Murdoch's World: The Last of the Old Media Empires

by David Folkenflik

  But Hunt waited until March 3 to announce them. The independent media regulator OfCom had accepted News Corp’s UIL as addressing the plurality of voices presenting news coverage, though not market concentration issues. But Hunt said a ruling of the European Commission had handled the concentration concerns back in December, and therefore no longer mattered. He spoke for twelve minutes on the floor of the House of Commons, and announced he had decided not to refer the decision to the British Competition Commission.

  “You were great at the Commons today,” Michel texted from his iPhone. A few days and texts later, Hunt responded, “Merci hopefully when consultation over we can have a coffee like the old days!”

  The parties, the fund-raising, the dinners, the meetings, the personal blandishments, all the connections before the scandal would surely accrue to News Corp’s benefit. But the regulatory review would take months. And the longer the process stretched out, the more it could trip up News Corp.

  News of the World won a break when the murder case against its former investigator Jonathan Rees fell apart in March 2011. That was not due to a lack of evidence, but rather a surfeit: Rees’s defense lawyers would be unable to review adequately 750,000 pages going back two dozen years to ensure a fair trial. (The Guardian hinted that the past corruption of police officers had compromised prosecutors’ ability to get a conviction. Rees maintained his innocence throughout.)

  But the next month incurred more damaging disclosures. News International admitted phone hacking at News of the World from 2004 through 2006 involved more people than previously had been believed. The company offered what it called “unreserved apologies” and money for a limited number of cases. They were the famous, wealthy, people. Labour MPs, who could have scored damaging points against News Corp and their Tory friends in government, held back in Parliament. Most were shackled or shamed by their own party’s links to the Murdochs and News International. It was a land mine but did not trigger right away.

  That came a few days later, when the Murdochs’ leading Sunday tabloid was found to have hacked into the phone of a dead girl.

  13

  THE YARD

  THE EXPLOSIVE CHARGES UNLEASHED BY the blockbuster Guardian piece were not limited to hacking. They also placed Murdoch’s tabloid papers at the center of a related corruption scandal that not only threatened his journalists but wreaked great damage at Scotland Yard.

  Few of the illegal acts taken by the tabloids could have been accomplished without the active involvement of the police throughout the ranks. Similarly, the reporters and editors and their investigators practicing journalism in the shadows could never have gotten away with hacking “on an industrial scale” had senior police officials not decided that allegations of wrongdoing did not merit pursuit, sometimes as they were receiving gifts from News International executives.

  Such concerns had surfaced years earlier. Back in 2003, when she was still editor of the Sun, Rebekah Brooks testified before a parliamentary committee holding hearings about the press and privacy. Labour MP Chris Bryant asked Brooks whether her newspaper—whether she—had ever paid the police for information. Brooks replied, “We have paid the police for information in the past, yes.”

  Asked whether she would do it again in the future, Brooks said, “It depends,” prompting an interruption by her friend and fellow witness Andrew Coulson.

  “We operate within the code and within the law, and if there’s a clear public interest,” Coulson said. “The same holds for private detectives, for subterfuge, for [hidden] video bags, whatever you want to talk about.”

  Bryant recognized the importance of the two editors’ admission: “It’s illegal for police officers to receive payments.”

  COULSON: “No, no, no. I just said—within the law.”

  Bryant was right. In paying police, the papers had acted outside the law. But under Prime Minister Tony Blair’s leadership, there was little appetite to confront newspapers. Rather, as Blair would later testify, his government’s officials sought to “manage” them, as best they could.

  After that 2003 appearance before Bryant’s committee, Brooks refused requests by MPs to answer more questions about paying police. Several lawmakers with the Commons Select Committee on Culture, Media, and Sport later told reporters they decided against compelling her testimony in significant part because its chairman had privately warned that her papers might retaliate by investigating their personal lives. (He denied warning lawmakers against such questions.)

