Although phone hacking seems to have been a quietly accepted practice in British media for a number of years (In January 2006, for example, an investigation by Scotland Yard revealed that reporters at the News of the World managed to get the PIN codes needed to access the voice mail of Prince William, the second in line to the throne), only when it was revealed that the most-popular tabloid in Britain had hacked into the cell phone of a murdered girl did the Murdoch ship begin to take on water.
On March 21, 2002, Milly Dowler, 13, an English schoolgirl, was abducted on her way home from school and subsequently murdered. Her body was discovered on September 18, 2002, and her killer has been sentenced to life in prison. The tragedy took on a disturbing new dimension, however, when it was discovered that reporters at the News of the World, anxious to be the first to “break the story,” hacked into messages left on the missing girl’s cell phone. This led UK police, not to mention Milly’s parents, to hold out hope that the little girl was still alive.
Revelations of these illegal and highly repugnant activities triggered a wave of public condemnation across the UK, as well as a wave of firings inside of the once impenetrable media fortress known as News International.
Media magnate Rupert Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks, who was editor of the News of The World (NOTW) when its reporters allegedly hacked into the slain girl's cell phone in 2002, will face a three-hour grilling by a parliamentary committee to determine “the extent to which they knew, approved or subsequently covered up widespread phone hacking at News International,” the Guardian reported on Tuesday.
Incidentally, Brooks has been described in the British media as a “neighbor and close friend” of UK Prime Minister David Cameron, whom the British PM has met “at least six times since entering office 14 months ago.”
Rupert Murdoch’s son, James Murdoch, who is expected to inherit whatever is left of his father’s rapidly crumbling empire, will also testify at the parliamentary hearing.
At the same time, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) announced it would open a probe to determine whether News of the World might have hacked into the cell phones of 9/11 victims and their family members, which could prompt yet another firestorm since the transcripts of those calls have never been released in the public domain.
Meanwhile, the scandal has claimed its first victim. Sean Hoare, 47, was former NOTW entertainment reporter who blew the whistle on Andy Coulson, 43, who ran News of the World between 2003 and 2007. Hoare was found dead at his home in Watford, about 25 miles (40 kilometers) northwest of London. Thus far, Scotland Yard does not seem inclined to call the death a murder.
"The death is currently being treated as unexplained but not thought to be suspicious,” a police spokesman told British media. “Police investigations into this incident are ongoing."
According to the New York Times, “The two men first worked together at The Sun, where, Hoare said, he played tape recordings of hacked messages for Coulson.”
Coulson “actively encouraged me to do it,” Hoare said.
But the story gets better. Despite mounting allegations concerning his “professional activities,” Coulson went on to become the communications chief for none other than UK Prime Minister David Cameron. In January this year, Coulson resigned from his government position, saying that endless claims about illegal activities during his stint at News of the World were “making his job impossible.”
Scotland Yard placed Coulson under arrest on July 7, where he was held for questioning “on suspicion of conspiring to intercept communications,” before being released on bail. He faces an October hearing. But this has not stopped the political opposition from using the scandal to disparage David Cameron.
Ed Miliband, leader of the opposition Labour Party, lectured Cameron for the “conduct of his government” as the facts behind the scandal continued to thicken.
"He (David Cameron) must take responsibility for the decisions he made, for the decisions he made in relation to Andy Coulson, for the decisions he made around the contacts he had, for example, with James Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks,” Miliband told a session of parliament. “And he's also got to take responsibility for the conduct of his government, and I'm afraid the conduct of his government has been found wanting in the last couple of weeks."
Meanwhile, Theresa May, British Home Secretary, presented the rhetorical question: who is policing the police?
"These allegations are not, unfortunately, the only recent example of alleged corruption and nepotism in the police,” May told the House of Commons. “…There is nothing more important than the public's trust in the police to do their work without fear or favor. So, at moments like this, it is natural that people should ask: who polices the police?"
But the headaches for David Cameron, it seems, do not stop there. Scotland Yard's Assistant Commissioner John Yates tendered his resignation on Monday, just one day after police chief Paul Stephenson called it quits, over their links to Neil Wallis, a former NOTW executive whom Scotland Yard had employed as a media consultant.
Wallis was arrested last week on suspicion of conspiring to intercept communications.
