Dear Readers
I apologize for the technical difficulties that prevented many of you from accessing this site yesterday. Because of this, I have decided to reprise yesterday’s post, which was published at 5:17 am. I appreciate your patience. Thank you.
ALH
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I know this story is playing out like a television drama series: Dallas or Dynasty comes to mind. But I’m eschewing the tabloid (or Twitter) impulse to comment on every episode. Instead, as related commentaries linked to below will attest, I’m only doing so when truly pivotal events occur – as was the case over the past 48 hours.
Who polices the police?
(BBC News, July 18, 2011)
This is the central question Home Secretary Theresa May posed and answered during a statement to Parliament yesterday. Most notably, she announced an official inquiry into the corrupt relationship between the police and media that facilitated phone hacking on “an industrial scale” – as former PM Gordon Brown, himself a target of it, remonstrated.
She also announced that the country’s two top cops, Commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson (left) and Assistant Commissioner John Yates, both resigned within the past 24 hours so that Scotland Yard could begin the process of regaining the public’s trust. But nobody doubts they were effectively fired: Stephenson for hiring a former Murdoch crony to do PR work for the metropolitan police, and Yates for whitewashing a police investigation into complaints of phone hacking back in 2009.
As I lamented in my original commentary, the most troubling aspect of this scandal is the extent to which the police were complicit in such egregious wrongdoing. Getting fired therefore is a small price to pay for their failures in this context.
Meanwhile, just as this scandal is becoming an albatross around the neck of Murdoch’s business empire, it is also becoming one around the neck of PM David Cameron’s political career. Indeed, speculation is rife that daily revelations about the ‘cozy relationships” he nurtured with executives at News Corp may force him to resign in due course too:
He reportedly spent Christmas with Rebekah Brooks, the ex-NOTW editor who was forced to resign on Friday as head of all of Murdoch’s UK newspapers; and, like Commissioner Stephenson, he hired Murdoch crony Andy Coulson – who presided as editor of the rogue and now defunct NOTW during the years when much of the phone hacking at issue occurred – as director of communications for 10 Downing Street. This, despite early, private warnings from journalists at the Guardian – who finally exposed the full extent of phone hacking at the NOTW and are becoming the Woodward and Bernstein of the UK – that Coulson was up to his eyeballs in this unfolding scandal.
So it was bad enough for him when Coulson was arrested on July 8. But then came Brooks’s arrest on Sunday (bringing to 10 the number of News Corp executives who have been arrested since this scandal broke two weeks ago). This latest arrest bodes especially ill for Cameron because he nurtured an even cozier relationship with her, which included attending a Christmas party at her home last December. Even worse, reports are that he was so deferential to the media power Brooks wielded that he hired Coulson merely to curry favor with her.
All the same, Cameron is clearly doing everything necessary to hang on to his job – even if only by the skin of his teeth. And he will. The pivotal moment in this respect came last week when he stood in Parliament and issued a fulsome and abject apology for getting in bed with Coulson and Brooks. And nothing demonstrates how determined he is to ride out this scandal, instead of being ridden over by it, quite like the way he cut short his state visit to South Africa—not just to attend the special session of Parliament he called for tomorrow, but also to take credit for the two high-profile resignations at Scotland Yard.
We have helped to ensure a large and properly resourced police investigation that can get to the bottom of what happened, and wrongdoing, and we have pretty much demonstrated complete transparency in terms of media contact.
(Cameron, Associated Press, July 18, 2011)
Now comes today’s scheduled appearance by Rupert, his son James (chairman of British Sky Broadcasting), and Brooks before the Parliamentary select committee investigating this matter, which the media are hyping as if it were high noon at the O.K. Coral.
They were summoned to testify about what they knew and when they knew it. But just as it always is with congressional hearings in the U.S., I suspect we will be treated more to political grandstanding by the committee members than to incriminating revelations by the witnesses.
In fact, besides sticking to their say-nothing scripts and emulating Cameron’s public contrition, I fully expect them to insist that the ongoing investigation into their alleged criminal misconduct by the now thoroughly discredited Scotland Yard precludes them from answering any difficult questions. This is too rich with irony.
Yet I’m willing to bet that it’s only a matter of time before James goes the way of Brooks; i.e., by being forced to resign and then getting arrested. Because I can’t imagine Coulson and Brooks falling on their sword for him; especially since all indications are that he not only knew about the phone hacking years ago, but was the paymaster behind News Corp’s efforts to buy the silence of anyone who could expose it. In any case, his unwitting proffer of willful blindness cannot possibly sustain him through all of the criminal and civil proceedings he now faces.
On the other hand, Rupert will escape arrest (if only because he really can plausibly deny having any clue). But the way News Corp is hemorrhaging market value ($8 billion and counting), he’ll be lucky to retain control of “his company”. That hemorrhaging will become a BP gusher if the congressional and law-enforcement investigations that are now underway in the U.S. uncover evidence that his new-age journalists also hacked the phones of Americans, especially the relatives of 9/11 victims as is being alleged.
Murdoch has been at the head of News Corp and its Australian predecessors since 1952, and he and his family have maintained an iron grip on the company ever since. Yet, citing two anonymous sources, Bloomberg writes that people within the company ‘have begun questioning the company’s response to the crisis and whether a leadership change is needed.’
(Huffington Post, July 18, 2011)
Finally, the whispers about a cover up became outright screams yesterday after the dead body of Sean Hoare, the NOTW reporter who blew the whistle on his tabloid’s phone-hacking criminal enterprise, was found in his home. I drew immediate parallels with the shocking suicide of the scientist, David Kelly, who blew the whistle on efforts by the government of former PM Tony Blair to “sex up” its dossier on WMDs to justify the UK joining the U.S.-led coalition to invade Iraq.
In this case, Hoare revealed that his erstwhile close friend and former boss Coulson was not only aware of the phone-hacking by NOTW journalists, but actively encouraged them to use this illegal device to gather highly profitable, exclusive scoops.
I suspect, however, that, Hoare either died of a sudden heart attack or killed himself because he could not handle the stress of his new-found and fast-growing notoriety. In other words, I’m not buying into suspicions of foul play. After all, Coulson, Brooks and (James) Murdoch might have been stupid and arrogant enough to think they could get away with phone hacking, but even they (and anyone else who fears being implicated) must appreciate that it’s impossible to cover up their misdeeds by killing everyone, including police officers, who might now decide to confess and finger others to save their own hides….
Stay tuned….
Related commentaries:
PM Brown fuels public anger against