17 Jul 2011 | Uncategorized
When a man of 80 making an apology invokes both his mother, who is 102, and his father, who has been dead for 58 years, he is probably entitled to a hearing. Rupert Murdoch is reported to have done just that, head in hands, in his meeting with the Dowlers. You would need a hard heart to be certain now that he is not sorry.
This has implications for the Commons media committee, which meets him on Tuesday and will have to avoid the appearance of monstering a sorry old man. The public respects penitence. It punished Rebekah Brooks for delaying hers for so long, but I suspect it will think Rupert Murdoch, remarkably, has earned himself the right to at least a little politeness.
It is different for James Murdoch, who has more specific and evidence-based questions to answer, questions based in large measure on material gathered by the committee itself. The key passages are from the committee hearing on 21 July 2009, and the questioning of Colin Myler, then editor of the News of the World, and Tom Crone, then legal manager for that paper and the Sun.
Crone explained that when lawyers for Gordon Taylor of the Professional Footballers’ Association produced two documents appearing to show that at least one and possibly three of the paper’s journalists knew Taylor’s phone had been hacked, both he (Crone) and the paper’s external lawyers immediately agreed they could no longer contest Taylor’s case against the paper for breach of privacy. Tom Watson MP asked the questions.
Watson: When did you tell Rupert Murdoch?
Crone: I did not tell Rupert Murdoch.
Myler: The sequence of events, Mr Watson, is very simple, and this is very clear: Mr Crone advised me, as the editor, what the legal advice was and it was to settle. Myself and Mr Crone then went to see James Murdoch and told him where we were with the situation. Mr Crone then continued with our outside lawyers the negotiation with Mr Taylor. Eventually a settlement was agreed. That was it.
Watson: So James Murdoch took the ultimate decision?
Myler: James Murdoch was advised of the situation and agreed with our legal advice that we should settle.
In subsequent written evidence the company confirmed that James Murdoch not only agreed they should settle, he also authorised the actual payment, although curiously neither the meeting nor the decision was minuted.
The settlement, it is well known, was for £700,000, which Watson described as “a huge amount of money”, and which is certainly far more than Taylor stood to win in the event of outright victory in court. Some reports have suggested that the damages element of the payment was £400,000 (the rest being costs), but that is still out of proportion. By way of comparison, Max Mosley won £60,000 in his privacy case against the same paper, and recently Sienna Miller extracted a reported £100,000 in her hacking suit.
Why pay several times over the odds? The explanation that comes most readily to mind is that it was to secure Mr Taylor’s silence, an explanation that receives support from Mr Taylor’s total silence on the matter since the day of the settlement.
So the committee will ask James Murdoch whether he paid Gordon Taylor £700,000 in an attempt to ensure that he did not talk about or show to anybody the documents which prompted the lawyers to recommend settling. And if that was not the objective, what could it have been?
Last week, in a televised interview on the day he announced the closure of the News of the World, James Murdoch shed a little more light on this: “The company paid out-of-court settlements approved by me. I now know that I did not have a complete picture when I did so. This was wrong and is a matter of serious regret.”
That is apparently his defence: that he ‘did not have a complete picture’ when he authorised this £700,000 payment. He made his decision, according to the company, “following discussions with Colin Myler and Tom Crone”, but he says he “did not have a complete picture”.
Crone left News International last week and Myler ceased to be editor of the News of the World with its closure. Both men, we can be sure, will testify under oath in due course before Lord Justice Leveson’s public inquiry about the picture they gave to the younger Murdoch. It is possible that Gordon Taylor and his lawyers will also do so. In short, James Murdoch (who will also face Leveson) knows that what he says about this to the select committee this week will ultimately be tested pretty rigorously against the evidence of others.
The committee will want to know a lot about that incomplete picture. It will ask how the picture could have been incomplete and yet still unpleasant enough to lead James Murdoch to authorise a payment toTaylorseveral times over the odds for a privacy case. What was missing?
Did Crone and Myler not tell him about the documents (which any normal reader would conclude demonstrated that, at the very least, knowledge of criminal phone hacking was spread more widely at the News of the World than the company was at that time admitting)? That would be an incomplete picture, but it begs the question: if they didn’t tell him, why did he think such a large payment was justified?
Did they tell him thatTaylor’s lawyers had got the documents from the police and did he reason that, if the police had taken no action over them the documents could not be evidence of criminality? That begs the same question: if that was the case, why would he have felt the need to authorise a payment of £700,000?
We could go on like this but it does not get any less suspicious. And then there is the murky business of the settlement with Max Clifford. Perhaps it is better to wait and hear what happens on Tuesday.
Brian Cathcart teaches journalism atKingstonUniversityand tweets at @BrianCathcart
8 Apr 2011 | Uncategorized
News International’s apology over phone hacking, welcome and overdue as it is, cannot “draw a line” under phone hacking.
This gesture, and the settlement of some of the private claims for breach of privacy by hacking victims, must not bring to a halt the process of exposing the facts, because so far we have only seen a small fraction of those facts. The litigants and their lawyers have transformed our understanding of what happened by their relentless demands for documents from the police and the company, but we need that process to continue.
As the former Tory Cabinet minister, Lord Fowler, has said, only a public inquiry will get to the bottom of this. That’s what it will take to address the full breadth of issues at stake, from the role of the police and the Crown Prosecution Service to the relationships between News International and government, and from the sinister silence of the rest of the tabloid press to the conduct of senior company executives right up to Rupert Murdoch himself. Who was doing this? Who knew? When? Was there a cover-up? What was the role of the phone companies? Who was implicated? We need an exhaustive investigation.
