Rupert Murdoch's Endless Reign The Sun King

The Triumph of the Truth (Who Is Watching the Watchers?)

by Stephen Carew-Reid - Google Books

First Edition Published by the Weekend News  1996

https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Triumph_of_the_Truth.html?id=fL7iGwAACAAJ

The Triumph of the Truth (Who Is Watching the Watchers?) series of books which now cover of 10,000 pages have been described as provocative, frighting, informative and humorous ..... after reading any of various volumes of these series pf books titled The Triumph of the Truth (Who Is Watching the Watchers?) your view of the way the Legal, Police, Director of Public Prosecutions. Courts, Political, Public Trustee, Government, Business and Mainstream Media Circles operate in Western Australia will never be the same .... reading these  series of books titled The Triumph of the Truth (Who Is Watching the Watchers?) are a must for present and budding legal eagles. police, politicians, litigants in persons, or for anyone studying the law or the legal and political system, high school students, anyone else wanting to search for the truth and/or just interested wanting to search for the truth and/or just interested in  series of books that are about an extremely unique set of situations  where City Hall which an unlimited resources  has taken on one single individual with no resources .... has fought back in what Perth Solicitor Ian Wilson, who tried help but he realized it was too hard for him ...  has described it as a  David v Goliath Affair.... which in the end the legal fight was taken all the way from the Magistrates, District and Supreme Courts in Western Australia...  to the Australian wide courts known as the justices in the Federal and High Courts of Australia.... who were also prepared to hide and bury quite obvious and provable criminal, immoral and wrongful behaviour committed by the police, the director of public prosecutions. politicians, government employees, the court and legal system ... and protect those personally responsible for such obvious and provable criminal, immoral and wrongful behaviour from any proper investigation, prosecution and accountability .... showing that the little guy can not win against City Hall .....  the shocking reality that was discovered was that the system will protect itself at all and at any costs from being publicly exposed ....

Truth Always Wins The Triumphof Truth Who's Watching The Watchers?

Truth Always Wins

The Truth Always Wins

The triumph of truth / by Stephen Carew-Reid

Political Corruption In Western Australia

Misconduct in Office in Western Australia

Corporations - Corrupt Practices In Western Australia

Police Corruption in Western Australia 

Moral Conditions in Western  Australia

Available to Read in the Australian National Library CANBERRA Australia

https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/catalog/1388995

Available to Read in the Western Australian State Library Australian

https://catalogue.slwa.wa.gov.au/search~S2/?searchtype=X&searcharg=triumph+of+truth+by+stephen+carew+reid+&searchscope=2&sortdropdown=-&SORT=DZ&extended=0&SUBMIT=Search&searchlimits=&searchorigarg=Xtriumph+of+truth%26SORT%3DD

Published/Produced Perth Western Australia by the Weekend News 1996 t0 2004

 

 

Triumph of Truth Who Is Watching The Watchers The Truth Always Wins front cover by Sir Bertram McKennal.

Triumph of Truth -The Truth Always Wins  (Who Is Watching The Watchers?)

Front cover of these controversial series of books Triumph of Truth -The Truth Always Wins  (Who Is Watching The Watchers?) created Sir Bertram MacKennal who is the Great Grandfather of the author  

The Triumph of Truth (Who Is Watching The Watchers?)  ....

Triumph Of Truth -The Truth Always Wins -Who Is WatchingTheWatchers?

Triumph Of Truth The Truth Always Wins - Who Is Watching The Watchers?)  ......

the now famous extremely controversial series of books published by the Australian Weekend News and INL News Publishing, Film and Media Group

"Truth and Justice can sometimes take a while..."....Justice Paul Lawrence Seaman of the Supreme Court of Western Australia who dedicated his life to fight for and to protect Truth, Fairness and Justice without fear of favour, for every party that appeared before him, and gave all litigants in person special help and assistance to guide in the law.... when he was a Master of the Supreme Court of Western Australia from 1983 to 1988 and then a Justice of the Supreme Court of Western Australia from 1988 to 1994..

The triumph of truth / by Stephen Carew-Reid

https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/catalog/1388995

Bib ID:1388995

Format:Book

Author: Carew-Reid, Stephen

Edition:2nd ed.

Description:

  • Perth : The Weekend News, 1996
  • v. <1> : ill., ports., facsims. ; 30 cm.

Notes:Typescript (Photocopy)Subject:

Also Titled:

  • Triumph of truth : who's watching the watchers?
  • Triumph of the truth

 

Sir Edgar Bertram Mackennal KCVO RA (12 June 1863 – 10 October 1931), usually known as Bertram Mackennal, was an Australian sculptor and medallist, most famous for designing the coinage and stamps bearing the likeness of George V. He signed his work "BM".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertram_Mackennal 

Bertram_Mackennal_Sir_Bertram_Mackennal

Bertram Mackennal Sir Bertram Mackennal

Who Dedicated His Life For The Search of The Truth Through His Art

Bertram_Mackennal,_Glory,_holding_a_figure_of_Victory_in_her_right_hand_and_a_laurel_wreath_in_her_left._Bronze._Signed_&_dated,_Mackennal_1905._Boar_War_Memorial,_Highbury_Fields,_London._Photo,_Jamie_Mulh

Bertram_Mackennal,_Glory,_holding_a_figure_of_Victory_in_her_right_hand_and_a_laurel_wreath_in_her_left._Bronze._Signed_&_dated,_Mackennal_1905._Boar_War_Memorial,_Highbury_Fields,_London._Photo,_Jamie_Mulh

220px-George_V_UK_three_halfpence British 1½d stamp of 1912 with the Mackennal portrait of King George V.

British 1½d stamp of 1912 with the Mackennal portrait of King George V.

Bertram Mackennal was born in Fitzroy, Victoria, a suburb of Melbourne, the second son of parents who were both of Scottish descent. His mother was Annabella, née Hyde, and his father was John Simpson Mackennal, a "prominent Melbourne artist and sculptor". Bertram's brother Horace John Mackennal (died 28 June 1949) would go on to be a prominent architect who was responsible for the design of many large architectural projects in Victoria in his capacity as Commonwealth Works Director for Victoria (1912–1939).

John Mackennal provided Bertram his early training which was followed by studies at the school of design at the Melbourne National Gallery which he attended from 1878 to 1882. Marshall Wood, a visiting English sculptor, advised him to go Europe and promised employment.[1] Mackennal left for London in 1882 to study at the National Gallery Schools, discovered Wood had died and shared a studio with Charles Douglas Richardson and Tom Roberts. In 1884 he visited Paris for further study and married a fellow student, Agnes Spooner.

One Quarter anna engraved by Mackennal

One_Quarter_anna_(1933)_One Quarter anna engraved by Sir Bertram Mackennal

One_Quarter_anna_(1933)_One Quarter anna engraved by Sir Bertram Mackenn

ObverseKing George V crowned head surrounded by lettering "GEORGE V KING EMPEROR" at the periphery.

Reverse: Denomination and year surrounded by wreath. Lettering "ONE QUARTER ANNA INDIA 1933"

1_Indian_rupee_(1918)_Indian rupee engraved by Sir Bertram Mackennal

Indian rupee engraved by Mackennal.

Obverse: Profile of George V surrounded by his name.

Reverse: Face value, country and date.

On returning to England, Mackennal was appointed head of modelling and design at the Coalport PotteriesShropshire early in 1886. In the same year he won a competition for the sculptured reliefs on the front of Parliament House, Melbourne, and returned to Australia in 1887 to execute these.[1]

Among Mackennal's later works were the nude male figure Here I Am for the Eton College War Memorial, the Parliamentary War Memorial to the members of both houses of parliament in London, the figures of the soldier and the sailor for the cenotaph in Martin Place, Sydney, the bronze statue of King George V at Old Parliament House, Canberra, and the head of "Victory", presented to the Commonwealth by the artist, also at Canberra. He completed the Desert Mounted Corps memorial at the Suez Canal from the designs of Charles Web Gilbert a little while before his death. Sir Bertram Mackennal died suddenly from rupture of abdominal aneurysm[1] at his house, Watcombe Hall,[4] near TorquayDevon on 10 October 1931; he was survived by Lady Mackennal and a daughter.

Mackennal returned to London, and among his works of this period were the fine pediment for the local government board office at Westminster, a Boer War memorial for Islington, and statues of Queen Victoria for BallaratLahore, and Blackburn. In 1907 his marble group "The Earth and the Elements" was purchased for the National Gallery of British Art under the Chantrey Bequest, and in 1908 his "Diana Wounded" was also bought for the nation. This dual success brought Mackennal into great prominence, and he was elected an associate of the Royal Academy in 1909, the first Australian accorded this honour.[1] He also designed the medals for the 1908 London Olympic Games.

In 1910 Mackennal designed the Coronation Medal for King George V and also won the important commission for the obverse design (the monarch's head) of the new coinage needed for the new reign from 1911, from which he developed the new design for the King's head on British postage stamps. This is certainly his most enduring design. His initials, B.M., can be seen on the truncation of the King's neck on the obverse of all British coins of George V. His next important work was the memorial to Thomas Gainsborough at Sudbury, which was followed by the memorial tomb of King Edward VII at St. George's Chapel, Windsor. Mackennal also sculpted statues of King Edward VII for London, Melbourne, Calcutta and Adelaide.

Mackennal was the first Australian artist to be knighted. He was created a Knight Commander of the Victorian Order in 1921 by H.M. King George V on the occa

Both his enemies and those who work for him paint him as an almost supernatural figure. Beyond critics calling him “the Supreme Satan”, or “Dracula”, or the “Prince of Darkness” are eyewitnesses to Murdoch’s uniquely insinuative and wily approach.

In Australia, Kevin Rudd’s former campaign manager Bruce Hawker wrote that News Corp is “easily the most powerful political force in Australia, bigger than the major parties or the combined weight of the unions … I saw how, on a daily basis, the storm of negative stories that emanated from News Corp papers blew our campaign off course.”

In the UK, Murdoch’s tabloids were at one time the most feared political force in the country. This is partly due to their concentration – they are national tabloids, not city-based – and also their supreme nastiness. The former director general of the BBC John Birt once met a government minister who was physically shaking at the prospect of an imminent meeting with Murdoch.

“I have never met Mr Murdoch,” the former Tony Blair communications deputy Lance Price wrote for The Guardian, “but at times when I worked at Downing Street he seemed like the 24th member of the cabinet. His voice was rarely heard … but his presence was always felt. No big decision could ever be made inside No 10 without taking account of the likely reaction of three men – Gordon Brown, John Prescott and Rupert Murdoch.”

 

Murdoch accepting the Hudson Institute's 2015 Global Leadership Award in November
 
Former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd is more indicative of how these tiger rides usually end. He was so poorly treated by Murdoch’s Australian newspapers that in a recent interview with The Saturday Paper he called News Corp a “cancer” on democracy and suggested it should be the subject of a royal commission. “They go after people who have the audacity to raise a question about their behaviour,” Rudd said. He added, “It’s one of the reasons I’m speaking out directly, so that people can have a normal national conversation rather than a continued national embarrassed silence about this.”

"To Beat or  subdue or weaken the Enemy, You Have To Understand How The Enemy .:.. and how How The Enemy  Operates and Thinks..." .... USA Major Smedley Butler

News Corp’s Board of Directors and management are committed to strong corporate governance and sound business practices.

BOARD OF DIRECTORS of News Corporation
K. Rupert Murdoch
Executive Chairman, News Corp
Lachlan K. Murdoch
Co-Chairman, News Corp

 Lead Director – Masroor Siddiqui
News Corporation
1211 Avenue of the Americas
New York, New York 10036
email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Executive Chairman & Chief Executive Officer, Fox Corporation
Executive Chairman, NOVA Entertainment Group
Masroor Siddiqui
Lead Director, News Corp
Chief Executive Officer, Naya Capital Management UK Limited
Ana Paula Pessoa
Director & Partner, Kunumi AI
Robert J. Thomson
Chief Executive, News Corp
Natalie Bancroft
Director, News Corp
Kelly Ayotte
Former United States Senator for the State of New Hampshire
BOARD COMMITTEES
Audit Committee

Masroor Siddiqui – Chair
José María Aznar
Ana Paula Pessoa

Managers and Directors of REA Group Limited year in review 2022
511 Church Street, Richmond(Vic) 3121
Owen James Wilson
Cheif Executive Director
Janelle Hopkins - Chief Financial Office and CEO of Financial Services
Hamish Roy McLennan - Chairman
Chris Venter- Chief Texhnology Officer
Nick Dowling- Independent Non Executive Director
Jennifer M, Lambert- Indeoendent Director
Richard John Freudenstein- Non Executive Director
Tracey Fellows- Non Executive Director
Michael Miller- Non Executive Director

Shareholders of REA Group Limited
News Corporation       81,141;397  81.4%

The Sun King: The endless reign of Rupert Murdoch: After decades of influence, the media mogul isn’t so much a person as an epoch

News International phone hacking scandal

In July 2011, Murdoch, along with his youngest son James, provided testimony before a British parliamentary committee regarding phone hacking. In the UK, his media empire came under fire, as investigators probed reports of 2011 phone hacking.

On 14 July 2011 the Culture, Media and Sport Committee of the House of Commons served a summons on Murdoch, his son James, and his former CEO Rebekah Brooks to testify before a committee five days later. After an initial refusal, the Murdochs confirmed they would attend, after the committee issued them a summons to Parliament. The day before the committee, the website of the News Corporation publication The Sun was hacked, and a false story was posted on the front page claiming that Murdoch had died.

 Murdoch described the day of the committee "the most humble day of my life". He argued that since he ran a global business of 53,000 employees and that News of the World was "just 1%" of this, he was not ultimately responsible for what went on at the tabloid. He added that he had not considered resigning, and that he and the other top executives had been completely unaware of the hacking.

On 15 July, Murdoch attended a private meeting in London with the family of Milly Dowler, where he personally apologized for the hacking of their murdered daughter's voicemail by a company he owns.

 On 16 and 17 July, News International published two full-page apologies in many of Britain's national newspapers. The first apology took the form of a letter, signed by Murdoch, in which he said sorry for the "serious wrongdoing" that occurred. The second was titled "Putting right what's gone wrong", and gave more detail about the steps News International was taking to address the public's concerns. In the wake of the allegations, Murdoch accepted the resignations of Brooks and Les Hinton, head of Dow Jones who was chairman of Murdoch's British newspaper division when some of the abuses happened. They both deny any knowledge of any wrongdoing under their command.

On 27 February 2012, the day after the first issue of The Sun on Sunday was published, Deputy Assistant Commissioner Sue Akers informed the Leveson Inquiry that police are investigating a "network of corrupt officials" as part of their inquiries into phone hacking and police corruption. She said that evidence suggested a "culture of illegal payments" at The Sun and that these payments allegedly made by The Sun were authorised at a senior level.

In testimony on 25 April, Murdoch did not deny the quote attributed to him by his former editor of The Sunday TimesHarold Evans: "I give instructions to my editors all round the world, why shouldn't I in London?"

 On 1 May 2012, the Culture, Media and Sport Committee issued a report stating that Murdoch was "not a fit person to exercise the stewardship of a major international company".[103]

On 3 July 2013, the Exaro website and Channel 4 News broke the story of a secret recording. This was recorded by The Sun journalists, and in it Rupert Murdoch can be heard telling them that

Rupert Murdoch "... the whole investigation was one big fuss over nothing, and that he, or his successors, would take care of any journalists who went to prison..."

Rupert Murdoch said: "Why are the police behaving in this way? It's the biggest inquiry ever, over next to nothing."

On 8 May 2006, the Financial Times reported that Murdoch would be hosting a fund-raiser for Senator Hillary Clinton's (D-New York) Senate re-election campaign.

In a 2008 interview with Walt Mossberg, Murdoch was asked whether he had "anything to do with the New York Post's endorsement of Barack Obama in the democratic primaries". Without hesitating, Murdoch replied, "Yeah. He is a rock star. It's fantastic. I love what he is saying about education. I don't think he will win Florida [...] but he will win in Ohio and the election. I am anxious to meet him. I want to see if he will walk the walk."

Metropolitan Police role in the news media phone hacking scandal

This article provides a narrative beginning in 1999 of investigations by the Metropolitan Police Service (Met) of Greater London into the illegal acquisition of confidential information by agents in collaboration with the news media that is commonly referred to as the phone hacking scandal. The article discusses seven phases of investigations by the Met and several investigations of the Met itself, including critiques and responses regarding the Met's performance. Separate articles provide an overview of the scandal and a comprehensive set of reference lists with detailed background information.

By 2002, the practice by news media organizations of using private investigators ("law enforcement") to acquire confidential information was widespread. Some individuals used illegal methods to accomplish this. Victims of illegal phone hacking included celebrities, politicians, law enforcement officials, solicitors, and ordinary citizens.

As this illegal activity became apparent, suspects were arrested and some were convicted of crimesSome victims retained solicitors upon learning their privacy had been violated, and filed suit against news media companies and their agents. Some victims received financial payments for violation of privacy. Successful suits and publicity from investigative news articles led to further disclosures, including the names of more victims, more documentary evidence of wrongdoingadmissions of wrongdoing by some news media agents, and payments potentially related to the scandal.

Allegations were made of poor judgement and cover-up by news media executives and law enforcement officials. As a result, additional investigations into illegal acquisition of confidential information were initiated and several senior executives and police officials were forced to resign. There were also significant commercial consequences of the scandal. Contemporary commentators made comparisons with the Watergate scandal.

The Metropolitan Police conducted several investigations between 1999 and 2011. The first three investigations, involving phone taps and seizure of records, successfully gathered large quantities of evidence that confidential information was being acquired illegally, sometimes with the help of public officials including policemen. By 2006, seven men had been found guilty, but no further arrests were made until 2011. The Met was criticized for not aggressively pursuing all the significant leads available from this evidence, for not adequately informing all individuals who were victims of the phone hacking, and for allegedly misleading the public and Parliament about the scope of the problem.

While continuing to investigate illegal acquisition of confidential information, the Met itself became the object of several investigations about the diligence of its probes and possible involvement of its own personnel in illegal activities. After the scope of the phone hacking scandal became generally known in July 2011, the top two officials of the Met resigned. The new Met leadership augmented the ongoing investigations with the unusual measure of bringing in an independent police organization to help. By mid-July 2011, there were as many as ten separate investigations active at the Met, Parliament and other government agencies.

Investigations by the Metropolitan Police

Full article is displayed lower down on this webpage 

                                                                  .............................

Murdoch's British-based satellite network, Sky Television, incurred massive losses in its early years of operation. As with many of his other business interests, Sky was heavily subsidised by the profits generated by his other holdings, but convinced rival satellite operator British Satellite Broadcasting to accept a merger on his terms in 1990.

The merged company, BSkyB, has dominated the British pay-TV market ever since, pursuing direct to home (DTH) satellite broadcasting.

By 1996, BSkyB had more than 3.6 million subscribers, triple the number of cable customers in the UK.

Murdoch has a seat on the Strategic Advisory Board of Genie Oil and Gas, having jointly invested with Lord Rothschild in a 5.5% stake in the company which conducted shale gas and oil exploration in ColoradoMongoliaIsrael and, controversially, the occupied Golan Heights.

In response to print media's decline and the increasing influence of online journalism during the 2000s, Murdoch proclaimed his support of the micropayments model for obtaining revenue from on-line news,  although this has been criticised by some.

In January 2018, the CMA blocked Murdoch from taking over the remaining 61% of BSkyB he did not already own, over fear of market dominance that could potentialise censorship of the media. His bid for BSkyB was later approved by the CMA as long as he sold Sky News to The Walt Disney Company, which was already set to acquire 21st Century Fox. However, it was Comcast who won control of BSkyB in a blind auction ordered by the CMA. Murdoch ultimately sold his 39% of BSkyB to Comcast.

News Corporation has subsidiaries in the Bahamas, the Cayman Islands, the Channel Islands and the Virgin Islands. From 1986, News Corporation's annual tax bill averaged around seven percent of its profits.

....................

Rupert Murdoch - Wikipedia

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Murdoch

Rupert Murdoch Has ‘More Impact Than Any Living Australian’ Says Tony Abbott

By Max Chalmers on November 13, 2015Australian Politics

The former Australian PM also praised British leader David Cameron for school privatisations, and quoted a favourable editorial about himself, writes Max Chalmers.

Tony Abbott may have promised no sniping from the sidelines after his messy dislodgement from the office of Prime Minister in September, but he never said anything about holding off on self-aggrandizement.

The Member for Warringah was at it again today, doing what he could to resurrect his political image in a piece penned for conservative British magazine The Spectator, lavishing himself and conservative allies with praise.

“While in Britain, I caught up with Sir Michael Hintze, perhaps the most successful Australian businessman in London; Alexander Downer, who’s hugely enjoying a second stint of public service; Rupert Murdoch, who arguably has had more impact on the wider world than any other living Australian; Tony Blair, by far British Labour’s most electorally successful prime minister; and Prime Minister David Cameron who’s still savouring his against-the-polls win in this year’s election, assisted by our very own strategist Lynton Crosby,” the former PM wrote.

Abbott used the piece to downplay David Cameron’s support for same-sex marriage and climate action, arguing the Prime Minster’s best decisions had been his cuts to welfare and transformation of education “in effect, privatising public schools”.

Though unable to achieve such feats at home, Abbott did manage to limit Federal funding for schools by slicing up the Gonski plan, cutting off the program’s future funding despite promising to be on a ‘unity ticket’ with Labor before his election.

In the Spectator column Abbott dedicated a significant portion of his comments to praising his government’s efforts at stopping the boats, as he did recently during his oration at the Margaret Thatcher Lecture.Screen Shot 2015-10-28 at 4.26.08 pm

The Sun King

It was Neil who first gave Murdoch one of his most durable nicknames – the Sun King – and made one of the most influential descriptions of him. In his book Full Disclosure, he wrote:

When you work for Rupert Murdoch you do not work for a company chairman or chief executive: you work for a Sun King. You are not a director or a manager or an editor: you are a courtier at the court of the Sun King … All life revolves around the Sun King: all authority comes from him. He is the only one to whom allegiance must be owed and he expects his remit to run everywhere, his word to be final. There are no other references but him. He is the only benchmark and anybody of importance reports direct to him. Normal management structures – all the traditional lines of authority, communication and decision-taking in the modern business corporation – do not matter. The Sun King is all that matters.

This understanding has been endorsed by others close to the throne. One executive admitted to Neil that he had dreamed about Murdoch for years after he left his employ. David Yelland, the former editor of The Sun, likened his boss’s mindset to a “prism” through which News editors saw the world. “Most Murdoch editors wake up in the morning, switch on the radio, hear that something has happened and think ‘what would Rupert think about this?’ It’s like a mantra inside your head,” he said. “You look at the world through Rupert’s eyes.” Another Sun editor, the legendary Kelvin MacKenzie, once said that if the boss told him to print the paper in Sanskrit, he would do so without question.

MacKenzie himself was a tyrannical man – Murdoch affectionately called him “my little Hitler” – and along with Paul Dacre, the editor of the Daily Mail, he personified the ugly, hectoring soul of British tabloid journalism. ‘‘Look at you lot, eh?” began a typical MacKenzie pep talk. “Useless load of fuckers, aren’t you, eh? Right load of wankers, eh, eh?” Bullying was so endemic at News’s Wapping compound that The Sun once published a staff member’s phone extension in the paper, inviting readers to abuse him, under the headline “RING HIGGY THE HUMAN SPONGE, HE’LL SOAK IT UP”.

