James Murdoch claimed on Friday that U.S. news outlets will be faced with a 'reckoning' after last week's deadly pro-Trump riot at the U.S. Capitol. In an interview with the Financial Times, the 48-year-old blamed 'media property owners' for unleashing 'insidious and uncontrollable forces' with their support of disinformation about the 2020 election. James, the youngest son of billionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch, also claimed that media groups fueled the riot by leading 'a substantial portion' of the public to believe 'a falsehood' about the election. 'The damage is profound,' James said in Friday's interview as he criticized media groups coverage of election fraud. 'The sacking of the Capitol is proof positive that what we thought was dangerous is indeed very, very much so. Those outlets that propagate lies to their audience have unleashed insidious and uncontrollable forces that will be with us for years.' He did not explicitly mention Fox News, whose board includes his father as chairman and older brother Lachlan as CEO, yet was clearly focused on the right-wing cable network that has been criticized for its coverage of President Trump's election fraud claims. 

STOP THE PRESSES; RUPERT MURDOCH ON THE FRONT PAGE (At Least For a Little While)

N.Y. TIMES

HACK ATTACK

The Inside Story of How the Truth Caught Up With Rupert Murdoch

By Nick Davies

Illustrated. 430 pages. Faber and Faber. $27.

There is an emerging subgenre of British nonfiction in which journalists from The Guardian fearlessly recount their own derring-do in David-and-Goliath battles waged against omnipotent state interests in the pursuit of Big Important Truths.

David Leigh’s “WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy” showcased how The Guardian “defied the world’s biggest superpower” and released a torrent of American military and diplomatic secrets. More recently, Luke Harding’s “The Snowden Files” detailed how the “famous newspaper” took on “some of the most powerful people on the planet” to expose the surveillance state.

Now comes Nick Davies, an award-winning special correspondent for The Guardian, with “Hack Attack: The Inside Story of How the Truth Caught Up With Rupert Murdoch.”

This book, too, is a Guardian-centric tale: in this case, about the pivotal role the newspaper played in exposing the British phone-hacking scandal that forced the closure of Mr. Murdoch’s tabloid The News of the World, and cast an unforgiving light on the incestuous ties among the country’s most powerful media conglomerate, the police and the political elite.

 

 

Lawyers who won court orders forcing the disclosure of information that underpinned much of The Guardian’s early reporting on The News of the World’s widespread use of voice mail interception to land front-page “splashes” are supporting characters in this telling. So, too, is Tom Watson, a member of Parliament whose relentless inquiries helped keep the story alive. For their trouble, they found themselves under surveillance, their private lives laid bare in reports commissioned by the News of the World’s parent company, News International. The whistle-blower Sean Hoare risked jail when he became the first former News of the World reporter to go on the record to say that phone hacking was endemic in the newsroom and encouraged by top editors.

That said, if any one person deserves to place himself squarely at the center of this tale, it is Mr. Davies, who spent three years chipping away at a tower of lies, enduring attacks on his credibility and overcoming stonewalling of the first order to produce his account of tabloid criminality and British officialdom’s role in covering it up.

 

 

In 2007, The News of the World’s royal reporter and a private investigator the tabloid employed pleaded guilty to intercepting voice mail left for the royal family. The editor at the time, Andy Coulson, resigned, but he and the company insisted it was an isolated incident involving a rogue reporter. Two years later, Mr. Davies landed several scoops that suggested otherwise, but the rest of the British press didn’t seem to care, even though Mr. Coulson was now the chief spin doctor for Prime Minister David Cameron. Though “a blind man in a dark room could see that these people were lying,” Mr. Davies writes, a Parliamentary inquiry into the matter had produced a whitewash.

Frustrated, Alan Rusbridger, The Guardian’s editor in chief, reached out to Bill Keller, then the executive editor of The New York Times. Send a team of reporters, and do your own investigation, Mr. Rusbridger urged, which is how I came to meet Mr. Davies and his editor a few days later in The Guardian’s offices.

 

“Reporting is not a spectator sport,” Mr. Davies writes in “Hack Attack.” “You can’t sit and wait for the information to present itself like a postman knocking at your door.” Instead, “you have to get in there and make it happen.”

If that meant briefing reporters from another newspaper on everything he had managed to dig up so far, in the hope that they would be able to turn up something new, so be it. (Mr. Davies graciously credits The Times with breaking new ground and reinvigorating the story.)

In the United States, the mainstream news outlets like to portray themselves as observers, content to let events play out without interference. But in Britain, where crusading journalistic campaigns are part of the tradition, it is far more acceptable for reporters to become active participants, with a specific outcome in mind.

 

 

Mr. Davies writes of plotting strategy with lawyers whose clients had been stalked and tormented by The News of the World, of “feeding information” to Labour Party politicians who had “shown signs of wanting to get to the truth,” and even giving evidence to Parliament, all in the name of breaching “Murdoch’s castle” instead of “watching him and his court feasting.” His blow-by-blow approach occasionally bogs down with unnecessary detail about peripheral characters and story lines, and his efforts to protect sources can border on obfuscation. Mr. Davis is at his candid best writing about moments of self-doubt and mistakes made along the way, as when he learns that he most likely got a crucial detail wrong in the story — about the hacking of a murdered schoolgirl’s phone messages — that finally brought The News of the World to its knees.

As Mr. Davies pursues his quarry, readers are introduced to the seamy underside of Fleet Street, a brutally transactional place of “casual treachery” where people volunteer “to sell the secrets of those who most trust them.” Scotland Yard muckety-mucks sit on mountains of phone-hacking evidence, as they are wined and dined by the powerful editors and reporters they are charged with investigating. Bent cops are put on the tabloid’s payroll, while dodgy private eyes, some with criminal pasts, lurk about. Nothing is sacred; medical records, even a person’s precise location at any given moment as determined by cellular tower triangulation technology, can be had for a price. Politicians, fearful of the enormous power wielded by the Murdoch press, cower in corners.

 

It’s journalism noir, and it’s not surprising that last week George Clooney announced that he plans to direct a film version of “Hack Attack.”

Still, Mr. Davies did not get the Hollywood ending he clearly wanted. The News of the World closed, and Mr. Murdoch’s company has been forced to settle hundreds of hacking lawsuits at a cost that, combined with legal fees, could exceed $1 billion. But despite his best efforts, Mr. Davies was unable to prove complicity within the highest echelons of Mr. Murdoch’s empire. Mr. Coulson was convicted, along with reporters and midlevel editors, but Rebekah Brooks, the most senior member of News International to be charged, was acquitted. Mr. Murdoch’s son James once at the center of the scandal, was never charged.

The “brief humbling of Rupert Murdoch seduced us into thinking that we had won a great victory, that truth had caught up with power,” Mr. Davies writes, when, in fact, as “the scandal slipped into the past, the elite simply took back their power, as if we had never challenged it.”

And that, in the end, is the moral of the story. As Mr. Davies puts it, “Power enjoys secrecy, because it increases its scope.” It takes tenacious muckrakers like Mr. Davies to upend that dynamic.

 

Murdoch to Be Questioned After Editor Andy Coulson Found Guilty of Phone Hacking. Previous editor Rebekah Brooks Aquitted.

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.
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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

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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.”