The story is dreadful enough on its own terms, but what makes it even more compelling to a wide swath of Britons is that the disclosure of the Milly Dowler incident is an outgrowth of a larger police investigation into the paper's history of voicemail-hacking, an illegal activity that has resulted in juicy celebrity gossip and thus higher circulation numbers. Most assumed the tactic was limited to the message boxes of celebrities and politicians (and there's a curious acceptance by the British public of the activity when directed against the popular, rich and famous). However, the revelation that ordinary folks at the center of a news story could be similarly intruded upon aroused significant public anger.
Nor is it just the News of the World and Murdoch's empire that are in hot water. Scotland Yard is accused of being unenthusiastic about investigating the News of the World's illegal voicemail access because some of its officers had accepted payments from News International for information. The current investigations (there are two, Operation Weeting and Operation Elveden, the first focusing on the illegal voicemail access and the second on police corruption arising from the News International payments) are the result of enormous political pressure brought to bear on the police by politicians and the public -- pressure arising from stories published by, among others, the Guardian (UK), Channel 4 (UK), and the New York Times.
The story also is a large headache for Prime Minister David Cameron. He had already been criticized for appointing a former News International editor, Andy Coulson, as the Conservative Party's communications chief. Cameron made the appointment in 2007, shortly after Coulson had resigned from News International in the initial wake of the illegal voicemail-access scandal. (At first, the illegal access was thought to have been limited to only a few high-profile subjects, including the royal family.) Cameron's perceived closeness to Murdoch and his media empire, a perception based on more than Coulson's appointment but hardly helped by it, is now an enormous liability as all of Murdoch's media rivals have turned up the heat on the Dowler story.
Finally, what galls a lot of people, especially in the wake of the shutdown of News of the World, is that no one terribly high up in the News International or News Corporation hierarchy has been held responsible. Most criticism has focused on Rebekah Brooks, the current News International CEO who was the News of the World's editor at the time of the illegal voicemail access under investigation, in 2002. (Coulson was her deputy at the paper.) Most observers believe she had to have known about and approved of the illegal voicemail access; however, she denies this. To all appearances, Brooks still retains Rupert Murdoch's confidence.
The story is gossipy in some respects, but it's important because Murdoch's News International owns so many of the UK's major newspapers (including the storied Times of London) and is poised to snap up the part of satellite broadcaster BSkyB (British Sky Broadcasting Group) that it doesn't already own. Indeed, the all-but-done deal is now endangered by the News of the World scandal. News International's newspaper rivals, meanwhile, are using the story to press for increased scrutiny of News International, which they hope will lead to public pressure to rein it (and Rupert Murdoch) in.
I distilled this information from a number of articles I've read about the story. My interest was piqued by a Guardian article I read a few months ago about the apparent police misconduct surrounding the "phone hacking" investigation. Unfortunately, I decided not to blog about the article so I can't provide a link to it. However, by way of compensation, I have plenty of links now.
- An article in The Independent lays out the News International and News Corporation personnel at the center of this scandal, from Rupert Murdoch on down. It's a handy reference piece in case the names start to blur.
- The Guardian first broke the Milly Dowler voicemail-hacking story on 4 July 2011. In it we get an explanation for why some of the voicemails for the girl were deleted:
The messages were deleted by journalists in the first few days after Milly's disappearance in order to free up space for more messages. As a result friends and relatives of Milly concluded wrongly that she might still be alive. Police feared evidence may have been destroyed.
Flabbergasting, and this is only one revelation. Read this article to understand why Britons are up in arms. Some believe that this story convinced James Murdoch to take the drastic step of closing News of the World; see a Guardian analysis of NOTW's closure for more details.
- With regard to the NOTW's closing, The Independent describes Rebekah Brooks' visit to the NOTW to explain the shutdown. To say her reception was frosty would be an understatement.
A NOTW staff member told The Independent that Ms Brooks dodged difficult questions: "She said: 'I am not going to resign because these are unproven allegations,' to which someone replied: 'Well, you closed the paper down over these unproven allegations.'"