But Murdoch was the biggest bully of all. After a million-pound libel settlement to Elton John, MacKenzie was subjected to 42 minutes of non-stop abuse – “the bollocking of a lifetime”, he called it. Other times it would be more studied psychological disintegration: “You’re losing your touch, Kelvin. [Pause] Your paper is pathetic. [Pause] You’re losing your touch, Kelvin.” A favourite Murdoch tactic was silence over the phone, lengthy enough to induce the other person to crack, and over time MacKenzie would learn to keep shtum as well, locking the two in unspoken brinksmanship. Staff joked about the thousands of pounds spent conveying silence over the Atlantic.

Broadsheet editors, in whom Murdoch feels less invested, receive a more icy disdain. Neil was given the silence, but not the performative abuse. Still, the calls left him “angry and depressed”, he said, until he tried MacKenzie’s tactic. Neil answered silence with a silence so long he “could have gone and made a cup of tea”.

“Just as I was about to crack,” Neil wrote in Full Disclosure, “he finally said, ‘Are you still there?’” Murdoch then excused himself – he had to go.

Eric Beecher, a former Murdoch executive, once said that the empire was ruled “by phone and by clone”. The intimacy of these relationships with his editors – Murdoch, jet-lagged or up late, freshly landed or in the office in person, asking after the front page, the editorial line, the gossip – provoke an old question: how much direct editorial influence does the proprietor wield? “He has said he never interferes with his editors’ editorial decisions,” the correspondent Phillip Knightley said. “Absolutely true, because he is careful to choose editors whose views agree with his.”

A former News employee put it this way: “To be honest, I think Murdoch’s presence was a less important feature of the environment at News than the character of the fairly idiosyncratic editors he appointed to represent him. The most charismatic of those editors, Paul Kelly, told me that Murdoch brought no influence to bear on his commissioning or story selection. I’ve often wondered if this was a hollow boast, but I believe it was largely true, or true at the time. Kelly was later removed by Murdoch, so I wonder if the game had changed by then.”

The editors are more “idiosyncratic” at The Australian than anywhere else. It has none of the prestige of The Times or the tradition of The Wall Street Journal, and a cousin-marriage ideological relationship with the Liberal Party. Apart from a handful of talents who might be spirited to the higher echelons of News itself, most Australian senior editorial staff find there is nowhere to go, no other paper to poach them, no organisation (apart from the Liberal Party again) keen for their talents. They are lifers, and express their gratitude with a loyalty that borders on the obsequious.

Happily, as the paper’s hard-copy readership has settled into old age, the proclivities of its readers and its proprietor have become more symbiotic. Did The Australian’s bizarre jihad against wind farms stem from Murdoch’s frequently voiced disdain for them? Hard to prove, and there is no special conspiracy required: the paper’s readers cling to the same topic, perhaps the only time they express concern for native birdlife.

Christopher Hitchens wrote that when politicians said they were afraid of Rupert Murdoch what they were really saying was that they were afraid of his readers. But this misses the intensely personal presence of Murdoch in the political world, where he is not a proxy for his readers but for his businesses. For a free-marketeer, he has been adroit at fostering regulatory capture. He is not shy about lying, or confessing to this lying.

“You tell these bloody politicians whatever they want to hear,” he told his biographer Thomas Kiernan, “and once the deal is done you don’t worry about it. They’re not going to chase after you later if they suddenly decide what you said
 wasn’t
 what they wanted to hear. Otherwise they’re made to look bad, and they can’t abide that. So they just stick their heads up their asses and wait for the blow to pass.”


He is more patient than politicians, and more cunning. There is something about Murdoch’s insistency that seems to change the conduits of time: he forgives no transgression, while his transgressions are forgiven. Politicians manage to persuade themselves they can use him to their benefit, but find out the hard way who is in charge. “It is better to ride the tiger’s back than let it rip your throat out,” Tony Blair once said. It is hard not to see in Blair’s rumoured affair with Murdoch’s wife some cold revenge. (Post-divorce, the Murdoch camp stopped denying these rumours, and even leaked an embarrassing mash note Deng wrote about Blair: “I’m so so missing Tony,” she wrote. “Because he is so so charming and his clothes are so good. He has such good body and he has really really good legs Butt . . . And he is slim tall and good skin. Pierce blue eyes which I love. Love his eyes. Also I love his power on the stage …”)

Former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd is more indicative of how these tiger rides usually end. He was so poorly treated by Murdoch’s Australian newspapers that in a recent interview with The Saturday Paper he called News Corp a “cancer” on democracy and suggested it should be the subject of a royal commission. “They go after people who have the audacity to raise a question about their behaviour,” Rudd said. He added, “It’s one of the reasons I’m speaking out directly, so that people can have a normal national conversation rather than a continued national embarrassed silence about this.”

Rudd’s sense of wounding was understandable. Less so was his decision to write for The Australian shortly afterwards – six days after The Saturday Paper interview, the national broadsheet ran a piece called “What We Got Right: Kevin Rudd’s Top 10 Labor Triumphs in Office”, by Kevin Rudd. The cancer was seemingly inoperable.


"The endless reign of Rupert Murdoch: After decades of influence, the media mogul isn’t so much a person as an epoch | The Monthly" https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2018/july/1530367200/richard-cooke/endless-reign-rupert-murdoch#mtr 

JULY 2018

ESSAYS

The endless reign of Rupert Murdoch By Richard Cooke

Image of Rupert Murdoch and Jerry Hall

Rupert Murdoch and Jerry Hall, March 2016

 
Rupert Murdoch

Rupert Murdoch - Flickr - Eva Rinaldi Celebrity and Live Music Photographer.jpg
Murdoch in December 2012
Born
Keith Rupert Murdoch

11 March 1931 (age 91)
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Citizenship
  • Australia (until 1985)
  • United States (from 1985)[a]
Education Worcester College, Oxford (BAMA)
Occupation
  • Businessman
Known for
  • Chairman and CEO of News Corporation (1980–2013)
  • Executive chairman of News Corp (2013–present)
  • Chairman and CEO of 21st Century Fox (2013–2015)
  • Executive co-chairman of 21st Century Fox (2015–2019)
  • Acting CEO of Fox News (2016–2018)
  • Chairman of Fox News (2016–2019)
  • Chairman of Fox Corporation (2019–present)
Board member of
  • News Corp
  • Fox Corporation
Spouses
Patricia Booker
(m. 1956; div. 1967)
(m. 1967; div. 1999)
(m. 1999; div. 2013)
(m. 2016; div. 2022)
Children 6, including PrudenceElisabethLachlan, and James
Parents
Relatives
Awards Companion of the Order of Australia (1984)[1]
Notes
  1. ^ Australian citizenship lost in 1985 (under S17 of Australian Citizenship Act 1948) with acquisition of US citizenship.

Keith Rupert Murdoch AC KCSG (/ˈmɜːrdɒk/ MUR-dok; born 11 March 1931) is an Australian-born American business magnate. Through his company News Corp, he is the owner of hundreds of local, national, and international publishing outlets around the world, including in the UK (The Sun and The Times), in Australia (The Daily TelegraphHerald Sun, and The Australian), in the US (The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post), book publisher HarperCollins, and the television broadcasting channels Sky News Australia and Fox News (through the Fox Corporation). He was also the owner of Sky (until 2018), 21st Century Fox (until 2019), and the now-defunct News of the World. With a net worth of US$21.7 billion as of 2 March 2022, Murdoch is the 31st richest person in the United States and the 71st richest in the world.

After his father's death in 1952, Murdoch took over the running of The News, a small Adelaide newspaper owned by his father. In the 1950s and 1960s, Murdoch acquired a number of newspapers in Australia and New Zealand before expanding into the United Kingdom in 1969, taking over the News of the World, followed closely by The Sun. In 1974, Murdoch moved to New York City, to expand into the US market; however, he retained interests in Australia and the UK. In 1981, Murdoch bought The Times, his first British broadsheet, and, in 1985, became a naturalized US citizen, giving up his Australian citizenship, to satisfy the legal requirement for US television network ownership.

In 1986, keen to adopt newer electronic publishing technologies, Murdoch consolidated his UK printing operations in London, causing bitter industrial disputes. His holding company News Corporation acquired Twentieth Century Fox (1985), HarperCollins (1989), and The Wall Street Journal (2007). Murdoch formed the British broadcaster BSkyB in 1990 and, during the 1990s, expanded into Asian networks and South American television. By 2000, Murdoch's News Corporation owned over 800 companies in more than 50 countries, with a net worth of over $5 billion.

In July 2011, Murdoch faced allegations that his companies, including the News of the World, owned by News Corporation, had been regularly hacking the phones of celebrities, royalty, and public citizens. Murdoch faced police and government investigations into bribery and corruption by the British government and FBI investigations in the US. On 21 July 2012, Murdoch resigned as a director of News International.

Many of Murdoch's papers and television channels have been accused of biased and misleading coverage to support his business interests  and political allies, and some have credited his influence with major political developments in the UK, US, and Australia

Influence, wealth, and reputation of Keith Rupert Murdoch

According to Forbes' real time list of world's billionaires, Murdoch is the 34th richest person in the US and the 96th richest person in the world, with a net worth of US$13.1 billion as of February 2017.

 In 2016, Forbes ranked "Rupert Murdoch & Family" as the 35th most powerful person in the world.

Later, in 2019, Rupert Murdoch & family were ranked 52nd in the Forbes' annual list of the world's billionaires.

In August 2013, Terry Flew, Professor of Media and Communications at Queensland University of Technology, wrote an article for the Conversation publication in which he investigated a claim by former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd that Murdoch owned 70% of Australian newspapers in 2011. Flew's article showed that News Corp Australia owned 23% of the nation's newspapers in 2011, according to the Finkelstein Review of Media and Media Regulation, but, at the time of the article, the corporation's titles accounted for 59% of the sales of all daily newspapers, with weekly sales of 17.3 million copies.

In connection with Murdoch's testimony to the Leveson Inquiry "into the ethics of the British press", editor of Newsweek InternationalTunku Varadarajan, referred to him as "the man whose name is synonymous with unethical newspapers".

News Corp papers were accused of supporting the campaign of the Australian Liberal government and influencing public opinion during the 2013 federal election. Following the announcement of the Liberal Party victory at the polls, Murdoch tweeted "Aust. election public sick of public sector workers and phony welfare scroungers sucking life out of economy. Other nations to follow in time."

In November 2015, former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott said that Murdoch "arguably has had more impact on the wider world than any other living Australian".

In late 2015, The Wall Street Journal journalist John Carreyrou began a series of investigative articles on Theranos, the blood-testing start-up founded by Elizabeth Holmes, that questioned its claim to be able to run a wide range of lab tests from a tiny sample of blood from a finger prick.

Holmes had turned to Murdoch, whose media empire includes Carreyrou's employer, The Wall Street Journal, to kill the story. Murdoch, who became the biggest investor in Theranos in 2015 as a result of his $125 million injection, refused the request from Holmes saying that "he trusted the paper’s editors to handle the matter fairly.”

In November 2021, Murdoch accused Google and Facebook of stifling conservative viewpoints on its platforms, and called for "substantial reform" and openness in the digital ad supply chain.

The Rise of the Murdoch Dynasty

The Rise of the Murdoch Dynasty is a three-part documentary series broadcast on BBC Two in 2020. Parallels have been drawn between it and the American series Succession.[1] It is about the business magnate Rupert Murdoch and his political influence, the News International phone hacking scandal and his children's battles to succeed him.

Participants

The documentary has a cast that includes the British politicians Nigel FarageMichael HeseltineJohn Prescott and Tom Watson, the journalists Piers MorganAndrew NeilPeter OborneAlan Rusbridger and David Yelland, the strategists Steve Bannon and Alastair Campbell, as well as Hugh GrantAlan Sugar and former president of the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA) Max Mosley.

Reception

In The GuardianTim Dowling opined that "While this political drama is no less gripping for being so familiar, it also feels strangely remote. On the one hand, it is hard to believe these events happened as long as a decade ago; on the other, it is difficult to recall the mood of a time when phone hacking was all we had to worry about".

The endless reign of Rupert Murdoch 
 By Richard Cooke
 
 
https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2018/july/1530367200/richard-cooke/endles
After decades of influence, the media mogul isn’t so much a person as an epoch

“Those who say they give the public what it wants begin by underestimating public taste, and end by debauching it.”
– T.S. Eliot (attrib), The Pilkington Report on Broadcasting, 1962

 

“Privacy is for paedos.”
– Paul McMullan, former News of the World journalist, in evidence to the Leveson Inquiry into the culture, practices and ethics of the press, 2011


Rupert Murdoch's Fall

A man falling down, especially an important man, has been considered an ill omen since ancient times. It is somehow intuitive – no special explanation is needed for the origin of fallen angels, or the expression “pride goeth before a fall”. It is not mere superstition either. In older adults, falls really are a harbinger of senescence and death, and geriatric patients will often hide these events from their doctors and their families, recognising what they represent in terms of fading life force. The most dangerous type of ground-level fall involves white males over the age of 85, especially those who break a bone. When Rupert Murdoch slipped and severely injured his back on the deck of a yacht somewhere in the Caribbean, he was 86.

Those who watch Murdoch, many of whom wish him ill, noted the significances. The yacht was owned by Lachlan Murdoch, one of several prospective dynastic heirs to the family companies, and Murdoch senior stumbled in the fresh hours of 2018, not long after New Year’s Eve. “I hope you all are having a great start to 2018,” he wrote to his staff later. “I suspect it has been better than mine. I am writing to tell you that last week I had a sailing accident and suffered a painful back injury. While I am well on the road to recovery, I have to work from home for some weeks.”

The some weeks became some months, and rumours circulated that the injuries were more serious than a bad back. The tycoon, it was said, had hit his head. In public, he had been rambly and vague for a while. Some thought this was an act: at the Leveson Inquiry into press malpractice in 2012, his dotty demeanour was compared to the pseudo-dementia of the arraigned Junior Soprano in The Sopranos. Now apparently it was for real.

Few executives are as synonymous with their companies as Rupert Murdoch is with his. News Corp, he had said in the past, “for better or worse, is a reflection of my thinking, my character, my values”. Not only does he govern them by fiat, stacking boards with lackeys, consulting little further than his gut, he also has not much life outside the office. He has few friends and virtually no hobbies. (His biographer Michael Wolff noted that “he may be the only Australian man not interested in sports” – he is said to have purchased the Los Angeles Dodgers franchise without ever having seen a live game of baseball.) He has struck the balance between work and family life by bringing his children to work.

It seemed natural, then, that as Rupert Murdoch lay in bed his company was in the balance as well, not bankrupted but in the process of being broken up. It had already been split into two in 2013, and in December 2017, Disney announced it was seeking to buy the entertainment assets of 21st Century Fox, leaving the news concerns to the Murdochs. Some tried to paint this divestment as a failure, just as in the past Murdoch has been accused of failures that reap him tens of millions of dollars. This time it was an overall deal worth more than $US50 billion. The arrival of another possible buyer in Comcast seemed to confirm the irresistible prospect that Murdoch and Murdoch Inc. were reaching the end of the line, even if it did also mean a bigger payday for the old fox.

Pundits began the dangerous business of peering into the future. Possibilities were war-gamed: the sons, James and Lachlan, would take over, or at least Lachlan would. (By April, he was already taking Rupert’s empty chair at meetings.) These changes would supposedly stem the destructive rage at the US cable network Fox News, long rumoured to be an embarrassment to the young scions, and possibly Murdoch himself. The Australian and The Times newspapers, reliant on subsidy, would be wound up and sold off. There was speculation about resignation, succession and even death. (A year before, former ABC presenter Quentin Dempster had called on Murdoch to resign for the good of journalism.) Instead, Rupert Murdoch did what he always does, and recovered and went back to work.

His first real public appearance was at the Trump White House’s inaugural state dinner in April, where he was one of the only civilian attendees. (Donald Trump speaks to Murdoch regularly, and calls him “Rupie”; according to Wolff, in return Murdoch thinks Trump is a “fucking idiot”.) Murdoch is close to Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and reportedly pressed him for an invitation. The same month Murdoch hosted a dinner for Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who was visiting the United States. Bin Salman is one of the world’s richest men – he began his tour by booking all 285 rooms at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills – and together he and Murdoch have a net worth roughly equivalent to the gross domestic product of Mongolia. They sparred lightly in a genteel Q&A session, where the sharia-mania of Murdoch’s media properties seemed a long way away, as did premonitions of demise.

In late June, it was announced that Disney had offered $US71.3 billion to buy most of Fox’s entertainment assets – beating Comcast’s previous bid of $US65 billion. In the months of Murdoch’s recuperation, his price had risen by $20 billion, and the bidding wouldn’t stop there.


Rupert Murdoch's Accumulations

It is not too soon to start countenancing legacy, though. Murdoch is a legacy unto himself, at least in the sense of something left over from a previous era, but still in active existence. Within the Murdoch companies, plans for his succession are made on the assumptions of something like immortality. “Don’t you know my dad’s never going to die?” his son Lachlan said once. When a Wall Street Journal editor asked his boss, Robert Thomson, about pre-preparing an obituary for Murdoch (a standard newspaper practice), he was told, “Rupert is not going to die.” “In the event he does?” the editor asked. “Rupert is not going to die,” he was told again. Murdoch once rejected 10-year and 20-year contingencies for his replacement, finally settling on a 30-year plan he was comfortable with. He was then 76. He likes to point out that his mother, Dame Elisabeth Murdoch, lived until 104. She did not, though, run a major international company as a centenarian.

Murdoch had already survived prostate cancer 18 years ago, and a fall from a horse before that. Business-wise, he had shrugged off the UK phone-hacking scandal, the advent of the internet, attempts at regulation, private debt crises, delayed satellite launches. After five decades of writing him off, Murdoch watchers should have been more careful. Tom Shales, the TV critic at The Washington Post, once told PBS’s Frontline that “Murdoch is someone who seems to have been allowed to grow unchecked, like – you know, like some sort of monster in a science fiction movie, The Blob or something. And you keep waiting for somebody to sort of shape him up and push him back in, but it doesn’t happen.” Shales said that in 1995, and neither age nor circumstance have changed its pertinence.

There is something deeply unsatisfactory about the Rupert Murdoch story – the lack of consequences, the triumph of cynicism – and it trips those who tell it into making the same mistakes over and over again. He has attracted a coterie of chroniclers, many of very high quality, who are tempted to contrive comeuppances for him. “You have to write something at the end,” one biographer told me, so they suggest that his journalists might stand up to their boss (this has happened a couple of times, but not for decades), that he might be spayed by regulators (never happened), that he might be overcome by second thoughts. All wishful thinking. “If I was going to be shot tomorrow morning, I bet I could get out of it,” Murdoch said once, and he does.

There is no happy ending, and hardly even any character development. Instead, Murdoch seems to exist in his own time, an era rather than a character. “What does Rupert Murdoch want?” the now deceased Christopher Hitchens asked, 28 years ago. He was already part of the fourth decade of Murdoch observers, and the library trying to answer this question stretches and swells to the present day. Delving into it finds almost spooky continuities. Reading The Australian, I thought “vendetta journalism” seemed a concise, if obvious, description of the paper’s style, and wondered if anyone had used it before. Donald Horne had, in 1975, years before I was born. In 1969, Murdoch and the then editor, Larry Lamb, redesigned The Sun, inventing the enduring form of the modern tabloid – right down to the red top. Murdoch was then, as now, in competition with a new technology threatening the print media. It was colour television.


The spear

Events that might have been career or life defining to anyone else are half-remembered in Murdoch’s, miniaturised by the scale of his events. There was a kidnapping attempt on Anna Murdoch, Rupert’s second wife, not long after the couple moved to the UK. Muriel McKay, the wife of one of Murdoch’s senior executives, was murdered as a result. It was a case of mistaken identity: the McKays had borrowed the Murdoch family car. Anna said in 2001 it was like something that “happened to someone else. That sort of period was somebody else … another lifetime.” Part of the tension in their marriage reportedly came from a belief Rupert might finally retire when he hit his 60s. That was almost 30 years ago.

The Murdoch epoch was also supposed to end, or at least begin to end, on July 19, 2011, the self-described “most humble day” of Murdoch’s life. The News man, called before the UK House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee, did his best impression of a human being, a bumbling, forelock-tugging old man with an Anglospheric mongrel accent. He was there to explain the apparent fact that he was running what one MP called a “criminal enterprise”: his newspapers were illegally hacking thousands of people’s phones, alongside bribing police officers and public servants.

However, he had an accidental ally. An activist and failed stand-up comedian (code name: Jonnie Marbles; real name: Jonathan May-Bowles) had hidden a pie made from shaving foam in the hearing room. At the right moment he would thrust it into Murdoch’s face, shouting “You naughty billionaire!”, and turn humility into humiliation. Instead, Marbles missed with most of the pie, Murdoch’s third wife, Wendi Deng, punched him in the face, he was arrested (and later sentenced to six weeks in jail, inevitably announcing outside the courtroom “This is the most humble day of my life”), and Murdoch barely changed posture.

The mood in the room changed. It had become a joke. “Don’t worry, this will play well,” the MP Tom Watson overheard one of Murdoch’s crew saying. “Rupert must have fixed that,” someone from the press muttered as they were ushered out of the room. “We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality,” Baron Macaulay wrote a long time ago. Rupert Murdoch might know more about those fits than anyone else who has ever lived, and he had outlived another one.

Some journalists went to jail, Murdoch’s son James was forced to step down from News International, but the measures to further investigate widespread criminality on Fleet Street never materialised. A cross-party parliamentary committee determined Rupert Murdoch was “not a fit person to exercise the stewardship of a major international company”, but so what? It added to a pile of ineffectual establishment condemnation and naysaying. It was really language aimed at assisting the regulator, Ofcom, but that had never worked in the past either. The secretary for culture and media, Jeremy Hunt, had once been nicknamed “The Minister for Murdoch”.

There was always something that was supposed to bring about his downfall. He didn’t understand the internet. He didn’t even know how to use email. The purchase of MySpace had bloodied his nose. Print newspapers were dead. His reputation as a CEO was in the doldrums. He was not the man to manage in the digital age. Tabloid dinosaurs were on the brink of extinction. But the downfalls always seemed to happen to other people. Rupert Murdoch had fared better than his direct competitors. Robert Maxwell had disappeared off his yacht. Conrad Black went to jail. Ted Turner challenged him to two televised fist fights that never transpired. The others – it was hard to even remember their names.

When Rupert Murdoch’s father, Keith, bequeathed him a small Adelaide-based press consortium in his will, he wrote, “I desire that my said son Keith Rupert Murdoch shall have the great opportunity of spending a useful altruistic and full life in newspaper and broadcasting activities and of ultimately occupying a position of high responsibility.” He hoped, he wrote in an accompanying letter, that Murdoch might use the company to “do some good”.

The “full life” and “position of high responsibility” have transpired. But how many people not employed by him would describe Keith Rupert Murdoch as an altruist?

