Amid scandal, Murdoch kills off News of the World

JILL LAWLESS, ROBERT BARR

Asso­ci­ated Press

LONDON (AP) — The Mur­doch media empire unex­pect­edly jet­ti­soned the News of the World Thurs­day after a pub­lic back­lash over the ille­gal guer­rilla tac­tics it used to expose the rich, the famous and the royal and remain Britain’s best-selling Sun­day newspaper.

The abrupt deci­sion stunned the paper’s staff of 200, shocked the world’s most com­pet­i­tive news town and ignited spec­u­la­tion that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. plans to rebrand the tabloid under a new name in a bid to pre­vent a phone-hacking scan­dal from wreck­ing its bid for a far more lucra­tive tele­vi­sion deal.

“This Sun­day will be the last issue of the News of the World,” James Mur­doch, son of the media mag­nate, announced in a memo to staff.

Mush­room­ing alle­ga­tions of immoral and crim­i­nal behav­ior at the paper — includ­ing brib­ing police offi­cers for infor­ma­tion, hack­ing into the voice mail of mur­dered school­girls’ fam­i­lies and tar­get­ing the phones of the rel­a­tives of sol­diers killed in Afghanistan and the vic­tims of the Lon­don tran­sit attacks — cast a dark cloud over News Corp.’s multibillion-dollar plan to take full own­er­ship of British Sky Broad­cast­ing, an oper­a­tion far more valu­able than all of Murdoch’s British newspapers.

Faced with grow­ing pub­lic out­rage, polit­i­cal con­dem­na­tion and flee­ing adver­tis­ers, Mur­doch stopped the presses on the 168-year-old news­pa­per, whose lurid scoops have ranged from Sarah Ferguson’s claims she could pro­vide access to ex-husband Prince Andrew to motor rac­ing chief Max Mosley’s pen­chant for sadomasochism.

James Mur­doch said all rev­enue from the final issue, which will carry no ads, would go to “good causes.” The paper has been hem­or­rhag­ing adver­tis­ers since the phone hack­ing scan­dal esca­lated this week, with com­pa­nies includ­ing automak­ers Ford and Vaux­hall, gro­cery chain J. Sains­bury and phar­macy chain Boots pulling ads from the paper.

Police say they are exam­in­ing 4,000 names of peo­ple who may have been tar­geted by the tabloid, which sells about 2.7 mil­lion copies a week.

The paper has acknowl­edged hack­ing into the mes­sages of politi­cians, celebri­ties and royal aides, but main­tained for years the trans­gres­sions were con­fined to a few rogue staff. A reporter and a pri­vate inves­ti­ga­tor work­ing for the paper were jailed for hack­ing in 2007.

But in recent days the alle­ga­tions have expanded to take in the phone mes­sages of 13-year-old Milly Dowler, who dis­ap­peared in 2002 and was later found mur­dered, as well as the fam­i­lies of two other miss­ing schoolgirls.

James Mur­doch said if the alle­ga­tions were true, “it was inhu­man and has no place in our company.”

“Wrong­do­ers turned a good news­room bad,” he said, “and this was not fully under­stood or ade­quately pursued.”

“While we may never be able to make up for dis­tress that has been caused, the right thing to do is for every penny of the cir­cu­la­tion rev­enue we receive this week­end to go to orga­ni­za­tions — many of whom are long-term friends and part­ners — that improve life in Britain and are devoted to treat­ing oth­ers with dig­nity,” he said.

The announce­ment sent shock waves across the British media estab­lish­ment, and among News of the World staff. Fea­tures edi­tor Jules Sten­son said the news was met with gasps and some tears.

“No one had any inkling,” he told reporters out­side the company’s Lon­don head­quar­ters. “There was no lynch mob men­tal­ity, there was just a very shocked accep­tance of the decision.”

Some sus­pected shut­ting the paper was a ploy to sal­vage Murdoch’s British media empire as well as the job of Rebekah Brooks, the trusted chief exec­u­tive of his British news operation.

