Rupert Murdoch and the Corruption of the British Media

[Douglas Caddy]

Phone hacking: police who took tip-off fees to be investigated by taxman

HMRC crackdown means officers who accepted payments from newspapers or private investigators face prosecution and fines

By Patrick Collinson

guardian.co.uk,

Friday 5 August 2011 18.54 BST

Police officers who allegedly took payments from newspapers and private investigators could face hefty fines and criminal prosecution after it emerged HM Revenue & Customs is reopening personal tax records to check if payments were fully disclosed.

It is understood HMRC has already begun probing self-assessment forms from previous years in the wake of new information obtained amid the phone-hacking revelations.

Last month Sir Paul Stephenson, the outgoing Metropolitan police commissioner, said documents provided by News International appear to include information on "inappropriate payments" to police officers. It was reported that the company provided the Met with details of payments made by the News of the World to senior officers between 2003 and 2007.

Under HMRC rules any payments earned in connection with an individual's employment are required to be disclosed for tax purposes, even if the payment is deemed illegal.

An HMRC spokesperson said he could not confirm the nature or extent of any investigation into a private individual's tax affairs. But he confirmed that HMRC will act on any new information and that illegal earnings can still be liable for tax.

Action to recover tax from police officers paid illegal tip-off fees relies on the precedent set by the "Miss Whiplash" prostitution case of the early 1990s, which has since entered the HMRC rule book. Miss Whiplash, who also went by the name of Lindi St Clair, was pursued for £112,000 in unpaid income tax in the late 1980s. It culminated in a court case in 1990 where she argued that since it was illegal to live on immoral earnings, taxing her would be committing an offence. But she lost the case and was subsequently made bankrupt.

An HMRC spokesman said: "If you receive money in connection with your employment then it is liable for income tax. Illegality is irrelevant."

Over the past year HMRC has intensified investigations into alleged tax cheats and promised to increase the number of prosecutions. Since April HMRC has had powers to name and shame anyone found to have deliberately evaded £25,000 or more in tax. The scheme will see names, addresses and details of the evasion made public. But those who come clean can avoid having their details published.

Earlier this year the government gave HMRC with an additional £900m to fund more investigations into tax evasion. The aim is to raise an additional £7bn in tax each year by 2014/15. HMRC has also gained new powers to inspect taxpayers' records and documents. In a typical investigation it will examine income and earnings dating back six years. If it discovers an individual has knowingly submitted an inaccurate return or document, or taken active steps to conceal earnings, it can demand repayment of the tax, plus interest and a penalty of up to 100% of the unpaid tax.

The department recently announced the targeting of the restaurant industry with a new task force dedicated to detecting tax and national insurance evasion. But it added that criminal prosecutions were reserved only for the most serious cases of high level fraud.

[Douglas Caddy]

Key quote from article: “It now seems to be everyone for themselves. The edifice is cracking. They’re all fighting like rats in a sack.”

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A Murdoch’s Missed Opportunity

The New York Times

By JAMES B. STEWART

August 6, 2011

When the News Corporation announced it would stop paying the legal fees for Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator at the center of Britain’s tabloid phone hacking scandal, the consequences were swift. Mr. Mulcaire could obviously shed light on who at the News Corporation knew about the phone hacking and efforts to conceal it.

After four years of silence, and just hours after the News Corporation said it would stop paying, he stepped before television cameras outside his home to say, “I have no further comment to make at this stage.” He added, “This may change.” Mr. Mulcaire is said to employ a lawyer full time as well as several more part time, an arrangement he surely can’t afford for long on a private investigator’s income.

In Parliament, the Labour member Paul Farrelly asked James Murdoch, who heads the company’s international operations, if he understood why people might interpret paying those legal fees as an effort to buy the private investigator’s cooperation or silence.

Mr. Murdoch murmured his agreement, saying his lawyers had told him “it’s important and customary” to pay such fees. “I’ve asked for those things to cease.”

After the company cut Mr. Mulcaire loose, two former executives came forward to accuse Mr. Murdoch of being “mistaken” in his testimony to Parliament about his knowledge of phone hacking. Now Mr. Murdoch is under investigation for potentially misleading Parliament.

As Mr. Farrelly put it, “It now seems to be everyone for themselves. The edifice is cracking. They’re all fighting like rats in a sack.”

However controversial in Britain, the practice of companies’ paying their officers and employees’ legal expenses in criminal investigations is not only routine in America but has been elevated by some to the status of a constitutional right. A little-discussed but open secret among defense lawyers and prosecutors alike is that who pays the legal fees often decides the outcome of an investigation.

As John C. Coffee Jr., Berle professor of law at Columbia, told me: “Someone whose legal fees are not paid may have a strong and urgent need to cooperate with the government. The employee, if he can’t afford to defend himself, has to cut a deal, and he might, shall we say, color his testimony. Who’s going to get the benefit of that, the company or the government? Lawyers know very well how to coach witnesses on what to say without telling them to lie.”

Confronted in the 1990s with an unprecedented wave of white-collar crime at major corporations like Enron and WorldCom, Justice Department prosecutors grew exasperated with companies that made public pledges to cooperate with investigators only to unleash a phalanx of defense lawyers bent on anything but.

In 2003, when he was chief of the Justice Department’s criminal division, Larry Thompson wrote that a factor in whether a company, as opposed to individuals, would be charged with a crime would be the extent of its cooperation, one measure of which “is whether the corporation appears to be protecting its culpable employees and agents,” among other things, “through the advancing of attorneys fees.” Mr. Thompson might well have added lavish severance packages and other forms of hush money to the list.

In 2005, the accounting firm KPMG admitted to creating fraudulent tax shelters that enabled wealthy clients to evade $2.5 billion in federal taxes, and six former partners, including the firm’s former deputy chairman, were indicted. KPMG, as it had in the past, paid their legal bills. All pleaded not guilty and declined to cooperate with the government.

