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

by David Folkenflik

  In New York, News Corp executives monitored the developments lightly and with relief. The declarations by police were good enough for them. The board did not formally review the matter—it was a local nuisance that could be handled in Britain.

  Yates clung to the justification that a crime would have required proof that the person whose voice mail had been hacked had not listened to the violated message first. The Crown Prosecution Service later explicitly rejected that interpretation of the law.

  Like Hayman, Yates of the Yard (as he was inevitably dubbed in coverage) repeatedly dined with editors of News of the World and executives from News International. In November 2009, he met with the tabloid’s crime editor and the paper’s new editor in chief, Colin Myler, at the Ivy, a restaurant known for its famous clientele and pricey fare. The Ivy charged about $125 per person, and $220 for a nice bottle of Bordeaux. Everything proper about it, Yates insisted in the moment: all such contacts were promptly disclosed online, per police guidelines.

  Yates later admitted having at least ten meals with Neil Wallis between April 2009 and August 2010 that had not been disclosed publicly. Wallis was a public relations official who had just stepped down as the number two editor at News of the World. Those meals took place at restaurants that were among the most exclusive in the city. They also attended professional soccer games together, by Wallis’s account. And none of those contacts was publicly disclosed.

  In October 2010, a suspicious package was singled out at the UPS hangar at East Midlands Airport in England. The box contained a toner cartridge with wires sticking out. Initial testing detected the presence of explosive material. The package was sent from Yemen with a label designating a Chicago synagogue as its destination. President Obama and UK home secretary Teresa May issued statements registering their concern and dismay.

  The News of the World felt it had an inside line to an international story with scary implications. An editor on the news desk emailed Lucy Panton, the crime editor. “John Yates could be crucial here. Have you spoken to him?” The news desk editor wrote he wanted a splashy headline for the front page: “so time to call in all those bottles of champagne.”

  Wallis’s daughter also had a job on the force—a job that she got thanks to a plug from Yates. On January 29, 2009, Yates wrote to the head of Scotland Yard’s human resources office: “Bit of advice, plse—the attached CV belongs to the daughter of Neil Wallis, the Dep[uty] Editor of the News of the World. You probably know that Neil has been a great friend (and occasional critic) of the Met in past years and has been a close advisor to Paul [Stephenson] on stuff/tactics in respect of the new Commissionership.”

  Stephenson had been elevated to police commissioner the day before. By October 2009, Wallis had left the paper and was on a £2,000 (about $3,200) monthly contract to the force, answering to PR chief Dick Fedorcio and Yates, newly head of antiterrorism efforts. The Wallis appointment was not formally vetted. Instead, Yates simply wrote Fedorcio: “Is there anything in the matters that [the Guardian’s] Nick Davies is still chasing and reporting on, that could at any stage embarrass you, Mr Wallis, me, the Commissioner or the Metropolitan police?” Yates said he received “categorical assurances” there was not.

  At moments the membrane separating the two institutions seemed so porous as to be effectively absent. When I interviewed Paul McMullan, the former reporter and editor at News of the World, he made this casual slip of the tongue: “A few times, I was put on stories that came from police force employees—sorry—they weren’t employees. Coppers we paid for good information.”

  The connections between the papers and the police were perhaps best personified by the Sun’s annual awards banquet, which recognized bravery and distinction among police officers. The decades-old practice enabled editors including Rebekah Brooks and her successor, Dominic Mohan, to cement their favored position with police and prominent politicians.

  On the evening of July 7, despite the growing clamor about News International, Prime Minister David Cameron joined both at the Sun’s black tie affair at the five-star Savoy Hotel, featuring special appearances by the British soap opera star and victims’ rights advocate Brooke Kinsella, among other luminaries. Cameron had also attended the dinner the year before. His predecessor, Gordon Brown, had done much the same when he was prime minister. But this was different: the phone hacking scandal had precipitated a crisis within the ranks of the country’s top media and law enforcement echelons and denunciations from parliamentary benches front and back. Yet there was Cameron, outwardly in good cheer, circulating amid the nation’s tabloid and police chieftains.

