Hacked: The Tabloid Scandal That Rocked Britain by The New York Times

Author:The New York Times
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: COMPUTERS/Internet/Security
Publisher: The New York Times Company
Published: 2015-03-22T22:00:00+00:00

Murdochs Deny That They Knew of Illegal Acts

By SARAH LYALL

July 19, 2011

LONDON — It was riveting theater, a newly emboldened parliamentary committee facing off against the 80-year-old Rupert Murdoch, the world’s most powerful media mogul, in a series of exchanges designed to get to the bottom of the phone hacking scandal that has engulfed not just Mr. Murdoch’s News Corporation, but also Britain’s political and law-enforcement elite.

In two hours of intense questioning broken only by a bizarre incident in which Mr. Murdoch was accosted with what appeared to be a foil pie plate filled with shaving cream, both he and his son James declared repeatedly that they had been shocked to discover something that has become increasingly apparent: that phone hacking and other illegal behavior were endemic at their News of the World tabloid, which is now defunct.

Even so, the Murdochs and Rebekah Brooks, a former editor at the paper who resigned from the News Corporation on Friday, only to be arrested on Sunday on suspicion of phone hacking and bribing the police, apologized again and again for the failures at their company.

“I would just like to say one sentence,” Rupert Murdoch said, breaking at one point into a long answer by his son, the News Corporation’s deputy chief operating officer. “This is the most humble day of my life.”

But his humility did not extend to declaring that he was at fault or that he should step down from his company.

“I feel that people I trusted — I don’t know who, on what level — have let me down, and I think they have behaved disgracefully, and it’s for them to pay,” he said. “And I think, frankly, that I’m the best person to see it through.”

While the elder Mr. Murdoch has long had the reputation of being a hands-on manager, pressing for and savoring the scoops scored by the newspapers he had always felt were the soul of his media empire, he said in his testimony that in the case of The News of the World, he had no knowledge of the specifics of what was going on.

He did not know, for example, that his company had paid confidential out-of-court settlements of £600,000 and £1 million to two victims of phone hacking. Nor, he said, did he know that the company was paying the legal fees of Glenn Mulcaire, a private investigator under contract to The News of the World who was convicted in 2007 of hacking into the phones of staff members of the royal family.

James Murdoch said he had not known about paying Mr. Mulcaire’s legal fees either, and was “as surprised as you are that some of these arrangements had been made.”

The Murdochs shut down the tabloid last week in a futile effort to contain a crisis that has also claimed the careers of two high-ranking police officers and two top News Corporation officials, caused the company to withdraw a much-wanted $12 billion takeover bid of a broadcasting company, and led to the arrests of 10 former News of the World editors and reporters.

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