The "phone-hacking" scandal, 14 July 2011

Belated Happy Bastille Day. They're not quite King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, but Rupert Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks seem to have roused the same angry passions among the common folk.

• Now you won't see them, now you will: Thursday morning, Rupert and James Murdoch declined a House of Commons committee's "polite request" to answer questions next Tuesday (19 July 2011), claiming they were unavailable but offering to appear at other times. Both men later reversed themselves and agreed to appear -- after Members of Parliament started scouring the law books for ways to clap them in irons. Actually, the Commons committee issued summonses after the Murdochs' initial refusals, and a few hours later the Murdochs suddenly announced their schedules were clear.
  
  The committee's work is separate from the formal inquiry Prime Minister David Cameron announced Wednesday into press regulation and the specifics of the News of the World phone-hacking scandal. My limited understanding of the committee's purpose in calling the Murdochs and Rebekah Brooks to testify is, it will be a wonderful opportunity for MPs to fulminate against a much-disliked media baron and his lieutenants while reporters are present.
  
  In previous entries on this scandal, I've written that James Murdoch holds U.S. citizenship, and speculated that British law might be hard to apply to him. It turns out he holds dual citizenship, in Britain and the U.S., so he might well be fully subject to British law.
  
  Here are the various accounts of the Murdochs' about-face:
  
  • the Independent
  • the BBC
  • the Guardian
  • the Daily Mail (I must admit to enjoying the slightly hysterical tone of this piece)
• J. Edgar's boys are testing the water: the F.B.I. has begun an "assessment" -- a prelude to an investigation, if you will -- to look into whether News Corporation journalists tried to find 11 September 2001 attack victims' phone numbers. I suppose the F.B.I. can't ignore a direct request from a member of Congress, namely, Rep. Peter King (R-NY). However, I hope not too much time and money are spent on this assessment for the nonce, since the only evidence adduced so far is an anonymously sourced account in a British tabloid published by a competitor of News International.
  
  Here are the various accounts of the F.B.I. pre-investigation:
  
  • the New York Times
  • the Guardian
  • the Independent
  • the Daily Mail
  • the BBC
• Another former News of the World editor, Neil Wallis, was arrested "on suspicion of conspiring to intercept communications," according to one of the Guardian's articles on the subject. In an embarrassing turn of events, it was revealed that Wallis was paid as a public-relations advisor to the Metropolitan Police (the "Met") "during a period when the Yard rejected calls for the reopening of a criminal investigation into the interception of voicemails," according to another Guardian article.
  
  Read all the linked articles: each paper throws in different, wonderful details.
  
  • the Guardian's article on the arrest
  • the Guardian's article on Wallis's work with the Met
  • the Independent
  • the Daily Mail
• Rupert Murdoch took to a friendly forum to defend himself and News Corp.: the Wall Street Journal, which you might remember is owned by News Corp.
  
  Here be the articles:
  
  • the Independent
  • the Guardian
  • the BBC

Various publications have whole sections of their Web sites dedicated to the phone-hacking story.

• BBC
• The Guardian
• Not so much a section as an FAQ, courtesy of the Independent; it includes basic questions that you likely would have if you knew little but the headlines, plus a glossary of terms like "hacking" and "blagging" (a term I had never encountered before this scandal)
• The (New York) Times Topic page