  The next day, on the morning of July 8, his former communications director, onetime News of the World editor Andy Coulson, was arrested on charges related to the phone hacking and corruption of public officials, which he firmly denied.

  Commissioner Stephenson found himself confronting prickly questions. Earlier that year, while on sick leave, he accepted hospitality worth £12,000 from Champneys, a luxury spa and retreat in the British countryside, as he recuperated from an illness. Champneys was one of Wallis’s PR clients. It was run by one of Brooks’s friends. Stephenson said he was unaware of such links. Later that month Stephenson and Yates resigned within a day of each other.

  14

  “GOODBYE, CRUEL WORLD”

  IN THE EARLY DAYS OF the summer of 2011 the Murdochs and News Corp’s British executives were moving confidently to take ownership of BSkyB, the lawsuits seemed no more than an irritation and embarrassment, and the bombshell involving the Dowlers had yet to detonate. Prime Minister Cameron attended the News Corp annual garden party at which the Murdochs held court. (Labour leader Ed Miliband attended too.) “David [Cameron] was in great form,” News Corp’s top lobbyist for the UK and Europe, Frederic Michel, texted to Craig Oliver, the prime minister’s communications director. Cameron saw Rupert Murdoch twice more that month: at a breakfast on the morning of June 20 and at a dinner for a summit of CEOs convened by the Times of London the same night.

  On June 27 Rebekah Brooks had emailed Michel to ask when Jeremy Hunt would share his thinking on Rubicon—the acquisition. Michel replied that it would play out within days and that Hunt believed “phone-hacking has nothing to do with the media plurality issue.” The secretary would extend a review of privacy concerns to all newspaper groups. In addition, Michel wrote, Hunt “has asked me to advise him privately in the coming weeks and guide his and No. 10’s positioning.”

  By this point, Michel was puffing up his role; the lobbyist was in closer contact with Hunt’s special adviser Adam Smith than Hunt himself. But the two sides—News Corp and media ministry—operated hand in glove. On July 3 Michel texted Hunt at the Wimbledon men’s tennis finals and suggested a round of drinks. “Let’s do that when all over,” Hunt replied.

  On July 4 the Guardian published the Milly Dowler story. For News International, time accelerated and yet stood still. All the suspicions, all the prejudices fueled a swelling chorus from defeated rivals, abandoned political allies, and targets of the company’s coverage.

  Blue chip companies withdrew their ads from News of the World: Sainsburys grocery chain, pharmacy giant Boots, Halifax bank, even Ford Motor’s UK division. Others, such as T-Mobile, signaled they would tolerate only so much more scandal before jumping ship.

  Brooks was among those who instantly registered the stakes. On July 5, 2011, as new accusations were mounting, she wrote a memo assuring staffers she’d stick around to lead the company to resolve this crisis. “I hope that you all realise it is inconceivable that I knew or worse, sanctioned these appalling allegations.”

  The accusations in the Guardian that her company—her own newspaper—had hacked into Milly Dowler’s phone cut to the heart of Brooks’s professional identity. “I am proud of the many successful newspaper campaigns at The Sun and the News of the World under my editorship,” she wrote, citing her work against sexual offenders. “The battle for better protection of children from paedophi
les and better rights for the families and the victims of these crimes defined my editorships. Although these difficult times will continue for many months ahead, I want you to know that News International will pursue the facts with vigour and integrity.”

  PRIME MINISTER David Cameron was fighting battles on several fronts, seeking to protect his shaky standing among political allies and fending off attacks from opponents. He did not yet frontally attack the Murdochs, his champions in the press, but by this point, restraint was a relative term. “What has taken place is absolutely disgusting, and I think everyone in this House, and indeed this country, will be revolted by what they have heard and seen on their television screens,” Cameron told MPs in the House of Commons.