As an accounting firm dependent on public trust, KPMG recognized that its survival depended on the firm’s escaping criminal charges. At a meeting with prosecutors, the firm’s lawyer, Robert Bennett, emphasized that KPMG “had decided to change course and cooperate fully.” The prosecutors zeroed in on the issue of legal fees, with one saying that “misconduct should not be rewarded” and another warning that with respect to legal fees, “we’ll look at that under a microscope,” according to notes taken at the meeting.

KPMG subsequently said it would pay legal fees up to $400,000 as long as employees cooperated and did not invoke the Fifth Amendment but would cease altogether for anyone indicted, including the six former partners already indicted.

Two years later, United States District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan took the drastic step of dismissing the indictments and harshly criticized both the Thompson memo and the prosecutors’ use of it to cow KPMG into terminating the fees to its former partners.

He suggested that this violated the Sixth Amendment right to counsel and ruled that the Justice Department “deliberately or callously prevented many of these defendants from obtaining funds for their defense that they lawfully would have had absent the government’s interference. They thereby foreclosed these defendants from presenting defenses they wished to present and, in some cases, even deprived them of counsel of their choice. This is intolerable in a society that holds itself out to the world as a paragon of justice.”

In reaching his decision, Judge Kaplan asked the defense lawyers what it would cost to defend the case. Their estimates ranged from $7 million to $24 million per defendant.

In the wake of Judge Kaplan’s broadside (subsequently upheld by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals), the Justice Department discarded the Thompson memo. While still giving credit for cooperation, Justice Department policy now states flatly that “prosecutors should not take into account whether a corporation is advancing or reimbursing attorneys’ fees or providing counsel to employees,” unless the fees are part of an effort to obstruct justice, such as making their payment conditioned on supporting “a false version of events.”

Today, “99 percent of all publicly held U.S. companies have indemnification agreements with their senior management and directors” to pay legal expenses, Mr. Coffee noted. “Their bylaws state that they will indemnify to the full extent permitted by law.”

He noted that in litigious America, this is sound public policy in order to attract qualified officers, directors and employees, who otherwise might face ruinous costs of defending themselves against what are often frivolous lawsuits.

Still, not everyone is enamored of either Judge Kaplan’s opinion or the outcome of the KPMG case. The six former partners had their indictments dismissed, but other defendants were found guilty at trial. Both a federal judge and a prominent defense lawyer I spoke to said they doubted that the Supreme Court would elevate a corporation’s payment of legal fees to a constitutional right. “It’s a leap, to put it mildly,” the lawyer said. “Just because you can’t afford the most expensive lawyers or have an unlimited budget doesn’t mean your constitutional rights have been violated.”

The right to counsel is far less established in English law, and Parliament may have been well within its rights to pressure the Murdochs on the subject of legal fees. But the News Corporation is incorporated in Delaware with headquarters in New York. If I were Rupert Murdoch, I’d wrap myself in the American flag and Constitution, and pay everyone’s lawyers. However heinous Mr. Mulcaire’s investigative techniques, he’s entitled to due process, which in America would be the best, most expensive defense lawyers the News Corporation’s money can buy.

[Douglas Caddy]

Posted at 11:34 AM ET, 08/05/2011

Guardian reporter admitted to phone hacking

By Elizabeth Flock

Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/blogpost/post/guardian-reporter-admitted-to-phone-hacking/2011/08/05/gIQAXK9SwI_blog.html

As CNN anchor Piers Morgan continues to deny allegations of phone hacking, an article written in 2006 has surfaced in which the Guardian’s assistant editor readily admits to having participated in the practice.

David Leigh wrote the article after News of the World royal editor Clive Goodman pleaded guilty to phone hacking, a crime for which he was later jailed.

In the article, Leigh admits to once hacking the phone of a “corrupt” arms company executive, after the businessman accidentally left his voicemail pin code on a printout.

Leigh writes that investigative journalism is “not a dinner party”, “particularly in a secretive country like ours where the privacy cards are stacked in favor of the rich and powerful.” His defense: It all depends who the target is.

“Unlike Goodman, I was not interested in witless tittle-tattle about the royal family. I was looking for evidence of bribery and corruption,” he writes.

Leigh also admits to what’s called “blagging,” or pretending to be someone else on the phone to get a story.

Leigh suggests that these kind of practices should be kosher in journalism only when it is a last resort and when it is in the public interest.

“As for actually breaking the law? Well, it is hard to keep on the right side of legality on all occasions,” he writes.

Leigh’s investigative work has led to the jailing of former British MP Jonathan Aitken and to the exposure of secret payments by defense and aerospace company BAE.

Leigh is also a professor of reporting at City University in London.

By Elizabeth Flock | 11:34 AM ET, 08/05/2011

[Douglas Caddy]

Coulson vetted by investigator linked to News International

Man who cleared the former editor for Downing Street was once paid by Murdoch

The Independent

James Hanning, Jane Merrick and Matthew Bell

Sunday, 7 August 2011

Andy Coulson was cleared for work at No 10 Downing Street last year after an investigator who had also done work for News International (NI) carried out his vetting, the IoS can reveal.

Mr Coulson, David Cameron's media chief, who resigned in January as the phone-hacking scandal developed, was scrutinised by an experienced investigator with strong links to both the Security Services and to the newspaper group that owned the News of the World, which Mr Coulson had previously edited.

The revelation is certain to renew controversy about Mr Cameron's 2007 decision to appoint Mr Coulson months after the former journalist's resignation as editor of the paper when two men were sent to prison for phone hacking.

The vetting process, which took place around the time of last year's election, gave Mr Coulson the green light to work alongside the Prime Minister in Downing Street and to see certain secret documents.

Last week, a former tabloid journalist and author, Wensley Clarkson, alleged on Newsnight that the investigator in question – who is known to Mr Clarkson – "would have used phone-hacking in the past" as one of his investigative tools. Now the IoS has learnt, independently of Mr Clarkson, that the person had done work for NI, a conflict of interest of which the PM is aware and knowledge of which is likely to cause embarrassment in Downing Street.

