controlled Sky Television and HarperCollins publishing, and nearly 33% of national newspaper sales. Somehow he had also convinced the BBC, in the prone personages of Marmaduke Hussey and Michael Checkland, to let Sky have a monopoly of live premier league soccer on television. Both ITV and BBC were bidding high for live premier league soccer (and less for recordings), but the BBC is said to have indicated that its offer to pay for the right to broadcast Match of the Day recordings was confined to an FA deal with Sky. ITV executives could be forgiven for thinking that Murdoch's personal relationship with Hussey – he had made the gesture of keeping him on a consultant at Times Newspapers in 1981 – had as much to do with this debacle as BBC rivalry with ITV. In any event, terrestrial viewers of both BBC and ITV were deprived of the long-time excitement of watching the highest level of the national sport as it happens.
To William Shawcross, who had access to Murdoch for his 1992 biography, nobody should lose any sleep over this accumulation. Shawcross is particularly dismissive of the criticisms I made in the first edition of Good Times, Bad Times, about the conduct of Times Newspapers. "If Murdoch had been running a chemical company and Harold Evans had been a dismissed foreman, his complaints would never have gained such wide currency. Much of the criticism of him [Murdoch] by journalists and media experts has been repetitive and uninteresting." Students of the British class system, on show in the Shawcross lexicon, will be amused to note that I am put in my place as a foreman. It is never to be forgiven that a horny-handed son of toil somehow got to edit The Times. But there are other more important curiosities about this Murdochian statement. The whole point, as the journalist and author Robert Harris remarked in a review in the Independent, is that Murdoch is not running a chemical company, but seeking to become the most powerful disseminator of opinion and entertainment in the world, and a different standard of judgment must apply. Not one of Murdoch's five national newspapers, read by ten million, deviated from his anti-Labour party line in the British general election of 1992, a decisive feature of the bias in the British press whereby the Conservative party can count on 70% of the total circulation of national dailies.
The second curiosity of the Shawcross-Murdoch defence is that he is at pains, here and throughout, to skip over the fundamental issue at Times Newspapers. A newspaper owner who imposes a political policy and fires a recalcitrant editor can invoke his right to do what he will with his property. At Times Newspapers Murdoch had unequivocally forsworn that right.
Parliament, the Thomson Organisation and the Times board would never otherwise have agreed to his purchase. It was the breach of all the guarantees he gave that made the case rather more interesting than Shawcross is willing to concede. How did Murdoch get away with it? How did he? It is an important question about Times Newspapers, but it is one to be asked of many of Murdoch's initiatives. Shawcross objects to the repetitious nature of journalists' complaints about Murdoch, but it never seems to dawn on him that the repetition is produced by a significant repetition in Murdoch's behaviour. He makes solemn promises, then breaks them when it suits him.
He pledges loyalty to people, then double-crosses them. He commits a wrong, but disguises his motives in a smoke trail of disinformation.
There are scores of instances on three continents, but one need only consider the case of William Collins Publishing, which in 1988 so closely followed the parallel at Times Newspapers in 1981-2. In 1981 he had failed in a hostile bid for Collins, but held on to a 19% shareholding that gave him 42% of the voting stock.