Not easy to skirt the charge that you covered your own ass by cutting loose 200 others', is it, Ms. Brooks?
Roy Greenslade in The Guardian, meanwhile, reminded his readers not to get too sentimental about the NOTW's demise.
I know some of the staff. And I know many of them are not guilty of any wrong-doing. However, it's a bit rich to claim integrity while working for a paper that has engaged in the dark arts – entrapment, subterfuge, covert filming, the use of agents provocateur and phone hacking – for the best part of 20 years.
Greenslade cites several instances of "post-2006 iniquities" that flat-out contradict News International's "party line that hacking was confined to 'a few years up to 2006' and involved just 'some' of the staff."
- The Independent has a piece about the possible scuttling by regulators of News Corporation's bid for BSkyB. The "independent regulator and competition authority for the UK communications industries," Ofcom, wants to be kept informed of developments in the police investigation and parliamentary committees. This is hardly the kiss of death for the deal, but it's an obstacle News Corp. would not have anticipated -- until last week, anyway. (Closing News of the World is seen by some as a News Corp. preemptive strike to placate Ofcom.)
That all said, an opinion piece in The Independent notes:
In January, Ofcom recommended that the BSkyB bid should be referred to the Competition Commission. But the Culture Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, decided to allow the company to avoid this referral in return for an agreement to sell off Sky News. It is inconceivable that any other organisation would have been offered such regulatory leeway.
Considering the extremely negative publicity about the Prime Minister's cozy relations with News International, it seems unlikely Cameron's government would interfere further with the regulatory approval process for BSkyB's acquisition. Nevertheless, as the opinion piece shows, such interference would not be unprecedented.
- Another contributing factor to NOTW's shutdown was probably pull-outs by major advertisers, like Ford, as The Independent reported. People were already calling for a boycott of NOTW advertisers, and I can't imagine a significant number of companies would have risked a public-relations firestorm by sticking with the paper. There is no way for a newspaper to survive without advertisers, so NOTW's future was in serious jeopardy anyway.
- A 2010 Guardian article documents an earlier stage of the police investigation into illegal voicemail access. The article says that the Metropolitan Police asked "for any new material the paper holds about phone hacking at the News of the World." The article is no longer current, of course; the reason to read the piece is for the glee the paper shows at leading, not following, the police.
"The fact that three separate news organisations have been able to uncover this story must give you hope that you, too, could got to the bottom of it without too much trouble," [Guardian editor-in-chief Alan] Rusbridger told [Detective Superintendent Dean] Haydon.
Rusbridger's letter to Haydon is sarcastic, even condescending in spots. In light of the police's mishandling of the initial investigation into the illegal voicemail access, perhaps Rusbridger's attitude is justifiable.
- Speaking of that initial investigation, The Independent says that the Times of London, owned by News International,
... will continue to employ the services of Andy Hayman the former senior police officer who led Scotland Yard's original investigation of phone hacking by the News of the World and concluded that there were "perhaps a handful of victims".
"Scotland Yard has since confirmed that more than 4,000 people may have had their phones hacked." That's quite a discrepancy, Mr. Hayman. (The Daily Mail wrote earlier this year that among those whose phones may have been hacked was a police official. How ironic.)
The man who led the apparently mishandled investigation will continue to be employed by an arm of News International. Imagine that. - The Independent reported on Andy Coulson's arrest, which took place Friday morning. The police "arrested [Coulson] by appointment at Lewisham in south London on suspicion of conspiracy to hack voicemails and making corrupt payments to police officers." The article says that News of the World "paid serving police officers around £100,000" between 2003 and 2007, during Coulson's tenure at the paper. Earlier that same morning, the police arrested former News of the World royal editor Clive Goodman. Goodman already served time for illegally accessing the voicemail of Prince William; the new charge against Goodman is for corrupting police officers.