Lachlan Murdoch’s yacht is called Sarissa, the name of an ancient Greek spear. James Murdoch studied history at Harvard, and often draws on this knowledge to name things. (One of James’s pet projects inside News Corp was called “Project Rubicon”.) He must know there is a special exception to the rule that a fallen leader presages disaster. The sarissa was introduced to the armies of antiquity by Philip II of Macedon, who once tried to kill his son Alexander the Great in a drunken wedding fight, but slipped and fell instead. When Julius Caesar arrived at Hadrumetum to attack Carthage, he landed face-first on the sand, and a murmur went through his army that this was fatal, but he laughed and said, “Oh Africa, I have you!” And at Pevensey in 1066, the man then called William the Bastard tripped off the boat.

The exception to the superstition is conquerors.


Raw power

Rupert Murdoch believes that the press is not as powerful as people think, that it follows the public, not the other way around, and that its influence is overstated. At least, this is his line when talking to a judge. “If these lies are repeated again and again they catch on,” he told Lord Leveson. “But they just aren’t true … We don’t have that sort of power.” He was referring to the power to swing elections. He has been careful to maintain this stance, at least most of the time. Privately he did tell Harold Evans that he was more powerful than the government.

But he does not look powerful, and did not look any more powerful when he was younger. He is self-deprecating, even self-effacing, a cheapskate who used to have a Hong Kong tailor make knock-off suits, before Wendi Deng gave him a makeover. He is cheeky in interviews, and over the years has made the transition from boyish to avuncular without much in between, though his tentative smile and darting eyes have grown less self-conscious.

He emanates reasonableness, not sulphur. He makes few gestures of dominance, though he does have a habit of tapping his palm or his watch on the surface in front of him when he talks. (There was a moment during the Leveson Inquiry, a tense moment, when his wife, sitting behind him, reached out a staying hand to his elbow – he was doing it again.) Overall, this anodyne, rather dorky presence is hard to square with the Rupert Murdoch that his peers describe. This is no doubt part of the danger.

The words they use – mogul, empire, fiefdom, dynasty, properties – are the language of territorial, even imperial, power, although this transposition between the feudal realm and the financial realm is commonplace. Less common is the response others have to Murdoch. Other formidable people not only respect him but are also afraid of him. They note that his influence is transcontinental, ranging from Australia to the United Kingdom to the United States. It is more lasting than political power: during his career, he has enjoyed access to nine US presidents, nine British prime ministers and nine Australian prime ministers. It is not just his current power but his aggregate power over time that produces velocity.

Both his enemies and those who work for him paint him as an almost supernatural figure. Beyond critics calling him “the Supreme Satan”, or “Dracula”, or the “Prince of Darkness” are eyewitnesses to Murdoch’s uniquely insinuative and wily approach.

In Australia, Kevin Rudd’s former campaign manager Bruce Hawker wrote that News Corp is “easily the most powerful political force in Australia, bigger than the major parties or the combined weight of the unions … I saw how, on a daily basis, the storm of negative stories that emanated from News Corp papers blew our campaign off course.”

In the UK, Murdoch’s tabloids were at one time the most feared political force in the country. This is partly due to their concentration – they are national tabloids, not city-based – and also their supreme nastiness. The former director general of the BBC John Birt once met a government minister who was physically shaking at the prospect of an imminent meeting with Murdoch.

“I have never met Mr Murdoch,” the former Tony Blair communications deputy Lance Price wrote for The Guardian, “but at times when I worked at Downing Street he seemed like the 24th member of the cabinet. His voice was rarely heard … but his presence was always felt. No big decision could ever be made inside No 10 without taking account of the likely reaction of three men – Gordon Brown, John Prescott and Rupert Murdoch.”

There is a temptation to play out counterfactuals and counter-histories. Would Margaret Thatcher have been PM without The Sun? Would the Iraq War have happened without Rupert Murdoch? For a man invested in a lot, he was unusually invested in this disgrace, and in the lead-up to invasion Tony Blair spoke with him almost as often as he spoke with his generals. The thought experiment is not interesting so much for its result but for its difficulty. Murdoch media properties were so synonymous with the call to arms it is hard to imagine the clamour in a different voice.

That indivisibility extends to the rest of our cultural reality. Murdoch’s close association with Fox News and The Wall Street Journal are obvious, but he is just as responsible for Harlequin romance novels, realtor.com, and Married at First Sight Australia. It is easy to underestimate the scale of his cultural impact: The Simpsons, Avatar, the format of the modern tabloid newspaper and cable television sports coverage would not exist without Rupert Murdoch. We can play this game with whole countries. Today’s Australia feels more insular, völkisch and hostile in character than its near neighbour New Zealand. Is this just an accident of history or the end product of strong Murdoch influence in one place and weak Murdoch influence in the other?

If you bought Harper Lee’s second novel, you gave money to Rupert Murdoch. It is possible to work for him without really realising it – partway through writing this piece I remembered that I had once worked for The Sunday Times in the UK and then remembered that Factiva, the research tool I was relying on, is a Murdoch property as well. Even Michael Moore, Murdoch critic extraordinaire, is a sometime Murdoch employee, and his Stupid White Men was published, albeit reluctantly, by the Murdoch-owned HarperCollins.

News’s ambitions are not confined to Earth either. Andrew Neil, a former editor of The Sunday Times, said that Murdoch once told him he had bet the entire company on the launch of a satellite. Like many of those close to Murdoch – Harold Evans, the former editor of The Sunday Times; Les Hinton, the former Dow Jones CEO; even Philip, Murdoch’s former butler – Neil felt compelled to write about his relationship with his boss, perhaps to say that he had survived it.


The Sun King

It was Neil who first gave Murdoch one of his most durable nicknames – the Sun King – and made one of the most influential descriptions of him. In his book Full Disclosure, he wrote:

When you work for Rupert Murdoch you do not work for a company chairman or chief executive: you work for a Sun King. You are not a director or a manager or an editor: you are a courtier at the court of the Sun King … All life revolves around the Sun King: all authority comes from him. He is the only one to whom allegiance must be owed and he expects his remit to run everywhere, his word to be final. There are no other references but him. He is the only benchmark and anybody of importance reports direct to him. Normal management structures – all the traditional lines of authority, communication and decision-taking in the modern business corporation – do not matter. The Sun King is all that matters.

This understanding has been endorsed by others close to the throne. One executive admitted to Neil that he had dreamed about Murdoch for years after he left his employ. David Yelland, the former editor of The Sun, likened his boss’s mindset to a “prism” through which News editors saw the world. “Most Murdoch editors wake up in the morning, switch on the radio, hear that something has happened and think ‘what would Rupert think about this?’ It’s like a mantra inside your head,” he said. “You look at the world through Rupert’s eyes.” Another Sun editor, the legendary Kelvin MacKenzie, once said that if the boss told him to print the paper in Sanskrit, he would do so without question.

MacKenzie himself was a tyrannical man – Murdoch affectionately called him “my little Hitler” – and along with Paul Dacre, the editor of the Daily Mail, he personified the ugly, hectoring soul of British tabloid journalism. ‘‘Look at you lot, eh?” began a typical MacKenzie pep talk. “Useless load of fuckers, aren’t you, eh? Right load of wankers, eh, eh?” Bullying was so endemic at News’s Wapping compound that The Sun once published a staff member’s phone extension in the paper, inviting readers to abuse him, under the headline “RING HIGGY THE HUMAN SPONGE, HE’LL SOAK IT UP”.

But Murdoch was the biggest bully of all. After a million-pound libel settlement to Elton John, MacKenzie was subjected to 42 minutes of non-stop abuse – “the bollocking of a lifetime”, he called it. Other times it would be more studied psychological disintegration: “You’re losing your touch, Kelvin. [Pause] Your paper is pathetic. [Pause] You’re losing your touch, Kelvin.” A favourite Murdoch tactic was silence over the phone, lengthy enough to induce the other person to crack, and over time MacKenzie would learn to keep shtum as well, locking the two in unspoken brinksmanship. Staff joked about the thousands of pounds spent conveying silence over the Atlantic.

Broadsheet editors, in whom Murdoch feels less invested, receive a more icy disdain. Neil was given the silence, but not the performative abuse. Still, the calls left him “angry and depressed”, he said, until he tried MacKenzie’s tactic. Neil answered silence with a silence so long he “could have gone and made a cup of tea”.

“Just as I was about to crack,” Neil wrote in Full Disclosure, “he finally said, ‘Are you still there?’” Murdoch then excused himself – he had to go.

Eric Beecher, a former Murdoch executive, once said that the empire was ruled “by phone and by clone”. The intimacy of these relationships with his editors – Murdoch, jet-lagged or up late, freshly landed or in the office in person, asking after the front page, the editorial line, the gossip – provoke an old question: how much direct editorial influence does the proprietor wield? “He has said he never interferes with his editors’ editorial decisions,” the correspondent Phillip Knightley said. “Absolutely true, because he is careful to choose editors whose views agree with his.”

A former News employee put it this way: “To be honest, I think Murdoch’s presence was a less important feature of the environment at News than the character of the fairly idiosyncratic editors he appointed to represent him. The most charismatic of those editors, Paul Kelly, told me that Murdoch brought no influence to bear on his commissioning or story selection. I’ve often wondered if this was a hollow boast, but I believe it was largely true, or true at the time. Kelly was later removed by Murdoch, so I wonder if the game had changed by then.”

The editors are more “idiosyncratic” at The Australian than anywhere else. It has none of the prestige of The Times or the tradition of The Wall Street Journal, and a cousin-marriage ideological relationship with the Liberal Party. Apart from a handful of talents who might be spirited to the higher echelons of News itself, most Australian senior editorial staff find there is nowhere to go, no other paper to poach them, no organisation (apart from the Liberal Party again) keen for their talents. They are lifers, and express their gratitude with a loyalty that borders on the obsequious.

Happily, as the paper’s hard-copy readership has settled into old age, the proclivities of its readers and its proprietor have become more symbiotic. Did The Australian’s bizarre jihad against wind farms stem from Murdoch’s frequently voiced disdain for them? Hard to prove, and there is no special conspiracy required: the paper’s readers cling to the same topic, perhaps the only time they express concern for native birdlife.

Christopher Hitchens wrote that when politicians said they were afraid of Rupert Murdoch what they were really saying was that they were afraid of his readers. But this misses the intensely personal presence of Murdoch in the political world, where he is not a proxy for his readers but for his businesses. For a free-marketeer, he has been adroit at fostering regulatory capture. He is not shy about lying, or confessing to this lying.

“You tell these bloody politicians whatever they want to hear,” he told his biographer Thomas Kiernan, “and once the deal is done you don’t worry about it. They’re not going to chase after you later if they suddenly decide what you said
 wasn’t
 what they wanted to hear. Otherwise they’re made to look bad, and they can’t abide that. So they just stick their heads up their asses and wait for the blow to pass.”


He is more patient than politicians, and more cunning. There is something about Murdoch’s insistency that seems to change the conduits of time: he forgives no transgression, while his transgressions are forgiven. Politicians manage to persuade themselves they can use him to their benefit, but find out the hard way who is in charge. “It is better to ride the tiger’s back than let it rip your throat out,” Tony Blair once said. It is hard not to see in Blair’s rumoured affair with Murdoch’s wife some cold revenge. (Post-divorce, the Murdoch camp stopped denying these rumours, and even leaked an embarrassing mash note Deng wrote about Blair: “I’m so so missing Tony,” she wrote. “Because he is so so charming and his clothes are so good. He has such good body and he has really really good legs Butt . . . And he is slim tall and good skin. Pierce blue eyes which I love. Love his eyes. Also I love his power on the stage …”)

Former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd is more indicative of how these tiger rides usually end. He was so poorly treated by Murdoch’s Australian newspapers that in a recent interview with The Saturday Paper he called News Corp a “cancer” on democracy and suggested it should be the subject of a royal commission. “They go after people who have the audacity to raise a question about their behaviour,” Rudd said. He added, “It’s one of the reasons I’m speaking out directly, so that people can have a normal national conversation rather than a continued national embarrassed silence about this.”

Rudd’s sense of wounding was understandable. Less so was his decision to write for The Australian shortly afterwards – six days after The Saturday Paper interview, the national broadsheet ran a piece called “What We Got Right: Kevin Rudd’s Top 10 Labor Triumphs in Office”, by Kevin Rudd. The cancer was seemingly inoperable.


Why didn’t we think of that?

Former politicians seeking rapprochement with the Murdoch media are relatively rare. Usually, it is a hopeful opposition leader, or a grateful incumbent, who tries to accommodate themselves. Murdoch is a right-wing ideologue, but not the most doctrinaire kind. His papers editorialised in favour of the Labor prime minister Kevin Rudd, supported Tony Blair extensively, and launched the career of the Democratic New York mayor Ed Koch in such one-eyed fashion that New York Post reporters complained. This history means that left-wing parties (unless they are, say, the Australian Greens or UK Labour under Jeremy Corbyn) can be seduced into thinking they may get a fair hearing.

It is nearly forgotten now, but Murdoch’s earliest serious politicking was his support for Gough Whitlam. He even instructed Evan Williams to write a speech for Whitlam in 1972; Whitlam wouldn’t give it. “In every basic area of human need,” Williams wrote, “the Australian people are deprived and wanting, and lagging behind other comparable nations.” The speech takes aim at private health insurance and private schools, and advocates efficient public transport, unpolluted cities, and equality of access to services. Most notable is the language. “Australians are entitled to them – as a right. We will provide them – as a right.” Murdoch would go on to attack this idea of “entitlement” more than almost any other person. By 1975 he was instructing his editors to “kill Whitlam”.

There is a half-believed explanation for this turnaround. Once elected, Whitlam didn’t give Murdoch the credit he anticipated, and compounded the insult by ditching him for a dinner with English television host David Frost. If Whitlam had been more grateful, the story goes, perhaps Murdoch would have been a lion for the left instead. This overlooks how thin Murdoch’s views are, and how capricious. He has supported candidates as outlandish as Ross Perot and Ben Carson. His ideas are skittish and shallow, and he has the easily bored political positioning of a rich man with no fixed abode.

“I don’t know that my views are as right wing as they’re painted to be,” Murdoch once said, but Andrew Neil countered that his former boss is much more right wing than he first appears. Perhaps what Murdoch means is that he is a social moderate: years ago, he dabbled with the candidacy of the televangelist Pat Robertson, but now cultivates only a garden-variety homophobia, which he has the sense to keep quiet about. “I’m considered homophobic and crazy about these things and old-fashioned” was his take on same-sex marriage.

On foreign policy, though, few are more belligerent. When Margaret Thatcher was negotiating with the Chinese over Hong Kong’s sovereignty, Murdoch suggested dropping an atomic bomb on Beijing should they invade, conceding that “I suppose we could fire a warning nuke into a desert first”. His most significant falling out with Thatcher came when she refused to back Ronald Reagan’s invasion of Grenada. During the Falklands War, The Sun’s coverage was so jingoistic that Private Eye parodied it with a headline reading “KILL AN ARGIE AND WIN A METRO”. Service personnel thought the offer of a car was real. “Why didn’t we think of that?” Kelvin MacKenzie is said to have responded.

Someone in a time machine pressing Gough Whitlam towards a dreary dinner would be making a more fundamental mistake: misunderstanding the role of the media in a Western society. Bellicosity is virtually a prerequisite for becoming a popular press baron. War feeds the interests of proprietors as well as their readers – and this function of power dates back centuries. In 1776 Adam Smith could note that

the people who live in the capital … feel, many of them, scarce any inconveniency from the war; but enjoy, at their ease, the amusement of reading in the newspapers the exploits of their own fleets and armies … They are commonly dissatisfied with the return of peace, which puts an end to their amusement, and to a thousand visionary hopes of conquest and national glory from a longer continuance of the war.

This warmongering is only a single element in a set of selection biases. Alongside William Randolph Hearst or Lord Northcliffe, Murdoch looks unexceptional, no longer one of a kind. A News underling writing today could note a “volcanic intolerance of slipshod work”, outline Murdoch’s enthusiasm for “fact before argument”, or argue that he “had little concern for the abstract … was not a thinker … was mainly emotional … was more interested in people than in things” – but these are descriptions of the father of popular journalism, Lord Northcliffe, written in 1931. As Guardian writer Ian Jack pointed out, they applied equally to Paul Dacre. A gambler in business who always wins, someone with an uncanny ability to divine the tastes of the public – so many of the conditions of Murdoch’s career are pre-conditions for survivorship, not deep insights into his character.


Bloody press lords

One thing that did make Murdoch exceptional was his lack of care for social graces. This, set against the stiff propriety of upper-class Britain, is perhaps his most Australian quality. “I’m quite ashamed,” he said. “I enjoy popular journalism. I must say I enjoy it more than what you would call quality journalism.” But he wasn’t really ashamed at all. When Watergate happened, Murdoch’s response broke with the rest of the journalistic class. “The American press might get their pleasure in successfully crucifying Nixon,” he said, “but the last laugh could be on them. See how they like it when the Commies take over the West.” He would be in the business of speaking power to truth instead.

Before he railed against Commies, Murdoch was one. One of the key props of his life is a bust of Lenin kept in his rooms at Oxford, to which he would drink toasts and recite Russian poetry. This relic of “Red Rupe” is supposed to show the extremity of his evolution: from undergraduate Marxist in the Labour Club to a union-breaker and Thatcherite-in-chief. It was, he said, his tussle with the printing union chapels of Fleet Street – “the most searing experience of my life” – that repelled him from labour politics forever. He repaid the chapels by disbanding them for good, with the assistance of Margaret Thatcher and her police.

The printing unions in the 1970s were an almost parodic expression of the inefficiencies of “Winter of Discontent” British labourism. Sexist, corrupt, rife with go-slows and no-shows, they took The Times, never a profit-making newspaper, to the absolute brink of bankruptcy. (In an irony that would be noted later, The Times was unable to report on Thatcher’s ascension to 10 Downing Street because of a year-long industrial action.) But Murdoch’s easy transition to the side of capital, shedding his undergraduate state socialism in the process, glosses over something more fundamental. He has never stopped being a Leninist, at least in the Steve Bannon–like sense of wanting to destroy the contemporary establishment.

The ready psychological explanation for this is his status as a perpetual outsider. At Geelong Grammar he was the son of a press baron, not the offspring of landed gentry, and was bullied accordingly. He was a colonial in Great Britain, and a man of initiative in the stuffy languor of Menzies’ Australia. In the United States he was a foreigner trying to do business in New York City with no connections (a category previously considered ripe for fleecing), and a newspaper proprietor who did not share America’s sacral view of the press. He hated all of these incumbent attitudes, and not only sought revenge on them but also saw them as opportunities for arbitrage. They were different, but also fundamentally the same: flabby, mistaken and patronising enclaves, ripe for attack from real competition. He has called these people many names – Commies, and poofters, and limp liberals – but one particular epithet is most salient: “the bishops”.

The ur-establishment Murdoch set himself against, the template for all the others, was Establishment Britain after the Second World War. He encountered it twice, first in 1950 as a student at Oxford, then again when he started his British newspaper empire, beginning with the purchase of the News of the World in 1969. In Australia, the Murdochs were unusual among establishment families for their Anglophobia (partly driven by Sir Keith Murdoch’s experiences at Gallipoli), and Rupert reserved special hostility for English snobbery. The hostility was reciprocated – at Oxford, a magazine described him as a “brilliant betting man with the individual Billingsgate touch”, a reference to the coarse, working-class fish market known for its foul language.

There is a British tradition of colonial subjects, especially Canadians, gaining peerages through owning newspapers, and at first Murdoch seemed to be joining it. Roy Herbert Thomson, the son of a barber, became Lord Thomson of Fleet. William Maxwell Aitken, one of 10 children, became Lord Beaverbrook. Conrad Black became Lord Black of Crossharbour. These men put on airs, and renounced their own citizenships, and bought into the deference and ludicrousness of the English aristocracy. (In return, hereditary peers considered them the apogee of vulgarity.)

But Murdoch’s key advantage, apart from being sober (he once said that on Fleet Street this made him a comparative genius after lunchtime), was that he wasn’t interested in any kind of social esteem. Not from those people, anyway. The press wasn’t a route to anything else, it was the final destination. “When people start taking knighthoods and peerages,” he told one of his biographers, “it really is telling the world you’ve sold out.” Worse than being obsequious, it was a mistake.

The establishment attacked Murdoch with gusto from the beginning. He serialised a Christine Keeler book when former minister John Profumo’s reputation was being rehabilitated, and David Frost prepared a hostile reception for him on television, complete with booing audience. (David Frost has a lot to answer for.) Murdoch, uncowed, suggested Britain was under the thumb of its upper classes, and Frost said with disdain, “That’s an Australian view of England … I mean, of course there’s a lot of daft old-school ties in this country and so on but it doesn’t work like that – the establishment are not as well organised as that.” Murdoch replied, “You reckon?”

Not long afterwards, he bought the production company responsible for the show.

“The British always thought in terms of their empire and were pretty patronising toward us Australians,” Murdoch recalled in a 2005 interview. “Pat you on your head and say ‘You’ll do well,’ and when you do well they kick you to death.” Not only would he not succumb to this attitude, or try to ignore it, he would attack it. “The Sun has no party politics,” ran a front-page manifesto in its first week proper under Murdoch management. “The Sun is a radical newspaper. We are not going to bow to the establishment in any of its privileged enclaves. Ever.” Impervious to the need for honours, Murdoch was going to kick the establishment to death instead.


Hey sonny, you can’t park here

In 1953, when Murdoch took over his father’s business, he was only 22, and so green that when he pulled his car into the Adelaide News garage that he owned, an attendant called, “Hey sonny, you can’t park here.” He had watched his father carefully, though, and had also worked as a sub-editor on Lord Beaverbrook’s Daily Express, then an influential and popular newspaper. This tutelage means that Murdoch is probably the only press baron in the world who could, if necessary, perform almost any of the jobs on any of his news titles.

He has excellent editorial judgement. Once, counselling Piers Morgan not to splash with an image of Ronnie Kray’s corpse, he told him that “stiffs don’t sell papers, they sell American magazines”. (He was right.) He can sub-edit in a way that is now almost extinct – when he took over The Wall Street Journal, he dictated the new look of the front page with a Magic Marker, right down to the size of the picture boxes. Post-takeover, the paper became the highest selling national paper in America.

He can report. Michael Wolff found him on the phone, note-pad working, calling sources and making corroborations. (Typically, this industry was for a New York Post gossip story smearing Hillary Clinton; it never ran.) He can write. In 1974, the founder of Rolling Stone, Jann Wenner, told Murdoch how much he loved the National Star’s political column. Who wrote it? Murdoch did, under a pseudonym.

He also has an uncanny eye for detail. Proofreading his wife Anna’s novel, a rural romance, he clocked that she had the Murrumbidgee River flowing the wrong way.

When he bought the News of the World, it published on the weekend; he bought The Sun so that the expensive presses would not be dormant during the week. One was broadsheet format, and one was tabloid format, and the printers told him printing these on the same press was impossible. His biographer William Shawcross described what happened next:

He informed the printers that their presses had originally been supplied with bars which would fold the pages to tabloid size. The head printer denied it. So Murdoch took off his jacket and climbed onto a press. In a box at the top of the machine he found the bar in question wrapped in sacking and covered in ink and grime.