  Each subsequent installment of the tabloid scandals inspired more hearings, first in 2007, after the conviction of Goodman and Mulcaire, and again in 2009, after the Guardian’s piece on the Gordon Taylor settlement. In March 2011, Labour MP Jim Sheridan asked Assistant Police Commissioner John Yates: “Do you declare how much, if any, is paid by newspapers for stories that are given out by police?”

  “As I think we all know, it is illegal to pay for stories from the police, and if we did have information about it, we would investigate it,” Yates replied.

  SHERIDAN: “So, that does not happen, then?”

  YATES: “It has happened on very rare occasions, and where we have found out about it, we have caught them and they have gone to prison.”

  Not so very rare, it turned out. But rarely found out, and almost invariably unpunished. Time and time again, it was later alleged, police officers were paid for phone data and other information on databases that are by law confidential. The existence of payments had been a relatively common practice in the UK for decades. But it had started small, with a reporter buying a police officer or desk sergeant a beer (or three) at a pub, occasionally a fancy dinner, perhaps a free ticket to a soccer match. Reporters in cities across the globe routinely take sources out for a drink or a bite. In the UK, hard currency became a journalistic emollient. By American standards, such payments were considered both unethical and counterproductive.

  From the New York Times ethics code: “We do not pay for interviews or unpublished documents: to do so would create an incentive for sources to falsify material and would cast into doubt the genuineness of much that we publish.” Several leading news organizations, including the Los Angeles Times and NPR News, simply state they do not pay sources for information.

  In the practice of British respectable media outlets, such actions are not entirely banned. The BBC, for example, cautions its reporters: “Payment or payment in kind to criminals, former criminals, their families or their associates (directly or indirectly) for interviews or other contributions relating to their crimes, must be referred to Director Editorial Policy and Standards.” Similar warnings stand for other, analogous situations, but clearly envision circumstances that warrant or at least tolerate payments to sources for information. In 2009 the Telegraph paid the equivalent of $165,000 (£110,000) to obtain digital records of the expense accounts of members of Parliament from a government employee, arguably a violation of British law. However, the Telegraph’s coverage, generously ladled out in daily installments that rotated the focus of attention among the three major parties, led to an uproar over lawmakers who secured reimbursement for highly questionable personal expenses.

  In the US, the professionalization of the news industry in the decades after Watergate and the relatively pristine codes of conduct that emerged tended to keep journalists at mainstream news organizations out of trouble. The spirit of such codes can be brushed aside, however, when a story turns out to be too tantalizing to resist.

  ABC and NBC spent lavishly in pursuing interview subjects for their morning shows and their prime-time newsmagazines. Both networks had policies banning payments to people for participating in interviews. But producers would fly people to New York City and put them up at four- and five-star hotels. Occasionally a booker would be punished for paying for shopping sprees as well. (The hotel rooms, kept secret, had the added incentive of quarantining people from prying competitors.)

  Networks evaded their own rules in other ways as well. In March 2
010, Casey Anthony, a Florida woman accused of killing her two-year-old daughter Caylee, sought public support to pay fees for defense lawyers. The presiding judge asked how she had paid for the lawyers previously. Her lawyer disclosed that ABC News had paid her $200,000 for exclusive rights to use videotape footage and photographs of her then missing toddler for a story on Good Morning America and an hour-long treatment on the newsmagazine 20/20 later that night. No interview was granted, however, the shield behind which producers hid to justify the payment. ABC soon changed its policy.

  American supermarket tabloids make no apologies for paying their sources and interview subjects. Iain Calder, editor in chief of the National Enquirer, once boasted that he had an impeccable source after comedian Tom Arnold angrily denounced the weekly tabloid for its coverage of his wedding and marriage to Roseanne Barr. Calder appeared on live television and held up a copy of a canceled check the Enquirer had given to Arnold. Arnold’s signature was visible on the back.