Last night, a No 10 spokesman said he had spoken to "several top security people" and issued a categorical denial that the work had been "farmed out" to a private investigator, but left open the possibility that someone working for the Security Services had done work for News International.

"It is pretty ironic, given what has happened recently," said Mr Clarkson last night. "For one thing, it calls into question the efficiency of the vetting procedure and, for another, it makes you wonder why the Security Services are not doing this stuff themselves from their own resources. But they're not likely to admit it, are they? I know the way the vetting world works. They just never admit things like this. I'm not in the least surprised to hear that Coulson would be vetted by a private individual, but I suspect most people assume the Security Services do their own donkey work, although they, like everyone else, are suffering from the current splurge of cuts."

Questions have been raised as to why Mr Coulson was not submitted for "Developed Vetting", the highest form of clearance, as soon as he started working in Downing Street. There was speculation this was the result of royal or Civil Service pressure, or that something might be unearthed that would prevent him being awarded clearance. Downing Street has said that his resignation from the News of the World (NOTW) had no bearing on any decision about his vetting status.

It was reported last week that senior officials working with Andy Coulson believed he did have the highest security clearance, raising questions over whether he was inadvertently granted access to the most sensitive information.

Mr Coulson underwent a total of three vetting procedures during his time working for David Cameron, yet it seems none uncovered serious concerns about the extent of phone hacking during his time as editor of NOTW (2003-07). At the time of his initial appointment in July 2007 to work with Mr Cameron in opposition, Mr Coulson was given a low form of clearance, which was reportedly handled by a branch of Control Risks, a private security company with good connections to the Conservative Party. Downing Street has declined to confirm that the company carried out the search, as does the company, now known as Sterling Infosystems. But a security expert last night questioned the wisdom of Mr Coulson being employed, even in opposition, if that was the case – on the basis of the sort of search that this firm carries out.

Ambrose Carey, 49, who owns and runs an investigations company Alaco, said: "Control Risks Screening was the company you would call if you wanted a standard background check. There is nothing wrong with it, but it is absolutely entry level. It's what multinational companies do as a matter of routine on everyone from the receptionist upwards. They are good and respected, but the kind of investigation they do is the most basic. They'll check degrees and qualifications, essentially just box-ticking stuff.

"I would be amazed if that was the only check the Tories did on someone of Andy Coulson's seniority. A thorough 'due diligence' would require bespoke investigation – canvassing as many people from the man's past to get as full a picture as possible. Background screening typically costs a few hundred pounds. But a full 'due diligence' report would typically cost a few thousand."

The final stage, unusually for someone of Mr Coulson's closeness to the Prime Minister, did not begin until six months after the election. The Cabinet Secretary, Sir Gus O'Donnell, has said that it was felt that Mr Coulson's security clearance level should be upgraded following a counterterrorism incident at East Midlands airport last October.

Sir Gus has warned about the danger of misunderstanding "the purpose of security vetting, which is about access to information not suitability for a job". In Mr Coulson's case, the Developed Vetting (DV) process, which Sir Gus said can take up to six months, was cut short by the media chief's resignation in January. The Security Services are in charge of DV, which is regarded with extreme seriousness. Having DV clearance would have enabled Mr Coulson to be shown the most secret of government documents.

Downing Street has said the ongoing vetting process had nothing to do with Mr Coulson's eventual resignation, and Mr Coulson denies having known that unlawful phone hacking was going on during his editorship of NOTW.

It was reported yesterday that Mr Coulson's predecessor as editor of the News of the World, Rebekah Brooks, who resigned as chief executive of News International last month, was still on the payroll, having been told by Rupert Murdoch to go travelling for a year until the phone-hacking scandal dies down. A News International spokesman said last night: "We decline to comment on the financial arrangements of any individual."

[Douglas Caddy]

Poster's notte: This interview is not to be missed. Chris Bryant is one courageous individual.

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Murdoch & me: How Chris Bryant brought a media mogul down to earth

Chris Bryant MP has been barracked by the tabloids for seven years. But as a man who has experienced far worse an alcoholic mother, state terrorism and intense poverty in his parish while he was a vicar he wasn't about to stop hounding Rupert into the dock

The Independent

Interview by Robert Chalmers

Sunday, 7 August 2011

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/murdoch-amp-me-how-chris-bryant-brought-a-media-mogul-down-to-earth-2331193.html

One day in December 2003, after he had dared to question the ethical standards of Britain's bestselling newspapers, Chris Bryant recalls, he was approached by a senior editorial figure of a popular tabloid. "We will have killed you," the journalist said, "by Christmas."

More than seven years on, this promise remains unfulfilled. The worst Bryant has suffered in that time is embarrassment surrounding a leaked photograph he took of himself, posing in front of a mirror in his Y-fronts discomforting as an experience, certainly but, career-wise at least, rather less disruptive than death. Meanwhile, the professional reputations of the executives who have grown to despise him threaten to disintegrate with a dark inevitability reminiscent of certain tragedies by Marlowe or Shakespeare.

"Or Dickens," says Bryant. "At the first civil hearing I attended [when News International was negotiating out-of-court settlements with PFA chairman Gordon Taylor and publicist Max Clifford], the name of the Metropolitan Police's lawyer was Mr Buckett; the News of the World's man was a Mr Silverleaf, and now we discover that the legal firm they've been using is called Harbottle & Lewis. All of them could have come straight out of The Pickwick Papers."

Chris Bryant's name may lack the wild implausibility that so appealed to the creator of Wackford Squeers, Luke Honeythunder and Paul Sweedlepipe, but many aspects of his character he's bright, determined, and not easily intimidated are not incompatible with the qualities of a Dickensian hero. Had it not been for the tireless work he put in, together with fellow MP Tom Watson, it's more than likely that the full extent of News International employees' improprieties, both proven and alleged, would never have become the subject of a full and transparent investigation.