  Cameron’s opponents in the Labour Party ridiculed him. His Liberal Democrat partners in the governing coalition undermined him by demanding that a judge lead a wide-ranging inquiry. Cameron resisted those calls, instead urging police to follow the evidence wherever it might lead and promising that full inquiries into hacking and the press would follow, probably after criminal prosecutions had played out. He could not interfere, Cameron argued, in the BSkyB process, where his culture minister, Jeremy Hunt, was playing a “quasi-judicial role”: “What we have done is follow, absolutely to the letter, the correct legal processes. That is what the Government have to do.”

  Hunt’s department stopped accepting public comment on BSkyB Friday, July 8, and announced that its decision would come shortly. The juxtaposition of the BSkyB deal with the roiling scandal could not have been worse. Cameron’s idea of an inquiry after criminal prosecutions—potentially hundreds of them—presupposed a delay of years, long after any verdict on BSkyB.

  Even some of Cameron’s fellow Conservatives stood up to object and directed their ire at the person they previously viewed as an untouchable power. “Rupert Murdoch is clearly a very, very talented businessman. He’s possibly even a genius, but his organization has grown too powerful and it has abused that power,” Tory MP Zac Goldsmith said on the floor of the House of Commons. “It has systematically corrupted the police and, in my view, it has gelded this Parliament, to our shame.”

  Rupert Murdoch had put out a statement late on July 6 in his own name that was meant to show his concern. He called the actions of News of the World “deplorable and unacceptable,” but delivered a dissonant vote of support for Brooks. The message was meant to soothe public opinion but only served to inflame it. Many MPs had already called for Brooks’s resignation and pressed for a hold on the BSkyB deal.

  “These were not the actions of a ‘rogue’ individual or a ‘rogue’ reporter, but part of a wider, systematic pattern of abuses,” said Labour leader Ed Miliband. “The public see a major news organization in this country where no one appears prepared to take responsibility for what happens. Nobody is denying that Milly Dowler’s phone was hacked and nobody is denying that it happened on the watch of the current chief executive of News International, who was editor of the newspaper at the time.” He concluded by asking Cameron to join him in calling for Brooks’s resignation. Miliband also invoked Cameron’s decision to hire Brooks’s former deputy Andrew Coulson, who was now under police scrutiny.

  “Is it not the case that if the public are to have confidence in him, he must do the thing that is most difficult and accept that he made a catastrophic judgment in bringing Andy Coulson into the heart of his Downing Street machine?”

  After a few cautious days, Miliband declared Labour’s independence from the Murdochs and News Corp. The scandal had inverted the formula of accommodation and courtship, as those politicians who recently had scurried for face time with Rupert and James Murdoch and their wives and executives now competed to denounce them most roundly.

  But amid the deluge of scandal, News Corp lobbyist Fred Michel still labored behind the scenes—far behind the scenes—to maintain a sense of shared purpose between the government and the corporation. On the day after the Guardian piece, July 5, Michel wrote to Cameron’s chief spokeswoman, Gabby Bertin, thanking her for her supportive messages to Brooks. Both Bertin and Michel ended their texts with multiple Xs—for kisses.

  Michel texted Cameron’s communications director, Craig Oliver: “Hey buddy. Are you guys still on for dinner tomorrow?” Oliver wrote back: “Looking forward to tonight. Is location discreet?” News International executive Will Lewis would join the dinner, first set for Pimlico. But everything about the appointment kept shifting amid the bedlam. The spot was moved to an intimate French restaurant in the upscale neighborhood of Mayfair, not far from Whitehall. The time moved, too. Lewis backed out, leaving just Michel and Oliver.

  Bertin texted Michel during dinner. “Another hard core day,” she wrote the lobbyist. He replied swiftly (ellipses his):

  “Yes . . . mon dieu . . . incredible,” he wrote. “Am with Craig now. DC [David Cameron] was very good at PMQ [Prime Minister’s Questions]. We need to get through this. You ok? Xx”

  On July 7 Michel thanked Oliver for dinner. He didn’t hear back.