Hostile bid

He made a significant promise to Ian Chapman, the Collins chief executive and architect of its fortunes, in the presence of Lord Goodman, representing Murdoch, and of Sir Charles Troughton, deputy chairman of Collins. He swore he would never again make a hostile bid for the company. (He also said that he would not exercise his right to acquire in the market 2% a year of the stock and he didn't.). Collins flourished under Chapman. His good name and his recommendation of Murdoch were decisive in persuading the board of Harper & Row in New York to sell control to Murdoch in 1987. Chapman was rewarded the following year in exactly the same manner other Murdoch benefactors have been rewarded: he was betrayed and traduced. Murdoch broke his pledge of 1981. He made a hostile takeover bid, he suborned Chapman's deputy, and he denounced Chapman's management.
When Chapman and the board resisted, Murdoch charged, in an unpleasant offer document, that staff morale was low and the performance of the core business was bad – charges, as Chapman retorted, that had been manufactured for the bid. The Collins board finally capitulated when Murdoch raised his offer from £290m to £400m and gave the directors promises about the future editorial and management autonomy of Collins, London, and HarperCollins in the United States. These promises, too, were soon forgotten.
The global trail of recidivism was less distinct in 1981, when Murdoch sought to acquire control of the Times and Sunday Times, but I have come to regard the judgments I made then as the worst in my professional career. The first blunder was not to campaign against Murdoch, the second to be tempted from my power base at the Sunday Times where, with a world-class staff behind me, I would have been much harder to assail. My professional vanity was intrigued; I thought I could save the Times. In the event, I did not save anything. Two of the most important newspapers lost their cherished independence.
The anti-Labour bias of the press was given a further twist. A proprietor who had debauched the values of the tabloid press became the dominant figure in quality British journalism.
There was a critical opportunity, as I describe, to block Murdoch in 1981. At five to midnight the Sunday Times journalists chapel were on the verge of applying to the courts for a Writ of Mandamus to force the government into referring the take-overs to the Monopolies Commission; the Fair Trading Act provided that in principle all newspaper takeovers should be referred. If Murdoch had persisted, he would have had to testify publicly about his international dealings, his cross-ownership of media, and his record of promise-keeping. The Thomson Organisation would have had to defend its cooked-up presentation of the Sunday Times as a loss-maker. All the issues which have subsequently become key to the Murdoch question would have been brought into the daylight. The Sunday Times journalists voted down that initiative at the eleventh hour by more than a hundred votes, but the 14 dissenters of the so-called Gravediggers' Club felt the result might have been different if I had given a lead. As editor and chairman of the Sunday Times executive board. I was not a member of the chapel, but I believe they are right in their assessment. I did give the chapel every financial statement I possessed so that they could debate the issue in the crucial meeting and prepare evidence if they decided to go ahead with a Writ of Mandamus, but I did not try to persuade any of them to vote for it.
That was a mistake. Short of sitting in the stocks in Gray's Inn, I do not know what more I can do to acknowledge the error of my ways. I did not then know that the Thomson organisation had given the government a set of figures at variance with those presented to our Times Newspapers board meeting and at variance with the Warburg prospectus in their successful attempt to make the Sunday Times appear a loss-maker. Knowledge of that squalid stratagem might well have changed my attitude even at that late stage. The circumstances are set out in the following pages for the reader to judge. My decision was to resist Murdoch from within rather than challenge him in public. One of the leading Gravediggers, Magnus Linklater, later editor of the Scotsman (1998-1994), has written to say that in my position he would probably have taken the same actions. This is generous. It is, as Maitland remarked, hard for historians to remember that events now past were once in the future. The reasons for the decisions I took seemed good at the time: the determination of the Thomson organisation and especially Gordon Brunton and Denis Hamilton to sell only to Murdoch and to sell the Times and Sunday Times together; the mutual distaste for each other as a body of journalists on the Times and Sunday Times which militated against the Times's editor, William Rees-Mogg, and myself joining forces – as we should have done from the start; the unprecedented editorial guarantees we had secured from Murdoch; the risk of a second choice purchaser closing the Times: the Daily Mail, which bid £8m more than Murdoch, insisted on the freedom to do this. (John Grigg, in his 1993 The History of The Times, says Lord Rothermere confirmed this to him.)
None of these risks was as great as the risk we took with Murdoch. It was not that we trusted him. The outgoing board and both editors thought we had shackled him, locked him in a trunk in an inviolable castle tower, given one key to a group of honourable men and entrusted the other to the highest court in the land, parliament. But Murdoch is the Houdini of agreements. With one bound he was free. His machinations are almost Jacobean in their strategic cunning. How all this occurred and how it seemed at the time are worth describing in detail because it suggests the manner in which institutions are vulnerable when they rest on moral assumptions which a determined, clever man can exploit. My own abrupt and painful severance from the Times is the least of it, though revealing of his methods of defenestration. I was the 12th editor in nearly 200 years. Murdoch is on his 18th editor in thirty: the late Charles Douglas-Home was the 13th, Charles Wilson the 14th, Simon Jenkins the 15th, Peter Stothard the 16th, Robert Thomson the 17th and James Harding the 18th. It would be interesting to know how successive Times editors, with Rupert Murdoch hovering over them on the satellite, have worked out their responsibilities for the once cherished independence of the titles we had so carefully written into the Articles of Association. Andrew Neil at the Sunday Times is the only one who has written an account, in his book suitably titled Full Disclosure. (Robert Thomson 2002-2007 is in charge of Murdoch's the Wall Street Journal and Peter Stothard 1992-2002 of the Times Literary Supplement). I hope all the editors will one day share with us as I share my own experiences with readers of this book.

Organ of Thatcherism

When I first told of the pressures I had resisted, which are described in this book, there was some disbelief. The stance of Murdoch, to judge from his interviews with William Shawcross and "private" briefings during his moves to buy the Wall Street Journal, were that these were fictions of my imagination. It is no pleasure to be vindicated by events. A corporate culture which regards truth as a convenience was bound to prefer a coverup to candor; in this respect the response to the hacking scandal was instinctive. And but for the Guardian's revelation about Milly Dowler it might just have worked as it had worked before given the ample supply of cash and the scarcity of political courage. I had not dreamed up the idea that my principal difficulty with Murdoch was my refusal to turn the paper into an organ of Thatcherism.
That is what the Times became in the 80s. I'd seen many things to praise, and did, but I believed that the independence of the Times required discrimination. No doubt Charles Douglas-Home was more in sympathy with Thatcherism than I was, but a succession of editors struck the identical note and, as Shawcross concedes, Murdoch's voice soon resonated in other editorial opinions designed to appease him. Shawcross mentions "constant sniping criticisms of such Murdoch bêtes noires as the BBC and the British television establishment in general". I had not dreamed up the row I had over insisting on the proper reporting of parliament. Under my successor, who had felt as keenly as I did, the famous parliamentary page and its team disappeared overnight. I had not dreamed up the way Murdoch, under pressure, would subordinate editorial independence to his other commercial interests, as he did when he secretly transferred the corporate ownership of the Times titles and then suggested I suppress the news in the Times itself. In the following decade extraneous commercial pressures became manifest, especially in the reporting of his ambitions for Sky Television and his takeover of Collins. The convictions supposedly animating the crude campaign against the BBC vanished the moment it agreed to a commercial partnership with Murdoch. I had not dreamed up the proprietor's determination to give orders to staff, in breach of the guarantees. It was by his direct instruction that Douglas-Home, soon after becoming editor, dismissed Adrian Hamilton as editor of the business news at the Times. I had not dreamed up the scandal of the eviction of his father, Sir Denis Hamilton, as chairman of Murdoch's national directors; on that gallant man's death, the Times obituary suppressed this entire period of his life. I had not dreamed up the threats to the reputation for accuracy and fairness. When Murdoch lied about the circulation of the Times in my editorship, the Times published the falsehood, and then Douglas-Home refused to publish my letter of response or any form of correction. The same lie was retailed to Shawcross. Douglas-Home suffered a tragically early death, but the truth is that he was the figleaf behind which Murdoch began the rape of the Times as an independent newspaper of unimpeachable integrity.
I am often asked my feelings about Murdoch today. My concerns are professional rather than personal. I have been happily engaged in the United States as an editor, publisher and historian, and when I came across Murdoch socially in New York I found I was without any residual emotional hostility. I share his romantic affection for newspapers. He is for his part agreeable and sometimes vividly amusing. I have to remind myself, as he wheels about the universe of "The Big Deal", that Lucifer is the most arresting character in Milton's Paradise Lost. There are many things to admire: his courage in taking on the unions at Wapping (though not his taste for Stalag Luft architecture), in challenging the big three television networks in the US with a fourth, and altogether in pitting his nerve and vision against timid conventional wisdom. If only these qualities could throughout have been been matched by an understanding of journalistic integrity, he would have been a towering figure indeed rather than, at the climax of his career, having to submit to a grilling by MPs on the most humble day of his life.
I am still in one respect in his debt. On my departure from the Times I became a non-person, and it proved a very happy experience. For years my birthday had been recorded in the Times, a matter I felt more and more to be an intrusion into private grief. After my resignation, my name was left out of the birthdays list. I then came to regard each passing year as not having happened since it had failed to be recorded in the paper of record, and I adjusted my stated age accordingly. More recently my name has been put back in the birthdays list, which is a pity. Perhaps this new edition of Good Times, Bad Times will generate another act of rejuvenation.

