No evidence has emerged. Press Complaints Commission
Murdoch hit by FBI 9/11 hacking inquiry. The Independent 15th July 2007
Revealed: Cameron’s 26 meetings in 15 months with Murdoch chiefs. The Independent 16th July 2011, weeks into Murdoch phone-tapping scandal
Phone hacking: police uncover more evidence: Prescott name on new list of potential victims. The Independent front page
News of the World hacked Milly Dowler’s phone when Rebekah Brooks was editor. The Independent front page
The seeds of the corrupt relationship which exploded in the phone hacking scandal were actually there all the time in News Corps. Sir Harold Evans, former editor The Times & The Sunday Times
News of the World hacked Milly Dowler’s phone during police hunt: Paper deleted missing schoolgirl’s voicemails, giving family false hope. The Guardian front page
Reward and punishment is how this company works. And that’s essentially the business model. Michael Wolff, author The Man Who Owns the News
James Murdoch wants to ... create the world’s first multi-platform media operator ... If we block it, our media sector will suffer for years. Jeremy Hunt, memo to David Cameron
There was not, there never has been, any grand bargain between the Conservative Party and Rupert or James Murdoch. David Cameron, parliament
Rupert Murdoch – the most powerful media mogul in the world. He is accused of dragging Britain’s press into the gutter, of having contempt for the law, and contaminating our politics and public life. Rupert Murdoch – Battle With Britain, BBC 2013
The News of the World: within a few months Carr was shunted upstairs to become life president, and Rupert Murdoch took control of the biggest selling English language newspaper in the world. He was just thirty-eight years old. ibid.
In 1974 Rupert, Anna and the family – now three children – moved to New York. This was Rupert Murdoch’s land of greatest opportunity. ibid.
1979: from this point on Murdoch and Thatcher are inextricably linked. ibid.
The Times/Times on Sunday: rightly regarded as a stitch-up. ibid.
Wapping reignited the powerful suspicion that Murdoch had again conspired with Mrs Thatcher – this time to smash another of Britain’s powerful trade unions. ibid.
Murdoch had planned the move to Wapping like a military operation. ibid.
Sky went on air on 5th February 1989. ibid.
He had no choice but to agree to a merger with his establishment rival BSB. ibid.
Then a monumental scandal broke. Journalists at the News of the World had hacked the mobile phone message box of murdered teenager Milly Dowler. ibid.
People value honest, fearless and above all independent news coverage that challenges the consensus. James Murdoch, McTaggart lecture, Sky 2009
The only reliable, durable, and perpetual guarantor of independence is profit. ibid.
It’s a distraction. Ian R Crane, interview On the Edge, AlexG
By shutting down the profit centre, what it means is that after Sunday 10th July the only records required to be kept are the fiscal records. ibid.
The sorts of people we’re really talking about make the Mafia look angelic. We’re talking about socio-psychopaths who basically have no moral compass whatsoever. ibid.
Sean Hoare lost his life – this is the whistleblower ... On the News of the World hacking scandal probably lost his life because he had nothing else that could be taken away from him. ibid.
Sunday Hack: Let the Truth Be Heard. Hacks 2011 starring Kayvan Novak & Nigel Planer & Phil Davis, writer & director Guy Jenkin
Female Hack: I’ve seen more of Ashley’s cock than Cheryl has. Max, Max, we’ve got computers full of Ashley’s cock; we’ve had to install more memory to cope with it. No, it’s always that shape. ibid.
Don’t tell me you’re taking this phone hacking bollocks seriously? ibid. Bland/Nigel Planer
Why won’t you just hack phones like everyone else? ibid. Kate to Ray
The cops are coming! ibid. in offices
I have high self-esteem, dad. ibid. son to dad (James to Rupert Murdoch)
Our weather forecast is depressing: I want less rain. And the phone hacking is causing a lot of shit; from now on you absolutely have to stop telling me you’re doing it. ibid. Kate to Byron
I persuaded two Blue Peter presenters to sell me drugs. ibid. Kate
Oliver Bland was bludgeoned to death two days into his sentence. Police arrested 26 men including the prison chaplain. Zoe Perkin now edits The Sun. Connor Feast became an Islamist extremist in prison and founded the Martyrs Brigade of Proactive Sustainability. He is second-in-command. Ho Chi Mao Feast divorced her husband and is now married to Bernie Ecclestone. Stanhope Feast was placed by his family in the Supermax Secure Care Home in the Mojave desert. He has since escaped. Katherine Loy now runs the prison reform charity ‘Yes We Can’. Last year it made profits of £7.5 million. ibid. caption
Nothing can be more discordant than the noise of editors and proprietors of British newspapers howling in unison about their dedication to the freedom of the press. A group of people more dedicated than any other in the country to the distortion and corruption of the truth cover themselves with glory for their truth telling. Loaded down with bias and deceit they proclaim the values of fairness and veracity. Ignoring a million lies, they unearth a rare expose and pretend that it is the norm. From Kelvin MacKenzie of The Sun to Andreas Whittam-Smith of The Independent, the editors and their masters stuff their newspapers with frenzied diatribes in support of their right to do just as they please.
A perfect example of this hypocrisy was the Daily Mirror leading article of 11 January. It started:
‘The freedom of the press is no more no less – and must never be more or less than the inalienable right of every citizen to speak his mind in public without fear of penalty, prosecution or persecution.’
Five days later Tim Minogue, a subeditor on the Sunday Mirror, who had written a marvellous defence in a letter to the UK Press Gazette of those like him who had been summarily sacked without a word of explanation a few weeks earlier, was told he must swear in writing that he will never again denounce his employers in public – or be sacked. Thus did the Mirror management practise the ‘freedom from persecution’ which it preached ...
Competition between newspapers and the desire to bring readers new and fresh material occasionally allows a bold spirit or an inquiring mind to break free from the mould. A whole host of exposes even in the last 10 wretched years, even in some of the most Tory newspapers, are evidence that the rich do not always get everything their own way. For all their reaction and corruption, the newspapers do publish a good deal of information which is hostile and embarrassing to ruling class interests.
It is this material which is constantly threatened by the oppressive measures with which the ruling class protects its privacy and its purse. The law of libel, more vicious in Britain than in any other industrial democracy, and the associated laws of confidence and even copyright, are a constant menace to anyone who threatens the rich (the poor are not protected, since actions under these heads are not eligible for legal aid) ...
Rotten as the press is, it is better without a law which would still further boost the people responsible for its rottenness. Paul Foot, article February 1993, ‘Stop Press’
If I had not already been a socialist, the astonishing events at the Daily Mirror in the last few days would have quickly made me one. They are calling the Maxwell Robbery the greatest financial scandal of all time.
He robbed some £300 million from the workers at the Mirror, either from their company or from their pension fund.
All around there is a great tut-tutting. Newspapers which only weeks ago were describing Maxwell as a ‘swashbuckling buccaneer’ now fall over one another to denounce him for what he was – a revolting crook. Nowhere is the embarrassment greater than in the City.
In 1971 a distinguished lawyer and a distinguished accountant declared after a careful examination of Maxwell’s relations with a company called Leasco that Maxwell was not fit to chair a public company.
In the early 1980s Maxwell became chairman of one of the biggest public companies in the country, the British Printing Corporation.
In July 1984, on what we on the Mirror called Black Friday, he became chairman of the Mirror Group of Newspapers – which ran five national newspapers with a combined circulation of four million copies every weekday and six million every Sunday. How could this happen? Paul Foot, article December 1991, ‘They All Knew He Was a Crook’