The New York Times, in concert with UK’s Guardian, has been exemplary in its journalistic diligence in digging into the scandals rippling through News Corp. In a longish piece today, the Times outlines how the organization tried to cover up its alleged crimes and dirty tricks. The take away is that the hacking scandal is just the tip of a much bigger operation to falsify, spy and hound public figures, pay off police and infiltrate political parties. And then an even bigger effort to keep the mess quiet. It’s a must read.
Here are some of the claims in the article:
• According to an account he relayed to his management team, Dacre confronted Brooks, telling her: “You are trying to tear down the entire industry”. Lady Claudia Rothermere, the wife of the owner of The Daily Mail, also overheard Brooks saying at a dinner party that The Mail was just as culpable as The News of the World. “We didn’t break the law,” Lady Rothermere said, according to two sources who spoke to the NY Times. Brooks was said to have asked who Lady Rothermere thought she was, “Mother Teresa?”
• By the middle of last year, News International’s lawyers and some executives were urging that the company accept some responsibility but Rebekah Brooks, then Chief executive, disagreed. “Her behaviour all along has been resist, resist, resist,” said one company official who spoke to the NY Times.
• Over the last several months, Brooks spearheaded a strategy that appeared to be designed to spread the blame across Fleet Street. Several former News of the World journalists said she asked them to dig up evidence of hacking. One said her target was not her own newspapers, but her rivals.
• Planning to come in to the UK earlier this to take charge of the crisis enveloping his company, Rupert Murdoch wanted to “fly commercial to London,” so that he might be seen as a man of the people.
• Paul Dacre, editor of the Daily Mail, told his senior managers that he had received several reports from businesspeople, footballers and public relations agencies that News International executives Will Lewis and Simon Greenberg had encouraged them to investigate whether their phones had been hacked by Daily Mail newspapers.
Cross posted at Let Freedom Rain