  In the UK, the home of freewheeling papers that combined serious news with a ferocious hunger for gossip, the law was actually much stricter than in the US. An official secrets act dictated what information news organizations could publish, post, or broadcast about national security. In addition, laws protecting privacy achieved their goal at the cost of the public’s ability to gain information.

  Reporters who considered such privacy strictures absurd thought little of payments or ruses to jump-start the flow of information. “It was almost industry standard,” Paul McMullan, former deputy features editor for the News of the World, told me. The News of the World might not have been able to pinpoint the mobile numbers for Princes William and Harry had they not acquired the master manual for the royal family from several members of the royals’ security detail, who, it was alleged, sold the phone numbers and contact information for the royal family, the princes, and their associates and friends.

  Such information could yield the movements of Queen Elizabeth II. As head of state, the queen makes a ripe target for terrorists; her husband’s uncle, Lord Mountbatten, was assassinated in a 1979 bombing by an offshoot of the IRA. Yet senior police officials overseeing the hacking investigation did not explore how the paper’s investigator got his hands on the manual.

  Perhaps editors at the two News International titles had cause for confidence because they had worked so closely over the years with the police. For two decades, another senior editor at News of the World, Alex Marunchak, had served as a paid translator for police investigations involving Ukrainian suspects. He stopped in 2000. In 2001 the paper’s chief correspondent and former news editor, Neville Thurlbeck, had been an unpaid police informant, while still on the staff of the paper.

  Thurlbeck had first joined the paper in 1988 and had held a number of posts, including chief investigations editor and news editor before settling back in as chief correspondent. A man who outwardly conveyed he held the high cards in almost any hand, Thurlbeck carried himself with élan and was not easily flustered. His targets included some of the nation’s most famous names. His articles had proved that Lord Jeffrey Archer, a prominent Tory politician and best-selling author, had perjured himself in court testimony. Thurlbeck also landed a scandalous on-the-record interview with an Australian model who claimed to have had an affair with British soccer star David Beckham.

  Some of his record was seedier than his manner might suggest. Thurlbeck had been caught on video pleasuring himself at a British nudist retreat after conducting a hidden camera investigation (earning the sobriquet “Onan the Barbarian”). For another story, he blackmailed women who had taken part in a sex party into giving interviews.

  In 2001, a judge gave his blessing for Thurlbeck’s arrangement with police to serve as a back-channel source for police in exchange for information from a secret intelligence database, terming it proper and declining to allow prosecution on corruption charges. A year later, at the height of the search for Milly Dowler, journalists from News of the World made no secret to police of the fact that the paper had been listening to her mobile voice mail messages—even though that might have reasonably led police to ask themselves whether the paper had broken the law.

  Some of the messages to Milly Dowler simply vanished from her mobile mailbox. At the time, Detective Constable John Lyndon of the Surrey police wrote in a private note, “In light of the News of the World revelation that they or a third party has accessed the voicemail it is possible that the messages had previously been listened to by unknown persons and deleted.” Indeed, reporters seeking to pry confirmations out of police offered an increasingly detailed glimpse of what they had heard on the girl’s phone messages. Police knew of the voice mail hacking—the paper had all but boasted of it—and yet still they detected no crime.

  On July 5, 2011, the day after the Guardian published its Milly Dowler hacking exposé, the Times of London reported police had been given evidence showing illegal payments to police officers by News of the World journalists between 2003 and 2007—which coincided almost precisely with Andy Coulson’s editorship. The next morning, Sir Paul Stephenson, the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, or Scotland Yard, indicated that lawyers for News International had passed along information disclosing the paper’s illegal payments to what he termed “a small number” of officers. No evidence had emerged so far to implicate senior officials, he said.

  Labour MP Tom Watson instantly charged the Times of London with doing the company’s dirty work: hanging Coulson out to dry while seeking to distract attention from Rebekah Brooks, by then CEO. The Times of London, Murdoch’s most prestigious UK title, had previously displayed little tolerance for those who took phone hacking seriously. But Coulson was incidental to Rupert Murdoch, and little more than a useful tool to James Murdoch. Rupert considered Brooks part of the family.