The author is editor-at-large at Thomson Reuters.
This is a full version, with changes, of the new preface to Sir Harold Evans's Good Times, Bad Times, published on Monday by Bedford Square Books as an ebook, £4.99 or paperback £13.99. An edited extract appears in Monday's Guardian.

Wednesday 14 September 2011

Now Murdoch Faces U.S. Bombardment

As if Rupert Murdoch did not already have enough turmoil to deal with as his British news unit faces increased scrutiny from police and politicians following the recent phone-hacking scandal, now a significant revolt is developing among some of his chief U.S. shareholders. On Tuesday the shareholders, who include Amalgamated Bank, New Orleans Employees' Retirement System and the Central Laborers Pension Fund, filed suit in Delaware Chancery Court against Murdoch, members of the News Corp board, James and Lachlan Murdoch, and News Corp COO Chase Carey. While the lawsuit mentions the phone-hacking scandal that brought down Murdoch's highly successful London tabloid News of the World , it goes well beyond that headline-grabbing debacle.

It accuses two News Corp subsidiaries in the U.S., News America Marketing and NDS Group, of engaging in "a wide range of anti-competitive behavior." It cites News America's decision to settle lawsuits by rivals for $650 million and points out that News America broke into the computer systems of a rival, Floorgraphics, at least 11 times. Jay Eisenhofer, a lawyer representing the complaining shareholders said that the cases "establish a pattern of misconduct that extends far beyond [the U.K. hacking activity]. It demonstrates a corporate culture that allows this sort of misconduct to take place over a very long period of time." News Corp did not immediately respond to the allegations.

by Contactmusic.com

Claire Enders vs Rupert Murdoch

I'm proud to say that Claire Enders, RDFRS Trustee, wearing a different hat as one of London's leading media analysts, is spearheading an attack on the odious Rupert Murdoch's ambitions to monopolise the British media. Power to her elbow, for Murdoch is one of the most malign influences in the world today.
by Richard Dawkins

Teamsters Call on Sotheby's Board to Oust Murdoch

WASHINGTON, Sept. 14, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- In a letter to Michael Sovern, Sotheby's Independent Chairman of the Board and Chairman of the Board's Nominating Committee, Teamsters General Secretary-Treasurer Tom Keegel urged that James Murdoch be asked to immediately step down as a director of the company.

The letter, sent on behalf of the Teamsters Affiliates Pension Plan, a shareholder of Sotheby's (NYSE: BID), argues that recent developments in the phone-hacking scandal at News Corp (Nasdaq: NWSA) cast doubt over Murdoch's ability to serve as an effective and credible director at Sotheby's. Murdoch has become a central focus of numerous investigations, in the U.S. and abroad, examining the failures of judgment, oversight and accountability that allowed a five-year old hacking scandal to escalate into a full-blown corporate crisis.
The ongoing investigations include a UK judicial inquiry into the extent of unlawful or improper conduct at News International; an investigation by the Commons Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee into the entire scandal; ongoing police investigations in the UK and U.S.; civil actions from alleged hacking victims; various shareholder legal actions; and an internal investigation by News Corp.
Together these lengthy and high-profile probes raise concerns as to how Murdoch will be able to devote the necessary time and energy to the board and serve with the required integrity. Even should these investigations clear Murdoch of misconduct, his relationship with key stakeholders, including the public, regulators, the media, and sections of the investment community, will remain damaged.
It is also not clear if Murdoch brings unique qualities and expertise to the board that could not be found in equal or greater measure elsewhere. 

"He has arguably no experience providing critical, independent oversight, as his business experiences stem entirely from positions within News Corp, or affiliated entities. In essence, the family business," Keegel said.
Sotheby's notorious price-fixing scandal a decade ago resulted in anti-trust convictions for former chairman Alfred Taubman and former CEO Diana Brooks and cost the company hundreds of millions of dollars in fines and settlement costs. These events demonstrated how highly sensitive Sotheby's stock is to reputational risks as Sotheby's shares lost more than half their value in just the short period from Nov. 1999-Feb. 2000. Sotheby's shareholders need to have confidence in the board's ability to rigorously manage risk and oversee management.