  By that point, opinion had turned against the BSkyB bid. Only a day remained for the public commenting period; more than 130,000 people took advantage of the chance to besiege Hunt’s department with emails and messages objecting to News Corp’s plans. Michel and his patrons were running out of cards to play.

  “They’ve used their power, in ways we know about and ways that we don’t know about,” former Independent editor in chief Simon Kelner told me at the time. “What we’ve seen this week is not just the first cracks of the edifice, but you’ve seen the edifice possibly begin to tumble.”

  “Politicians have suddenly become a lot braver,” Kelner added. “One of the least edifying elements in this phone hacking scandal has been the number of Labour politicians who have spent all their time sucking up to Murdoch. Now they’re in opposition, they are denouncing him.”

  Reliably conservative papers, the Telegraph and the Daily Mail, had started to take the story seriously. The Telegraph reported that the tabloid had hacked the phones of British soldiers and terror victims as well. The story would not stop.

  At Wapping, it was beginning to feel like the end of the world. The News of the World tabloid had been a presence on the British scene for 168 years. Before Murdoch entered the scene, the paper had paid a call girl more than £20,000 for a salacious story that fatally wounded the government of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. Under Murdoch six years later, the paper didn’t just tell her story. It serialized her memoir in eight parts over two months.

  The News of the World held onto its role as the leading red-top tabloid. It published just enough reporting about public events so readers knew what was happening in the world. By the 2000s the paper’s reporters had so internalized the need to gain scoops that it thought nothing of paying off a cop to get an unlisted mobile number to convince someone with a tangential link to a celebrity or sports star or actor or singer or prince into giving an interview to the paper. The stories weren’t quite fabricated but heavily produced by the reporters. Former investigative reporter Graham Johnson catalogues a tawdry line of such stories in his book Hack. In one case, he picked up a woman who had become a prostitute patronizing upper-end hotels and decamped with her for the night, solely as a means of writing a story that would embarrass her father, a law lord. The plan went off-kilter when the escort took a shine to him and started to perform a sexual act upon him, one of the few lines that he was not supposed to cross, as it could be used to discredit the paper’s reporting in court.

  The paper’s best-known reporter might well have been Mazher Mahmood, who claimed his reporting had led to the prosecution of more than 250 people. Mahmood often posed as an Arab sheik or some other shadowy figure whose money corrupted prominent people, Sarah, the Duchess of York, and the Pakistani national cricket team among them. The fact that his exposés largely created the scandals he revealed did not faze him: he described himself as “the king of the sting” in the subtitle to a memoir.

 
As indictments loomed, the Murdochs began the effort to draw a different line, to take a bold stance. The moment required a sacrifice.

  NEWS CORP announced the decision with statements reflecting regretful necessity, promising a shift of strategy and outlook. “The News of the World is in the business of holding others to account. But it failed when it came to itself,” James Murdoch declared in a statement sent to News International employees and shared with government officials and the press.

  “News of the World and News International failed to get to the bottom of repeated wrongdoing that occurred without conscience or legitimate purpose.” The younger Murdoch acknowledged that News International officials had “made statements to Parliament without being in full possession of the facts” and that he personally had not had “a complete picture” when he approved previous out-of-court settlements for Gordon Taylor and the two others. The company would continue full cooperation with police. It would rectify its shortcomings. “We are doing our utmost to fix them, atone for them, and make sure they never happen again.”

  And he announced the company would kill the paper. Its final edition, on July 10, would carry no ads. Any commercial proceedings would be given to charity.

  “Goodbye, Cruel World,” the Telegraph headlined its front-page story. Rebekah Brooks would stay as News International’s CEO. But one of her signature titles would vanish.

  “We should see this for what it is,” the actor and activist Hugh Grant told the BBC. He called it “a very cynical managerial maneuver” that led to layoffs of hundreds of people while protecting the job of the woman who was editor of News of the World even as Milly Dowler’s mobile phone messages were being hacked.