The righteous outrage of the majority of his fellow MPs has been reactive, a passive response to revelations concerning the News of the World's hacking into Milly Dowler's phone messages, and the targeting of the mobile belonging to Sara Payne, whose daughter was abducted and killed in 2000; the case that famously prompted then-editor Rebekah Brooks to launch the News of the World's campaign for the shaming of paedophiles, known as "Sarah's Law". Where the alleged hacking of phones and computers is concerned, Bryant, by contrast, has been on the front foot for almost a decade. He's proved to be a dubious operator's worst nightmare: tenacious, with an exceptional memory for detail, and not easily deterred by intimidation.

We're sitting in his office at Portcullis House, the modern annexe across the street from the Commons, not far from the room where Rupert and James Murdoch endured an uncomfortable session of questioning from the Culture, Media and Sports Committee last month. Just beyond his reach is a ceremonial sword, awarded to the swimming champion of the House of Commons, a trophy which he's retained for the past five years.

Bryant, 49, was born in Wales, though he retains no trace of the accent. He is unusually articulate by the standards of his political peers and, while friendly and accommodating, doesn't trouble to employ the kind of ingratiating gestures of overfamiliarity perfected by to choose one name from many Tony Blair.

The Murdoch affair has been likened, somewhat prematurely, to Watergate. One similarity it does share with that scandal is the way in which the crude simplicity of the initial allegations is tending, with time, to become obscured by minutiae.

"Just to help anybody who hasn't followed the history of this business in every detail, could you remind me how you came to be so prominently involved?"

"I was elected in 2001 as Labour MP for the Rhondda. The following year we began an enquiry, on the Culture, Media and Sports Committee, into media intrusion."

"Did you have a particular interest in this?"

"A couple in my constituency had got in touch with me. Their child had a disability which, while it was not an obvious one, they hadn't wanted to be made public. A newspaper ran the story anyhow. It had been very upsetting for the family. They'd complained to the Press Complaints Commission, which was completely useless. There was another case where a man had been a victim of crime; days later he was called by the News of the World saying they were going to print the story."

"And that made you wonder about the relationship between some members of the press and the police?"

"That's where the matter of payment to police officers came in. So [in committee hearings in March 2003] we summoned all the editors of the national newspapers. I asked Rebekah Brooks, 'Have you ever paid police officers for information?' And she said, 'Yes.' Andy Coulson attempted to correct her by saying, 'But only under the law,' which of course paying policemen can never be."

"And then?"

"And then we ran out of time."

"Since when you've continued to scrutinise News International more closely than some colleagues?"

"I suppose so, yes. I left the committee in 2005 and then I was a PPS [Parliamentary Private Secretary] first of all to Charlie Falconer, then Harriet Harman; after that I became a minister." (Following Labour's 2010 General Election defeat, Bryant, by then Minister for Europe, returned to the back benches). "This phone-hacking business resurfaced in my life in 2009, when I read the Guardian story about the money that had been paid to the PFA chairman Gordon Taylor, and about how there were many more victims."

At that point, Bryant says, he wrote to the Metropolitan Police, asking whether his own name was mentioned in the files relating to Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator jailed for six months in 2007 for hacking phones on behalf on the News of the World and the man whose notebooks contained the mobile number of Rebekah Brooks's "good friend" Sara Payne.

"The police took seven months to reply. They said, 'There's a piece of paper with your name on it, but no evidence that you have been hacked.'"

"Did the detectives show you the full paperwork?"

"I asked them to. They wouldn't release the document, so we launched a judicial review on the Metropolitan Police, at the same time trying to set up a public inquiry. I was convinced there had been a cover-up. David Cameron kept on pooh-poohing it. Boris Johnson, as you will remember, said it was 'codswallop'."

Finally, in January 2011, the police investigation, Operation Weeting, was launched.

"And that was when officers showed me two sheets of foolscap, with names and addresses of people I'd been close to. There's a list of 23 telephone numbers which you could know only if you'd listened to my messages."

"So when people talk about 4,000 victims, does that figure refer to people who were central targets, like you, or does it include each subsidiary caller?"

This is one of many important questions, Chris Bryant says, which have yet to be answered.

When Rupert Murdoch gave his evidence in committee last month, Bryant was seated directly behind the Australian's wife, Wendi.

"It seemed to me," I suggest, "that Rupert Murdoch's defence was essentially: how can it be my fault that the plane hit the mountainside? I was too busy captaining the aircraft."

"It was even worse than that. One side to it was: 'Look, I'm an old, old man. I have to answer questions very slowly. I have no memory. And secondly, yes, this is a very big company. Both defences are dangerous. As to the first: if it's true, he shouldn't be in charge of the company. Regarding the second, if they have no proper corporate governance, all these things could happen again next week."

It was curious, I tell Bryant, to see those individuals striking poses of apparent contrition.

"A couple of years ago," I remind Bryant, "James Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks burst into the offices of the editor-in-chief at The Independent, shouting, 'You xxxxing xxxxwit.' ['Vocabulary,' the former Sunday Times editor Harold Evans remarked, when he heard, 'never was their strong point.'] You've encountered Rebekah Brooks in one of her less conciliatory moods, haven't you?"

"That was at a party conference, I think in 2004. The journalist Andrew Pierce took me to the News International Party; I wasn't invited. Rebekah Brooks was there. She said: 'Ah, Mr Bryant. It's after dark. Shouldn't you be out on Clapham Common by now?' This was not long after [then-Labour MP] Ron Davies had been caught there." (Davies was robbed at knifepoint by a man he had met at that well-known gay meeting place.) "And that's when Rebekah Brooks's then-husband Ross Kemp said: 'Shut up, you homophobic cow.'"

"And then?"

"I laughed, then I drank a couple more glasses of News International's champagne, as an act of vengeance."

"Aren't you the person who once remarked on Rupert Murdoch's 'casual violence'?"

"Well, you saw that in the way he kept tapping the table, when he was facing the committee. Normally he does that with rings on. He wasn't wearing his rings. Wendi stopped him. James tried to stop him. But it's what he does. He is very intimidating." k

"You felt they sort of got away with it, at least temporarily," I suggest.