“News Corp. has taken a bold deci­sion to stop print­ing the News of the World and close the title. Mr. Mur­doch was clearly not will­ing to jeop­ar­dize his bid for BSkyB,” said mar­kets ana­lyst Louise Cooper of BGC Part­ners in Lon­don. “Mur­doch has shown what a bril­liant oper­a­tor he really is.”

Gra­ham Foulkes, whose 22-year-old son David was one of the 52 peo­ple killed in the 2005 Lon­don tran­sit bomb­ings — and who sus­pects his phone may have been hacked — said the paper’s clo­sure was “a cyn­i­cal deci­sion” by Murdoch.

“The only lan­guage (Rupert) Mur­doch speaks is the dol­lar and this must have hit him hard,” Foulkes said.

The 43-year-old Brooks, edi­tor of News of the World at the time of the eaves­drop­ping alle­ga­tions, has main­tained she did not know about it. James Mur­doch said he was “sat­is­fied she nei­ther had knowl­edge of nor directed” the phone hacking.

News Inter­na­tional spokes­woman Daisy Dun­lop denied rumors that The Sun, the News of The World’s sis­ter paper that pub­lishes Mon­day through Sat­ur­day, would now become a seven-day oper­a­tion. Still, she seemed to leave room for fur­ther developments.

“It’s not true at the moment,” she said.

Accord­ing to online records, an unnamed U.K. indi­vid­ual on Tues­day bought up the rights to the domain name “sunonsunday.co.uk.”

For­mer Deputy Prime Min­is­ter John Prescott, one of the tabloid’s alleged hack­ing vic­tims, said clos­ing the paper would not resolve the prob­lems at News International.

“Cut­ting off the arm doesn’t mean to say you’ve solved it,” he said. “There is still the body and the head and the same cul­ture and that’s why there has be a pub­lic inquiry into it. I can­not accept for a moment that at the top of the com­pany, Mr. Mur­doch — and cer­tainly Rebekah Brooks — didn’t know what was going on.”

But Char­lie Beck­ett, direc­tor of the POLIS media insti­tute at the Lon­don School of Eco­nom­ics, said it was a bold move aimed at resolv­ing a sit­u­a­tion that had got out of control.

“This is a fan­tas­ti­cally brave move to try and cleanse every­thing and put a stop to it,” Beck­ett said.

The long-running hack­ing saga exploded Mon­day with the rev­e­la­tion that the News of the World had hacked into Milly Dowler’s voice mail soon after her 2002 dis­ap­pear­ance and deleted some mes­sages, giv­ing her par­ents and police false hope the girl was still alive and ham­per­ing their inves­ti­ga­tion. Her body was dis­cov­ered months later.

Later, news­pa­pers alleged the tabloid obtained the phone num­bers of rel­a­tives of peo­ple killed in the July 7, 2005, ter­ror­ist attacks on London’s tran­sit sys­tem, as well as those tied to two more slain school­girls and the fam­i­lies of sol­diers killed in Afghanistan.

What many saw as an accept­able, if ille­gal, tac­tic used to gather scoops on drug-using celebri­ties, phi­lan­der­ing politi­cians or cheat­ing star ath­letes sud­denly became com­pletely unac­cept­able when miss­ing chil­dren and griev­ing fam­i­lies were targeted.

There is so far no evi­dence the sol­diers’ and bomb vic­tims’ fam­i­lies’ phones were hacked or that the news­pa­per did any­thing ille­gal in obtain­ing their num­bers. Nonethe­less, a storm of out­rage followed.

The scan­dal has come uncom­fort­ably close to Prime Min­is­ter David Cameron, who, like pre­de­ces­sors Gor­don Brown and Tony Blair, courted the pow­er­ful Mur­doch empire whose endorse­ment is con­sid­ered capa­ble of swing­ing elections.

