News Corp. News Corp Shuts News of the World Amid Hacking Furor

[Winehole23]

News Corp. Shuts News of the World Amid Hacking Furor

Jul. 7 2011 - 12:10 pm


By JEFF BERCOVICI




Rupert Murdoch‘s furious critics are getting a sacrificial offering, but not the one they’ve been demanding. Facing calls for the firing of Rebekah Brooks, chief executive of News Corp.’s UK newspaper division, Murdoch has instead elected to shut down News of the World, the Sunday tabloid whose practice of obtaining information through illegal cell phone hacks is at the center of a rapidly-spiraling scandal with vast implications for the British press, and even the British government.


The last issue of News of the World will appear Sunday, announced James Murdoch, Rupert’s son and heir apparent, and chairman of News International.Any advertising revenues the final issue generates will be donated to charity. That amount is not likely to be much: Major marketers have been pulling their advertising from the paper in droves in an attempt to distance themselves from the scandal.


News of the World was founded in 1843; Murdoch acquired it in 1969. With a circulation of 2.6 million, it’s News Corp.’s most profitable U.K. paper, according to the Telegraph. But Michael White, an assistant editor for the Guardian — the paper whose reporting has been keeping the hacking story in public view — believes the company can hold onto all those profits and even reduce costs in the same stroke by transitioning NotW’s readership to a new, Sunday edition of the Sun.


Even so, scrapping NotW is a sure sign the Murdochs are fearful the continuing stream of hacking revelations is on the verge of derailing their takeover of British Sky Broadcasting Group. Although Prime Minister David Cameron has said the two issues are separate, Jeremy Hunt, the government secretary overseeing the regulatory approval process, has indicated that it may be necessary to postpone its conclusion. Meanwhile, Ofcom, a separate regulatory agency, has made noises about revoking News Corp.’s broadcasting license in light of the pattern of wrongdoing.

http://blogs.forbes.com/jeffbercovic...hacking-furor/

[RandomGuy]

In case anybody missed it, here are a couple of the things that the newspapers investigators have done:

Bribed police for information. (Illegal)
Hacked into the voicemail on a cell phone of a missing 12 year old, found dead shortly thereafter to get the anguished calls of the relatives.
Hacked into the voicemail of the victims of the bombings a few years ago for similar reasons.
Hacked into the cell phones of dead soldiers in Afghanistan, thumbing through address books and calling relatives' unlisted numbers.

Among other things.

I am a bit shocked that Murdoch shut down the paper. He always seemed like a total s bag, and axing the paper seemed somewhat decent.

Of course, all the innocent people at the paper now are out of a job in the middle of the worst austerity measures in over a generation in Britain. I guess he gets a slight upgrade from total s bag to mere asshole.

[Th'Pusher]

Murdoch should fire Roger Ailes while he is cleaning house.

[boutons_deux]

Surprising that Murdoch caved like an Obama, but good riddance to absolute rubbish (UK's top-selling "newspaper").

[Winehole23]

And you said there was no justice in the world.

[Winehole23]

Nor anything influenced by ethics and morality.

[Spurminator]

The only News of the World worth a ...

[boutons_deux]

ins utional UK "justice" will probably "settle" with Murdoch, since this debacle is far from over.

Murdoch wants BskyB, so he sacrifices NOTW.

Fox Repug Network is the same garbage as NOTW. Roger Ailes got his lie-and-slander career going under Repug head Nixon, a perfect indictment of both men.

[SnakeBoy]

Dammit! I guess I'm not getting my free Hannah Montana sticker now.

[xeromass]

Hacked into the voicemail on a cell phone of a missing 12 year old, found dead shortly thereafter to get the anguished calls of the relatives.

They also erased some of those messages to make place for more anguished calls and in process made family believe that the girl is still alive. Possibly also tampering with investigation.

I am a bit shocked that Murdoch did that. He always seemed like a total s bag, and axing the paper seemed somewhat decent.