"It was a very good act. James Murdoch did manager-speak for hours. He wittered on and on and on. But when you look at what he said about the money paid to Gordon Taylor... there is simply no rationale for paying out £700,000. If he really believed what he said, he got terrible legal advice. And [at that hearing] he had nine acolytes, including Wendi, but there were only eight seats. So you had two very expensively attired lawyers sitting on each other's laps."

"These comparisons with Watergate may be exaggerated, but you do get the same sense that, in order for the whole truth to emerge, events require at least one more small push."

"What you've still got to come are the police investigations," Bryant responds. "Rebekah Brooks was interrogated by detectives for 12 hours, and by MPs for 90 minutes. In American committees you can take a witness for a whole day." In addition, Bryant adds, "you have Operation Weeting. They are now contacting all the victims, which of course is what they should have done in the first place. And lastly you will have the inquiry [the judicial investigation into the regulation of the media, which began last week, led by Lord Justice Leveson]. In the course of that process, all of these emails, which apparently incriminate very senior figures at the News of the World, will come out."

Concerning Rebekah Brooks's denial that she, as editor of the News of the World, could have known that her paper had hacked the messages of the murdered teenager Milly Dowler, Bryant believes that, "If she did know, she's been lying all this time. If she didn't know, she has been culpably negligent."

The revelation that Mulcaire's notes contained the mobile phone number of Sara Payne, is, Bryant says, "breathtaking". The fact that a woman who considered the News of the World operatives her trusted allies could be targeted is, he adds, "a clear sign that this newspaper was completely out of control. The hypocrisy is just unimaginable."

Whatever your views about Bryant's politics, you can't but admire his passion and commitment. As recently as March he was addressing the Commons, imploring the few members present to address the allegations as a matter of urgency. In the past few weeks notably on the recent Channel 4 Dispatches special other MPs have spoken candidly about their fear of being victimised, should they appear to hinder the ambitions of News International. And this, says Bryant, is why the impending investigation is so important because it goes to the heart of a rather significant question: "Namely, who runs the country?"

A former vicar, Conservative activist and heterosexual, Chris Bryant, who has been openly gay since he was in his mid-twenties, has some personal experience of the risks of confronting powerful players in the British media.

The many admirable things that Bryant has achieved in his life include overcoming a very difficult childhood (a subject he will address in due course), gaining an English degree from Oxford, producing two well-written biographies (of Stafford Cripps and Glenda Jackson) and risking his life to help vulnerable individuals in Latin America. All of which, I suggest to the MP, makes it especially unfortunate that he was best known, until recently, for having, as is widely believed, posted that notorious photograph on the Gaydar dating website.

"What were you thinking of?"

"That's what everybody assumes: how stupid can he possibly be? But the only people who put that picture on a website were The Mail on Sunday and The Sun."

The first sign of trouble, he says, came when a Mail on Sunday reporter showed up at his Welsh constituency office.

"A large percentage of what was written was untrue."

"And yet that picture exists, and it will never go away."

"It won't. If I had £1,000 for every time I've read, 'Chris Bryant who once posed in his underpants,' I would be a very wealthy man."

"One thousand? I think you'd be financially secure if we said 10."

"Indeed. Or if anybody had paid me for the copyright: because I am clearly the photographer. I received proposals from middle-aged women who had clearly not grasped the main point of the story. And I increased my majority at the next election. Which possibly shows that it pays to advertise."

"If you didn't post the picture on Gaydar, how did The Mail on Sunday get it?"

"I don't know."

"Curious?"

"I am. I imagine it came from someone I had emailed it to."

"To me, that photograph was something and nothing. What surprised me more were those reports of you blogging under the name of Alfa101."

"I didn't blog as anything."

"Have you ever used that particular nom de guerre?"

"It's a fact that I was on Gaydar."

Anyhow, I tell Bryant, it was his alias as "Alfa101" that I found bizarre.

"Why?"

"I suppose because it's not a pseudonym I'd choose myself. Perhaps because it would encourage expectations that might be problematic to fulfil."

"It's a car."

"Pardon?"

"It's a car. It's an Alfa Romeo. What did you think it meant?"

"I thought it referred to Alpha Male."

"But that would be spelt with a 'ph', wouldn't it?"

I've never thought of using my own vehicle name as an online sobriquet, I tell him, "maybe because I drive an elderly Sharan".

"I don't know what a Sharan is. The 101 is actually a very cheap Alfa. And it wasn't the car I drove..."

Bryant's tone indicates that this somewhat surreal conversation has gone as far as it will go.

"OK, you've put your £10 in the pot," he says. "The irony of that story was that it was about a gay man who failed to get sex. I'm fortunate that my constituency was very supportive."

Looking through his file of press cuttings, you see the extent to which Chris Bryant has been vilified. In the first week of December 2003 alone, he inspired headlines including "Gay MP Faces the Axe", "How Gay Is My Valley?" (Daily Mail) and "Voters Must Give Bryant A Rhondda Rogering" (The Sun). The Mail sent a man to show the photograph to constituents. "A window cleaner," the journalist reported, "gasped, 'God help us!'... then the colour drained from his cheeks."

The Sunday Times published a profile in the same month, entitled "Blair's Attack Poodle Says Pants To The Lot Of You". Its author claimed to have observed men of the Rhondda "quivering with shock" at the photograph.

I remind him of how, around this time, a stalker rang his doorbell, "and said 'I am very submissive.' And you said: 'Well, piss off, then.'"

"Yes. Then he said: 'I'm not that submissive.' I had two stalkers. The other ended up in prison."

In modern politics, Bryant says, "I believe you have to be sufficiently open to the world around you to be hurt, when people attack you, but you have to have a thick enough skin to be able to survive. I have had hideous emails. Absolutely hideous. You have to let that hurt enough; otherwise you just become arrogant and irrelevant."

Chris Bryant was born in Cardiff, but between the ages of seven and 12 lived in Spain; first in Bilbao, then Madrid, where his father Rees ran the IT department for Chrysler. Gracie, the politician's late mother, had studied art in her home city of Glasgow.

