The thing that I fear that will come of this will be tighter control of the media. What they did was already illegal, they were just a scummy newspaper.
Most of the current scandal have been kept within News International, which only includes the UK papers. It does look like it might have a knock on effect on News Corp's buyout of BSkyB.
News Corp currently has a minority (but large) share of BSkyB, which is the premium satellite service and complete network of channels (including the 24 hour Sky News) in the UK. Such a purchase needs clearance by the UK regulators which was already a tough sell, given the fears over Murdoch's influence already. They had cleared a deal which required them fencing off Sky News into an independent company. Now that deal is under review and looks likely to fail.
That's without noting that the hacking scandal goes way further than just the NOTW. Surprisingly The Sun is one of the tabloids with only minor charges against it, but they are still somewhat caught up in it. The NI papers are fairly incestuous about staff, especially between the tabloids and qualities.
But this is mostly a sideshow. There are three layers to this whole affair.
1) The Murdoch fun and games. This is where I point and laugh.
2) The hacking itself. This has been a fairly widely used tactic by a wide group of journalists across several papers. In itself it's a crime and pretty nasty. Considerably more damaging to the tabloid's reputation than the usual day-to-day sleazy shit. This is also the layer that is claiming scalps at the moment as the scale of the crime is revealed, made personal (with stories of hacking murder victims and war casualties) and inflames public rage.
3) The bribing of police. This is kinda the big one.
The last time this came up at the end of last year it was known as Metgate because it involved bribing and corruption within the Metropolitan police. This summary from Jack of Kent is a nice roundup of that side of things.
• Scotland Yard has discovered references to both Brown and his wife, Sarah, in paperwork seized from Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator who specialised in phone hacking for the News of the World;
• Abbey National bank found evidence suggesting that a "blagger" acting for the Sunday Times on six occasions posed as Brown and gained details from his account;
• Brown's London lawyers, Allen & Overy, were tricked into handing over details from his file by a conman working for the Sunday Times;
• Details from his infant son's medical records were obtained by the Sun, who published a story about the child's serious illness.
The sheer scale of the data assault on Brown is unusual, with evidence of attempts to obtain his legal, financial, tax, medical and police records as well as to listen to his voicemail. All of these incidents are linked to media organisations. In many cases, there is evidence of a link to News International.
Scotland Yard recently wrote separately to Brown and to his wife to tell them that their details had been found in evidence collected by Operation Weeting, the special inquiry into phone hacking at the News of the World. It is believed that this refers to handwritten notes kept by Mulcaire, which were seized by police in August 2006 and never previously investigated. Brown last year asked Scotland Yard if there was evidence that he had been targeted by the private investigator and was told there was none.
Bold mine and enraging. This was effectively the number two man in the British government at the time. The man in charge of the purse strings and who was widely known to be next in line for the top job. Hell, the change over was announced in September 2006, so it would have been while the investigation was ongoing. And yet the digging of details on the next PM was never properly investigated. And then he was lied (or at least mislead) by the police.
• Jeremy Hunt, the culture secretary, referred News Corporation's bid for 100% of BSkyB to the Competition Commission, after News Corp withdrew its promise to spin Sky News off into a separate company, a key element of making sure the bid passed media plurality conditions. The decision about News Corp's bid will now not be taken until next year at the earliest. (See 4.43pm.) Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband called on Rupert Murdoch to drop the bid altogether.
• News International was revealed to have targeted Gordon Brown, attempting to access his voicemail and obtaining information from his bank account, his legal file as well as his family's medical records (see 3.54pm).
• Charles and Camilla were warned their voicemail may have been hacked by the News of the World (see 3.26pm). Separately, it was alleged that the News of the World paid royal protection officers for details of the royal family (see 2.48pm). Scotland Yard put out a strong statement implying that News International had been leaking details of their investigation in order to undermine it (see 2.54pm).
• David Cameron made his strongest comments about Andy Coulson, the News of the World editor who became his director of communications. He said he would be "incredibly angry and incredibly let down" if Coulson's assurances that he did not know about phone hacking turn out to have been untrue (see 4.12pm). Miliband said Cameron needed to explain why he ignored warnings about Coulson before making him No 10 director of communications (see 12.05pm) and the issue came up repeatedly in the Commons.
1743: Former Lib Dem leader Sir Menzies Campbell claims both his and Nick Clegg's phones were also hacked. He says a former Lib Dem employee went to work for the family of Madeline McCann and hackers listened to their voicemail to try to find out anything they could about the little girl's disappearance.
1739: Amid all the other developments today, editor of Private Eye magazine Ian Hislop has told a committee of MPs and peers that the Press Complaints Commission has been long been too strongly influenced by News International. He added: "The PCC are the people who censured the Guardian for running the phone hacking story, so you can see why some of us feel their judgement hasn't been awfully hot in the past few years."
The 9/11 victims claim comes from the Daily Mirror, itself not exactly a bastion of reputable reporting. Not saying there isn't anything to it but it's not something I'd take as holy writ.
EDIT: forgot to say, Hunt made a fun correction during his questioning. He went from saying that Cameron hadn't spoken to Coulson since his resignation to saying he hadn't spoken to him 'recently'. This prompted a request for details of all the times they had spoken. Could make interesting reading.
Let's not forget the take over of the Wall Street Journal. One he promised would stay out of his editorial control. One that has actually panned out for the most part. Not that the WSJ hasn't always had a more right-of-center approach anyways.
ok so here's the TLDR the UK has horrible newspapers and murdock owns the biggest one, some little girl was kidnapped, and the newspaper hacked her phone and listened to her voicemail and deleting them making the family think she was alive but had been dead for months. The story breaks about them hacking said phone and ppl go in an uproar. Also other news about them paying off police and hacking the prime minister's phone too.
Tom Crone has left News International. These are words one would never have expected to type. The sudden closure last week of News of the World was a shock; but to those in the small world of media law this is a development of a similar magnitude. One would have expected the ravens to depart the Tower of London before Tom Crone ceased to be the legal manager of News International. ... And from one perspective, the circumstances may not matter. There are certain events the significance of which lies in themselves. This is one such event, for this news means there is perhaps only one individual connected with News International whose departure would be even more unthinkable: Rupert Murdoch.
One other interesting point from that linked Guardian article;
The departure comes a week after Crone's boss, James Murdoch, implied that the lawyer and the former editor of News of the World, Colin Myler, may have misled him about the reasons for making a £700,000 payment to football chief Gordon Taylor in 2008. The payment, revealed by the Guardian two years ago, was the first evidence that phone hacking had spread beyond the royal reporter, Clive Goodman. In his statement last week Murdoch said: "The company paid out-of-court settlements approved by me. I now know that I did not have a complete picture when I did so. This was wrong and is a matter of serious regret."
It looks like every sidelined, ignored story about NI, the hacking and corruption since 2006 is coming back with bite in the space of just a few days.
if I'm not mistaken, the people who sold the journal have greatly regretted the decision, and have openly wished that they had the resources to buy it back.