I might be a cynical bas but I think that this canceling the newspaper deal will in the end show him as an even bigger s bag. There is the whole takeover thing, in general it would be best to quiet down the affair as soon as possible and also - can victims now possibly sue Newscorp directly or are they screwed?

So why not shut down the paper, add a Sunday edition to some other property of his and show a middle finger to everyone. Sly move, easy way out.

[RandomGuy]

They also erased some of those messages to make place for more anguished calls and in process made family believe that the girl is still alive. Possibly also tampering with investigation.

I might be a cynical bas but I think that this canceling the newspaper deal will in the end show him as an even bigger s bag. There is the whole takeover thing, in general it would be best to quiet down the affair as soon as possible and also - can victims now possibly sue Newscorp directly or are they screwed?

So why not shut down the paper, add a Sunday edition to some other property of his and show a middle finger to everyone. Sly move, easy way out.

I think that is the ultimate concern for Murdoch. Given his past indifference to ethics and fairness, I don't think it too far of a cynical stretch to say that the primary motive for the shutdown was fiscal. He said as much in its statement, i.e. the paper had become untenable.

Intrepreting the shutdown as indicative of some crisis of conscience on the part of Murdoch is not realistic, IMO.

[boutons_deux]

"Murdoch" and "conscience" on the same page? GMAFB

[boutons_deux]

Police suspect a Murdoch executive deleted ‘millions of emails’

London police are investigating the possibility that an executive working for Rupert Murdoch's News International deleted "millions of emails" in an attempt to thwart a phone hacking probe, reports said Friday.

On two separate occasions, a senior executive is thought to have erased "massive quan ies" of messages, according to The Guardian.

One of the massive deletions may have happened in January, just as police were launching "Operation Weeting" to look into charges that reporters at News of the World hacked voicemails.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/07/0...e+Raw+Story%29

[boutons_deux]

Murdoch Named PATRIOT Act Architect to Mop Up Paper's Eavesdropping Scandal; 'News of the World' to Close

Now the scandal is boomeranging back to New York, engulfing the top executive at the largest-circulation newspaper in the United States, the Wall Street Journal.

To clean up some of the mess, Murdoch has called upon the talents of former Bush administration Assistant Attorney General Viet Dinh, whose views on privacy are enshrined in the U.S.A. PATRIOT Act, and Joel Klein, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's union-bashing former schools chief, known for his phony claims of test-score gains.

But here in the U.S., an unseemly tale is unfolding about the steady unraveling of ethics at the Wall Street Journal since Murdoch's purchase of the paper and the appointment of Les Hinton as its CEO.

Coverup by Wall Street Journal Chief?

In January 2007, during an earlier blip of the News of the World hacking scandal, Hinton, then executive chairman of Murdoch's News International operation, assured British lawmakers that he had conducted a thorough investigation of the scandal and determined that only Clive Goodman, the News of the World reporter assigned to cover the royal family, was involved.

http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/151552

====

I place News Corp as corrupt and evil as Monsanto and BigPharma.

[boutons_deux]

Dedicated with great affection to all of our ST Fox Repugs Propaganda network lovers:

Murdoch's American Sins: Less Sensational, But More Dangerous

In the U.S. of A., it's a different story, and it cannot be understated. Here, Murdoch's sins were less sensational -- but more important, arguably a matter of life and death on some stories. With his most audacious move, the invention of the Fox News Channel, Murdoch and his minions created a vortex of misinformation and emotion draped in an American flag that changed a nation's politics for the worse. That affects a lot more people than phone hacking, no matter how heartless that was.

Murdoch had help from brilliant, cynical aides on both sides of the pond. In England, it was the massively ethically challenged, wild-eyed redhead Rebekah Brooks; in America, it is the frumpy and grumpy Roger Ailes, the only man to run the Fox News Channel since it was launched in the mid-1990s. As recent do ents have shown, Ailes -- who learned the American conservative politics of middle-class resentment at the foot of the master, Richard Nixon -- was long involved in a scheme for a conservative TV counterweight to the so-called "liberal media." But it took the arrival of Murdoch years later to execute the plan with the vision that a conservative cable news network could make millions in profits while wielding influence on a scale that a "Headless Body in Topless Bar" newspaper could only dream of.