  Others saw the accusation of corrupting police as a far more serious offense than phone hacking. In his statement, Stephenson acknowledged a second dimension to the police scandal: the coziness between top police officers and Murdoch’s executives.

  That first hacking investigation in 2005 had been badly botched. Assistant commissioner Andrew Hayman, who led the police’s investigation, was, at the same time dining at pricey restaurants with senior British News Corp executives, with the company repeatedly footing the bill. (His former boss periodically also had meals with News International executives at expensive spots.)

  On July 12, 2011, members of Parliament bluntly questioned Hayman, connecting the dots between the fifty quid slipped into the palm of a constable and the behavior of the police executives who oversaw the force. “Mr. Hayman, while a police officer, did you ever receive payment from any news organization?” one MP asked.

  “Good God! Absolutely not!” Hayman replied. “I can’t believe you suggested that.”

  “Lots of people did,” the lawmaker countered.

  “Oh, come on,” Hayman said. “I’m not letting you get away with that. Absolutely no way.”

  He said he never discussed the hacking inquiry with his dining companions from News International, despite their direct interest in the outcome. Hayman left the force at the end of 2007 and fulfilled what he later said had been a lifetime ambition—becoming a paid columnist for Murdoch’s Times of London in summer 2008. Roy Greenslade, former assistant editor of the Sun, recalled that reporters and police fraternized over drinks in his day, but said real money never changed hands. “If you think that senior policemen who were supposed to be investigating the News of the World were also enjoying dinners and meals with executives from the News of the World, you would have to say that is a corrupt or corrupting practice,” said Greenslade, later a columnist for the Evening Standard and the Guardian, “even if, and this beggars belief, . . . when they sat down for hours at that meal they never once referred to that inquiry.”

  Hayman’s deputy, Peter Clarke, took over responsibility for the hacking investigation at the time. But he was also overseeing the Met’s antiterror operations in the
UK, which he set as his chief priority. The man who replaced him two years later in that role—assistant commissioner John Yates—also said the force put greater priority on combating terrorism than casting a wide net on the hacking allegations. The memories of the bloody bus and Tube bombings that killed dozens and paralyzed London in July 2005 were all too fresh.

  In July 2009, at the time the Guardian newspaper exposed News International’s secret payment to Gordon Taylor and revealed the existence of hundreds of other potential instances of illegal voice mail hacking, Yates had little appetite for pursuing leads. After a review of the past inquiry that lasted not days but hours, Yates announced no further investigation was needed.

  At the time, Andy Hayman chimed in with supportive columns that ran in the Times of London and the News of the World. “We put our best detectives on the case and left no stone unturned as officials breathed down our neck,” Hayman wrote.

  “As I recall the list of those targeted, which was put together from records kept by [the paper’s private eye, Glenn] Mulcaire, ran to several hundred names. Of these, there was a small number—perhaps a handful—where there was evidence they had actually been tampered with,” Hayman wrote. “Had there been evidence of tampering in the other cases, that would have been investigated, as would the slightest hint that others were involved.” And then, in a coup de grâce, Hayman wrote, “Yet, as is so often the case, in the storm of allegation and denial the facts get lost. Well-known figures such as John Prescott are said to have been victims of the hacking without any clear evidence that their phones were in fact hacked into.”

  Lord Prescott’s two-year affair with a secretary while serving as deputy prime minister had been disclosed by the tabloid and had badly damaged his public standing. Prescott had been repeatedly told by police he was not a target of phone hacking by News of the World. In January 2012, years after Hayman’s column and months after the Dowler revelations, News International admitted it had in fact intercepted private messages and paid him £40,000 (about $66,000) in damages. Only then did the police apologize.