He was a day boy at Cheltenham College before reading English at Mansfield College, Oxford, where contemporaries included William Hague and Boris Johnson.

"I know you don't like dead metaphors, but not to beat about the bush you're posh."

"The cheap end of posh."

I would have had some trouble, I tell him, in guessing that he was a former vicar. (Bryant, who trained at Ripon College, Cuddesdon, Oxford, served as a curate, chaplain and priest between 1986 and 1991.)

"There was a period when everything went wrong at home and I lived with my school chaplain, Sam Salter, and his wife Margaret, for a year. He was eccentric and wonderful. He had a great influence on me."

"When you say 'went wrong'..."

"My mother was alcoholic. It was a terrible, terrible mess. She was a very unhappy person. I have memories of pouring vast quantities of vodka down the drain; of Mum being drunk in the kitchen, and of searching around trying to find out where the bottle was. I remember realising that the reason my avocado stone hadn't grown a root was because it was suspended not over water, but vodka. It became impossible for my dad. Once he left, I was the oldest [sober] person in the house." (Bryant has a younger brother, Rhodri.) "The first time I went on a date with a girl I came home and Mum had fallen over and hit her head; she was lying in the kitchen, in a pool of blood."

"Did this responsibility give you a different perspective on life, as a child?"

"Possibly, in the sense that I spent a great deal of time with adults. Teachers were very supportive of me. I took mum through DTs several times."

"Which is a life-threatening condition?"

"It is. She had terrible fits, on the floor. The really difficult thing was all the lies. I remember once taking her to Marks & Sparks and buying her some clothes. I came back a month later and she was in the old ones. The new stuff had all been taken back and exchanged for booze. It was very hard to help her in that period. It was just miserable, around her.

"How did this end, with your mother?"

"We don't know the exact date she had a lodger who was away at the time but she probably died on 1 May 1993. I'm not sure whether she deliberately took so many pills with too much booze."

On his first weekend in Oxford, in 1980, the MP recalls, "I thought: shall I go to church? I did, and I loved it."

Chris Bryant served as a curate in High Wycombe, and as a youth chaplain in Peterborough. He conducted the funeral of Michael Croft, founder of the National Youth Theatre (where Bryant performed regularly as a teenager) at Croft's specific request.

"I heard you were 25 when a girlfriend told you: 'You know you're gay, don't you?'"

"About that age. I had some wonderful girlfriends, one of whom sang at my civil partnership [with the company director Jared Cranney] last year. But I had also... dabbled."

"And you left the church because of your sexuality?"

"Yes. A second-century saint said that there are only two rivers you can never dam: spirituality and sexuality. I don't think the Church of England has noticed, but I am boycotting them. Because if they don't want us, I don't see why we should want them."

"How old were you when you left the clergy?"

"Twenty nine. I knew so many men who had stayed in the Church lots of them gay because they had no choice. I didn't want to end up like that. I would have hated to be in there now, with this suggestion that you can be in a civil partnership but only if it's celibate. This nonsense that the Church got itself into. I didn't want to live a lie. So I looked around for some other area where I could make a difference."

"How did your parents react?"

"My mother said she should always have known I was gay because I walked oddly."

"And your father?"

"When I came out, we were in a period where we weren't talking, because of the trauma of my mother's drinking."

"How long did that estrangement last?"

"Twelve years."

"How did it end?"

"I wrote to him; I said, 'I think you ought to know that I'm gay.' We get on very well now."

"Of all the things you've been, the most surprising to me is that you were a Tory."

"I went to Cheltenham College. The world around me was Tory. At Oxford I stood for the Conservative Association executive, where the aim was to deliver the vote of the Tory Reform Group against William Hague."

"I'd have thought that the era of Margaret Thatcher would have politicised anybody with a strong sense of right and wrong."

"Two things changed me. The National Youth Theatre, where I think I was the only public schoolboy. And, especially, the Church. My first placement was at Walker, in Newcastle."

"Which introduced you to a different world?"

"Yes. One of boarded-up houses and intense poverty. I realised that people were being generous to me with money that they didn't have. They were putting food on the table for me that they simply couldn't afford. And yes, that opened my eyes to a different world; the world I represent now, in the Rhondda."

At the suggestion of Richard Harries, Bishop of Oxford, Bryant went to Latin America, in his early twenties. He recalls being beaten up in Lima, after spending a day with liberation theologist Gustavo Gutiérrez. He spent six months in Buenos Aires, studying theology and working for a human-rights organisation.

"After that, I was supposed to spend three months in Chile. But I was ordered to leave after a week because I went to the funeral of a boy who'd had petrol poured over him by the police. I was asked to lead the prayers; then the police arrived with water cannon and tear gas."

It was this latter episode, he says, that prompted him to join the Labour Party.

"All the tear gas used by Pinochet was made in Britain. I brought a canister back. I wrote to Chris Patten, then Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. He never replied. I wrote to the Liberal Simon Hughes. He told me to write to Patten. Then I contacted George Foulkes, now Lord Foulkes, and he invited me for tea."

"There seems to have been general surprise that, in the Rhondda, out of 53 candidates for the Labour nomination, you were selected."

"I was surprised."

"And you got on with Blair, who was not universally adored in those Labour heartlands. I remember talking to his father-in-law, Tony Booth, and explaining that, at one point, I'd believed Tony Blair to be fundamentally driven by morality. Booth said: 'That's where you're making your mistake.'"

"I don't agree. I think Blair was good for the Labour Party and the country. I think there were a couple of things he got profoundly wrong."

"Iraq?"

"I voted in favour of the war. For me it was never about the dossier; it was about the failure to comply with the international community's demands."

"So you wanted regime change?"

"Erm... not quite... there were big, big mistakes. We should have fought harder for a second resolution. It was a ludicrous decision to dismantle the security services."

"Especially letting them keep all their weapons."

"Yes. It meant the country collapsed into madness." k

"So if you had your time again?"