Yates, who was Scotland Yard's leading anti-terrorist official, decided two years ago not to reopen police inquiries into media-connected phone hacking and police bribery, saying he did not believe there was any new evidence to consider.
Investigators reopened the inquiry earlier this year, saying they have discovered the names of some 3,700 potential victims.
Rupert Murdoch, whose media empire includes hundreds of newspaper, magazine, radio and television holdings around the world, including the Wall Street Journal, New York Post, Washington Post and Fox News, closed down NOTW on July 10, 2011.
Murdoch now enjoys the distinction of being at the helm of Britain’s formerly most-popular UK tabloid, which has been churning out sensational news since 1843, when it crashed and burned.
Meanwhile, as the rest of the world waits for yet more juicy news on The News, David Cameron has cut short a trip to Africa to attend an emergency session of Parliament on the scandal.
Taken from the Russian perspective, the NOTW scandal, which has already claimed – either directly or indirectly – the life of one journalist, reeks of double standards and pure hypocrisy. After all, Russia is regularly dragged over the coals over its supposed lack of "press freedoms" yet is very far away from reaching the level of the British tabloids, which regularly trampled on the rights of the very people they were supposedly protecting – their readers.
Meanwhile, the western media is no stranger to the mysterious demise of well-known media personalities, which may or may not have been "natural" in cause. I will name just two: Tim Russert, the influential and very popular moderator of NBC's Meet the Press show. Russert was known as a no-holds-barred interviewer, and was the only media personality to question then-President George W. Bush and his Democratic contender, John Kerry, about their alleged membership in an ultra-secret fraternity at Yale University.
Neither of the candidates admitted or denied their affiliation in the group, which has been described something of a breeding ground for future leaders.
Russert was equally tough on Democrats and Republicans alike, and was criticized for asking Hillary Clinton to pronounce the name of the Russian President, Dmitry Medvedev, which she obviously had not practiced beforehand. He did not ask the same of Clinton's contender, Barack Obama.
Although Russert may really have succumbed to an early death by heart attack at a youthful 58, as the official record holds, others say the most tenacious man in American media would never have allowed himself to miss one of the most important elections of recent times (at least many believed it to be so at the time, as the Bush years were beginning to weigh very heavily on the nation) between John McCain and Barack Obama.
In any case, the main point is that had a similarly prominent Russian journalist succumbed to an early demise on the eve of a major election, you can guarantee that Western rights groups would have been up in arms, accusing Russia of every sort of treachery. When something similar happens in the West, however, everybody just accepts it as unadulterated fact that doesn't require an investigation.
How would the Western media have treated the "suicide" of the most infamous names in Western media, Hunter S. Thompson, had something similar occurred in Russia's journalist community? Although said to have been working on "the best article he's ever written" based on the events surrounding 9/11, and having just started the "Fourth Amendment Foundation," an organization to defend privacy rights against the threat of unwarranted search and seizure by the authorities, gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, 67, shot himself in the head on February 20, 2005 at his home in Aspen, Colorado.
Meanwhile, aside from the extremely untimely death of Sean Hoare just days after the HackerGate story broke, there have been a number of other reporter deaths in the West that will never see the light of a fair trial.
For example, consider the inexplicably high number of reporter deaths in Iraq.
Since US, British and other soldiers began "Operation Iraqi Freedom" in March 2003, more than 70 journalists have been killed in the country.
The International Federation of Journalists said that at least a dozen journalists had been killed at the "hands of US soldiers", including the killings of Taras Protsyuk of Reuters and Jose Couso of Spain's Telecinco after US tanks opened fire on the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad.
US military officials claimed the tanks had been responding to small arms fire coming from the hotel, which housed journalists who were non-embedded with military forces, but later changed the claim, saying: military personnel fired at "what was believed to be an enemy firing platform and observation point".
A US military investigation into the attack found that "no fault or negligence" could be attributed to US soldiers.
Perhaps the one lesson that the British tabloids could learn from this latest fall from grace amongst their ranks is to concentrate less attention on how the foreign media is behaving, and more on how they themselves are serving their public. Perhaps that's the most we can ask of any media organization.
Meanwhile, it will certainly be no bad thing if Rupert Murdoch's fall from grace eventually leads to less concentration of media power. That would be real progress for journalists everywhere.
Robert Bridge, RT
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