Cameron is friendly with Brooks, and even appointed a for­mer News of the World edi­tor, Andy Coul­son, to be his com­mu­ni­ca­tions chief. Coul­son resigned from the paper after its for­mer royal edi­tor Clive Good­man and pri­vate inves­ti­ga­tor Glenn Mul­caire were jailed for hack­ing into voice mail mes­sages in 2007, but has always insisted he knew noth­ing of the eavesdropping.

In Jan­u­ary, as the hack­ing alle­ga­tions widened, Coul­son resigned from 10 Down­ing St.

The Guardian news­pa­per and the BBC’s “News­night” pro­gram reported late Thurs­day that Coul­son had been told by police that he would be arrested Fri­day and ques­tioned about hack­ing. Sev­eral News of the World jour­nal­ists have already been arrested and quizzed over the alle­ga­tions, but Coul­son would be by far the most senior. No one has been charged since the two con­vic­tions in 2007.

Police declined to com­ment on the reports.

This week Cameron spoke out against the cul­ture of hack­ing at the paper, call­ing for pub­lic inquiries into the News of the World’s behav­ior as well as into the fail­ure of the orig­i­nal Lon­don police inquiry to uncover the extent of the hacking.

“We are no longer talk­ing here about politi­cians and celebri­ties, we are talk­ing about mur­der vic­tims, poten­tially ter­ror­ist vic­tims, hav­ing their phones hacked into,” Cameron said dur­ing an emer­gency debate Wednes­day in the House of Commons.

The Met­ro­pol­i­tan Police force is also fac­ing an inquiry by the police watch­dog over claims its offi­cers took money from the News of the World in exchange for infor­ma­tion. The orig­i­nal police inves­ti­ga­tion into phone hack­ing, shelved after Good­man and Mul­caire were jailed, was reopened ear­lier this year.

Met­ro­pol­i­tan Police Com­mis­sioner Paul Stephen­son said he was “deter­mined” to see any offi­cers who received pay­offs from jour­nal­ists fac­ing crim­i­nal conviction.

Brian Pad­dick, a for­mer senior police com­man­der, told the BBC one jour­nal­ist paid $50,000 (30,000 pounds) for police infor­ma­tion and oth­ers paid cash in envelopes handed over at a drive-thru fast food restau­rant near the News Inter­na­tional headquarters.

Some pay­offs were “jeop­ar­diz­ing seri­ous crim­i­nal inves­ti­ga­tions by giv­ing out con­fi­den­tial infor­ma­tion that could be use­ful to crim­i­nals,” Pad­dick said.

Rupert Mur­doch — a global media titan with news­pa­per, tele­vi­sion, movie and book pub­lish­ing inter­ests in the United States, Britain, Aus­tralia and else­where — is seek­ing to buy full con­trol of broad­caster BSkyB, in which he owns a 39 per­cent share.

His British arm of News Corp. was within reach of gain­ing the British government’s approval to make a bid for BSkyB when the scan­dal exploded, embold­en­ing rivals and crit­ics, who called on the gov­ern­ment to block the takeover.

As the week went on, BSkyB’s share price sank, reflect­ing mar­ket anx­i­eties there might be no takeover bid. On Thurs­day they were down 1.8 per­cent on the Lon­don Stock Exchange.

Shares in News Corp., how­ever, were up 1.6 per­cent after Thursday’s announce­ment, at $18.22 on the Nas­daq index in New York, although they have fallen from above $18.50 since Tuesday.

Cameron’s Conservative-led gov­ern­ment had insisted the News of the World scan­dal had noth­ing to do with a pure com­pe­ti­tion deci­sion, and News Corp. had offered to spin off Sky News as an inde­pen­dent com­pany to allay con­cerns it would have a too-dominant posi­tion in the British news market.

Rupert Mur­doch refused to dis­cuss the sit­u­a­tion Thursday.

“I’m not mak­ing any com­ments,” he said when ambushed by reporters at a con­fer­ence in Sun Val­ley, Idaho.

Posted by AP News on Jul 7 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.