But Ailes and Murdoch -- with a typical disregard for the consequences -- created a monster as their FNC grew in popularity over the course of the 2000s. They held onto to their millions of viewers by playing to their emotions, and to what they felt was true about America -- regardless of whether it was actually true. Over the years, misinformed Fox viewers wielded more and more clout over a directionless Republican Party that in turn drove the U.S. body politic, with disastrous consequences.

You want examples?

etc, etc

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/will-b...tml?view=print

[Winehole23]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/n...-payments.html

[Winehole23]

http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/...752/story.html

[Winehole23]

http://www.mirror.co.uk/2011/07/11/p...5875-23262694/

[MannyIsGod]

The use of the word hacking is a pretty big misnomer here. In my opinion anyway. This was more of taking advantage of stupid company employees and incredibly poor passwords on these systems than it was actually exploiting a computer security problem or over coming a computer security system that hacking implies.

If any of you have 0000, 1234 etc etc as your passwords then you're ripe for this.

[boutons_deux]

Hacking here obviously means "cracking" into someone's phone, or sniffing someone's over-the-air cell phone transmissions (which I think are mostly clear text, unless you buy an encrpyted phone and service). IIRC, it was OTA sniffing that caught Prince Charles and Diana cooing with their lovers.

brute-force attacking (weak) passwords is cracking into a private space, in this case by a corporate hired criminals.

[MannyIsGod]

Yeah - technically its "hacking" but its such a basic form that most people don't think of. I just think the term hacking has changed to mean something more advanced than what this is and I think it gives the wrong idea of what is wrong here.

Just a personal opinion/observation.

[boutons_deux]

hacker original was someone, mainly non-malicious hobbyists, who liked to "hack" up stuff to see how it worked, make it work differently, new uses, but it has taken on the pejorative sense of illegal intrusion, of cracker (like a vault, safe cracker)

[boutons_deux]

Why Rupert Murdoch Love$ God: World's Biggest Sleaze Mogul Also Getting Rich from Christian Moralizers

So are religious moralizers and others writing about religious and/or “moral” themes prepared to enrich the Murdoch “ media juggernaut” forever while Rupert Murdoch further corrupts UK, American and Australian politics while his companies trade in human misery for profit by hacking murder victim's phones, paying off the police, elevating smut to a national sport and even hacking the phones of killed soldiers’ families?

You bet!

Rupert Murdoch is one of America’s number one publishers of evangelical and other religious books, including the 33-million seller Purpose Driven Life by mega pastor and anti-gay activist Rick Warren. Murdoch is also publisher of "progressive" Rob Bell’s Love Wins.

Rick Warren, Rob Bell and company helped Murdoch fund his tabloid-topless-women-on-page-3 empire, phone hacking of murdered teens and Fox News' spreading "birther" and "death panel" lies about the president. They helped Murdoch by enriching him. And these weren’t unknown authors just lucky to get published anywhere, they could have picked anybody to sell their books.

Do the religious authors making their fortunes off Murdoch wear gloves when they cash their royalty checks? Do they ever dare look in the mirror?

The authors publishing with Murdoch serve a religious market so fine-tuned to grandstanding hypocrisy and moralizing, that, for instance, my novels about growing up religious (Portofino, Zermatt and Saving Grandma) will never be sold in the thousands of CBA member (Christian Bookseller’s Association) bookstores because – horrors! – my books have profanity and sex in them!

http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/151585

[TDMVPDPOY]

lol hope he goes to jail...

lol wanker hates his own country cause its run by wankers not smart like him...

[TDMVPDPOY]

lol hope he goes to jail...

lol wanker hates his own country cause its run by wankers not smart like him...