DAILY BEAST
Andy Coulson [above] has been found guilty of phone hacking while he was a senior executive in Rupert Murdoch’s media empire.
The former editor of the now-defunct News of the World conspired to intercept voicemail messages of public figures between 2000 and 2006. Rebekah Brooks, a previous editor of the tabloid, was found not guilty on all charges.
The phone hacking scandal has gripped the British establishment for years as the relationships between senior media figures, politicians and the police force were placed under unprecedented scrutiny. The guilty verdict at the Old Bailey in London is a blow to Murdoch and Prime Minister David Cameron who hired Coulson as his chief communications advisor.
Cameron is expected to make a formal apology this morning for inviting the former editor of Britain’s most notorious tabloid into Downing Street despite the allegations against him having already been made public. The Conservative prime minister said he had believed Coulson’s claims that he knew nothing about the hacking that had gone on at his newspaper. “If it turns out I have been lied to, that would be a moment for a profound apology,” he told the House of Commons in 2011.
The court heard that the News of the World, formerly Murdoch’s biggest-selling newspaper, had listened in to the voicemail messages of Prince William and Kate Middleton, actors like Daniel Craig and Angelina Jolie, senior political figures including the deputy prime minister, and victims of crime including Milly Dowler, who was murdered at the age of 13.
--------------------------------------------------------------
 |
| Photograph: Adrian Sanchez-Gonzalez/AFP/Getty Images |
THE GUARDIAN
Rupert Murdoch has been officially informed by Scotland Yard that detectives want to interview him as a suspect as part of their inquiry into allegations of crime at his British newspapers.
It is understood that detectives first contacted Murdoch last year to arrange to question him but agreed to a request from his lawyers to wait until the phone-hacking trial was finished.
The interview is expected to take place in the near future in the UK and will be conducted "under caution", the legal warning given to suspects. His son James, who was the executive chairman of News International in the UK, may also be questioned.
 |
| Rupert Murdoch with his sons Lachlan, left, and James, right. Photograph: Jason LaVeris/FilmMagic |
N.Y. TIMES
She rose from being a secretary in Rupert Murdoch’s British newspaper empire to running it. She called prime ministers her friends. Then she found herself in the middle of one of the most riveting trials in years, accused of illegally intercepting voice mails and other crimes, alongside her husband and her former deputy, who it turned out, was also her lover.
Mr. Coulson was the only one to be convicted Tuesday...
That single conviction belied the outsize impact of a yearslong saga that produced parliamentary hearings, humbled Mr. Murdoch, led to a new media law and spurred a cleanup of the worst practices in tabloid newsrooms.
The trial embarrassed many in Britain’s media and political establishment, inducing additional political heartburn for Mr. Cameron....Testimony in the trial revealed that former Prime Minister Tony Blair offered to act as an “unofficial adviser” to Ms. Brooks after she was implicated in the case.
Tense and at times tawdry, the trial has also exposed in great detail the inner workings of British tabloid journalism — the six-figure price tags paid for celebrity scoops, the scavenging in trash cans and the systematic eavesdropping on the cellphones of celebrities, sports stars, politicians, members of the royal family and others caught up in the news.
Prosecutors had presented phone data confirming widespread hacking during Mr. Coulson’s editorship of News of the World from 2003 to 2007. There was far less evidence of hacking from 2000 to 2003, when Ms. Brooks was in charge.
The most controversial instance of hacking, however, did occur on her watch, in 2002: News of The World intercepted the voice mail of a kidnapped teenager, Milly Dowler, who was later found dead. When The Guardian disclosed the hacking in 2011, it galvanized public outrage at unscrupulous tabloid practices and helped pave the way to the trial.During the week in question in 2002, however, Ms. Brooks was on vacation and her then-deputy, Mr. Coulson, was in charge. The prosecution failed to persuade the jury that as Mr. Coulson’s boss and on-and-off lover, Ms. Brooks must have known.
 |
| Ms. Brooks and her husband, Charlie. John Phillips/Getty Images |
Ms. Brooks and her husband, Charlie, a racehorse trainer who was also acquitted of charges of hiding evidence (along with his pornography collection) from the police, left the court in a taxi without offering comment....At times Britain’s phone-hacking scandal has felt like a badly scripted television drama, with all its barely believable turns and twists: the father-daughter-like relationship between Mr. Murdoch and Ms. Brooks; her $17.6 million severance payment from News International (since renamed News UK); a steamy love letter to Mr. Coulson that was read in court; and a tabloid-style defense strategy that featured the kind of highly personal revelations for which the tabloids Ms. Brooks once edited might have paid six figures, like the adultery and the daughter she had by a surrogate mother. “My personal life was a bit of a car crash,” she said in the witness stand early on.
The tabloid culture revealed in the trial was one in which paying as much as $240,000 for a single article was deemed justified, if that meant beating rivals, even at other Murdoch papers, to a scoop. In one striking example, News of the World tracked down the prostitute Divine Brown, who had been arrested with the actor Hugh Grant in Los Angeles in 1995, and offered her 100,000 pounds, or about $160,000, for an exclusive. “Hugh Told Me I Was His Sex Fantasy,” the resulting headline read.
The testimony was such that Ms. Brooks is unlikely to fully recover her reputation — and the trial has humbled a once mighty and swaggering tabloid press, regardless of the outcome. Newspapers may become a little more boring, experts said, but at least they appear to stay within the law these days.
“The tabloids have become rather less tabloidy,” said John Lloyd, co-founder of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford. Indeed, given the economics of the industry, he suggested, these changes are unlikely to be reversed. The tabloids, Mr. Lloyd said. “are losing power all the time.”