Murdoch combines his intelligences with this kind of ready reckoning, some of it quite philistine. Like many gamblers he reads the horoscopes. (The Sun’s editors were always trying to get him in a good mood by cooking the entry for Pisces.) Anna Murdoch tried to get him interested in the arts, but he didn’t care if it was Carmen or Camelot. He wears a transparently quackish brand of watch that provides a “constant supply of natural frequencies that circle the earth”; it is supposed to be good for his jetlag. The criticism that he dumbs down every media property he purchases is largely true. Even when taking over TV Guide, he complained that it was “far too cerebral”.

Together, his aptitude and his tastes combine into something one of his editors, Sam Hall Kaplan, called “crassmanship”. “When it comes to headlines, as well as the play of stories, Rupert sheds with ease, if not relief, his Oxford prejudices, intellectual pretensions and the mannerisms of his wealth,” Kaplan wrote in a 1985 review of Michael Leapman’s Arrogant Aussie: The Rupert Murdoch Story. The proprietor’s talent is “uniquely geared to attract the lowest common denominator of reader”. This unique gearing never made the New York Post a profit, but it worked in Australia and on Fleet Street, and it clearly informed the thinking behind Fox News too.

Looking back, it is difficult to appreciate the contrast. At the end of the 1960s, tabloid proprietors still had a naive, almost pathetic sense of stewardship; it was still possible to hear them talk about a “mission to educate”. The Sun itself was pro Labor. The Daily Mirror ran an ambitious supplement called Mirrorscope, aimed at educating its readers on world affairs in a lively way. When planning his redesign of The Sun, Murdoch once picked up a copy of Mirrorscope and put it into the bin. “If you think we’re going to have any of that upmarket shit in our paper,” he told Godfrey Hodgson of The Sunday Times, “you’re very much mistaken.”

The relaunched Sun crushed the Mirror instantly and permanently. Mirrorscope was gone by 1974. The Mirror was forced to ape its every move – especially the introduction of bingo – or die trying. Murdoch’s mother disapproved of the crass and sexual nature of The Sun (this objection is often cited as the reason his Australian newspapers had no Page 3 girls), but he had explained his reasoning about the popular press to her: “Look, Mum, in Britain there are hundreds of thousands of people who are living in miserable postwar tenement places. They have nothing in the world but the Pools and, you know, this is the sort of thing that they [want].”

At its peak in the early 1990s, The Sun was selling four million copies a day in a country of 55 million people, and it wasn’t just read in the tenements.

Funny, hypocritical, racist, jingoist, homophobic and leering, and with a new disdain for the royal family generally and their privacy in particular, together The Sun and the News of the World transformed the United Kingdom, and in the process degraded it. It was the ultimate form of colonial revenge. Britain, not Australia, Murdoch seemed to say, was the crass and ugly place, with the coarse and common people with the insatiably lurid tastes. Just look at its press. Christopher Hitchens called the process “the replacement of gutter journalism by sewer journalism”. Instead of repudiating this sort of charge, Murdoch and his employees revelled in it. Kelvin MacKenzie later suggested that his own epitaph should read, “He lived and died in the gutter.”


Bringing the tone down

What unites Murdoch’s “crassmanship” and his business sense is an eye for human weakness. When Murdoch bought the News of the World, for example, he realised that its establishment owners would be reluctant to sell to his competitor, Robert Maxwell, because he was Jewish. Murdoch drank tea from a china set to impress them, and ordered some uncharacteristic champagne. This pantomime display of gentlemanly manners made them sign an agreement they shouldn’t have, and he quickly undermined them.

The same instinct is expressed in the people he hires. Nick Davies described this synergy between company and product in Hack Attack:

“He loves thugs,” as one of his senior executives puts it. Roger Ailes at Fox TV; Kelvin MacKenzie at The Sun; Col Allan at the New York Post; Sam Chisholm at Sky TV: they all came out of the same box, marked “bully”. And when Murdoch’s men bully, their victims really feel it. All these members of the power elite have seen what Murdoch’s news outlets can do, using their stories in the same way muggers in back alleys use their boots, to kick a victim to pulp. “Monstering”, they call it – a savage and prolonged public attack on a target’s life, often aimed at the most private and sensitive part of their existence, their sexual behaviour, inflicting maximum pain, maximum humiliation.

You would anticipate then that the Murdoch media arm that does the most bullying externally does the most bullying internally, and that is so.


Creeps

Not long ago, the management at Fox News put up wall posters extolling staff to speak up about improper behaviour. This marked the establishment of a Workplace Professionalism and Inclusion Council, which would report independently to the 21st Century Fox board. This body, as incongruous as an ice-cream shop in hell, exists in a workplace antithetical to diversity and professionalism. It is there only because it was mandated as part of a suit settlement, and has its work cut out. The same month the council launched, Fox News presenter Sean Hannity, himself accused of sexual harassment, ran a series of segments claiming women invent stories of workplace mistreatment for the money.

Curious about this development, I contacted one of the council members, the former vice president of litigation at NBC, Brande Stellings, to find out what her job was like. It was the only interview I have ever conducted where I did not even hear the subject’s voice: her communications person jumped in at every question, before ending the call. She then referred me instead to Irena Briganti, Fox’s executive vice president for corporate communications. Several Fox women told New York magazine in 2016 that “one of the reasons they did not speak up about sexual harassment in the past was that they were terrified Briganti would find out and smear them in the press”.

Few expected Briganti to survive the 2016 firing of Roger Ailes, the founder of Fox News, and one of the worst prolific sexual abusers in American corporate history. “[Briganti’s] departure would send a powerful signal of just how dramatically the Murdochs intend to change Fox News post-Ailes,” New York magazine wrote. What her retention might mean it did not say, but the council’s report should be good.

When Murdoch himself was asked in December 2017 if the Ailes issue had hurt Fox’s bottom line, he replied, “It’s all nonsense. There was a problem with our chief executive. Sort of, over the years. But isolated incidents. As soon as we investigated it he was out of the place in hours – well, three or four days. And there’s been nothing else since then.”

Douglas Wigdor, a lawyer who filed a number of actions on behalf of alleged Fox News harassment and discrimination victims, so many that he had to make a spreadsheet to stay on top of all the allegations, has described both 21st Century Fox and Fox News as having a top-to-bottom “systemic culture of not only discriminating against people based on their gender and color, but also of retaliating against them when they stand up to voice complaints”.

The Murdoch sons are said to be genuinely invested in institutional change at the company, though it seldom seems to arrive. Recently the brothers, in a meeting with the British communications regulator, stressed that “no individual working for Fox News could now be under the impression that sexual harassment is acceptable … having seen the sacking of Mr Ailes, [Bill] O’Reilly and a number of other employees including very senior managers.” Lachlan appointed a female CEO, Suzanne Scott, and pointed to this as a sign of difference. The Washington Post noted that Scott had been named in one complaint as “a member of a team of senior executives who ‘retaliated’ against employees or contributors who complained about Ailes’ alleged harassment”.

Thinking some wall posters change Fox News fundamentally misunderstands what Fox is. The harassment is not an unfortunate by-product of some “big personalities”. It did not become what was described as a “breeding ground for sexual misconduct” by accident. Fox News is itself a form of harassment, aimed at critics and liberal politicians, civilians and reporters, especially if they are persons of colour, especially if they are young women. This applies not just to the content but also to the structure of the organisation.

Erik Wemple, a Washington Post reporter who has covered the scandal extensively, wrote, “Ailes managed to construct a legal-institutional complex at Fox News – complete with a compliant HR apparatus and extensive use of non-disclosure and arbitration agreements – designed to facilitate the sexual harassment of women.” He made multimillion-dollar hush payments with negligible oversight. He had critics followed by private detectives. The look of the network from the very beginning, was, as USA Today put it, “blustery male commentators and women, just as qualified, who were showcased for their looks with revealing clothes and camera shots”.

A combination of angry men and attractive women, and sometimes angry attractive women, is, when you think about it, not an obvious formula for television success. Its invention is usually credited to Roger Ailes, and partly explained by his habit of watching TV with the sound off. He explained this approach in a 1989 book called You Are the Message: Getting What You Want by Being Who You Are. Television is a visual medium, so the best way to rate an anchor was to watch them for 10 minutes on mute. “If nothing moved me toward that sound knob,” he wrote, “I would often recommend terminating the contract of that performer.”

A compelling origin story, but one that overlooks the influence of Rupert Murdoch.


Campaigning journalism

Perhaps Murdoch’s key innovation as a media proprietor has been permanently welding right-wing politics to sexual prurience. This moral deregulation dates all the way back to The Sun – a “tear-away paper with a lot of tit in it” was his blueprint – where he recognised that a conservative periodical printing Page 3 girls and simultaneously complaining about filth on TV wasn’t a problem but a plus. Breaking this ground didn’t stop him getting a papal knighthood (for those of “blameless character”) years later. This tabloid hypocrisy is now uniform and often noted – if you want to experience its most repellent exemplar, search the paedophilia-obsessed Daily Mail website for the phrase “all grown up” – but Murdoch was the person who cemented it, if not invented it.

This investiture in hypocritical sex immediately captures an audience in an act of exclusion, even collusion. Kelvin MacKenzie once barked at one of his staff, “You just don’t understand the readers, do you, eh? He’s the bloke you see in a pub – a right old fascist, wants to send the wogs back, buy his poxy council house, he’s afraid of the unions, afraid of the Russians, hates the queers, weirdos and drug dealers. He doesn’t want to hear about that stuff [serious news].” He is also, it goes without saying, the kind of bloke who is interested in tits and doesn’t mind bandying this interest about in the course of his chronic low-level harassment, under the guise of a “bit of banter”. Media products are also conditioning tools, and Murdoch recognised the potent multiplier effect of feeding xenophobia to a reader with a hard-on.

His targets internationally are the same: nefarious, cosmopolitan and multicultural “elites”.

Murdoch, his immediate family and his executives are elite by any measure of the word, sometimes comically so. Lachlan studied at Princeton, where he wrote a thesis on Kantian ethics. Rebekah Wade, the former editor of The Sun, went to the Sorbonne, and shares the Murdochian taste for yachting and horseback riding. The Australian’s Nick Cater, who made the awkward coinage “the bunyip alumni” to describe the bien pensant tertiary educated, lives in a multimillion-dollar harbour-front apartment in Kirribilli. None of these are impediments to an anti-elitist posture.

What it really means is the endorsement of capital over concern, the lionisation of “fact over feeling”, where the facts are dubious and themselves vehicles for rage, sometimes sadistic rage. The “new establishment” is not really a class so much as a set of ideas, the already beleaguered remains of the postwar social democratic institutions: public universities, public servants, public broadcasters, public transport, and occasionally public health. Anyone who defends them, especially anyone with a degree or a non-white face, is a target. In Murdoch-land, a wealthy lawyer would never be described as elitist unless they worked in human rights. Fighting racism is the real racism. Fighting sexism is the real sexism. Fighting elitism is the real elitism. A multinational media company is not globalist though, because Murdoch believes in sovereignty. Particularly his own.

Take The Australian, supposedly launched after his mother said Murdoch “must publish something decent for a change”. The result is now, 54 years later, one of the most repetitive newspapers in the free world. It is hard to explain to a foreigner just how singular its obsessions are, or to exactly describe the strange manner in which it prosecutes them.

After the News Corp Australia columnist Andrew Bolt was prosecuted under section 18C of the Racial Discrimination ActThe Australian mentioned the legislation more than a hundred thousand times in a campaign to have it scrapped. The campaign failed, although victory was declared. But the main effect was opportunity cost: a significant player in the national conversation couldn’t seem to change the subject.

As Benjamin Law itemised in his Quarterly Essay Moral Panic 101The Australian’s obsession with the Safe Schools sex-education story ran to 90,000 words across almost 200 stories, an average of a story every two days. The Australian responded to this critique with multiple articles critical of Law.

This monomania extends to the other people The Australian pursues most fanatically as well. Julie Posetti, Yassmin Abdel-Magied, Emma Alberici, Larissa Behrendt, Gillian Triggs – they are often relatively marginal public figures hounded with a creepy, stalkerish intensity where anything they say or do can be grounds for criticism, vilification or (this is a favourite) calls for their resignation. It is not an accident that this treatment centres on women, and The Australian’s commenters, many of whom apparently go on to troll the targets on social media, take a pleasure in the treatment that borders on the masturbatory. This is the Murdoch version of “something decent”.


The wedding

Despite what Lachlan Murdoch and Robert Thomson say, Rupert Murdoch will die, but he has already lived more than one life. “The Murdoch-ization of America has never felt so irreversible,” Jonathan Mahler wrote in 2005, in a prescient piece that described how Rupert Murdoch had changed New York City. “On the ashes of the social-democratic city, he built a capitalist utopia where corporate lawyers live in the Soho lofts once occupied by garment workers; where Trump and Diller have replaced Shanker and Gotbaum as icons; where the mayor isn’t just a Republican, he’s a billionaire.” That process has now been repeated across the world, with Donald Trump playing a role grander than even Rupert Murdoch could hope for. Still, Murdoch can hardly complain. Both men share the trait of underestimating the intelligence of the general public, and not going broke.

In the theatre, and this is a kind of theatre, stories that don’t end with retribution end with a wedding. So picture this scene.

Murdoch, age 85, already grandfather to Sigmund Freud’s great-great-grandchildren, has become step-father to Mick Jagger’s daughters as well. Murdoch’s sons are there, as are their model wives, his four daughters, and a selection of his 13 grandchildren. His new wife is Jerry Hall, best known as a former supermodel. She is also rumoured to have been one of the first ever victims of tabloid voicemail hacking, a test case. How else did The Sun manage such precise, gruelling coverage of her split from Mick Jagger in 1999?

One of Hall’s bridesmaids is her daughter Elizabeth Jagger. When Elizabeth was 21, one of Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper published CCTV stills of her “engaged in sexual activities” in a nightclub, and paid her lover for a tell-all interview.

Now take a look at the reception venue. The celebration of Rupert Murdoch’s fourth marriage is taking place inside Spencer House, owned by Charles Spencer, the 9th Earl Spencer, brother of Diana, Princess of Wales. At her funeral, he said: “[Diana] talked endlessly of getting away from England, mainly because of the treatment that she received at the hands of the newspapers. I don’t think she ever understood why her genuinely good intentions were sneered at by the media, why there appeared to be a permanent quest on their behalf to bring her down. It is baffling. My own and only explanation is that genuine goodness is threatening to those at the opposite end of the moral spectrum.”

You know who he’s talking about.

 

Thanks to Marcia Robiou and Katherine Noel for research assistance with this essay.

RICHARD COOKE

Richard Cooke is The Monthly’s contributing editor. 

Rupert Murdoch Has ‘More Impact Than Any Living Australian’ Says Tony Abbott

By Max Chalmers on November 13, 2015Australian Politics

The former Australian PM also praised British leader David Cameron for school privatisations, and quoted a favourable editorial about himself, writes Max Chalmers.

Tony Abbott may have promised no sniping from the sidelines after his messy dislodgement from the office of Prime Minister in September, but he never said anything about holding off on self-aggrandizement.

The Member for Warringah was at it again today, doing what he could to resurrect his political image in a piece penned for conservative British magazine The Spectator, lavishing himself and conservative allies with praise.

“While in Britain, I caught up with Sir Michael Hintze, perhaps the most successful Australian businessman in London; Alexander Downer, who’s hugely enjoying a second stint of public service; Rupert Murdoch, who arguably has had more impact on the wider world than any other living Australian; Tony Blair, by far British Labour’s most electorally successful prime minister; and Prime Minister David Cameron who’s still savouring his against-the-polls win in this year’s election, assisted by our very own strategist Lynton Crosby,” the former PM wrote.

Abbott used the piece to downplay David Cameron’s support for same-sex marriage and climate action, arguing the Prime Minster’s best decisions had been his cuts to welfare and transformation of education “in effect, privatising public schools”.

Though unable to achieve such feats at home, Abbott did manage to limit Federal funding for schools by slicing up the Gonski plan, cutting off the program’s future funding despite promising to be on a ‘unity ticket’ with Labor before his election.

In the Spectator column Abbott dedicated a significant portion of his comments to praising his government’s efforts at stopping the boats, as he did recently during his oration at the Margaret Thatcher Lecture.Screen Shot 2015-10-28 at 4.26.08 pm

“It had to be an issue of consequence and it had to be a subject where I had standing – so perhaps unsurprisingly, I spoke of the challenge of illegal migration that Europe is struggling with but that Australia, at least for the moment, has largely solved,” he wrote.

In a move of daring self-reflexivity the one-time leader of Australia then quoted from a Spectator editorial about himself.

“Amidst carping from the usual suspects, gratifyingly, the UK Spectator editorialised that ‘Abbott (had) explained what so few European policy makers seem able to grasp’.”

That’s Tony Abbott writing in the Spectator quoting the Spectator praising Tony Abbott. Much like a meeting between Tony and Rupert, it made a perfect conservative circle jerk.

While Abbott may have plenty of love for the international conservative cadre, his comrades back home haven’t been getting on so well.

After reports emerged that Julie Bishop’s chief of staff attended an ‘anti-Abbott plot’ meeting shortly before his demise, Liberal Senators Eric Abetz and Cory Bernardi both hit out at their party’s deputy leader.

But that skirmish – or should we say, sniping – is far from Abbott’s mind, it seems.

Now relieved of the strains of leadership, and any pretence of accountability to the people, Abbott is able to fully outline his quirky dystopian vision for the future, a place without safety nets or public schools, where even the endless highways can’t take you out of the sights of the mass-surveillance state.

“The real challenge, in Australia as in Britain, is how responsibly to spend less on short-term consumption and more on long-term investment in infrastructure and national security,” he wrote. “How, in short, can government best foster the economic growth that makes everything else so much easier? That always makes for a good conversation between conservative leaders.”

Who exactly Abbott is leading these days was not made clear.

 "Rupert Murdoch - Wikipedia" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Murdoch

On 27 February 2012, the day after the first issue of The Sun on Sunday was published, Deputy Assistant Commissioner Sue Akers informed the Leveson Inquiry that police are investigating a "network of corrupt officials" as part of their inquiries into phone hacking and police corruption. She said that evidence suggested a "culture of illegal payments" at The Sun and that these payments allegedly made by The Sun were authorised at a senior level.[100]

In testimony on 25 April, Murdoch did not deny the quote attributed to him by his former editor of The Sunday TimesHarold Evans: "I give instructions to my editors all round the world, why shouldn't I in London?"

On 1 May 2012, the Culture, Media and Sport Committee issued a report stating that Murdoch was "not a fit person to exercise the stewardship of a major international company".

On 3 July 2013, the Exaro website and Channel 4 News broke the story of a secret recording. This was recorded by The Sun journalists, and in it Murdoch can be heard telling them that the whole investigation was one big fuss over nothing, and that he, or his successors, would take care of any journalists who went to prison.

 He said: "Why are the police behaving in this way? It's the biggest inquiry ever, over next to nothing."

 

Rupert Murdoch's activities in the United States

Murdoch (seated center right) and Roy Cohn meeting with President Ronald Reagan in the Oval Office in 1983

Murdoch made his first acquisition in the United States in 1973, when he purchased the San Antonio Express-News. In 1974, Murdoch moved to New York City, to expand into the US market; however, he retained interests in Australia and Britain. Soon afterwards, he founded Star, a supermarket tabloid, and in 1976, he purchased the New York Post.

On 4 September 1985, Murdoch became a naturalized citizen to satisfy the legal requirement that only US citizens were permitted to own US television stations.

In March 1984, Marvin Davis sold Marc Rich's interest in 20th Century Fox to Murdoch for $250 million due to Rich's trade deals with Iran, which were sanctioned by the US at the time. Davis later backed out of a deal with Murdoch to purchase John Kluge's Metromedia television stations.

 Rupert Murdoch bought the stations by himself, without Marvin Davis, and later bought out Davis's remaining stake in Fox for $325 million.

 The six television stations owned by Metromedia formed the nucleus of the Fox Broadcasting Company, founded on 9 October 1986, which later had great success with programs including The Simpsons and The X-Files.

In 1986 Murdoch bought Misty Mountain, a Wallace Neff designed house on Angelo Drive in Beverly Hills. The house was the former residence of Jules C. Stein. Murdoch sold the house to his son James in 2018.

In Australia, during 1987, he bought The Herald and Weekly Times Ltd., the company that his father had once managed. Rupert Murdoch's 20th Century Fox bought out the remaining assets of Four Star Television from Ronald Perelman's Compact Video in 1996.

 Most of Four Star Television's library of programs are controlled by 20th Century Fox Television today.

 After Murdoch's numerous buyouts during the buyout era of the eighties, News Corporation had built up financial debts of $7 billion (much from Sky TV in the UK), despite the many assets that were held by NewsCorp

The high levels of debt caused Murdoch to sell many of the American magazine interests he had acquired in the mid-1980s.

In 1993, Murdoch's Fox Network took exclusive coverage of the National Football Conference (NFC) of the National Football League (NFL) from CBS and increased programming to seven days a week.

 In 1995, Fox became the object of scrutiny from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), when it was alleged that News Ltd.'s Australian base made Murdoch's ownership of Fox illegal. However, the FCC ruled in Murdoch's favour, stating that his ownership of Fox was in the best interests of the public. That same year, Murdoch announced a deal with MCI Communications to develop a major news website and magazine, The Weekly Standard. Also that year, News Corporation launched the Foxtel pay television network in Australia in partnership with Telstra. In 1996, Murdoch decided to enter the cable news market with the Fox News Channel, a 24-hour cable news station. Ratings studies released in 2009 showed that the network was responsible for nine of the top ten programs in the "Cable News" category at that time. Rupert Murdoch and Ted Turner (founder and former owner of CNN) are long-standing rivals.

 In late 2003, Murdoch acquired a 34% stake in Hughes Electronics, the operator of the largest American satellite TV system, DirecTV, from General Motors for $6 billion (USD). His Fox movie studio had global hits with Titanic and Avatar.

In 2004, Murdoch announced that he was moving News Corporation headquarters from Adelaide, Australia to the United States. Choosing a US domicile was designed to ensure that American fund managers could purchase shares in the company, since many were deciding not to buy shares in non-US companies.

News Corporation logo

On 20 July 2005, News Corporation bought Intermix Media Inc., which held MyspaceImagine Games Network and other social networking-themed websites, for US$580 million, making Murdoch a major player in online media concerns.

 In June 2011, it sold off Myspace for US$35 million.

 On 11 September 2005, News Corporation announced that it would buy IGN Entertainment for $650 million (USD).

In May 2007, Murdoch made a $5 billion offer to purchase Dow Jones & Company. At the time, the Bancroft family, who had owned Dow Jones & Company for 105 years and controlled 64% of the shares at the time, declined the offer. Later, the Bancroft family confirmed a willingness to consider a sale. Besides Murdoch, the Associated Press reported that supermarket magnate Ron Burkle and Internet entrepreneur Brad Greenspan were among the other interested parties.

 In 2007, Murdoch acquired Dow Jones & Company, which gave him such publications as The Wall Street JournalBarron's Magazine, the Far Eastern Economic Review (based in Hong Kong) and SmartMoney.

