**This post has been updated to reflect changes in this ongoing story**
By now you have certainly heard about the phone-hacking scandal in Great Britain. To bring you up to speed, reporters for the News of the World, which by Sunday evening was defunct, had hacked numerous celebrities, royals and now, it seems, victims of crimes, terrorism and war. It would be these latest revelations that would rock Rupert Murdoch and his News Corp, which owns the News and lead to the paper's demise.
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| Rupert Murdoch (Wikipedia) |
News Corp is better known in the United States for owning Fox News, the New York Post, and the Wall Street Journal. It also owns the Fox Television network and 20th Century Fox, the Hollywood Studio. So far, none of the allegations are believed to have hopped across the pond to American media, although The News is suspected of trying to hack 9/11 victim. This whole things remains an egregious example of how Britain's famous free-wheeling ethics-eschewing tabloid press does its dirt. Still what has spun the story out of control is how much it has also rocked 10 Downing Street, the political home and office of David Cameron, elected the country's first Conservative Party Prime Minister last year after fourteen years of Labour government. Murdoch's various holdings in England, which include the Sun and the Times of London, the storied paper from which so many American publications get its name, supported Cameron's bid to be Prime Minister.
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| PM David Cameron (The Guardian) |
All the trouble seemed to bubble up several years ago when the royals noticed that details of an injury Prince William suffered became public. An investigation discovered that cell phones had been hacked and it was found that reporters for the News were involved. Dismissed at the time as an isolated incident, the scandal did not got very far, although Andy Coulson, the paper's editor resigned. Coulson would then serve as communications chief for the Conservative Party and later 10 Downing Street after Cameron's victory. He resigned amidst renewed furor over the story in January.
The gas began to hit the fire when the Guardian, a paper that openly detests the News and Murdoch generally, found evidence of payoffs. This is in turn led to a larger analysis of the situation in the New York Times Magazine. This in turn, led to charges by Murdoch and his company that both the Guardian and the New York Times were childishly sniping at a rival. Earlier in 2010 before the bulk of the New York Times coverage, the Wall Street Journal had announced it had intended to take on the Times for dominance as the Nation/New York's paper of record. Although the coverage of the Journal's British sister publication was called personal, the Times' ombudsman spoke to two media critics who found the stories sound. Time would later bear out their coverage.
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| (wikipedia) |
What ultimately made the entire situation odious was the revelation that phone hacking was not limited to celebrities like Hugh Grant and the heir to the throne. Early this week, it was revealed that the phone of a murdered teenager had been hacked, frustrating a police investigation and giving her parent false hope that she remained alive (the hackers had played with her voice messages and allowed new ones to be left after her inbox was originally full). To make matters worse it turned out that families of victims of London's Subway bombing as well the family of deceased British soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan were likewise hacked. The bombing victims' names were believed to have been obtained by bribing police in Scotland Yard.
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