"I can only stand by what I did. I'd seen what Pinochet had done in Chile. I had friends who'd been tortured. That made me instinctively an intervener." (By September 2006, Bryant had become sufficiently disenchanted with Blair, then widely perceived as a liability, to co-ordinate a letter demanding his resignation.)

"Given your experience with News International, what on earth do you make of Tony Blair's decision, in 1995, to fly halfway across the world to Hayman Island and begin sucking up to Murdoch? After everything he had done to Neil Kinnock?"

"In the 1992 election, everybody thought we were going to win. We lost. It's not so much that they systematically attacked Neil Kinnock. It was more that they tried to destroy him."

"But that's exactly what I mean. Given that appalling history, how could Blair..."

"As leader of a Labour Party which had been out of power for 18 years, you'd say, right, I have at least to neutralise everything that's been against us. We probably surrendered policy areas that we shouldn't have done because of it."

"But the question there is..."

"Whether you surrender your soul in the process."

There's a sketch from A Bit of Fry and Laurie circulating on YouTube, based on the James Stewart film It's a Wonderful Life, showing how Britain might have been if Murdoch had never lived: a country less troubled by racial intolerance, sexism and greed.

"It ends," I tell Bryant, "with Fry, in the role of guardian angel, pushing Murdoch off a bridge and into a river. Have you seen it?"

"No. I've heard about it."

"You've been a priest and an English literature student. The Edinburgh Review wrote an article about Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray in which they described the novel as 'the opposite of sacred'. Do you think that phrase could apply to what Rupert Murdoch has done in the world?"

"No," says Bryant. "That's not the way my mind works. My politics sprang out of liberation theology, where everything is black and white. But that's not where I am now."

"Tell me a few of the good things Murdoch has done."

"In the Rhondda," Bryant says, "people wouldn't have got access to digital television if not for Sky."

"That's like saying there would be no cars if it wasn't for Carl Benz. It possibly wouldn't have happened so soon."

"Not so soon... all right. The problem has been that television, by its nature, tends to produce monopolies. The Murdoch empire has always used anti-competitive practices to move faster towards monopoly."

"Anything else?"

"Well, TiVo couldn't get off the ground in the UK; but Sky Plus means that you don't have to watch terrible adverts. And they've improved the showing of cricket."

"Just staying with sport, how about The Sun's allegations that Liverpool fans robbed the dead at Hillsborough. Or...?"

"Listen, I believe they have done appalling things. I'm not detracting from that."

These are remarkably measured responses from a man who knows better than most what can happen when, to quote the late US investigative journalist Gary Webb, "you get the big dog off the porch". In The Sunday Times' 2003 profile alone, Bryant was described as "a pillock", "sanctimonious", "po-faced" and "a bumptious little berk": characteristics that I couldn't identify in the man I met.

But Chris Bryant is a man focused more on the future than on past grievances. His aims, he tells me, are simple.

"All the criminals in prison," he says. "The Met never compromised so much again. A press that is robust but based on decency and legality. And better media-ownership rules that do not place too much power in the hands of one person."

"You received some feedback from people purporting to be connected to NewsCorp quite recently, didn't you?"

"It was along the lines of: 'This will not be forgotten. Nothing will happen now. But Rupert will not forget it.' It came via a friend. Two lieutenants of Rupert Murdoch's, one in the States, one here, approached him independently with the same message."

One of the less contentious paragraphs in that 2003 profile referred to a statement the MP once made concerning London theatres. Their interiors, he suggested, should be modernised, "because the seats were designed for backsides of the Victorian, not the modern era". While 19th-century furniture was stable, the author remarked, "Chris Bryant's own seat may have an ejector button."

It's entirely possible that the MP may, having made so many powerful enemies, find himself catapulted into the void. And yet in view of the persistence and courage with which he has pursued his cause it seems equally likely that, as his career progresses, Chris Bryant will see his endeavour rewarded with some more gradual and dignified ascent.

Edited August 7, 2011 by Douglas Caddy

[Douglas Caddy]

News Corp.’s Soft Power in the U.S

The New York Times

By DAVID CARR

August 7, 2011

Over the last month, many Americans watched from a distance in horror or amusement as it became evident that the News Corporation regarded Britain’s legal and political institutions as its own private club.

That could never happen in the United States, right?

As it turns out, a News Corporation division has twice come under significant civil and criminal investigations in the United States, but neither inquiry went anywhere. Given what has happened in Britain with the growing phone-hacking scandal, it is worth wondering why.

Both cases involve News America Marketing, an obscure but lucrative division of the News Corporation that is a big player in the business of retail marketing, including newspaper coupon inserts and in-store promotions. The company has come under scrutiny for a pattern of conduct that includes below-cost pricing, paying customers not to do business with competitors and accusations of computer hacking.

News America Marketing came to control 90 percent of the in-store advertising business, according to Fortune, aided in part by a particularly quick and favorable antitrust decision made by the Justice Department in 1997. That year, the News Corporation announced it wanted to buy Heritage Media, a big competitor, for about $754 million in stock plus $600 million in assumed debt. The News Corporation said it would sell the broadcast properties and hang onto the marketing division, which serviced 40,000 groceries and other retailers.

The deal would make News America Marketing the dominant player in the business and, for that reason, the San Francisco field office of the Justice Department recommended to Washington that the News Corporation’s takeover bid be challenged on antitrust grounds. Typically, such a request from a field office would carry great weight in Washington and, at a minimum, delay the deal for months.

But the Justice Department brass overrode San Francisco’s objections and gave its blessing in just two weeks. So who ran the antitrust division at the Justice Department at the time? Joel Klein, who this year became an executive vice president at the News Corporation, head of its education division and a close adviser to Rupert Murdoch on the phone-hacking scandal in Britain.

It’s worth noting that less than a year later, the Justice Department division led by Mr. Klein blocked the News Corporation from selling its share of a satellite company to PrimeStar, owned by a group of cable providers, on antitrust grounds, so any suggestion that a department of the United States government was snugly in the hip pocket of Mr. Murdoch would not be correct.