In June 2014, Murdoch's 21st Century Fox made a bid for Time Warner at $85 per share in stock and cash ($80 billion total) which Time Warner's board of directors turned down in July. Warner's CNN unit would have been sold to ease antitrust issues of the purchase.

 On 5 August 2014 the company announced it had withdrawn its offer for Time Warner, and said it would spend $6 billion buying back its own shares over the following 12 months.

Murdoch left his post as CEO of 21st Century Fox in 2015 but continued to own the company until it was purchased by Disney in 2019. A number of television broadcasting assets were spun off into the Fox Corporation before the acquisition and are still owned by Murdoch. This includes Fox News, of which Murdoch was acting CEO from 2016 until 2019, following the resignation of Roger Ailes due to accusations of sexual harassment.

Political activities in the United States

Murdoch (right) with President John F. Kennedy and Zell Rabin in the Oval Office in 1961
President Ronald Reagan during a meeting with Murdoch in the Oval Office in 1983

McKnight (2010) identifies four characteristics of his media operations: free market ideology; unified positions on matters of public policy; global editorial meetings; and opposition to liberal bias in other public media.[

In The New YorkerKen Auletta writes that Murdoch's support for Edward I. Koch while he was running for mayor of New York "spilled over onto the news pages of the Post, with the paper regularly publishing glowing stories about Koch and sometimes savage accounts of his four primary opponents."

According to The New York TimesRonald Reagan's campaign team credited Murdoch and the Post for his victory in New York in the 1980 United States presidential election.

Reagan later "waived a prohibition against owning a television station and a newspaper in the same market," allowing Murdoch to continue to control The New York Post and The Boston Herald while expanding into television.

On 8 May 2006, the Financial Times reported that Murdoch would be hosting a fund-raiser for Senator Hillary Clinton's (D-New York) Senate re-election campaign.

 In a 2008 interview with Walt Mossberg, Murdoch was asked whether he had "anything to do with the New York Post's endorsement of Barack Obama in the democratic primaries". Without hesitating, Murdoch replied, "Yeah. He is a rock star. It's fantastic. I love what he is saying about education. I don't think he will win Florida [...] but he will win in Ohio and the election. I am anxious to meet him. I want to see if he will walk the walk."

In 2010, News Corporation gave US$1 million to the Republican Governors Association and $1 million to the US Chamber of Commerce.

 Murdoch also served on the board of directors of the libertarian Cato Institute.

 Murdoch is also a supporter of the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect Intellectual Property Act.

Murdoch was reported in 2011 as advocating more open immigration policies in western nations generally.

 In the United States, Murdoch and chief executives from several major corporations, including Hewlett-PackardBoeing and Disney joined New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg to form the Partnership for a New American Economy to advocate "for immigration reform – including a path to legal status for all illegal aliens now in the United States".

The coalition, reflecting Murdoch and Bloomberg's own views, also advocates significant increases in legal immigration to the United States as a means of boosting America's sluggish economy and lowering unemployment. The Partnership's immigration policy prescriptions are notably similar to those of the Cato Institute and the US Chamber of Commerce — both of which Murdoch has supported in the past.

The Wall Street Journal editorial page has similarly advocated for increased legal immigration, in contrast to the staunch anti-immigration stance of Murdoch's British newspaper, The Sun.

 On 5 September 2010, Murdoch testified before the House Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security, and International Law Membership on the "Role of Immigration in Strengthening America's Economy". In his testimony, Murdoch called for ending mass deportations and endorsed a "comprehensive immigration reform" plan that would include a pathway to citizenship for all illegal immigrants.

In the 2012 US presidential election, Murdoch was critical of the competence of Mitt Romney's team but was nonetheless strongly supportive of a Republican victory, tweeting: "Of course I want him [Romney] to win, save us from socialism, etc."

In October 2015, Murdoch stirred controversy when he praised Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson and referenced President Barack Obama, tweeting, "Ben and Candy Carson terrific. What about a real black President who can properly address the racial divide? And much else." After which he apologized, tweeting, "Apologies! No offence meant. Personally find both men charming." 

During Donald Trump's term as US President Murdoch showed support for him through the news stories broadcast in his media empire, including on Fox News. In early 2018, Mohammad bin Salman, the crown prince and de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, had an intimate dinner at Murdoch's Bel Air estate in Los Angeles.

Murdoch is a strong supporter of Israel and its domestic policies. In October 2010, the Anti-Defamation League in New York City presented Murdoch with its International Leadership Award "for his stalwart support of Israel and his commitment to promoting respect and speaking out against anti-Semitism." However, in April 2021, in a letter to Lachlan Murdoch, its director Jonathan Greenblatt wrote that the ADL would no longer make such an award to his father. This was in the immediate context of accusations made by the ADL against Fox News presenter Tucker Carlson and his apparent espousal of the White replacement theory.

 

Activities in Europe

Murdoch owns a controlling interest in Sky Italia, a satellite television provider in Italy.

 Murdoch's business interests in Italy have been a source of contention since they began.

 In 2010 Murdoch won a media dispute with then Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. A judge ruled the then Prime Minister's media arm Mediaset prevented News Corporation's Italian unit, Sky Italia, from buying advertisements on its television networks.

 

Activities in Asia

In November 1986, News Corporation purchased a 35% stake in the South China Morning Post group for about US$105 million. At that time, SCMP group was a stock-listed company, and was owned by HSBCHutchison Whampoa and Dow Jones & Company.

 In December 1986, Dow Jones & Company offered News Corporation to sell about 19% of share it owned of SCMP for US$57.2 million,[158] and, by 1987, News Corporation completed the full takeover. In September 1993, News Corporation have agreed to sell a 34.9% share in SCMP to Robert Kuok's Kerry Media for US$349 million. In 1994, News Corporation sold the remaining 15.1% share in SCMP to MUI Group, disposing the Hong Kong newspaper.

In June 1993, News Corporation attempted to acquire a 22% share in TVB, a terrestrial television broadcaster in Hong Kong, for about $237 million, but Murdoch's company gave up, as the Hong Kong government would not relax the regulation regarding foreign ownership of broadcasting companies.

In 1993, News Corporation acquired Star TV (renamed as Star in 2001), a Hong Kong company headed by Richard Li, from Hutchison Whampoa for $1 billion (Souchou, 2000:28), and subsequently set up offices for it throughout Asia. The deal enabled News International to broadcast from Hong Kong to India, China, Japan, and over thirty other countries in Asia, becoming one of the biggest satellite television networks in the east;[5] however, the deal did not work out as Murdoch had planned because the Chinese government placed restrictions on it that prevented it from reaching most of China.

In 2009, News Corporation reorganised Star; a few of these arrangements were that the original company's operations in East Asia, Southeast Asia and the Middle East were integrated into Fox International Channels, and Star India was spun-off (but still within News Corporation).

Personal life

Residence

In 2003, Murdoch bought "Rosehearty", an 11 bedroom home on a 5-acre waterfront estate in Centre Island, New York.

In May 2013, he purchased the Moraga Estate, an estate, vineyard and winery in Bel Air, Los Angeles, California.

 In 2019, Murdoch and his new wife Jerry Hall purchased Holmwood, an 18th-century house and estate in the English village of Binfield Heath, some 4 miles (6.4 km) north-east of Reading.

In late 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, it was reported that Murdoch and Hall had been isolating in their Binfield Heath home for much of the year. He received his first COVID-19 vaccine in nearby Henley-on-Thames on 16 December.

Marriages

Murdoch with his third wife, Wendi, in 2011

In 1956, Murdoch married Patricia Booker, a former shop assistant and flight attendant from Melbourne; the couple had their only child, Prudence, in 1958.  They divorced in 1967. 

In 1967, Murdoch married Anna Torv,  a Scottish-born cadet journalist working for his Sydney newspaper The Daily Mirror.

 In January 1998, three months before the announcement of his separation from Anna, a Roman Catholic, Murdoch was made a Knight Commander of the Order of Saint Gregory the Great (KSG), a papal honour awarded by Pope John Paul II.

 While Murdoch would often attend Mass with Torv, he never converted to Catholicism.

 Torv and Murdoch had three children: Elisabeth Murdoch (born in Sydney, Australia on 22 August 1968), Lachlan Murdoch (born in London, UK on 8 September 1971), and James Murdoch, (born in London on 13 December 1972).

Murdoch's companies published two novels by his wife: Family Business (1988) and Coming to Terms (1991). They divorced in June 1999. Anna Murdoch received a settlement of US$1.2 billion in assets.

On 25 June 1999, 17 days after divorcing his second wife, Murdoch, then aged 68, married Chinese-born Wendi Deng. She was 30, a recent Yale School of Management graduate, and a newly appointed vice-president of his STAR TV. Murdoch had two daughters with her: Grace (born 2001) and Chloe (born 2003). Murdoch has six children in all, and is grandfather to thirteen grandchildren. Near the end of his marriage to Wendi, hearsay concerning a link with Chinese intelligence (which was later proven to be unfounded) became problematic to their relationship.

On 13 June 2013, a News Corporation spokesperson confirmed that Murdoch filed for divorce from Deng in New York City, US.

 According to the spokesman, the marriage had been irretrievably broken for more than six months.

Murdoch also ended his long-standing friendship with Tony Blair after suspecting him of having an affair with Deng while they were still married.

Jerry Hall, Murdoch's fourth wife, whom he married in March 2016, photographed in 2009

On 11 January 2016, Murdoch announced his engagement to former model Jerry Hall in a notice in The Times newspaper.

 On 4 March 2016, Murdoch, a week short of his 85th birthday, and 59-year-old Hall were married in London, at St Bride's, Fleet Street with a reception at Spencer House; this is Murdoch's fourth marriage. 

 In June 2022, The New York Times reported that Murdoch and Hall were set to divorce, citing two anonymous sources.

 Hall filed for divorce on 1 July 2022 citing irreconcilable differences; the divorce was finalised in August 2022. 

Children

Murdoch has six children.[194] His eldest child, Prudence MacLeod, was appointed on 28 January 2011 to the board of Times Newspapers Ltd, part of News International, which publishes The Times and The Sunday Times.[195] Murdoch's elder son Lachlan, formerly the Deputy Chief Operating Officer at the News Corporation and publisher of the New York Post, was Murdoch's heir apparent before resigning from his executive posts at the global media company at the end of July 2005.[194] Lachlan's departure left James Murdoch, Chief Executive of the satellite television service British Sky Broadcasting since November 2003 as the only Murdoch son still directly involved with the company's operations, though Lachlan has agreed to remain on the News Corporation's board. 

After graduating from Vassar College  and marrying classmate Elkin Kwesi Pianim (the son of Ghanaian financial and political mogul Kwame Pianim) in 1993,  Murdoch's daughter Elisabeth and her husband purchased a pair of NBC-affiliate television stations in California, KSBW and KSBY, with a $35 million loan provided by her father. By quickly re-organising and re-selling them at a $12 million profit in 1995, Elisabeth emerged as an unexpected rival to her brothers for the eventual leadership of the publishing dynasty. But, after divorcing Pianim in 1998 and quarrelling publicly with her assigned mentor Sam Chisholm at BSkyB, she struck out on her own as a television and film producer in London. She has since enjoyed independent success, in conjunction with her second husband, Matthew Freud, the great-grandson of Sigmund Freud, whom she met in 1997 and married in 2001. 

It is not known how long Murdoch will remain as News Corporation's CEO. For a while the American cable television entrepreneur John Malone was the second-largest voting shareholder in News Corporation after Murdoch himself, potentially undermining the family's control. In 2007, the company announced that it would sell certain assets and give cash to Malone's company in exchange for its stock. In 2007, the company issued Murdoch's older children voting stock. 

Murdoch has two children with Wendi Deng: Grace (b. New York, November 2001) and Chloe (b. New York, July 2003).  It was revealed in September 2011 that Tony Blair is Grace's godfather.  There is reported to be tension between Murdoch and his oldest children over the terms of a trust holding the family's 28.5% stake in News Corporation, estimated in 2005 to be worth about $6.1 billion. Under the trust, his children by Wendi Deng share in the proceeds of the stock but have no voting privileges or control of the stock. Voting rights in the stock are divided 50/50 between Murdoch on the one side and his children of his first two marriages. Murdoch's voting privileges are not transferable but will expire upon his death and the stock will then be controlled solely by his children from the prior marriages, although their half-siblings will continue to derive their share of income from it. It is Murdoch's stated desire to have his children by Deng given a measure of control over the stock proportional to their financial interest in it (which would mean, if Murdoch dies while at least one of the children is a minor, that Deng would exercise that control). It does not appear that he has any strong legal grounds to contest the present arrangement, and both ex-wife Anna and their three children are said to be strongly resistant to any such change. 

Early life

Keith Rupert Murdoch was born on 11 March 1931 in Melbourne, the second of four children of Sir Keith Murdoch (1885–1952) and Dame Elisabeth (née Greene; 1909–2012).

 He is of English, Irish, and Scottish ancestry. His parents were also born in Melbourne. His father was a war correspondent and later a regional newspaper magnate owning two newspapers in Adelaide and a radio station in a faraway mining town, and chairman of the Herald and Weekly Times publishing company.

 Murdoch had three sisters: Helen (1929–2004), Anne (born 1935) and Janet (born 1939).

 His Scottish-born paternal grandfather, Patrick John Murdoch, was a Presbyterian minister.

 Later in life, Murdoch chose to go by his second name, the first name of his maternal grandfather. He attended Geelong Grammar School, where he was co-editor of the school's official journal The Corian and editor of the student journal If Revived. He took his school's cricket team to the National Junior Finals.

He worked part-time at the Melbourne Herald and was groomed by his father to take over the family business.

 Murdoch studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Worcester College, Oxford, in England, where he kept a bust of Lenin in his rooms and came to be known as "Red Rupert". He was a member of the Oxford University Labour Party, stood for Secretary of the Labour Club and managed Oxford Student Publications Limited, the publishing house of Cherwell.

 After his father's death from cancer in 1952, his mother did charity work as life governor of the Royal Women's Hospital in Melbourne and established the Murdoch Childrens Research Institute; at the age of 102 (in 2011), she had 74 descendants.

 Murdoch completed an MA before working as a sub-editor with the Daily Express for two years.

 

Activities in Australia and New Zealand

Journalist Sir Keith Murdoch (1885–1952), Rupert Murdoch's father

Following his father's death, when he was 21, Murdoch returned from Oxford to take charge of what was left of the family business. After liquidation of his father's Herald stake to pay taxes, what was left was News Limited, which had been established in 1923.

 Rupert Murdoch turned its Adelaide newspaper, The News, its main asset, into a major success.

 He began to direct his attention to acquisition and expansion, buying the troubled Sunday Times in Perth, Western Australia (1956) and over the next few years acquiring suburban and provincial newspapers in New South Wales, Queensland, Victoria and the Northern Territory, including the Sydney afternoon tabloid The Daily Mirror (1960). The Economist describes Murdoch as "inventing the modern tabloid", as he developed a pattern for his newspapers, increasing sports and scandal coverage and adopting eye-catching headlines.

Murdoch's first foray outside Australia involved the purchase of a controlling interest in the New Zealand daily The Dominion. In January 1964, while touring New Zealand with friends in a rented Morris Minor after sailing across the Tasman, Murdoch read of a takeover bid for the Wellington paper by the British-based Canadian newspaper magnate Lord Thomson of Fleet. On the spur of the moment, he launched a counter-bid. A four-way battle for control ensued in which the 32-year-old Murdoch was ultimately successful.

 Later in 1964, Murdoch launched The Australian, Australia's first national daily newspaper, which was based first in Canberra and later in Sydney.[34] In 1972, Murdoch acquired the Sydney morning tabloid The Daily Telegraph from Australian media mogul Sir Frank Packer, who later regretted selling it to him.

In 1984, Murdoch was appointed Companion of the Order of Australia (AC) for services to publishing.

After the Keating government relaxed media ownership laws, in 1986 Murdoch launched a takeover bid for The Herald and Weekly Times, which was the largest newspaper publisher in Australia.

 There was a three-way takeover battle between Murdoch, Fairfax and Robert Holmes à Court, with Murdoch succeeding after agreeing to some divestments.

In 1999, Murdoch significantly expanded his music holdings in Australia by acquiring the controlling share in a leading Australian independent label, Michael Gudinski's Mushroom Records; he merged that with Festival Records, and the result was Festival Mushroom Records (FMR). Both Festival and FMR were managed by Murdoch's son James Murdoch for several years.

Political activities in Australia

Murdoch found a political ally in Sir John McEwen, leader of the Australian Country Party (now known as the National Party of Australia), who was governing in coalition with the larger Menzies-Holt-Gorton Liberal Party. From the first issue of The Australian, Murdoch began taking McEwen's side in every issue that divided the long-serving coalition partners. (The Australian, 15 July 1964, first edition, front page: "Strain in Cabinet, Liberal-CP row flares.") It was an issue that threatened to split the coalition government and open the way for the stronger Australian Labor Party to dominate Australian politics. It was the beginning of a long campaign that served McEwen well.

After McEwen and Menzies retired, Murdoch threw his growing power behind the Australian Labor Party under the leadership of Gough Whitlam and duly saw it elected on a social platform that included universal free health care, free education for all Australians to tertiary level, recognition of the People's Republic of China, and public ownership of Australia's oil, gas and mineral resources. Rupert Murdoch's backing of Whitlam turned out to be brief. Murdoch had already started his short-lived National Star newspaper in America, and was seeking to strengthen his political contacts there.

Asked about the 2007 Australian federal election at News Corporation's annual general meeting in New York on 19 October 2007, its chairman Rupert Murdoch said: "I am not commenting on anything to do with Australian politics. I'm sorry. I always get into trouble when I do that." Pressed as to whether he believed Prime Minister John Howard should continue as prime minister, he said: "I have nothing further to say. I'm sorry. Read our editorials in the papers. It'll be the journalists who decide that – the editors."

In 2009, in response to accusations by Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd that News Limited was running vendettas against him and his government, Murdoch opined that Rudd was "oversensitive".

Murdoch described Howard's successor, Labor Party Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, as "more ambitious to lead the world [in tackling climate change] than to lead Australia" and criticised Rudd's expansionary fiscal policies in the wake of the financial crisis of 2007–2008 as unnecessary.

 Although News Limited's interests are extensive, also including the Daily Telegraph, the Courier-Mail and the Adelaide Advertiser, it was suggested by the commentator Mungo MacCallum in The Monthly that "the anti-Rudd push, if coordinated at all, was almost certainly locally driven" as opposed to being directed by Murdoch, who also took a different position from local editors on such matters as climate change and stimulus packages to combat the financial crisis.

Murdoch is a supporter of an Australian republic, having campaigned for such a change during the 1999 referendum.

 

Activities in the United Kingdom

Business activities in the United Kingdom

Rupert Murdoch – World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos, in 2007

In 1968, Murdoch entered the British newspaper market with his acquisition of the populist News of the World, followed in 1969 with the purchase of the struggling daily The Sun from IPC.

Murdoch turned The Sun into a tabloid format and reduced costs by using the same printing press for both newspapers. On acquiring it, he appointed Albert 'Larry' Lamb as editor and – Lamb recalled later – told him: "I want a tearaway paper with lots of tits in it". In 1997 The Sun attracted 10 million daily readers.[5] In 1981, Murdoch acquired the struggling Times and Sunday Times from Canadian newspaper publisher Lord Thomson of Fleet.

 Ownership of The Times came to him through his relationship with Lord Thomson, who had grown tired of losing money on it as a result of an extended period of industrial action that stopped publication.

In the light of success and expansion at The Sun the owners believed that Murdoch could turn the papers around. Harold Evans, editor of the Sunday Times from 1967, was switched to the daily Times, though he stayed only a year amid editorial conflict with Murdoch.[49][50]

During the 1980s and early 1990s, Murdoch's publications were generally supportive of Britain's Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher

At the end of the Thatcher/Major era, Murdoch switched his support to the Labour Party and its leader, Tony Blair. The closeness of his relationship with Blair and their secret meetings to discuss national policies was to become a political issue in Britain.

This later changed, with The Sun, in its English editions, publicly renouncing the ruling Labour government and lending its support to David Cameron's Conservative Party, which soon afterwards formed a coalition government. In Scotland, where the Conservatives had suffered a complete annihilation in 1997, the paper began to endorse the Scottish National Party (though not yet its flagship policy of independence), which soon after came to form the first-ever outright majority in the proportionally elected Scottish Parliament. Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown's official spokesman said in November 2009 that Brown and Murdoch "were in regular communication" and that "there is nothing unusual in the prime minister talking to Rupert Murdoch".

In 1986, Murdoch introduced electronic production processes to his newspapers in Australia, Britain and the United States. The greater degree of automation led to significant reductions in the number of employees involved in the printing process. In England, the move roused the anger of the print unions, resulting in a long and often violent dispute that played out in Wapping, one of London's docklands areas, where Murdoch had installed the very latest electronic newspaper purpose-built publishing facility in an old warehouse.

The bitter Wapping dispute started with the dismissal of 6,000 employees who had gone on strike and resulted in street battles and demonstrations. Many on the political left in Britain alleged the collusion of Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government with Murdoch in the Wapping affair, as a way of damaging the British trade union movement. In 1987, the dismissed workers accepted a settlement of £60 million.

In 1998, Murdoch made an attempt to buy the football club Manchester United F.C., with an offer of £625 million, but this failed. It was the largest amount ever offered for a sports club. It was blocked by the United Kingdom's Competition Commission, which stated that the acquisition would have "hurt competition in the broadcast industry and the quality of British football".

Murdoch's British-based satellite network, Sky Television, incurred massive losses in its early years of operation. As with many of his other business interests, Sky was heavily subsidised by the profits generated by his other holdings, but convinced rival satellite operator British Satellite Broadcasting to accept a merger on his terms in 1990.

The merged company, BSkyB, has dominated the British pay-TV market ever since, pursuing direct to home (DTH) satellite broadcasting.

By 1996, BSkyB had more than 3.6 million subscribers, triple the number of cable customers in the UK.

Murdoch has a seat on the Strategic Advisory Board of Genie Oil and Gas, having jointly invested with Lord Rothschild in a 5.5% stake in the company which conducted shale gas and oil exploration in ColoradoMongoliaIsrael and, controversially, the occupied Golan Heights.

In response to print media's decline and the increasing influence of online journalism during the 2000s, Murdoch proclaimed his support of the micropayments model for obtaining revenue from on-line news,  although this has been criticised by some.

In January 2018, the CMA blocked Murdoch from taking over the remaining 61% of BSkyB he did not already own, over fear of market dominance that could potentialise censorship of the media. His bid for BSkyB was later approved by the CMA as long as he sold Sky News to The Walt Disney Company, which was already set to acquire 21st Century Fox. However, it was Comcast who won control of BSkyB in a blind auction ordered by the CMA. Murdoch ultimately sold his 39% of BSkyB to Comcast.[

News Corporation has subsidiaries in the Bahamas, the Cayman Islands, the Channel Islands and the Virgin Islands. From 1986, News Corporation's annual tax bill averaged around seven percent of its profits.

Political activities in United Kingdom

In Britain, in the 1980s, Murdoch formed a close alliance with Conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher.