"The board has a duty of loyalty to shareholders, not to Mr. Murdoch," Keegel said. "And we believe that a pragmatic response to recent events dictates that James Murdoch should be asked to resign from the board."
Founded in 1903, the Teamsters Union represents more than 1.4 million hardworking men and women in the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico. Visit http://www.teamster.org/ for more information.

SOURCE International Brotherhood of Teamsters
iStockAnalyst

Tuesday 13 September 2011

Hacking MPs recall News International's James Murdoch

James Murdoch is to face more questions from MPs investigating the News of the World (NoW) phone-hacking scandal.

The Commons culture committee has recalled News International's chairman to give evidence. The company said Mr Murdoch would be "happy to appear". It comes after MPs heard conflicting evidence over how much Mr Murdoch knew about the practice at the NoW.

Separately, it has emerged the mother of a 7/7 bombing victim is to pursue a civil case against News International. The case of Sheila Henry, whose son, Christian Small, was killed in the 2005 Russell Square explosion, will be one of six test cases for civil damages claims against News Group Newspapers over phone-hacking claims.

'Happy to appear'
It is not known when Mr Murdoch will appear before the culture committee.
John Whittingdale, its chairman, said the committee wanted to first hear evidence from other witnesses, including former senior News Corporation executive Les Hinton and Mark Lewis, the lawyer representing alleged phone-hacking victims.

A spokesman for News Corp, the parent company of News International, said: "James Murdoch is happy to appear in front of the committee again to answer any further questions members might have."
Earlier this month, former NoW legal manager Tom Crone told MPs he was "certain" he told Mr Murdoch about an email which indicated phone hacking at the paper went beyond one rogue reporter.
Mr Crone said "it was the reason that we had to settle" a case. Former editor Colin Myler also told the committee the email was discussed.
Mr Murdoch, however, has insisted he was not told about the email.

In July, he and his father - Rupert Murdoch, head of News Corp - faced nearly three hours in front of the parliamentary committee, answering questions about what they had done to unravel the scandal at the News of the World.

At the High Court, Mr Justice Vos has been considering applications from a number of alleged phone-hacking victims to decide whose will be heard as test cases in the new year. Earlier, he added that of Sheila Henry to a list including actor Jude Law, MP Chris Bryant, interior designer Kelly Hoppen, sports agent Sky Andrew and ex-footballer Paul Gascoigne.

Other developments to emerge from the High Court hearing include:
  • The family of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler, whose phone was allegedly hacked, have not issued proceedings.
  • Lib Dem MP Simon Hughes issued proceedings against the NoW.
  • Mr Justice Vos, himself, was told the Daily Star had linked him to hacking, but he said he had not been provided with any evidence. "I rarely leave or receive voicemail messages in any case," he told the court.
  • New and significant information has been found at News International.
Scotland Yard is currently investigating claims that reporters hacked into the messages of celebrities and public figures between 2005 and 2006.

BBC News

Sunday 11 September 2011

Murdoch Makes No Retreat From Scandal With Australia Attack

Sept. 12 (Bloomberg) -The phone hacking scandal in the U.K. hasn’t muzzled Rupert Murdoch in his native Australia, where his newspaper empire is doing more than any other to undermine Prime Minister Julia Gillard.

Less than two months ago, Murdoch told the U.K. Parliament that the theft of voicemails by his News of the World made his appearance “the most humble day of my life.” That’s not the way it feels to members of Gillard’s Labor party, who say a drumbeat of criticism by his papers has created a “climate of fear,” according to Australian lawmaker John Murphy.

Murdoch’s Daily Telegraph, the best-selling daily newspaper in Australia’s largest city of Sydney, is “running a campaign on regime change,” according to Communications Minister Stephen Conroy. Gillard herself demanded and got a retraction and apology from the Australian, another daily owned by the billionaire’s News Corp., after it printed a falsehood. She said the Daily Telegraph should enter another report “for one of our fiction prizes.”

“It’s not surprising at all that Murdoch is at it again in Australia while the U.K. phone-hacking scandal is still fresh,” said Tim Bale, a professor of politics at the University of Sussex and the author of “The Conservative Party: From Thatcher to Cameron.” “He tries to use his economic power to get political influence. It’s part of his business model.”

Electoral Record
There is no campaign against the government by News Ltd., the company’s Australian unit, said spokesman Greg Baxter. The 80-year-old Murdoch has long wielded political clout in Australia, where he controls about 70 percent of the newspapers. His papers helped elect every British government over three decades, and no New York mayor has been re-elected without his backing since Murdoch first bought the New York Post in 1976.
The hacking scandal ravaged Murdoch’s reputation in the U.K. Revelations that his News of the World intercepted the voice mails in 2002 of Milly Dowler, a missing British schoolgirl who was found murdered, forced him to close the 168-year-old newspaper. Murdoch bought advertising in his own and competing publications to apologize.
The scandal also led to at least 16 arrests and derailed News Corp.’s plan to acquire complete control of British Sky Broadcasting Group Plc. In the U.S., the Justice Department opened a probe of whether News Corp. employees hacked into the cell-phone accounts of victims of the Sept. 11 attacks.

1953 Start
None of that has subdued New York-based News Corp.’s 120 metropolitan, regional and rural newspapers in Australia, an empire Murdoch built after he took control of the business and began running a daily in Adelaide in 1953 following his father’s death. The company also holds 25 percent of Foxtel, Australia’s biggest pay television operator.
Bloomberg News parent Bloomberg LP competes with News Corp. in providing financial news and information.
News Ltd.’s Herald Sun tabloid, the nation’s best-selling daily newspaper, reported Sept. 2 that unidentified senior figures in Gillard’s Labor party urged her to quit even though the next election isn’t until 2013.
The prime minister responded that she was “not going anywhere” before the next election. Gillard, 49, who became Australia’s first female prime minister 15 months ago, declined to comment for this article.