- As for the evidence of payoffs to police, The Guardian reports that News International memos seemingly "acknowledge that the practice of phone hacking was more widespread than previously thought and that police were paid for helping with stories." The Guardian's article is tendentious in spots, but cites a BBC story on the matter which appears to be more restrained and impartial. The BBC story says that the memos -- or rather, as the BBC makes clear, emails -- were found in the custody of a firm of solicitors, Harbottle & Lewis, who had been retained by News International to investigate "whether the illegal actions of Clive Goodman - the News of the World's former royal editor, jailed in 2007 for phone hacking - were known to his News of the World colleagues." Harbottle & Lewis apparently did not address the question of whether anyone other than Goodman actually participated in voicemail hacking.
However, when William Lewis and his fellow News International executives re-acquired those e-mails from Harbottle & Lewis, they found what they perceived to be prima facie evidence that the illegal phone hacking went wider than just the activities of Mr Goodman and that there were potentially illegal payments to the police.
Lewis is general manager of News International; according to the BBC, he "is in charge of News International's clean-up of what went wrong at the News of the World." Essentially, Lewis seems to be in charge of conducting a proper internal investigation, which Harbottle & Lewis increasingly appears not to have done. The obvious inference is that News Corporation sees the writing on the wall and hopes to limit the damage to its reputation by preemptively airing as much of its dirty laundry as possible. Whether this openness will extend to any evidence that implicates either James or Rupert Murdoch, who can say?
- Speaking of evidence, The Independent claims that an unidentified "senior executive" at News International "tried to delete millions of messages that may have included information about the phone-hacking scandal." The article is short on specifics but does include one curious detail:
The Information Commissioner's Office said last month it had closed an investigation into claims that emails had been sent to India and accepted assurances from NI that its archive was intact.
Why, after all the shenanigans in which News International is suspected of engaging, would anyone "accept assurances" from the organization about anything?
- The Independent has a good analysis of the relationship between David Cameron and Rupert Murdoch. It's also a good summary of the tangential Murdoch empire interests that are threatened by this scandal, including the BSkyB acquisition and the reputation of The Wall Street Journal, which currently is headed by Les Hinton. Hinton was News International's executive chairman during the time the illegal voicemail access was ongoing at the News of the World and "was also in overall charge of the first internal investigation into phone hacking," according to the aforementioned list of News Corp. personnel in The Independent. Hinton is suspected either to have botched or to have deliberately whitewashed that first investigation. (See also a Guardian piece giving further details of Hinton's involvement when he was News International's executive chairman.)
The aforementioned Independent analysis also claims:
In fresh developments yesterday, Mr [Andy] Coulson made clear he was standing by his story and would not be made a scapegoat in the crisis. Mrs [Rebekah] Brooks also stood her ground by telling a committee of MPs that she had "no knowledge whatsoever of phone-hacking" during her tenure as editor of the News of the World.
What's the old saying, about rats on a sinking ship turning on one another?
Mr Coulson is understood to be "steaming" with rage that he has been left swinging by News International, specifically by Ms Brooks. When he discovered early last week that emails over police payments had been handed to detectives, he tried to call her – but she failed to respond promptly. While it is not known if she called back later, the failure to pick up the phone straight away to her long-standing friend has caused a potentially explosive rift between two of the power-players at the heart of the crisis.
The Independent also is flogging the idea that
... senior executives could face criminal charges in the US and the UK. Legal experts say that Les Hinton, the publisher of the WSJ, and James Murdoch could potentially face charges under the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) or the UK's Regulation of Investigative Practices Act (RIPA). The US law means executives can be held to account for bribes paid by overseas subsidiaries, while the RIPA makes company officials liable regardless of their direct role in unlawful practices. "Under RIPA, ignorance of what was going on is not a defence," said a legal source.
While Hinton probably would sleep easier if a Fox News-beholden Republican were in the White House, Obama's Justice Department has shown little appetite for taking on what could be construed as partisan investigations. Unless British press and police investigations unearth concrete evidence of high-level News International or News Corp. involvement in either the phone-hacking or police-payoff scandals, neither Hinton nor James Murdoch is likely to face FCPA-based charges.