In February 1981, when Murdoch, already owner of The Sun and The News of the World, sought to buy The Times and The Sunday Times, Thatcher's government let his bid pass without referring it to the Monopolies and Mergers Commission, which was usual practice at the time.

 Although contact between the two before this point had been explicitly denied in an official history of The Times, documents found in Thatcher's archives in 2012 revealed a secret meeting had taken place a month before in which Murdoch briefed Thatcher on his plans for the paper, such as taking on trade unions.

The Sun credited itself with helping her successor John Major to win an unexpected election victory in the 1992 general election, which had been expected to end in a hung parliament or a narrow win for Labour, then led by Neil Kinnock.

 In the general elections of 19972001 and 2005, Murdoch's papers were either neutral or supported Labour under Tony Blair.

The Labour Party, from when Blair became leader in 1994, had moved from the centre-left to a more centrist position on many economic issues before 1997. Murdoch identifies himself as a libertarian, saying "What does libertarian mean? As much individual responsibility as possible, as little government as possible, as few rules as possible. But I'm not saying it should be taken to the absolute limit."

In a speech he delivered in New York in 2005, Murdoch claimed that Blair described the BBC coverage of the Hurricane Katrina disaster, which was critical of the Bush administration's response, as full of hatred of America.

On 28 June 2006, the BBC reported that Murdoch and News Corporation were considering backing new Conservative leader David Cameron at the next General Election – still up to four years away.[72] In a later interview in July 2006, when he was asked what he thought of the Conservative leader, Murdoch replied "Not much".

In a 2009 blog, it was suggested that in the aftermath of the News of the World phone hacking scandal which might yet have Transatlantic implications Murdoch and News Corporation might have decided to back Cameron. Despite this, there had already been a convergence of interests between the two men over the muting of Britain's communications regulator Ofcom.

In August 2008, Cameron accepted free flights to hold private talks and attend private parties with Murdoch on his yacht, the Rosehearty. Cameron declared in the Commons register of interests he accepted a private plane provided by Murdoch's son-in-law, public relations guru Matthew Freud; Cameron did not reveal his talks with Murdoch. The gift of travel in Freud's Gulfstream IV private jet was valued at around £30,000. Other guests attending the "social events" included the then EU trade commissioner Lord Mandelson, the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska and co-chairman of NBC Universal Ben Silverman. The Conservatives did not disclose what was discussed.

In July 2011, it emerged that Cameron had met key executives of Murdoch's News Corporation a total of 26 times during the 14 months that Cameron had served as Prime Minister up to that point.

 It was also reported that Murdoch had given Cameron a personal guarantee that there would be no risk attached to hiring Andy Coulson, the former editor of News of the World, as the Conservative Party's communication director in 2007.

This was in spite of Coulson having resigned as editor over phone hacking by a reporter. Cameron chose to take Murdoch's advice, despite warnings from Deputy Prime Minister Nick CleggLord Ashdown and The Guardian.

Coulson resigned his post in 2011 and was later arrested and questioned on allegations of further criminal activity at the News of the World, specifically the phone hacking scandal. As a result of the subsequent trial, Coulson was sentenced to 18 months in jail.

In June 2016, The Sun supported Vote Leave in the United Kingdom European Union membership referendum. Murdoch called the Brexit result "wonderful", comparing the decision to withdraw from the EU to "a prison break….we're out".

 Anthony Hilton, economics editor for the Evening Standard but describing a period when he interviewed Murdoch for The Guardian, quoted Murdoch as justifying his Euroscepticism with the words "When I go into Downing Street, they do what I say; when I go to Brussels, they take no notice". Murdoch denied saying this later in a letter to the Guardian.

With some exceptions, The Sun has generally been supportive of the government of Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Murdoch and his employees were the media representatives ministers from the Cabinet and Treasury most frequently held meetings during the first two years of Johnson's Government. However, newspaper circulation in general including among subsidiaries of News International fell sharply in the United Kingdom during the early 21st century, leading some commentators to suggest that Rupert Murdoch was not as influential in British political debate by the early 2020s as he had once been.

 

News International phone hacking scandal

In July 2011, Murdoch, along with his youngest son James, provided testimony before a British parliamentary committee regarding phone hacking. In the UK, his media empire came under fire, as investigators probed reports of 2011 phone hacking.

On 14 July 2011 the Culture, Media and Sport Committee of the House of Commons served a summons on Murdoch, his son James, and his former CEO Rebekah Brooks to testify before a committee five days later.

After an initial refusal, the Murdochs confirmed they would attend, after the committee issued them a summons to Parliament. 

The day before the committee, the website of the News Corporation publication The Sun was hacked, and a false story was posted on the front page claiming that Murdoch had died. Murdoch described the day of the committee "the most humble day of my life". He argued that since he ran a global business of 53,000 employees and that News of the World was "just 1%" of this, he was not ultimately responsible for what went on at the tabloid. He added that he had not considered resigning, and that he and the other top executives had been completely unaware of the hacking.

On 15 July, Murdoch attended a private meeting in London with the family of Milly Dowler, where he personally apologized for the hacking of their murdered daughter's voicemail by a company he owns. On 16 and 17 July, News International published two full-page apologies in many of Britain's national newspapers. The first apology took the form of a letter, signed by Murdoch, in which he said sorry for the "serious wrongdoing" that occurred. The second was titled "Putting right what's gone wrong", and gave more detail about the steps News International was taking to address the public's concerns. In the wake of the allegations, Murdoch accepted the resignations of Brooks and Les Hinton, head of Dow Jones who was chairman of Murdoch's British newspaper division when some of the abuses happened. They both deny any knowledge of any wrongdoing under their command.

On 27 February 2012, the day after the first issue of The Sun on Sunday was published, Deputy Assistant Commissioner Sue Akers informed the Leveson Inquiry that police are investigating a "network of corrupt officials" as part of their inquiries into phone hacking and police corruption. She said that evidence suggested a "culture of illegal payments" at The Sun and that these payments allegedly made by The Sun were authorised at a senior level.

In testimony on 25 April, Murdoch did not deny the quote attributed to him by his former editor of The Sunday TimesHarold Evans: "I give instructions to my editors all round the world, why shouldn't I in London?

 On 1 May 2012, the Culture, Media and Sport Committee issued a report stating that Murdoch was "not a fit person to exercise the stewardship of a major international company".

On 3 July 2013, the Exaro website and Channel 4 News broke the story of a secret recording. This was recorded by The Sun journalists, and in it Murdoch can be heard telling them that the whole investigation was one big fuss over nothing, and that he, or his successors, would take care of any journalists who went to prison.

 He said: "Why are the police behaving in this way? It's the biggest inquiry ever, over next to nothing."

Metropolitan Police role in the news media phone hacking scandal

Edit

In 1999, the Metropolitan Police began investigating the widespread illegal acquisition of confidential information by private investigators and journalists. In 2011, the Met initiated intensive investigations into interception of voice mail, computer hacking, and official corruption, leading to more than 90 arrests.

This article provides a narrative beginning in 1999 of investigations by the Metropolitan Police Service (Met) of Greater London into the illegal acquisition of confidential information by agents in collaboration with the news media that is commonly referred to as the phone hacking scandal. The article discusses seven phases of investigations by the Met and several investigations of the Met itself, including critiques and responses regarding the Met's performance. Separate articles provide an overview of the scandal and a comprehensive set of reference lists with detailed background information.

By 2002, the practice by news media organizations of using private investigators ("law enforcement") to acquire confidential information was widespread. Some individuals used illegal methods to accomplish this. Victims of illegal phone hacking included celebrities, politicians, law enforcement officials, solicitors, and ordinary citizens.

As this illegal activity became apparent, suspects were arrested and some were convicted of crimesSome victims retained solicitors upon learning their privacy had been violated, and filed suit against news media companies and their agents. Some victims received financial payments for violation of privacy. Successful suits and publicity from investigative news articles led to further disclosures, including the names of more victims, more documentary evidence of wrongdoingadmissions of wrongdoing by some news media agents, and payments potentially related to the scandal.

Allegations were made of poor judgement and cover-up by news media executives and law enforcement officials. As a result, additional investigations into illegal acquisition of confidential information were initiated and several senior executives and police officials were forced to resign. There were also significant commercial consequences of the scandal. Contemporary commentators made comparisons with the Watergate scandal.

The Metropolitan Police conducted several investigations between 1999 and 2011. The first three investigations, involving phone taps and seizure of records, successfully gathered large quantities of evidence that confidential information was being acquired illegally, sometimes with the help of public officials including policemen. By 2006, seven men had been found guilty, but no further arrests were made until 2011. The Met was criticized for not aggressively pursuing all the significant leads available from this evidence, for not adequately informing all individuals who were victims of the phone hacking, and for allegedly misleading the public and Parliament about the scope of the problem.

While continuing to investigate illegal acquisition of confidential information, the Met itself became the object of several investigations about the diligence of its probes and possible involvement of its own personnel in illegal activities. After the scope of the phone hacking scandal became generally known in July 2011, the top two officials of the Met resigned. The new Met leadership augmented the ongoing investigations with the unusual measure of bringing in an independent police organization to help. By mid-July 2011, there were as many as ten separate investigations active at the Met, Parliament and other government agencies.

Investigations by the Metropolitan Police

Murdoch family

Members of the Murdoch family are prominent international media magnates and media tycoons with roots in Australia and the United Kingdom, along with their media assets in the United States.

 Some members have also been prominent in the arts, clergy, and military.

Murdoch
Current region Australia
United Kingdom
United States
Place of origin PitsligoAberdeenshire, Scotland
Members
Connected members
 

Five generations of the family are descended from two Scottish immigrants to Australia: the Reverend James Murdoch (1818–1884), a minister of the Free Church of Scotland and his wife Helen, née Garden (1826–1905). Both were from the Pitsligo area of Aberdeenshire and migrated to the Colony of Victoria in 1884.

The media mogul Rupert Murdoch is known for being one of the founders and the owner of formerly the world's largest media company News Corporation, a company that was spun-off in mid 2013 splitting its entertainment assets to 21st Century Fox and its media publishing assets to form the new News Corp.

 Currently the Murdochs still have the controlling interest in the remains of the acquisition of 21st Century Fox by The Walt Disney Company that was spun-off to Fox Corporation, and still remain as top executives of News Corp.

The Murdoch's Family History

Family tree

  • Rev. James Murdoch m. Helen Murdoch
    • Rev. Patrick Murdoch (1850–1940) m. Annie, née Brown
      • George Murdoch (1883–1891)
      • Sir Keith Murdoch (1885–1952) m. Elisabeth Joy, née Greene now known as Dame Elisabeth Murdoch ACDBE
        • Helen, née Murdoch, now known as Helen Handbury AC (1929–2004)
        • Rupert Murdoch, (b. 1931) m. (1956) Patricia, née Booker (div. 1967)
          • Prudence (Prue)née Murdoch (b. 1958) m. (1985) Crispin Odey (div. c. 1986)
          • Prue Odey m. (1989) Alasdair MacLeod
            • James MacLeod (b. 1991)
            • Angus MacLeod (b. 1993)
            • Clementine MacLeod (b. 1996)
        • Rupert Murdoch m. (1967) Anna, née Torv (div. 1999) now known as Anna Murdoch Mann
        • Elisabeth, née Murdoch now known as Elisabeth Murdoch (born 1968) m. (1993) Elkin Kwesi Pianim (div. 1998)
            • Cornelia Pianim (b. 1994)
            • Anna Pianim (b. 1997)
          • Elisabeth Pianim m. (2001) Matthew Freud
            • Charlotte Emma Freud (b. 2000)
            • Samson Murdoch Freud (b. 2007)
          • Lachlan Keith Murdoch (born 1971) m. Sarah, née O'Hare now known as Sarah Murdoch
            • Kalan Alexander Murdoch (b. 2004)
            • Aidan Patrick Murdoch (b. 2006)
            • Aerin Elisabeth Murdoch (b. 2010)
          • James R. Murdoch (born 1972) m.
            • Anneka Murdoch (b. 2003)
            • Walter Murdoch (b. 2004)
            • Emerson Murdoch (b. 2009)
        • Rupert Murdoch m. (1999) Wendi Deng (div. 2013)
          • Grace Murdoch (b. 2001)
          • Chloe Murdoch (b. 2003?)
        • Rupert Murdoch m. (2016) Jerry Hall
        • Anne, née Murdoch, now known as Anne Kantor (b. 1936)
        • Elisabeth Janet, née Murdoch, now known as Janet Calvert-Jones AM (b. 1939)
      • Francis Garden Murdoch (1887–1933)
      • Alec Brown Shepherd Murdoch (1889–1920)
      • Ivon Murdoch (1892–1964), also known as Ivan Murdoch
      • Alan May Murdoch (1894–1971)
    • Francis Garden Murdoch (1852–? )
    • James Murdoch (1854–? )
    • Eliza Jane (Lizzie) Murdoch (1855–? )
    • William Garden Murdoch (1856–? )
    • Ivon Lewis Murdoch (1858–? );
    • Andrew Chrystal Murdoch (1859–? ) m. Annie Esler
    • Helen Nora, née Murdoch, now known as Nora Curle Smith (1861–1924)
    • Keith Arthur Murdoch (1862–? )
    • Isabella Agnes Murdoch (1864–? )
    • Hugh Murdoch (1865–? )
    • Grace Young Murdoch (1867–? )
    • Amelia Morison Murdoch (1870–? ) and
    • Sir Walter Murdoch (1874–1970) m. Violet Catherine, née Hughston

 

References

  1. ^ "About News Corp"News Corp. Retrieved 5 December 2021.
  2. Jump up to:a b c d e f Michael J Wood, 2005, Ancestry of Rupert Murdoch Archived 2 June 2017 at the Wayback Machine, William Addams Reitwiesner Genealogical Services (17 August 2013).
  3. ^ Moyer, Liz (4 December 2017). "Gabelli says media mergers are in the air: 'Scale up' is new mantra"CNBC. Retrieved 5 December 2021.
  4. ^ "Report: News Corp. board approves company split"Associated Press. 26 March 2015. Retrieved 6 December 2021.
  5. ^ Seifert, Dan (3 December 2012). "News Corp to split off Fox Group entertainment business"The Verge. Retrieved 6 December 2021.
  6. ^ "News Corp Leadership"News Corp. Retrieved 5 December 2021.
  7. ^ Gunson, Niel (1986). Murdoch, Patrick John (1850–1940)Australian Dictionary of Biography.
  8. ^ Curle Smith, H. Nora (2011). Thermo–electrical cooking made easy: proved recipes for guidance in the use of the Rational electric cooking stove (D. Curle Smith's patent). (Introduction by H. A. Willis.). Carlisle, Western Australia: Hesperian Press. Archived from the original on 9 July 2018. Retrieved 20 August 2013.
  9. Jump up to:a b Fred Alexander, 1986, "Murdoch, Sir Walter Logie (1874–1970)", Australian Dictionary of Biography Archived 10 September 2013 at the Wayback Machine; accessed 20 August 2013.
  10. ^ Serle, Geoffrey (1986). Murdoch, Sir Keith Arthur (1885–1952)Australian Dictionary of BiographyArchived from the original on 29 October 2013. Retrieved 24 October 2013.
  11. ^ "Censorship Down Under"Time. 30 December 1940. Archived from the original on 21 July 2013. Retrieved 21 August 2013.
  12. Jump up to:a b "Anna King Murdoch: "In metal, the deeds of men lie hidden but immortal""The Age. 11 November 2007. Archived from the original on 5 December 2013. Retrieved 16 August 2013.
  13. Jump up to:a b "First World War Embarkation Roll – Ivan George Murdoch". Australian War Memorial. Retrieved 6 September 2013.
  14. Jump up to:a b c Witzel, Morgen, ed. (2005). "Rupert Murdoch". The Encyclopedia of the History of American Management. Bristol, England: Thoemmes Continuum. p. 393.
  15. ^ Tryhorn, Chris (18 July 2007). "Rupert Murdoch – a lifetime of deals"The Guardian. London, UK. Archived from the original on 23 December 2016. Retrieved 12 December 2016.
  16. ^ Given, Jock (December 2002). "Foreign Ownership of Media and Telecommunications: an Australian story". Media & Arts Law Review7 (4): 253.
  17. ^ "The World's Billionaires No.73 Rupert Murdoch"Forbes. 7 October 2007. Archived from the original on 21 September 2009. Retrieved 8 October 2009.
  18. Jump up to:a b c d "How safe is the Murdoch empire?"The Irish Examiner. 9 July 2011. Archived from the original on 27 August 2013. Retrieved 17 August 2013.
  19. Jump up to:a b "So where does Rupert Murdoch go from here?"The Independent. London, UK. 31 July 2005. Archived from the original on 22 July 2011. Retrieved 17 August 2013.
  20. Jump up to:a b "Rupert Murdoch and His Family"International Business Times. 9 July 2011. Archived from the original on 15 July 2012. Retrieved 17 August 2013.
  21. ^ Hofmeister, Sallie (30 July 2005). "Murdoch's Heir Apparent Abruptly Resigns His Post"Los Angeles TimesArchived from the original on 27 August 2013. Retrieved 17 August 2013.
  22. Jump up to:a b c d e Stephen Mayne, "Tracking the Murdoch heirs", The Mayne Report, 2011 Archived 26 April 2014 at the Wayback Machine (17 August 2013).
  23. ^ Sir William Arbuthnot, 2011, The Genealogy of the Murdoch Family.[Usurped!] (9 May 2014).
  24. ^ "Francis Garden Murdoch". The Sydney Morning Herald. 27 December 1933. p. 8.
  25. ^ "Alec Brown Shepherd Murdoch"Find A Grave. 2011. Archived from the original on 21 September 2016. Retrieved 16 August 2013.

21st Century Fox

 Twenty-First Century Fox, Inc.doing business as 21st Century Fox (21CF), was an American multinational mass media corporation that was based in Midtown ManhattanNew York City. It was one of the two companies formed on June 28, 2013, following a spin-off of the publishing assets of the old News Corporation as News Corp.

21st Century Fox was the legal successor to News Corporation dealing primarily in the film and television industries. It was the United States' fourth-largest media conglomerate until its acquisition by The Walt Disney Company in 2019. The other company, News Corp, holds Murdoch's print interests and other media assets in Australia (both owned by him and his family via a family trust with 39% interest in each). Murdoch was co-executive chairman, while his sons Lachlan Murdoch and James Murdoch were co-executive chairman and CEO, respectively.

21st Century Fox's assets included the Fox Entertainment Group—owners of the 20th Century Fox film studio (the company's partial namesake), the Fox television network, and a majority stake in National Geographic Partners—the commercial media arm of the National Geographic Society, among other assets. It also had significant foreign operations, including the prominent Indian television channel operator Star India. The company ranked No. 109 in the 2018 Fortune 500 list of the largest United States corporations by total revenue.

On July 27, 2018, 21st Century Fox shareholders agreed to sell the majority of its assets to Disney for $71.3 billion. The sale covered the majority of 21CF's entertainment assets, including 20th Century Fox, FX Networks, and National Geographic Partners among others. Following a bidding war with Fox, Sky plc (a British media group which Fox held a stake in) was acquired separately by Comcast, while Fox's FSN regional sports networks were sold to Sinclair Broadcast Group to comply with antitrust rulings.

 The remainder, consisting primarily of the Fox and MyNetworkTV networks, and Fox's national BroadcastingTelevision Stationsnews and sports operations, were spun out into a new company named Fox Corporation, which began trading on March 19, 2019. Disney's acquisition of 21st Century Fox was closed on March 20 of the same year. After that, all the assets not transferred to the Fox Corporation were scattered across the divisions of Disney.

HistoryEdit

FormationEdit

21st Century Fox was formed by the splitting of entertainment and media properties from News Corporation. In February 2012, Natalie Ravitz accepted a position to become Rupert Murdoch's Chief of Staff at News Corporation.[6]

News Corporation's board approved the split on May 24, 2013, while shareholders approved the split on June 11, 2013;[7] the company completed the split on June 28 and formally started trading on NASDAQ on July 1.[8][9][10]

Plans for the split were originally announced on June 28, 2012, while additional details and the working name of the new company were unveiled on December 3, 2012.[11][12][13]

Murdoch stated that performing this split would "unlock the true value of both companies and their distinct assets, enabling investors to benefit from the separate strategic opportunities resulting from more focused management of each division." The move also came in the wake of a series of scandals that had damaged the reputation of the company's publishing operations in the United Kingdom.[9][11] The split was structured so that the old News Corporation would change its name to 21st Century Fox and spin-off its publishing assets into a "new" News Corporation.[10][14][15]

the logo for Fox Group

While the company was originally announced as the Fox Group, on April 16, 2013, Murdoch announced the new name as a way to suggest the retaining of 20th Century Fox's heritage as the group advances into the future. Its logo was officially unveiled on May 9, 2013, featuring a modernized version of the iconic Fox searchlights designed by Pentagram.[16][17]

However, the 21st Century Fox brand does not extend to the existing 20th Century Fox division (which remains under its original name).[18]

The formation of 21st Century Fox was officially finalized on June 28, 2013. It formally began trading on NASDAQ and the Australian Securities Exchange on July 1, 2013.[19][20]

Subsequent historyEdit

On January 8, 2014, Rupert Murdoch announced plans to delist 21st Century Fox's shares from the Australian Securities Exchange, in favor of solely trading on the NASDAQ. Its listing in Australia was a holdover from its period as News Corporation, and 21st Century Fox has relatively little presence in Australia, unlike News Corp. Murdoch stated that the changes, which were expected to be complete by June 2014, would "simplify the capital and operating structure" of 21st Century Fox and provide "improved liquidity" to shareholders. Also that month, the company acquired a majority ownership in YES Network, a New York regional sports network founded by the New York Yankees.

In June 2014, 21st Century Fox made a bid to acquire Time Warner, which had similarly spun off its publishing assets, for $80 billion in a cash and stock deal. The deal, which was rejected by Time Warner's board of directors in July 2014, would have also involved the sale of CNN to ease antitrust issues. On August 5, 2014, 21st Century Fox announced it had withdrawn its bid for Time Warner. The company's stock had fallen sharply since the bid was announced, prompting directors to announce 21st Century Fox would buy back $6 billion of its shares over the following 12 months.

On July 25, 2014, 21st Century Fox announced the sale of Sky Italia and Sky Deutschland to BSkyB for $9 billion, subject to regulatory and shareholder approval. Fox would use the money from the sale, along with $25 billion it received from Goldman Sachs, to attempt another bid for Time Warner.

In December 2014, Fox-owned television studio Shine Group merged with Apollo Global Management's Endemol and Core Media Group to form Endemol Shine Group, which is jointly owned by 21st Century Fox and Apollo.

On September 9, 2015, 21st Century Fox announced a for-profit joint venture with the National Geographic Society, which called National Geographic Partners, which took ownership of all of National Geographic media and consumer businesses, including National Geographic magazine, and the National Geographic-branded television channels that were already run as a joint venture with Fox. 21st Century Fox holds a 73% stake in the company.