‘More Emboldened’
“News Ltd. has been more emboldened than other media outlets, and the fact they have the majority of ownership in this country means they will have an impact on the way people think,” said Andrew Hughes, a professor who does research on political branding and marketing at the Australian National University in Canberra. “The Murdoch press has its feet on the throat of a government that’s already on the ropes.”
Baxter, the News Ltd. spokesman, responded to questions on the matter in an e-mailed statement to Bloomberg.
“We have made it clear that the company and its mastheads do not have and are not engaged in any kind of campaign for regime change as has been alleged by members of the government,” Baxter wrote.
Gillard’s approval rating plunged to 23 percent, down 6 percentage points in two weeks, in a survey by Australia’s Newspoll organization published Sept. 6 in the Australian. That was the lowest for a prime minister since 22 percent for Paul Keating in 1993. The poll queried 1,152 voters between Sept. 2 and Sept. 4 and had an error margin of three percentage points.

Snap Meeting
The findings reflect opposition to the prime minister’s proposed carbon tax, according to Hughes. Gillard was dealt another blow on Aug. 31 when the country’s top court ruled that the government couldn’t proceed with a plan to address an influx of refugees by sending asylum-seekers to Malaysia. Gillard plans a previously unscheduled meeting with Labor lawmakers today to discuss how to proceed with refugee policy.
A Nielsen poll published in Fairfax Media Ltd. newspapers today showed a drop in her approval by six points, to 32 percent. The Nielsen survey of 1,400 people had a margin of error of plus or minus 2.6 percentage points and was conducted Sept. 8-10.
Gillard’s standing has also eroded as Australia’s mining boom fuels a rise in the value of the currency, increasing the cost of exports and hurting the country’s ability to compete internationally. The Australian dollar is up 21 percent against the U.S. currency in the past two years. BlueScope Steel Ltd. last month announced plans to cut 1,000 jobs and shut a furnace because of losses related to the currency’s gains and to high raw material costs.

‘Not Great’
“It is clear things are not great for this government,” said Rodney Smith, professor of politics at the University of Sydney and author of the book, “Politics in Australia.” “Labor is already unpopular without any help from News Ltd.”
In last year’s election, Labor lost its majority, forcing Gillard to rule with a minority government. To retain the 76 votes in the House of Representatives needed to hold power, Gillard needs the backing of the 72 Labor seats plus three independents and one Greens party member.
Most of Murdoch’s metropolitan papers, including the Australian and the Daily Telegraph, urged voters to support Tony Abbott’s coalition, consisting of the Liberal party he leads and the National party. In the early-September Newspoll, the Abbott coalition got 50 percent backing, compared with 27 percent for the Gillard government.
Tensions escalated Aug. 29, when the Australian published an opinion piece including false allegations concerning Gillard’s former relationship with a union official. She telephoned the paper to demand a retraction and an apology. The Australian complied that same day and withdrew the article from its website.

Newspaper Apologizes
In a published apology, the paper said that the “assertions are untrue,” that it hadn’t made any attempt to contact Gillard for a response and that it “unreservedly apologizes.” In an article on Sept. 3, the Australian reported on its interactions with Gillard in the matter and quoted Editor-in-Chief Chris Mitchell describing the prime minister as “apoplectic” in her demand for an apology. Gillard declined to answer questions about the conversation.
“There is a climate of fear among my colleagues about retribution from News Ltd. if they campaign for government policies,” said Murphy, the Labor lawmaker, in an interview in Canberra. “News Ltd. has the power to get rid of this Labor government. I have an unshakeable belief in that.”

Switch in Support
Murdoch’s record for holding sway over Australian politics goes back to 1972, when his support helped Labor win. Three years later, he switched his backing to the Liberal party, which took control of the government.
He stepped into New York City politics in 1977, one year after his purchase of the New York Post, with the paper’s endorsement of Ed Koch.
“I would not have been elected if the Post had not endorsed me,” Koch said in a phone interview. When Murdoch called to tell him of the endorsement, “I said ‘You’ve just elected me mayor.’” Koch is a Bloomberg Radio commentator.
In 1979, Murdoch started his streak of supporting winning U.K. prime ministers by endorsing Margaret Thatcher. Politicians have been courting Murdoch ever since. Before he became prime minister, when he was still the opposition leader, Tony Blair, flew to Australia in 1995 to address a meeting of News Corp. executives.
“We have all got to be open about the fact that both front benches spent a lot of time courting Rupert Murdoch,” said Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron in the U.K. House of Commons in July. “This sort of relationship needs to be changed and put on a more healthy basis.”

Phone Hacking
He made the comment as the long-simmering phone hacking scandal erupted. Back in 2007, the News of the World’s former royal reporter, Clive Goodman, and Glenn Mulcaire, a private investigator, were jailed for tapping the mobile phones of prominent people. News Corp. insisted the phone hacking went no further.
Then last year London’s Metropolitan Police reopened the probe after the Guardian and the New York Times reported the practice was more widespread. Among those implicated was former News of the World editor Andy Coulson, Cameron’s communications chief. Coulson quit his government job at the start of this year and was later arrested in the hacking probe.
In July, the Guardian newspaper reported that News of the World journalists in 2002 hacked into the voicemail of Milly Dowler, who had disappeared. The hacking interfered with the police investigation and gave her parents false hope she might be alive. As companies withdrew advertising from the newspaper, Britain’s biggest-selling, News Corp. decided to close it.