What we are dealing with here, after all, appears to have been a sustained assault on the privacy of dozens and possibly hundreds of people, from royalty to Cabinet ministers, and from film actors and sportsmen to journalists and ordinary private citizens. We still have no idea of its full extent — whether, for example, other newspapers were engaged in the same practices. All this has important national security implications and raises big questions about how Britain is governed. And as with Watergate, the crime may have been bad, but the sequel was worse.
So far as News International executives are concerned, they must not be allowed to escape appropriate public scrutiny. In admitting, by implication at least, that Clive Goodman and Glenn Mulcaire were not the only News of the World employees engaged in illegally accessing people’s voicemails, they formally put to rest the “single rogue reporter” defence they sustained from 2007 until this January. But they must now be forced to explain themselves properly, not just in a brief, slick corporate statement, but one by one in an inquiry witness box, under cross-examination from leading barristers.
How, for example, do they now justify the company’s oft-repeated claim that, back in 2006-7, it thoroughly investigated the affair, that it deployed a top firm of white-collar fraud experts on the task, that it interrogated its own reporters and sifted through thousands of emails, and that the failure of these Herculean efforts proved its innocence?
Colin Myler, the paper’s editor, told the Press Complaints Commission in 2007 and the House of Commons Select Committee on the media in 2009 that he personally had led the investigation. Les Hinton, now the CEO of the Wall Street Journal, twice assured MPs that this investigation had been thorough. Tom Crone, head of legal affairs at News Group Newspapers, and Stuart Kuttner, former managing editor of the News of the World, helped to make the same case.
It doesn’t end there. James Murdoch, now deputy chief operating officer of News Corporation, approved a secret £700,000 payout to Gordon Taylor which prevented the public from learning important information about hacking, and Rebekah Brooks, the chief executive of News International who refused to testify before MPs, should also account for her role. Are all these people really fit to hold senior positions in a leading public company? We should find out.
And in the background now is Andy Coulson, former editor of the paper and former media adviser to David Cameron. He told MPs he knew nothing of phone hacking, and repeated the assertion under oath in a court of law. It is now acknowledged that his ignorance was not limited to what his royal editor was up to. So just how extensive was it?
We need an inquiry. Indeed if we don’t have one, if we let it lie on the strength of a few million in compensation, we are accepting that there is no kind of trouble that Rupert Murdoch and his company can’t buy their way out of.
READ ALL OF BRIAN CATHCART’S BRILLIANT ANALYSIS OF THE PHONEHACKING SCANDAL HERE
Brian Cathcart teaches journalism at Kingston University. He tweets at @BrianCathcart
5 Apr 2011 | Uncategorized
The arrest, on suspicion of conspiracy to intercept voicemails, of the chief reporter and the former news editor of the News of the World occurred, with a certain elegance, on one of those days when the press gathers to congratulate itself at a “glittering gala dinner”.
The annual press awards of the Society of Editors even held out the prospect of a run-off for the top prize involving both the News of the World and its nemesis, the Guardian.
Among the obvious questions to be aired among the guests — many of whom have been insisting for years, with a most unjournalistic scepticism, that the phone hacking story would never go anywhere — was how the press might report this interesting and important legal development.
After all, the Sun, the Mirror, the Star, the Express and the Mail have all tried their best to keep the hacking story from their readers ever since it first broke in 2006. And when other papers have reported the affair — as the Guardian, the FT and the Independent all have — they have been dismissed as misguided or (hah!) politically motivated.
Now, it must be said, with people under arrest, tabloid editors have the option of abiding closely by the contempt of court restrictions — restrictions which when it suits them they so often interpret in the most flexible manner. So we are set to witness a rare example of the press glimpsing what it might be like to be its own victim, and acting accordingly.
I’m not about to break the contempt law here either, but it is clear by now that those restrictions alone will not be enough to keep the scandal, in its widest sense, under wraps. The same day, after all, saw a remarkable new twist in the dispute between the Metropolitan Police and the Director of Public Prosecutions over — essentially — who was to blame for prematurely burying the hacking affair in 2007. The DPP, Kier Starmer, released a long and detailed letter which appeared to contradict directly the claims on this point of Acting Deputy Commissioner John Yates.
As if that were not enough, the Met also appears to be heading towards an awkward libel trial over its assertion that a solicitor, Mark Lewis, had wrongly attributed to a police officer a claim that there may have been 6,000 phone hacking victims.
And perhaps most sensationally, the private legal actions for breach of privacy against the News of the World by the likes of Sienna Miller and Steve Coogan are not only growing in number, but are moving forward in a way that surely should alarm Rupert Murdoch’s London henchmen. All such cases are now to be dealt with by one judge, Mr Justice Vos, and he has thus far shown little sympathy for the newspaper.
In interim rulings last month Vos appeared to sweep aside a number of key points in the defence offered by the News of the World. To the suggestion that there was no concrete evidence to show private investigator Glenn Muclaire actually hacked the phones of Andy Gray (though he had accumulated all the means to do so, and had apparently tried), Vos replied that he was satisfied that “interception of Mr Gray’s voicemails was something that Mr Mulcaire was undertaking regularly”. As for the proposition that there was nothing to link the paper to these activities, the judge announced bluntly that he disagreed, and that Mulcaire was effectively a News of the World employee.
A few days ago we learned that James Murdoch was leaving London to move to the heart of his father’s empire in New York. Young James was at the helm of News International here from early 2008, so he carries the ultimate responsibility for sustaining over two years the claim that hacking was all a finished affair involving just one rogue reporter. If the time comes to hold James accountable — say, before a public inquiry — we can look forward to his return.
Listen to Brian Cathcart’s podcast on the phone hacking affair here
Brian Cathcart teaches journalism at Kingston University London. He Tweets at @BrianCathcart