On December 9, 2016, 21st Century Fox announced it had made an offer to acquire the 61% share of Sky plc that it did not already own. The company was valued at £18.5 billion. The deal was approved by the European Commission on April 7, 2017,[ followed by Ireland's Minister for Communications, Climate Action and Environment on June 27. However, the deal has become subject to scrutiny and an extended regulatory review in the United Kingdom, over concerns surrounding the plurality of British news media that will be owned by the Murdoch family post-merger (counting Sky News, as well as News Corp's newspapers and recent acquisition of radio station operator Wireless Group), and violations of British news broadcasting regulations connected to Sky's former carriage of Fox News Channel in the country. However, a bidding war ensued over the company; in September 2018, Comcast won a regulator-mandated auction with a bid of £17.28 per-share. On September 26, 2018, 21st Century Fox subsequently announced its intent to sell all of its shares in Sky plc to Comcast for £12 billion.[ On October 4, 2018, 21st Century Fox completed the sale of their stake to Comcast, giving the latter a 76.8% controlling stake.

The Kingdom Holding Company, owned by Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, sold its minority stake in 21st Century Fox during the fiscal quarter ending September 2017. It previously held a 6% stake, which had been reduced to around 5% in 2015. The valuation of the shares, or who they were sold to, is unknown; Al-Waleed was the company's largest single shareholder behind the Murdoch family. The sale was reported after Al-Waleed was arrested in early-November 2017 as part of an anti-corruption probe by the Saudi government.

On December 5, 2017, 21st Century Fox appointed Uday Shankar, chairman and CEO of Star India, as the company's president for Asia. The new role would oversee Fox's television and online video platform business across the region, and the President of Fox Networks Group Asia would report directly to Shankar (instead of the equivalent at FNG U.S.). This did not affect 20th Century Fox's film business in the region, whose heads would continue to report to the Charman and CEO of the film company.

On April 10, 2018, European Commission officials conducted an unannounced search of Fox Networks Group's West London offices, as part of an antitrust inquiry surrounding broadcast rights to sporting events.[

Sale to Disney

On December 14, 2017, after rumors of such a sale, The Walt Disney Company began its acquisition of 21st Century Fox for $52.4 billion after the spin-off of certain businesses, pending regulatory approval. 21st Century Fox president Peter Rice stated that he expected the sale to be completed by mid-2019.

Under the terms of the deal, 21st Century Fox will spin-off an entity that was initially being referred to as "New Fox", consisting of the Fox Broadcasting CompanyFox NewsFox Business Network, and the national operations of Fox Sports (such as Fox Sports 1Fox Sports 2, and Big Ten Network, but excluding its regional sports networks), and Disney will acquire the remainder of 21st Century Fox. This will include key entertainment assets such as the 20th Century Fox film studio and its subsidiaries; a stake in Hulu; the U.S. pay television subsidiaries FX Networks, Fox Sports Networks and National Geographic Partners; and international operations of Fox Networks Group as well as Star India. The acquisition is primarily intended to bolster two over-the-top content endeavors—ESPN+ and Disney+. Disney will lease the 20th Century Fox backlot in Century City, Los Angeles for seven years.

The proposed transaction has raised antitrust issues, due to concerns that it could lead to a tangible loss in competition in the film and sports broadcasting industries. Several legal experts and industry analysts have expressed the opinion that the transaction is likely to receive regulatory approval, but would be scrutinized by regulators.

In February 2018, the Wall Street Journal reported that Comcast, the owner of NBCUniversal, was considering a counter-offer. Despite initially bidding $60 billion earlier, Fox had rejected Comcast's offer due to the possibility of antitrust concerns. On May 5, 2018, it was reported that Comcast was preparing to make an unsolicited, all-cash counteroffer to acquire the 21st Century Fox's assets Disney has offered to purchase, contingent on the outcome of an antitrust lawsuit AT&T's acquisition of Time Warner. Comcast confirmed on May 23, 2018, that it was "considering, and is in advanced stages of preparing, an offer for the businesses that Fox has agreed to sell to Disney."

A shareholder vote on the sale was scheduled for special shareholder meetings by Fox and Disney on July 10, 2018, at the New York Hilton Midtown and New Amsterdam Theatre respectively, although Fox warned that it might "postpone or adjourn" the meeting if Comcast were to follow through with its intent to make a counter-offer. It was also reported that Disney was preparing an all-cash offer of its own to counter Comcast's bid.

On June 13, 2018, the day after AT&T was given an approval to merge with Time Warner, Comcast officially announced a $65 billion counter-offer to acquire the 21st Century Fox's assets Disney had offered to purchase.[77] However, on June 20, 2018, Disney agreed to increase its bid to a $71.3 billion cash-and-stock offer.[78][79] Fox agreed to the new offer.[80]

The proposed purchase was given antitrust approval by the Department of Justice on June 27, 2018, under the condition that Disney divest all of Fox's regional sports networks. The networks could either be divested to third-parties, or retained by "New Fox". On July 19, 2018, Comcast announced it was dropping its bid for Fox in order to focus on its bid for Sky. On July 27, 2018, it was reported that Fox and Disney shareholders had "overwhelmingly" approved the proposed purchase. The acquisition was expected to be completed by late January 2019, after remaining regulatory approvals are granted in China and the European Union.

In October 2018, it was reported that the new, post-merger organizational structure of "New Fox" would be implemented by January 1, 2019, ahead of the closure of the Disney sale (which was still expected to occur within the early of March).

On November 6, 2018, the European Commission approved the sale, pursuant to the divestment of A&E Networks properties in Europe deemed to overlap with those of Fox. At a shareholders' meeting the following week, it was revealed that the new company would simply be known as "Fox". On November 19, 2018, the deal was approved unconditionally by Chinese regulators.

On January 7, 2019, 21st Century Fox filed the registration statement for "New Fox", under the name Fox Corporation, with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.[89] In an SEC filing, Fox stated that it did not intend to bid for its former regional sports networks.

In February 2019, it was reported by Bloomberg that Disney had planned to divest the international Fox Sports operations in Brazil and Latin America to secure antitrust clearance in Brazil and Mexico, as they both compete with ESPN International properties in their respective regions.

On February 27, 2019, the sale was approved by Brazil's Administrative Council for Economic Defense (CADE), with Disney having agreed to the expected divestiture of Fox Sports Latin America. CADE coordinated with regulators in Mexico and Chile in evaluating the transaction. Mexico approved the sale on March 12, 2019, with similar concessions. Clearance in Brazil and Mexico was reported to be the last major hurdles for the sale.

On March 12, 2019, Disney officially announced that the sale would be completed on March 20, 2019. On March 19, 2019, the spin-off of 21st Century Fox into Fox Corporation was completed in preparation for final consummation of the sale. On the next day, the sale was completed. Under the terms of acquisition, Disney will phase-out Fox brand usage by 2024.

 

Corporate governance

On its formation in 2013, Murdoch was chairman and chief executive officer (CEO) of the company, while Chase Carey took the posts of president and chief operating officer.

 Co-chairman and Co-CEO positions were created in 2014 and filled by Lachlan Murdoch and James Murdoch, respectively, both sons of Rupert Murdoch.

On July 1, 2015, Lachlan Murdoch was elevated to Co-Executive Chairman alongside his father and James Murdoch replaced his father as CEO. Former COO Chase Carey became Executive Vice-chairman.

Final holdings

21st Century Fox primarily consisted of the media and broadcasting properties that were owned by its predecessor, such as the Fox Entertainment Group and Star India. News Corporation's broadcasting properties in Australia, such as Foxtel and Fox Sports Australia, remain a part of the newly renamed News Corp Australia—which was spun off with the current incarnation of News Corp and was not a part of 21st Century Fox.[

Music and radio

Studios

TV

Production

Broadcast

Satellite televisionEdit

  • Tata Sky (30%), an Indian Direct To Home Television Service Provider. (in partnership with Tata Group (70%))
  • Fox Networks Group Asia Pacific (formerly STAR TV), an Asian satellite TV service having 300 million viewers in 53 countries, mainly in Taiwan, China & other Asian countries
  • Star India, satellite TV network with landing rights in India.

Cable

Cable TV channels owned (in whole or part) and operated by 21st Century Fox include:

Internet

Other assets

  • FoxNext – video game, virtual reality and theme park company
 

References

 Jump up to:a b Bucholtz, Andrew (April 26, 2019). "Sinclair is the reported winner of the former Fox RSNs"Awful Announcing.

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External links

 This is a list of assets owned by the mass media company News Corp.

Television

News Corp Australia

News UK

 

Internet

  • news.com.au
  • Punters.com.au – Australian horse racing and bookmaker affiliate[1]
  • SuperCoach
  • tips.com.au
  • hipages
  • racenet.com.au
  • odds.com.au
  • Mogo
  • onebigswitch.com.au
  • Knewz, a news aggregator
  • REA Group (about 60%) including realestate.com.au
  • Business Spectator
  • eurekareport.com.au
  • Australia's Best Recipes – bestrecipes.com.au
  • delicious.com.au including extensions delicious. Travel, delicious. Eat Out, the American Express delicious. Month Out, Studio delicious., delicious. Drinks and delicious. Produce Awards[2]
  • Kidspot.com.au
  • taste.com.au
  • homelife.com.au
  • myfun.com
 

Advertising, Branding & Tech

Global

News UK

  • bridge studio
  • wireless Group
    • wireless studios
    • urban media
    • First Radio
    • Switchdigital
    • TIBUS
    • ZESTY

News Corp Australia

 

Radio

News UK

  • wireless Group
    • talkSPORT
    • talkSPORT 2
    • talkRADIO
    • Virgin Radio
    • Virgin Radio Anthems
    • Virgin Radio Chilled
    • Virgin Radio Groove
    • FM104
    • Q102
    • 96FM
    • c103
    • Live 95FM
    • LMFM
    • U105
    • Scottish Sun 80s
    • Scottish Sun Hits
    • Scottish Sun Greatest Hits
    • Times Radio
 

Magazines and Inserts (digital and print)

News Corp Australia

  • Big League
  • body+soul
  • Broncos
  • Business Daily
  • delicious
  • Escape
  • Foxtel
  • GQ Australia
  • Hit
  • Kidspot
  • Mansion Australia
  • Motoring
  • Sportsman
  • Super Food Ideas
  • taste.com.au
  • The Deal
  • The Weekend Australian Magazine
  • Vogue Australia
  • Vogue Living
  • Whimn
  • Wish
 

News & Magazines (digital and print)

United Kingdom

News UKEdit

Australia

News Corp Australia

National
New South Wales
Victoria
Queensland
South Australia
Tasmania
Northern Territory

Community suburban newspapers

Sydney
Cumberland/Courier (NSW) newspapers
  • Blacktown Advocate
  • Canterbury-Bankstown Express
  • Central
  • Central Coast Express Advocate
  • Fairfield Advance
  • Hills Shire Times
  • Hornsby and Upper North Shore Advocate
  • Inner West Courier
  • Liverpool Leader
  • Macarthur Chronicle
  • Mt Druitt-St Marys Standard
  • NINETOFIVE
  • North Shore Times
  • Northern District Times
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  • Dow Jones Financial Information Services – produces databases, electronic media, newsletters, conferences, directories, and other information services on specialised markets and industry sectors.
  • Betten Financial News – leading Dutch language financial and economic news service.
Strategic Alliances
  • STOXX (33%) – joint venture with Deutsche Boerse and SWG Group for the development and distribution of Dow Jones STOXX indices.

Wireless Group

 

Books

 

Former assets

Sold

Defunct

 

See also

 

References

  1. ^ "Melbourne startup Punters.com.au acquired by News Corp Australia".
  2. ^ "delicious"NewsCorp Australia. Retrieved 2021-12-25.
  3. ^ News Limited – NewsSpace: The Australian newspaper Archived 2011-01-03 at the Wayback Machine
  4. ^ News Limited – NewsSpace: The Daily Telegraph newspaper Archived 2011-01-03 at the Wayback Machine
  5. ^ News Limited – NewsSpace: The Sunday Telegraph newspaper Archived 2010-05-29 at the Wayback Machine
  6. ^ News Limited – NewsSpace: Herald Sun newspaper Archived 2011-01-03 at the Wayback Machine
  7. ^ Limited – NewsSpace: Sunday Herald Sun newspaper[permanent dead link]
  8. ^ News Limited – NewsSpace: The Courier-Mail newspaper Archived 2011-01-03 at the Wayback Machine
  9. ^ News Limited – NewsSpace: The Sunday Mail (Qld) newspaper Archived 2011-01-03 at the Wayback Machine
  10. ^ News Limited – NewsSpace: Brisbane News magazine Archived 2011-01-03 at the Wayback Machine
  11. ^ News Limited – NewsSpace: The Advertiser newspaper Archived 2011-01-03 at the Wayback Machine
  12. ^ News Limited – NewsSpace: Sunday Mail newspaper Archived 2011-01-02 at the Wayback Machine
  13. ^ News Limited – NewsSpace: The Mercury newspaper Archived 2011-07-19 at the Wayback Machine
  14. ^ News Limited – NewsSpace: The Sunday Tasmanian newspaper Archived 2011-07-21 at the Wayback Machine
  15. ^ News Limited – NewsSpace: Northern Territory News newspaper Archived 2011-01-03 at the Wayback Machine
  16. ^ News Limited – NewsSpace: Sunday Territorian newspaper Archived 2011-01-03 at the Wayback Machine
  17. ^ News Limited – NewsSpace: Cumberland/Courier (NSW) newspapers Archived 2010-05-28 at the Wayback Machine
  18. ^ News Limited – NewsSpace: Leader (Vic) newspapers Archived 2008-02-20 at the Wayback Machine
  19. ^ News Limited – NewsSpace: Quest (Qld) newspapers Archived 2011-01-03 at the Wayback Machine
  20. ^ News Limited – NewsSpace: Messenger (SA) newspapers Archived 2011-01-03 at the Wayback Machine
  21. ^ News Limited – NewsSpace: Community (WA) newspapers Archived 2011-01-03 at the Wayback Machine
  22. ^ News Limited – NewsSpace: Sun (NT) newspapers Archived 2011-01-03 at the Wayback Machine
  23. ^ Bond, David (30 June 2016). "News Corp tunes into radio with £220m Talksport acquisition"Financial Times.
  24. ^ https://talkradio.co.uk/
  25. ^ Khrennikov, Ilya (11 December 2012). "Prokhorov's RBC Says It's Not in Talks to Buy Stake in Vedomosti"Bloomberg.
 

External links

  • News Corp website
  • NewsSpace, "a site for media professionals, combining News Limited's media platforms into one location – newspapers, magazines and digital brands"

Metropolitan Police role in the news media phone hacking scandal

In 1999, the Metropolitan Police began investigating the widespread illegal acquisition of confidential information by private investigators and journalists. In 2011, the Met initiated intensive investigations into interception of voice mail, computer hacking, and official corruption, leading to more than 90 arrests.

This article provides a narrative beginning in 1999 of investigations by the Metropolitan Police Service (Met) of Greater London into the illegal acquisition of confidential information by agents in collaboration with the news media that is commonly referred to as the phone hacking scandal. The article discusses seven phases of investigations by the Met and several investigations of the Met itself, including critiques and responses regarding the Met's performance. Separate articles provide an overview of the scandal and a comprehensive set of reference lists with detailed background information.

By 2002, the practice by news media organizations of using private investigators ("law enforcement") to acquire confidential information was widespread. Some individuals used illegal methods to accomplish this. Victims of illegal phone hacking included celebrities, politicians, law enforcement officials, solicitors, and ordinary citizens.

As this illegal activity became apparent, suspects were arrested and some were convicted of crimesSome victims retained solicitors upon learning their privacy had been violated, and filed suit against news media companies and their agents. Some victims received financial payments for violation of privacy. Successful suits and publicity from investigative news articles led to further disclosures, including the names of more victims, more documentary evidence of wrongdoingadmissions of wrongdoing by some news media agents, and payments potentially related to the scandal.

Allegations were made of poor judgement and cover-up by news media executives and law enforcement officials. As a result, additional investigations into illegal acquisition of confidential information were initiated and several senior executives and police officials were forced to resign. There were also significant commercial consequences of the scandal. Contemporary commentators made comparisons with the Watergate scandal.

The Metropolitan Police conducted several investigations between 1999 and 2011. The first three investigations, involving phone taps and seizure of records, successfully gathered large quantities of evidence that confidential information was being acquired illegally, sometimes with the help of public officials including policemen. By 2006, seven men had been found guilty, but no further arrests were made until 2011. The Met was criticized for not aggressively pursuing all the significant leads available from this evidence, for not adequately informing all individuals who were victims of the phone hacking, and for allegedly misleading the public and Parliament about the scope of the problem.

While continuing to investigate illegal acquisition of confidential information, the Met itself became the object of several investigations about the diligence of its probes and possible involvement of its own personnel in illegal activities. After the scope of the phone hacking scandal became generally known in July 2011, the top two officials of the Met resigned. The new Met leadership augmented the ongoing investigations with the unusual measure of bringing in an independent police organization to help. By mid-July 2011, there were as many as ten separate investigations active at the Met, Parliament and other government agencies.

Investigations by the Metropolitan Police

                                      

Operation Nigeria (1999)

 

As the Met initiated new investigations, it became the object of investigations by others.

Investigative reporting by newspapers

As early as 2002, when the Metropolitan Police's anti-corruption unit was engaged in Operation Nigeria, The Guardian raised questions about whether all the evidence relating to police corruption was being pursued.[

Between February 2004 and April 2005, as a result of Operation Glade, ten men working for private detective agencies were charged with crimes relating to the illegal acquisition of confidential information. Some of the information they obtained reportedly came from serving police officers. Only four of the accused were ultimately found guilty of crimes but did not serve prison time. The Guardian reported that the investigation and prosecution ended in fiasco since Whittamore and three others received conditional discharges. A trial of other members collapsed before it had even gotten started." The Guardian also observed that enormous amounts of information seized in raids had not been evaluated.

After the 2006 imprisonment of Clive Goodman and Glenn Mulcaire, and with assurances from News International executive and senior Metropolitan Police officials that a thorough investigation of evidence identified only these two as being involved in phone hacking, the public perception was that the matter was closed. Nick Davies and other journalists from The Guardian continued to critically examine evidence available from court cases and reported information contradicting official positions.

Other newspapers, including The New York TimesThe Daily Telegraph and The Independent, also published key articles critical of the Met's performance. These news media organizations persisted in obtaining and evaluating information from court records, Freedom of Information requests, and field contacts, reportedly including police officers. As in the case of the Watergate scandal of 1972, dogged investigative reporting led to public inquiries by national oversight bodies, intensified police investigations, and resignations by senior law enforcement officials.

Investigation by national oversight bodies

Commons Culture, Media, and Sport Select Committee

The House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee held hearings regarding phone hacking by news media companies in March 2007, July 2009, and again in July 2011. Representatives of the Metropolitan Police Service gave evidence to the committee on several occasions, including oral evidence as follows:

2 September 2009 John Yates, Assistant Commissioner
2 September 2009 Philip Williams, Detective Chief Superintendent
24 March 2011 John Yates, Acting Deputy Commissioner
March 2007

The 2007 inquiry regarding "Privacy and media intrusion" began shortly after Goodman and Mulcaire were sentenced. It was focused on activity at News of the World. The then executive chairman of News InternationalLes Hinton, assured the Committee that a "full, rigorous internal inquiry" had been carried out and, to his knowledge, Goodman was the only person at News of the World that knew about hacking. Hinton said, “I believe absolutely that Andy Coulson did not have knowledge of what was going on.”[23][95]

July 2009

Prompted by the allegations in the three articles published by The Guardian around 8 July 2009, the Committee convened new hearings. Chairman John Whittingdale questioned whether the Committee had been misled by News International executives who testified two years before that Goodman and Mulcaire acted alone. The Committee again heard evidence from Les Hinton, then chief executive officer of Dow Jones & Company, and Andy Coulson, then director of communications for the Conservative Party. They also heard from Met assistant commissioner John Yates and Detective chief superintendent Philip Williams. The Committee's findings, released in February 2010, were critical of News International executives for their “collective amnesia” and critical of the police for not pursuing "evidence that merited a wider investigation."[23][95]

July 2011

After The Guardian publicized the 2002 hacking of Milly Dowler's phone, the Committee renewed hearings to follow up on the 2009 inquiry into press standards, privacy and libel. Again evidence was given by John Yates and News International executives, this time including Rebekah BrooksJames Murdoch, and Rupert Murdoch. By this time, there was substantial evidence from various sources that phone hacking had been widespread, that senior newspaper executives were aware of it sooner than had been claimed, and that Parliament had been misledz.[96]

Home Affairs Committee

The Home Affairs Select Committee held hearings regarding phone hacking by news media companies beginning in July 2009 and in September 2010.

July 2009

Like the Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee, the Home Affairs Select Committee questioned the Met's decision not to reopen the investigation following allegations that 27 other News International reporters may have illegally commissioned private investigators to carry out tasks. The Met's assistant commissioner John Yates responded that he had only looked into the original inquiry of Goodman.

September 2010

As information continued to emerge from court cases and investigative reporting, the Home Affairs Committee initiated another inquiry on 1 September 2010. The Committee again received evidence from the Met, newspaper journalists and executives,

Shortly after the hacking of Milly Dowler's phone became public in 2011, committee chairman Keith Vaz wrote to Prime Minister David Cameron asking him to consider points raised during the committee's inquiry, including:

  • "Why there was such an extensive failure by the Metropolitan Police properly to investigate allegations of telephone hacking and other illegal activity when those allegations were first made;
  • "Whether the advice on the interpretation of section 1 of RIPA given by the CPS inappropriately limited the scope of the Metropolitan Police inquiry in 2006
  • "The police response to such offences, especially the treatment of those whose communications have been intercepted;
  • "The legal situation surrounding payment of police officers;
  • "Whether police officers were compromised by their relationships with journalists during the 2006 inquiry;
  • "Whether police officers were subject to blackmail by those they were investigating;"
  • "Whether criticism of the Metropolitan Police Service was suppressed by the use of public money to threaten legal action;
  • "Whether there should be advice to/restrictions on senior public officials such as the Director of Public Prosecutions about taking employment with those previously subject to investigations in which the officials were involved."

The committee issued its report finding that difficulties justifying the failure to investigate further were insufficient and that there appeared simply to be no real overcome obstacles.

Leveson Inquiry

Two days after The Guardian article regarding Milly Dowler was published, Prime Minister David Cameron announced that a public government inquiry would be initiated. Cameron named Lord Justice Leveson to chair the inquiry into phone hacking at News of the World and other newspapers, the diligence of the initial police inquiry, alleged illegal payments to police by the press, and the general culture and ethics of the media, including broadcasters and social media.

The Leveson Inquiry would be conducted in two parts. Part 1 of the inquiry would focus on ethical questions, specifically "the culture, practices and ethics of the press, including contacts between the press and politicians and the press and the police." Part 2 would focus on legal questions, specifically "the extent of unlawful or improper conduct within News International, other media organisations or other organisations. It will also consider the extent to which any relevant police force investigated allegations relating to News International, and whether the police received corrupt payments or were otherwise complicit in misconduct." Part 2 would not begin right away because of ongoing investigations by law enforcement organizations. The Leveson Inquiry's press release of September 2011 named the Met along with 46 celebrities, politicians, sportsmen, other public figures, and members of the public who may have been victims of media intrusion, granting them all "core participant" status in the initial module of the inquiry. Core participants could, through their legal representatives, ask questions of witnesses giving oral evidence.