Hawke Era
In Australia, Murdoch’s papers have mainly backed the Liberal party since 1975. Even so, their opposition to the Labor party eased from 1983 to 1996, when Bob Hawke and Keating led the country, according to professor Smith at the University of Sydney.
Hawke and Keating fostered stronger links with business and were “very clever” in the way they engaged the media, said Richard Stanton, author of “Do What They Like: The Media in the Australian Election Campaign 2010.” “They pursued an agenda the media couldn’t help but agree with, like economic reform.”
Tom Mockridge, a former adviser to Keating, is now chief executive officer News International, which runs News Corp.’s papers in the U.K.
Gillard has been less skillful than Keating at handling the press, Stanton said. She reversed a pledge before the last election not to enact a carbon tax, he said, then told the public, “you have to like it, and then tried to run an information campaign after the event.”

Australian Editorial
In a Sept. 6 editorial, the Australian said Gillard lacked authority, stemming “from her own inconsistencies and failure to deliver.” Gillard “seems to have expended the little political capital she had,” the newspaper said. “By her own criteria of securing our borders, delivering a mining tax and implementing a climate-change policy, she is without success.”
Murdoch’s papers aren’t the only ones criticizing Gillard and her party. Radio stations and papers owned by Fairfax Media Ltd., Australia’s second-largest newspaper publisher, last month revived allegations first published in 2009 that Craig Thomson, a Labor lawmaker, used a union credit card to pay for prostitutes before he entered parliament.
Gillard has defended Thomson, whose departure would threaten her government’s hold on power. Thomson last month resigned as chairman of the House Economics Committee and said in a statement e-mailed by his media officer, David Gardiner, that he continues to reject claims of wrongdoing.

Fairfax Support
Fairfax’s largest dailies, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age, supported Gillard in the last election.
In the aftermath of the News of the World scandal, Bob Brown, the leader of Australia’s Greens party, called for an inquiry into media concentration, ownership and content. Gillard, who relies on the Greens to maintain a majority in parliament, said July 14 she will discuss the proposal with lawmakers. In May, Brown called Murdoch’s papers “the hate media” because of their reporting on the climate change debate.
Gillard’s government may also toughen privacy laws to give people the statutory right to sue for invasion of privacy, Justice Minister Brendan O’Connor said July 21. The government said it was seeking public comment on a move that may increase compliance costs for media organizations.
Gillard told reporters July 20 that Australians watching “all of that happening overseas with News Corp., are looking at News Ltd. here and wanting to see News Ltd. answer some hard questions.”
In his testimony to the U.K. Parliament in July, Murdoch said he had “never guaranteed anyone the support of my newspapers.” Asked about his meetings with premiers, Murdoch replied: “I wish they would leave me alone.”

So does the Australian lawmaker Murphy.
“Both sides of politics are guilty of courting Murdoch,” he said. “And both are guilty of responding to his overtures.”
--With assistance by Robert Hutton, Simon Thiel and Eddie Buckle in London and Henry Goldman in New York. Editors: Peter Hirschberg, Anne Swardson, Robert Simison
To contact the reporters on this story: Gemma Daley in Canberra at gdaley@bloomberg.net Robert Fenner in Melbourne rfenner@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Peter Hirschberg at phirschberg@bloomberg.net

MurdochAlert identifies the domains that may place users at risk for Murdoch-related hacking.

http://www.anarchiel.com/index.php?URL=https%3A%2F%2Faddons.mozilla.org%2Fen-US%2Ffirefox%2Faddon%2FMurdochAlert-details%2F
About this Add-on
NewsCorp agents in multiple countries have been arrested for hacking into the phones and computers of at least thousands of innocent people. Since the Murdoch famMurdochAlert identifies the domains that may place users at risk for Murdoch-related hackingily controls 100+ high-traffic domains, it is difficult for average users to know which sites could potentially place them at risk.
MurdochAlert identifies the domains that may place users at risk for Murdoch-related hacking. MurdochAlert shows a bottom warning box whenever you visit a Murdoch-controlled sited.
Based on: Greasmonkey script, http://www.anarchiel.com/index.php?URL=http%3A%2F%2Fuserscripts.org%2Fscripts%2Fshow%2F107541
Compiled with: http://www.anarchiel.com/index.php?URL=http%3A%2F%2Farantius.com%2Fmisc%2Fgreasemonkey%2Fscript-compiler

Saturday 10 September 2011

Murdoch’s NY Post Fabricates Statistic to Vilify Green Jobs

by Jill Fitzsimmons, in a Media Matters repost

In an editorial blasting President Obama’s green jobs initiatives, the New York Post falsely claimed that despite significant investments in clean energy, California’s “environmental sector has actually lost jobs, not gained them”:
[T]he Obama administration’s entire green-jobs initiative has been a massive boondoggle.
As The New York Times reported last month, Obama’s grand plan to create 5 million green jobs over 10 years has turned into an enormous “pipe dream.”
In California, for example, the environmental sector has actually lost jobs, not gained them.
Which raises serious questions about this administration’s ability to come up with any kind of plan that will productively address America’s unemployment crisis.
In fact, those job losses refer only to the San Jose metro area, not to the state of California as a whole, which has gained almost 80,000 green jobs since 2003 — a 4.2% annual increase – and leads the nation in the number of clean energy jobs.
Those numbers come from a recent Brookings Institution report assessing green jobs nationally and regionally, which was the subject of the New York Times/Bay Citizen article cited by the New York Post editorial. The Times article has been criticized for cherry-picking information from the Brookings report to paint a misleadingly negative picture of green job growth.
Contrary to the New York Post‘s dismissal of green jobs programs, Brookings found that Recovery Act investments contributed to a surge of growth in the clean economy, despite the recession:

[D]uring the middle of the recession–from 2008 to 2009–the clean economy grew faster than the rest of the economy, expanding at a rate of 8.3 percent. This is likely due, in part, to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), which channeled large sums of public spending towards clean energy projects through much of 2009.
The report further concluded that its analysis “warrants excitement,” adding that “smart policy support,” rather than policy “uncertainties,” will be required in order to make the most of promising clean economy segments:
The measurements, trends, and discussions offered here provide an encouraging but also challenging assessment of the ongoing development of the clean economy in the United States and its regions. In many respects, the analysis warrants excitement. As the nation continues to search for new sources of high-quality growth, the present findings depict a sizable and diverse array of industry segments that is – in key private-sector areas – expanding rapidly at a time of sluggish national growth. With smart policy support, broader, more rapid growth seems possible. At the same time, however, the information presented here is challenging, most notably because the growth of the clean economy has almost certainly been depressed by significant policy problems and uncertainties.
In that sense, what is most challenging here is the fundamental question raised by the dynamic growth but modest size of the most vibrant and promising segments of the clean economy.
That question is: Will the nation marshal the will to make the most of those industries?
The New York Post is not the first conservative media outlet to twist the facts to support its bizarre opposition to American clean energy.
Gateway PunditHot Air and Town Hall gleefully trumpeted the New York Times‘ article as the final nail in the coffin for President Obama’s green jobs efforts. Investor’s Business Daily wrote that “the fact that President Obama’s ‘green jobs’ campaign has been an enormously expensive failure is now so glaringly obvious even the New York Times can’t ignore it any longer.”
And Fox News has repeatedly cited a discredited Spanish study to claim that clean energy investments destroy more jobs than they create.
But whether they like it or not, the Brookings data is further evidence that a robust clean economy is ours for the taking.
– Jill Fitzsimmons, in a Media Matters repost

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Friday 9 September 2011

A black eye? Murdoch must be joking...

Nine years ago Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation withdrew from the German TV market after making a failed investment in the stricken media empire Kirch.
It was, Murdoch said at the time, "a black eye".
Coincidentally, News Corp also lost a lot of money by investing in a US company, Gemstar, which licensed interactive programme guide technology.
Now he describes the News of the World phone hacking scandal as "a major black eye" for News Corp.
A black eye? That wins an award for understatement. The previous black eyes pale in comparison to the effects of hacking, real and potential, on Murdoch's company.
Neither the Kirch and Gemstar mistakes come anywhere close to the continuing crisis that is the hacking scandal. Clearly, he is seeking to imply that it's just another business setback, of relatively little consequence.
But News Corp's share price has yet to recover. The UK division, News International, remains in turmoil. And Murdoch has comprehensively lost his political sway.
Meanwhile, the future of Murdoch's son (and supposed heir), James, is on a knife edge.
He faces recall by a parliamentary committee to explain why his memory of a crucial meeting with the NoW's former legal manager Tom Crone and editor Colin Myler is so different from theirs.
And there are more problems facing James following the publication of an exchange of letters between the paper and its lawyers (see here and here).
Some black eye. Think corporate cancer instead.

The Guardian by Roy Greenslade

Phone hacking: Harbottle & Lewis lawyer 'found no criminal activity'

Lawrence Abramson says brief was 'narrow' and did not involve discussions about illegal activities
The senior lawyer at the law firm accused by Rupert Murdoch of making "a major mistake" in the News of the World investigation into phone hacking is adamant he did not discover any evidence of criminal activity at the paper.

It is understood that Lawrence Abramson insists the brief handed by News International to Harbottle & Lewis, where he then worked, was "narrow" and did not involve any discussion about illegal activities such as paying police.

The lawyer has told sources that Harbottle & Lewis did not discuss "criminal activity" with the News International executive who had hired the firm and it was "never on the radar".

Harbottle, also lawyers for the Prince of Wales, had been asked to examine about 2,500 internal emails exchanges among staff following claims by the paper's former royal editor, Clive Goodman, that his editor, Andy Coulson, knew about phone hacking and that others on the paper were also involved in the same activity.

It is believed Abramson – who now works at another law firm, Fladgate – is unhappy with reports on Friday claiming he had raised concerns with News International about criminal activities but they had dismissed them. Abramson is a commercial lawyer and would not necessarily have recognised criminal activity in the first instance.

In a letter to the culture, sport and media select committee, Abramson, says he queried about a dozen emails out of the 2,500 looked at by members of his team at Harbottle. The lawyer wanted to know if the emails fell inside his remit.

When he asked News International what he should do about them it was explained to him why these fell outside "the scope of what News International Limited ("News") had instructed Harbottle & Lewis to consider".

News International's former head of legal affairs, Jon Chapman, made similar remarks at the select committee on Tuesday when asked why a dozen emails fell outside the scope of the inquiry.

"If that's a suggestion that there were some that indicated criminal activity other than voicemail interception, I do not think he is trying to say that. I do not really understand that sentence – I have not had the benefit of looking at his evidence," said Chapman.

The Guardian by Lisa O'Carroll

Hacking 'a major black eye' says Murdoch

Rupert Murdoch describes the phone hacking scandal as "a major black eye" for News Corporation and remains humbled.

In the company's annual report, the chairman and chief executive writes:
"As has been widely publicised, our company has received a major black eye from the phone hacking scandal at our News of the World newspaper in the UK. As I said at a parliamentary hearing, this episode has been the most humbling of my career. Let me be clear: the behaviour carried out by some employees of News of the World is unacceptable and does not represent who we are as a company. It went against everything that I stand for."