- In the immediate aftermath of The Guardian's revelations about the illegal access to Milly Dowler's voicemail, and prior to developments like the shuttering of the NOTW and the arrests of Andy Coulson and Clive Goodman, The Independent ran a profile of Rebekah Brooks and her apparently unshakeable bond with Rupert Murdoch.
- The Independent has a sort of FAQ on what developments are likely in the immediate future.
- I've cited a lot of work from The Independent, but I have more respect for the reporting from The Guardian. An analysis entitled, "Phone-hacking scandal: is this the tipping point for Murdoch's empire?", for instance, is a history of how the unsavory journalistic practices at the News of the World came to be, a look at still-unanswered questions (how did private investigators hired by newspapers find the cellphone numbers of people of interest, for instance?), and a warning that the scandal will envelop other newspapers (possibly including some not owned by News International). The article notes that there is speculation (by whom, is unknown) that the same cellphone voicemail access tactic might have been used in the U.S. If true, this would open up additional possibilities for criminal prosecution that might not be entirely at the discretion of the discreet-to-a-fault U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder.
The article covers a lot of ground, and even though a lot of what it discusses is pure speculation, it's terrific food for thought. - The Spectator's Peter Oborne opines that the British press as a whole ignored the crisis, to its shame, with the sole exception of The Guardian.
By minimising these stories, media groups are coming dangerously close to making a very significant statement: they are essentially part of the same bent system as News International and complicit in its criminality. At heart this is a story about the failure of the British system, which relies on a series of checks and balances to prevent high-level corruption. Each one of them has failed: parliament because MPs [Members of Parliament] feel intimidated by the power of newspapers to expose and destroy them; and opposition, because Ed Miliband lacked the moral imagination to escape the News International mindset — until he was forced to confront it all by the sheer horror of the Milly Dowler episode.
Be it remembered that Ed Miliband is the robot politico who gave essentially the same answer six times in the course of an interview.
On the subject of ignoring this story, the Columbia Journalism Review ran a feature article in its May/June 2011 issue by Archie Bland, a writer for The Independent. The piece, a long analysis of the British press's failure to acknowledge the phone-hacking story until recently, was republished by CJR in light of the NOTW shutdown. Bland ties together much of the history I've been trying to summarize in a very readable way, and provides a lot of context that's missing from the other articles I've cited. - CJR also has put forth the most compelling speculation I've seen as to why Rupert Murdoch is standing so firmly behind Rebekah Brooks. In an article entitled, "What Damage Could Rebekah Brooks Do to News Corp.?", Felix Salmon writes:
One thing that’s undeniably true about the troika of Les Hinton, Rebekah Brooks, and James Murdoch — and Rupert Murdoch himself, for that matter — is that all of them are extremely smart and capable executives. I personally believe that all of them knew about the hacking and the bribery — and it’s also fair to assume that if Hinton or Brooks were fired and decided to tell everything to the police, they could do enough damage to the Murdochs that News Corp. might easily be declared not fit and proper to own a media company in the UK. (There is some precedent for former Murdoch editors telling expensive tales out of school; think of Judith Regan.)
Salmon's conclusion: "it’s easy to see one reason why Rebekah Brooks might still have her job: News wants her on the inside, working for them, rather than on the outside, turning witness against them. And the same goes for Les Hinton, too."
This story is still being unraveled, and it promises to be explosive.
[UPDATE: Nowhere did I explain that News International is "a British newspaper publisher owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation," according to Wikipedia.]
[UPDATE: Another significant contributor to public anger over the illegal voicemail-access tactic were revelations that families of terrorist attack victims and dead soldiers might have been phone-hacking targets. A 5 July 2011 Daily Telegraph article alleged that the names or phone numbers of families of victims of the 7 July 2005 London subway bombings had come up as part of the ongoing illegal voicemail access investigation. Two days later, the Daily Telegraph reported that "the personal details of the families of servicemen who died on the front line have been found in the files of Glenn Mulcaire, the private detective working for the Sunday tabloid [News of the World]."]
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