Internal Met investigations

By early July 2011, Metropolitan Police Service commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson was facing questions and accusations from several quarters about potential conflicts of interest arising from his social relationships with News International executives.

On 14 July 2011, Neil Wallis was arrested. Wallis was formerly executive editor at News of the World and was arrested on suspicion of conspiring to intercept communications[106] In 2009 and 2010, while Wallis' public relations firm, Chamy Media, was being paid £24,000 by the Met for him to do public relations work two days each month,[107] Wallis also received more than £25,000 from News International for providing “crime exclusives” using details of Met investigations. For one story, he was paid £10,000. His contract with the Met reportedly had a confidentiality clause, a Data Protection Act clause and a conflict of interest clause.[108] During January 2011, Stephenson accepted a five-week stay worth an estimated $19,000[109] from Champneys, a health farm at the time the spa's public relations were being handled by Wallis's firm.[105][107]

Three days later, on 17 July, Stephenson resigned. He claimed his relationship with Wallis was that of an acquaintance and maintained only for professional purposes. He denied having suspected Wallis was involved in phone hacking, relying upon senior figures from News International claiming misbehaviour was confined to a few rogues. Finally, he claimed to have been unaware of any other documents in the Met's possession of the nature that subsequently emerged."[104]

The next day, 18 July, an initiative was announced by Home Secretary Theresa May to examine the ethical considerations regarding the relations between the Metropolitan police and the media. It was to be led by Elizabeth Filkin, the former Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, and intended to create a framework for how officers should interact with journalists. May also noted that she had asked the Independent Police Complaints Commission to determine whether it needs the authority to question civilian witnesses during the course of their investigations and whether it should be able to investigate "institutional failings" of entire forces in addition to allegations against individual officers.[2][110]

On 1 September 2011, Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary began an inquiry to address alleged corruption and abuse of power in police relationships with the media." This, too, was ordered by Home Secretary Theresa May and led by a former chief constable of Essex, Roger Baker. His area of investigation was to include payments made to custody sergeants for tip-offs about arrests as well as buying drinks and providing lavish hospitality.[110]

Later in September, in what may also be considered an internal investigation, the new Met Commissioner, Bernard Hogan-Howe, took the unusual step of asking the Durham constabulary to review the work of Operation Weeting.[67]

 

Criticisms and responsesEdit

Investigations of the Met gave rise to criticisms of the Met's role in the phone hacking scandal. Commentators observed that the personal relationships among individuals variously in law enforcement, news media, and political institutions may have compromised principles and judgments, sometimes leading to inappropriate favors and even illegal payments. This entanglement of personal and commercial interests led some commentators to believe that a disincentive was created for police officials to thoroughly investigate allegations of wrongdoing. This may have resulted in the failure to notify victims in a timely manner, led to misleading statements to the public and government oversight bodies to cover-up wrongdoing, and/or led to attempts to stifle the voices of whistle-blowers.

Metropolitan Police spokespersons have maintained that investigations were pursued appropriately in light of information and guidance available to them and in light of competing priorities for their resources.

Personal relationships and potential conflicts of interest

While Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police from 1993 to 2000, Paul Condon established the Met's anti-corruption unit, acknowledging that police corruption was not an occasional threat, but a permanent, ongoing one. Condon's initiatives all but closed down communication between Met police and the news media.

Condon's successor, John Stevens was Met commissioner from 2000 to 2005. He was credited with reopening communication between the Met and the news media, consciously cultivating relationships with them. In this, he was assisted by the Met's public affairs head, Dick Fedorcio. One senior officer reportedly said that Stevens was a master of the media who had not understood the complications that could arise from close relationships with the media. After retiring, Stevens wrote a column for the News of the World. In his autobiography, he stated that he had worked hard to maintain good relations with the press and, in doing so had made himself "available" to editors such as Rebekah Brooks (then Wade) at The Sun and Andy Coulson at the News of the World.

Ian Blair was commissioner from February 2005 to December 2008. Apparently less skilled than Stevens in working with the media, Blair made high-profile media gaffes that contributed to his losing support and ultimately led to his resignation. Blair later wrote an article for the New Statesman in which he agreed with Condon that there would always be some small number of corrupt staff in the Met. Then in his role as journalist, the former commissioner held the view that only a small fraction of policemen became compromised and that the principal problem stemmed from their relationships with politicians rather than with journalists.

By the time Paul Stephenson became Met commissioner in January 2009, News Corporation executives had well established, interdependent relationships with both politicians and the police.

In the 15 months following his becoming Prime Minister, David Cameron met with News International executives 26 times. James MurdochRebekah Brooks, and Andy Coulson had all been his guests at the Prime Minister's official country residence. According to The Independent, Mr Cameron held at least twice as many meetings with Murdoch executives as he held with any other media organisation.[115] Leaders of both major parties cultivated relationships with the Murdochs.

Since 2006, Met commissioner Paul Stephenson dined with executives and others at News Corporation 18 times, including 8 times with Neil Wallis, one of which was in September 2006 during the Royal Household/Goodman inquiry when Wallis was deputy editor of News of the World. Andy Hayman who led that inquiry, attended several dinners, lunches and receptions with News of the World editors. One such dinner was on 25 April 2006 while his officers were gathering evidence in the cases. Shortly after Mr. Hayman left the Metropolitan Police in December 2007 he was hired to write a column for The Times of London, another publication of News International.

Home Secretary Theresa May, expressed concerns over the closeness of the relationship between News International and the police. Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg expressed concerns about growing public perception of police corruption. Labor MP Paul Farrelly said the meetings demonstrated inappropriate ties with the Murdoch organisation

 The report of the Home Affairs Select Committee noted a "level of social interaction which took place between senior Metropolitan Police Officers and executives at News International while investigations were or should have been being undertaken into the allegations of phone hacking carried out on behalf of the News of the World."

Paul Stephenson resigned 17 July 2011. This was the result of speculation about the Met's ties to senior people at News International including Neil Wallis who had been arrested in connection with Operation Weeting."

There was potential for mutual benefit from these various relationships, some of which could be rationalized to be in the public interest. Personal ties could help journalists obtain information on which to base news stories the public should know about. The police might obtain information from journalists that helped solve crimes. In defense of investigative reporting by News of the WorldThe New York Times noted that even disregarding sex scandals, wrongdoing resulting in dozens of criminal convictions had been reported

However, some mutual benefit from these personal ties was less focused on the public good. As early as 1997, it was customary for newspapers, including News of the World, about to publish a story about alleged criminal activity, to tip-off the police in advance so that the police could make arrests and get favorable publicity from the newspaper. Police officials might receive favors or even payment for information. Questionable aspects of their private life might also receive less scrutiny from the press. Politicians might receive influential support from newspapers. Every Prime Minister beginning with Margaret Thatcher reportedly benefited from News Corporation endorsement.

 Newspaper executives in return might receive preferred access to politicians that could help their companies. For example, News Corporation Chairman in Europe, James Murdoch dined at the Prime Minister's official country residence during the period that he was promoting the company's bid for British Sky Broadcasting Group (BSkyB).

In the worst case, such personal relationships could create a conflict of interest making senior Met officials less willing to act in the public interest. The Daily Beast concluded the current situation between the Met and News International was too cozy.

Limited, incomplete investigations

Critics of the Met's investigation into phone hacking noted that large amounts of evidence available to them was inexplicably left unevaluated and unused. It was speculated during a Parliamentary Debate in September 2010, that, if Andy Hayman, the Met officer who headed the phone hacking 2006 investigation, had been placed in charge of the Watergate inquiry, "President Nixon would have safely served a full term."[122] Critics also noted the legal criteria the Met used to guide its investigations was incorrect, and that conflicts of interest may have contributed to limiting the investigations.

The Met responded that there were higher priority investigations competing for the limited resources available, and that they conducted appropriate investigations based upon their knowledge and guidance at the time. Responding to a critical New York Times article, the Metropolitan Police Service released a statement defending its actions.

Eventually, with increasing publicity regarding the phone hacking scandal, a total of 185 people were committed to investigations relating to illegal acquisition of confidential information. Specifically, by mid-July 2012, 96 officers and civilians were working on Operation Weeting (phone hacking), 19 officers working on Operation Tuleta (computer hacking), and 70 working on Operation Elveden (bribery, corruption).

Unevaluated evidence

The Met began accumulating evidence against Jonathan Rees beginning in 1987 relating to the murder of Daniel Morgan and other crimes. Nick Davies, reporter for The Guardian, believes these "boxloads" of paperwork "could include explosive new evidence of illegal news-gathering by the News of the World and other papers."[ There has been no indication that this evidence was thoroughly evaluated for evidence of illegal acquisition of confidential information.

Documents dating back to the 1990s seized in 2003 by the Information Commissioner's Office from the home of private investigator Stephen Whittamore as part of Operation Motorman may not have been thoroughly evaluated by the Met for evidence of illegal acquisition of confidential information. Seized documents included 13,343 requests for confidential information from 305 journalists In 2007 the information commissioner "berated the police and PCC over their feeble prosecution and condemnation, respectively, of a range of offences, from garnering ex-directory numbers to hacking into the police national computer."

Staff at News of the World reportedly reported to the police in 2002 that the paper only had access to Milly's voice mails and that no one had been accused of phone hacking at that time."[126]

Documents seized by the Metropolitan Police in August 2006 from the home of private investigator Glenn Mulcaire totaled 11,000 pages of evidence, including a voicemail target list with over 4,000 names on it.

 According to The New York Times, no one at the Met cataloged this evidence until late 2010, even though senior Scotland Yard officials told Parliament, judges, lawyers, potential hacking victims, the news media and the public that there was no evidence of widespread hacking by the tabloid.

 According to The Daily Telegraph, evidence had been kept in trash bags for three years before deputy commissioner John Yates ] had the names entered on to a computer database to permit thorough examination for leads.

Only eight of 4,000 potential victims became the subject of charges against Mulcaire in 2006.

A key document seized from Mulcaire's premises in August 2006 was the "Transcript for Nevile" email. The names appearing on this document indicated that News of the World journalists in addition to Clive Goodman were involved in phone hacking. The Met acknowledged the existence of this document 1 November 2007 in response to inquiries related to the civil claim brought against News of the World by Gordon Taylor. The court ordered the Met to turn the document over to Taylor on 7 December 2007 and Farrer and Co, which then represented News Group Newspapers, received a copy by 2 April 2008.

The chairman of Culture, Media and Sport Committee asked Yates why this document did not provoke someone to interview Neville.[46] The committee criticized this 2006 decision not to investigate further, concluding that there had been evidence of additional lawbreaking by others and that more thorough police investigation had been warranted. The Committee criticized Yates judgment.[130] The following year, the Home Affairs Select Committee conducted an inquiry and leveled similar criticism at the Met "for its failures to pursue inquiries."

Priorities

Faced with criticism for not thoroughly pursuing available evidence in 2006, the Met asserted that the Royal Household/Goodman inquiry was limited "because the counter-terrorism unit, which was in charge of the case, was preoccupied with more pressing demands."

 According to deputy assistant commissioner Peter Clark, the unit then had over 70 live operations regarding terrorist plots and that not all of these were being investigated because of a shortage of officers to do so.[

Assistant commissioner John Yates pointed to the fact that, two days after Mucaire was arrested, the counter-terrorism unit foiled an Al-Qaeda plan to blow up transatlantic airliners.

The Home Affairs Select Committee acknowledged that the anti-terrorist unit had conflicting priorities and that Clark gave higher priority to protecting life threatened by terrorists than to criminal activity resulting only in breaches of privacy. Nonetheless, it was critical of not looking into the evidence it had in hand.

Incorrect legal criteria

As part of setting their investigative priorities in 2006, the Met consulted with the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) to agree upon a strategy for pursuing the Royal Household/Goodman inquiry. Assistant commissioner John Yates claimed that the Met was guided by advice from the CPS, then headed by Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) Ken Macdonald, that "phone hacking was only an offence if messages had been intercepted before they were listened to by the intended recipient."[31] Yates told Parliament on four separate occasions that it was on the basis of this legal theory that Yates repeatedly claimed that only 10 to 12 phone hacking victims had been identified. Yates maintained his position to the Culture, Media and Sport Committee in 2011 that the guidance received by the Met was "unequivocal."

This account was challenged by Keir Starmer, who succeed Macdonald as DPP. Starmer told the Home Affairs Select Committee that the Met were not given advice which limited their investigation. Specifically, he claimed:

The Met had been advised that phone hacking was an offence under the 1990 Computer Misuse Act, regardless of whether messages had or had not been heard by their intended recipient.

  • Although a CPS lawyer had raised the possibility early in the inquiry that, under the 2000 Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA), it might be necessary to prove voicemail messages had been intercepted before listened to by the intended recipient, an email sent to the Met in April 2006 cautioned that this was an untested view that warranted further consideration. Furthermore, after David Perry became the prosecutor in July 2006, he advised the Met that this was a narrow interpretation.
  • When charges were brought against Clive Goodman and Glenn Mulcaire, no mention was made as to whether messages had already been listened to by the intended recipient.

Conflict of interest

Some observers expressed the view that the decision to limit the investigation was in part due to conflict of interest by Met officials. According to The New York Times, some investigators acknowledged that Scotland Yard was reluctant investigate more fully in part because of its close relationship with News of the World."

 The New York Times further observed that, such interviews, combined with testimony before the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, indicated that “the police agency and News International … became so intertwined that they wound up sharing the goal of containing the investigation.[

In reply, the Met insisted that they followed the lines of inquiry that they thought was likely to produce the best evidence, and that the charges that were brought were appropriate for the criminality uncovered.[23] A former senior Met official denied the department was influenced by any alliance with News of the World.

Met assistant commissioner John Yates expressed his views to The Daily Telegraph in an interview that mistakes had been made, but that they reflected "cock-up, not conspiracy." The Met had simply taken a narrow view of what constituted a "victim," leading them to report publicly that there were a small number, a "handful," perhaps hundreds of victims, but not thousands.

Illegal payments to officers

Allegations of illegal payments to police officers date back to the earliest period of the phone hacking scandal. During the 1990s, Jonathan Rees reportedly had a network of sources within the Metropolitan Police Service, including serving officers, providing him with confidential information that he sold at a profit to news media organizations.

In March 2003, Rebekah Brooks, editor of The Sun, and Andy Coulson, editor of News of the World testified together before the Commons media select committee. Brooks responded to a question about payments to the police saying that the organization paid the police for information in the past. Asked if she would do so again in the future, her answer was pre-empted by Coulson who stated that, if there is a clear public interest, they would continue with that practice. It was pointed out to Coulson that it was always illegal to pay police officers, regardless of public interest. Coulson suggested he had been talking about the use of subterfuge."

According to The Guardian, the Met received documents in June 2011 from News International indicating that News of the World paid a total of £100,000 to between 3 and 5 as yet unidentified Met officers in 2003 while Coulson was editor. Former Met commissioner Ian Blair noted that this represents only "five junior police officers out of the Met's 52,000 staff."

 The Guardian believes evidence in the hands of the Met indicates there are more serving officers receiving thousands of pounds in brown envelopes from newspaper's crime reporters and that, when the attempts were made to stop the corruption, serving officers tipped them off so they could evade detection.[3] The New York Times reported that, at best, the police have been lazy, incompetent and too cozy with the people they should have regarded as suspects. At worst, some officers might be committing crimes themselves."

In addition to cash payments, there is concern that Met officers may be influenced by favors or promises of employment, since senior Met officers sometimes land jobs with newspapers. The report of the Home Affairs Select Committee concluded that they were seriously concerned about allocations of payments made to serving police officers

Victims not notified or information not released to them

As of June 2011, according to The Guardian, Scotland Yard is believed to still have hundreds of thousands of documents obtained during investigations into private investigator Jonathan ReesRick Davies, reporter for The Guardian, believes review of these "boxloads" of paperwork could expose explosive new evidence of illegal news-gathering by the News of the World and other news organizations. According to his sources, confidential information sold to newspapers may have been obtained through blagging, burglaries, bribery, and blackmail, sometimes involving corrupt customs officers, VAT inspectors, bank employees and police officers.

 In 2003, a raid by the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) was made as part of Operation Motorman on the home of private investigator Steve Whittamore. This resulted in seizure of records including more than 13,000 requests for confidential information from newspapers and magazines.

In 2006, Information Commissioner Richard Thomas stated that hundreds of journalists may have illegally bought private information. In 2006, the Metropolitan Police Service (Scotland Yard) seized records from another private investigator, Glenn Mulcaire, and found a target list with over 4,000 names on it.

 Release of "the totality of the Mulcaire information" has not yet been achieved but has been requested through the courts. According to The Guardian, that seized material included 4,332 names or partial names, 2,987 mobile phone numbers. 30 audiotapes, and 91 pin codes for accessing voicemail.

There is no indication of a systematic effort by the Met to identify or notify the thousands of potential victims whose names were obtained during the taping of Rees's phone in 1999 or the raid on Whittamore's premises in 2003. After the raid on Glenn Mulcaire's premises in 2006, the Met reportedly alerted the royal household and five other victims who would be included on the formal indictment of Mulcaire. The Met also claimed they notified "select individuals with national-security concerns: members of the government, the police and the military."

The precise number of phone hacking victims is unknown, but a Commons Home Affairs Select Committee report noted in July 2011 that "as many as 12,800 people may have been victims or affected by phone hacking."

 It was estimated in July 2011 that only 170 of these victims had been informed. In October 2011, it was estimated that only 5%, or about 200, of people whose confidential information had been acquired by Mulcaire had been notified.

In contrast, John Yates told the House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee in September 2009 that the police had only found evidence indicating that "it is very few, it is a handful" of persons that had been subject to message interception. Further, Mr. Yates assured the public that all those affected had been notified.

 For this, Yates was criticised by John Whittingdale, chairman of the Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee. As late as February 2010, the Met continued refusing to report how many victims it had warned that their voicemail may have been hacked.

The first solicitors to win financial settlements for their clients for phone hacking had to deal with the Met as an obstacle rather than a resource. In some cases, the Met's failure to notify potential victims in a timely manner resulted in their having to pay their own solicitors to simply find out whether they had been victims of phone hacking crimes. George Galloway, a member of Parliament, was alerted by a detective that his messages had been hacked in August 2006. Galloway said the detective urged him to change his PIN code. But when Galloway asked who had accessed his phone, the man from Scotland Yard “refused to tell me anything."[23] In most cases, the failure to notify delayed or even precluded legal action by victims against perpetrators. Some possible hacking victims said that by sitting on the evidence for so long, the police have made it impossible to get information from phone companies.[23] Not only were potential victims denied the opportunity to check the call data, which the phone companies only keep for 12 months, they also did not become aware of the desirability of changing their access codes or of considering what damage might have been done to them as a result of interception.

Only after The Guardian's article of July 2009 making public the details of the settlement News of the World made with Max Clifford was there a broad initiative by solicitors and barristers to force disclosure of phone hacking evidence held by the Met since at least August 2006." Two dozen people brought civil cases against News International, that forced the Met to release information relating to Mr. Mulcaire.

 Even then, obtaining useful information from the Met was not easy for victims. A woman who believed her phone had been hacked because details about her life appeared in News of the World wrote to the police for information. Two months later, she received a reply confirming that her number had been found among the documents seized from Mulcaire and suggested she contact her phone-service provider.

In summary, according to The New York Times Scotland Yard chose to notify only a fraction of the victims of phone hacking. This had effectively shielded News of the World from many civil lawsuits.

In the case of four people, including former deputy prime minister John Prescott and former senior police official Brian Paddick, lawyers for the Met told the court phones of the four had not been hacked. It turned out that they had, leading their attorney to accuse the Met of misleading the court.[26] Outraged, Prescott filed suit against the Met because police initially declined to hand over details about him taken from the office of Glenn Mulcaire.

Misled prosecutors, courts, Parliament, and the public

Senior Police officials, both in the MetCity, and other territorial forces have been accused of misleading victims, the public, Parliament, prosecutors, and courts.

The public was not generally aware of the narrow interpretation used by the Met of what constituted illegal phone hacking, i.e., it was only considered illegal if the hacker heard the message before the intended victim. Consequently, the Met's indicating there were just a "handful" of victims misled victims, the public, and Parliament regarding how widespread the practice was of intercepting confidential communications, regardless of when the intended recipient heard them. Scotland Yard originally claimed there were only eight victims. As late at mid-2009, John Yates claimed there were "hundreds, not thousands" of potential victims.

This same narrow interpretation was used by the Met when it assured everyone that all affected individuals had been notified by claiming the police had taken all appropriate action to ensure that people were informed where ever there was evidence of their being subject of any form of phone tapping.

In September 2010, Yates told the Home Affairs Select Committee that all reasonable steps had been taken with the major telephone service providers to ensure victims were notified "where we had even the minutest possibility they may have been the subject of an attempt to hack or hacking." According to Yates, this included speaking to the potential victims directly or ensuring that a phone company had done so. The four leading mobile phone companies denied that the police asked them to warn any victims.[

Met officials may have made misleading statements when they gave assurances that no evidence of widespread hacking had been found even though they had not thoroughly searched for it.

The Crown Prosecution Service (CPP) claimed it was misled by the Met during consultations on how broadly to investigate during the Royal Household/Goodman inquiry. Met officials reportedly didn't discuss certain evidence with senior prosecutors, who were later stunned to discover evidence had not been shared. A Met spokesman responded that CPP had access to all the evidence.

In its report, the Home Affairs Select Committee did not expressly accuse Mr. Hayman of lying to them but did say that it was difficult to escape the suspicion that he deliberately mislead them. Member of Parliament Chris Bryant directly accused assistant commissioner Yates of misleading two parliamentary committees and of failing to correct himself to Parliament after errors in testimony became apparent to him.[5] Yates responded to accusations by The Guardian by hiring a well known libel firm to threaten legal action against various media outlets for reporting he had misled parliament."

 Yates legal fees were reportedly paid by the Met.[

Discouraging whistleblowers

During parliamentary debate in July 2011, Baroness Berridge observed that more, not fewer, whistleblowers were needed since whistleblowers speak out in the public interest. This is not the same as leaking information.

In September 2011, as the Met conducted its three newly initiated investigations of illegal acquisition of confidential information, it pursued ongoing leaks from the Met concerning evidence it held as well as earlier leaks that gave rise to the various investigations. In an apparent effort to discourage future leaks, the Met took the unusual action of invoking the Official Secrets Act, which provides for severe penalties. Specifically, the Met used the Act to call for the journalists at The Guardian to reveal their sources for information upon which the Milly Dowler revelations were based. This action was immediately and widely condemned as an attempt to discourage whistleblowers and intimidate the media. The Guardian reported it had received papers demanding that reporters hand over anything that could lead the police to whistleblower for the Dowler story.

The Met's action was criticized by chairman Keith Vaz of the Home Affairs Select Committee and chairman John Whittingdale of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee.

 A representative on freedom of the media for the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, wrote to foreign secretary, William Hague expressing concern over the potentially chilling effects on investigative reporting and press freedom."

The Met initially sought to clarify its use of the Official Secrets Act but soon retreated from this initiative and withdrew its demand.

 

Timeline

 

See also

 

ReferencesEdit

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External links

Last edited  by AlistairMcMillan