He concedes that the various investigations and legal cases "could damage our reputation and might impair our ability to conduct our business".
But he says he can "put things right", explaining that News Corp is continuing to co-operate with "the relevant authorities in both the UK and the US".
His letter is positive about News Corp's businesses. He writes: "We are better positioned financially and operationally than we have ever been.
"I realise the current flavour of the day is economic pessimism, and it is clear that Europe in particular is in the midst of a period of extreme volatility.
"However, I am optimistic about the future because I believe that News Corporation... will continue to shape it."

Source: The Australian

HCL admits to deleting more emails for Murdoch

London: Indian IT company HCL has told the British parliamentary committee investigating phone hacking at Rupert Murdoch’s News International that it was asked to delete emails for the company on 13 occasions, four more than it had previously revealed.

The company wrote to the Home Affairs Select Committee to update testimony it had provided in August. The deletions affected thousands of emails over 19 months, from December 2009 to June 2011.
One of the four requests was to delete messages “from an inbox of a user who had not accessed his email account for eight years”.

Committee chairman Keith Vaz said: “The request for deletion of folders and emails by News International is concerning.”

James Murdoch and Rupert Murdoch at the hearing. Rupert Murdoch's wife Wendy Murdoch is seen in the background. AFP
United front crumbles at News International
The committee continues to try to find out what James Murdoch knew and when he knew it in terms of allegations of phone hacking at the News of the World, the newspaper his father closed in July as the crisis spiralled out of control.
Two News International executives contradicted James Murdoch when he said he had no knowledge that phone hacking went beyond disgraced former News of the World Royals reporter Clive Goodman.
News International’s former top lawyer, Tom Crone, and former News of the World editor, Colin Myler, had said that James Murdoch was “mistaken” when he told MP s that he had not been told of an email that phone hacking went beyond Goodman and was openly discussed at editorial meetings. That landed them in front of the committee.
However, in the hearing room, they stopped short of really sticking it to Murdoch. Crone said that he was certain that he had told Murdoch about the email, but neither Crone nor Myler said that they had actually shown the email to their former boss.
They denied that Goodman was paid a quarter of a million pounds after prison to buy his silence. They said the payment came was done out of “compassion”.

Conservative MP Louise Mensch said, “It’s as clear as mud.”

What is clear is that the united front is cracking at News International. As Cahal Milmo wrote in The Independent: “At times yesterday the only sound coming out of the Wilson Room in the Palace of Westminster was the thunk of the buck being passed between senior figures who once ran Rupert Murdoch’s British newspaper empire.”
James Murdoch defended his earlier testimony, saying it was an “an accurate account of events”. While Crone and Myler didn’t deliver the blow to Murdoch as some expected, it still increased the chances that he will be called back before the committee.
More details are coming out from the hearings, but while we might know more, it’s adding up to less.

Firstpost Technologie by Kevin Anderson

Wednesday 7 September 2011

Murdoch's London lawyers study new bribery law

(Reuters) - Lawyers for Rupert Murdoch's UK newspaper arm have begun an examination of its responsibilities under a new British law intended to crack down on bribery, Reuters has learned.

Two people briefed on internal matters at News Corp's News International unit said the bribery law review is being conducted by London-based Allen & Overy.
Lawyers from the firm have been acting as News International's in-house counsel since the departures of the publisher's previous staff lawyers earlier this summer during public uproar over questionable reporting practices at the company's now-shuttered News of the World.

One of the sources said that Allen & Overy's assignment would be to look at the publisher's "obligations" under a new British bribery statute which became law on July 1.
According to a description posted on the website of Britain's Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the new law is intended to provide a "modern legal framework to combat bribery in the UK and internationally."

The Foreign Office said the new law makes it illegal to offer or receive bribes and to bribe foreign officials. The law also makes it illegal for businesses to fail "to prevent bribery" by people working for them.
The second source briefed on the matter said some senior executives on News International's editorial staff had already been contacted by the lawyers about the bribery issue.
A representative for News International declined to comment.

The examination by Allen & Overy of News International's obligations under the new British bribery law follows the company's acknowledgment last week that another set of outside lawyers are conducting a broad review of reporting practices at the company's three remaining U.K. newspapers: The Sun, a daily tabloid, and two upscale papers, the Times of London and the Sunday Times.

A person briefed on this review said that the main law firm conducting the broad inquiry, Linklaters, was now being assisted by another large London firm, Olswang LLP.
New details of the reporting practices review, which has been under way since at least last month, were described by a source familiar with the review.
The source said selected editorial employees at News International titles had been advised in writing that they will be expected to discuss several issues related to reporting practices with lawyers from Olswang or Linklaters.
These issues include discussion of possible historical and recent use by News International journalists of phone hacking, the employment of private detectives, and details of dealings with police and other government employees.
The Olswang/Linklaters review will also examine the newspapers' use of cash payments, wire transfers and contributions to charity, the source said.
Two sources briefed on the inquiry said that employees who have been notified they will face interviews by Linklaters or Olswang have also been advised that they are not obliged to volunteer any information which would tend to incriminate them in illegal activity.

If a journalist facing an interview fears they have a problem, the company has offered to arrange and pay for independent lawyers to advise the journalist how to proceed.

A company representative also declined to comment on the new details of the broad reporting practices review. Last week, the company confirmed the review's existence, with a spokesperson saying it was "part of a process that started a number of weeks ago."

Reporting by Mark Hosenball; Editing by Tim Dobbyn