None of this suggests that Mr. Klein cut some sort of a deal that resulted in a job 14 years later. But the speed of the antitrust decision surprised even the people involved in the takeover. One of the participants, who declined to be identified discussing private negotiations, said he thought the sale was effectively blocked before the surprising turnaround.

“After that meeting with the San Francisco office, we all looked at each other and said, ‘This deal is not going to happen,’ ” he said.

My colleague Eric Lipton and I spent a few days trying to tease apart who made the actual decision to give the purchase the go-ahead — “It was as if a magic button had been pushed somewhere. We were all in shock,” said one of the same participants in the deal — but there is no paper trail.

People who worked at the Justice Department back then either could not recollect how the decision was made or declined to share information if they knew.

A spokeswoman for the News Corporation released this statement: “Joel didn’t know Mr. Murdoch at the time of the Heritage Media transaction 14 years ago. A year later, the D.O.J. under his leadership challenged the PrimeStar transaction in which News Corporation had a major interest. Any suggested inference is ludicrous.”

A lawyer who worked in the Justice Department in Washington at the time but did not want to be identified discussing internal matters, said: “This decision was made on the merits. The front office in Washington didn’t think a case could be won in court based on the very narrow definition of the market.”

But in retrospect, the anticompetitive fears of the San Francisco office were well founded.

After the Heritage Media deal, News America Marketing was in a position to throw its weight around and it did just that, drawing a variety of lawsuits in which competitors claimed they had been threatened and harassed. The News Corporation has settled those cases at a cost of over $650 million, and now the F.B.I. is looking into whether there was a pattern of illicit tactics by that division of the News Corporation.

“The way this whole thing got started was a horrible mistake. The government was bamboozled or worse,” said Thomas J. Horton, a law professor at the University of South Dakota who used to work at the Justice Department and represented a competitor, Insignia Systems of Minneapolis, in a lawsuit against News America Marketing. “The company has a long history of behaving unethically with no regard for our system of justice or legal ethics. They are ruthless.”

One of News America Marketing’s other competitors was Floorgraphics, a small New Jersey company that did in-store ads. George Rebh, who founded Floorgraphics along with his brother Richard, met with Paul V. Carlucci, head of News America, in 1999 at a Manhattan restaurant, and the News Corporation executive got right to the point.

“I will destroy you,” Mr. Carlucci said, according to his deposition in the Floorgraphics suit against News America, adding, “I work for a man who wants it all, and doesn’t understand anybody telling him he can’t have it all.” (Mr. Carlucci is now the publisher of the News Corporation-owned New York Post.)

Just in case the Rebh brothers did not get the point, court records indicate that beginning in October 2003, someone working out of the Connecticut headquarters of News America Marketing gained access to the Floorgraphics computer network, which included a collection of advertisements the company had created for its customers.

The News Corporation’s executives, as they have in case of phone hacking in Britain, said they had no idea that people working for them were engaged in such activity.

But in 2004, a Floorgraphics board member sent a letter to David F. DeVoe, chief financial officer of the News Corporation, detailing that Floorgraphics computers had “been breached by News America, as identified by their I.P. addresses.” News America has since admitted in court to breaching its competitor’s computers, but attributed it to lax security and a rogue employee.

According to correspondence that has been forwarded to members of the New Jersey Congressional delegation, Mr. Rebh also got in touch with the F.B.I., which sent two special agents to the Floorgraphics offices in 2004. One of the agents, Susan Secco, followed up with an e-mail in which she commented on the evidence Floorgraphics had compiled.

“I believe I have all I need to conduct interviews, as there is an excellent paper trail,” she wrote.

She then got in touch with the United States attorney in New Jersey and, after an initial burst of interest, the case died a slow death. The United States attorney at the time in New Jersey was Chris Christie, now governor of New Jersey and a rising star in the Republican Party.

Michael Drewniak, the governor’s press secretary, said politics played no role. “The U.S. attorney’s office receives thousands of referrals each year from parties seeking criminal investigations. Any decision to prosecute or not prosecute is based strictly on the strength of the evidence or lack thereof,” he said.

Two senior lawyers who supervised the unit that handled the initial investigation — Kevin O’Dowd and Deborah L. Gramiccioni — are now senior aides to Mr. Christie in the governor’s office. A state official said neither Mr. O’Dowd, then an assistant United States attorney, nor Ms. Gramiccioni, then chief of the office’s commercial crimes unit, recalled the details of the case and suggested that it had been handled at a lower level.

In early 2005, Mr. Rebh urged Representative Rush Holt and New Jersey’s two senators at the time, Jon S. Corzine and Frank R. Lautenberg — both Democrats — to press Mr. Christie and Alberto R. Gonzales, then the United States attorney general, to pursue the matter. The Federal Trade Commission asked for jurisdiction and was denied by the Justice Department. Frustrated, the Rebhs went to the Secret Service, but the case died for lack of cooperation.

Floorgraphics filed a civil lawsuit in federal court in 2009, but the suit was dropped when the News Corporation agreed to buy the assets of Floorgraphics for $29.5 million.

Given the pattern of conduct revealed recently in Britain, there is renewed interest in how News America behaved in the in-store business. Mr. Lautenberg and Mr. Holt sent a letter last month to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., reminding him about the original accusations made by Floorgraphics and suggesting that the Justice Department revisit the case.

Although the statute of limitations on many of the ostensible crimes has expired, Mr. Lautenberg and others have indicated that the Senate Commerce Committee may hold hearings to investigate whether there was a broad pattern of misconduct by the News Corporation.

It’s too early to say what the result of these accusations and inquiries might be. And certainly no one has credibly said that the News Corporation’s employees here have hacked phones as they did in Britain, or replicated in America the kind of cozy, possibly corrupt relationships British employees fostered with officials.

Then again, maybe they didn’t have to. In America, where the News Corporation does most of its business and also has a long reach into film, TV, cable and politics, the company’s size and might give it a soft, less obvious power that it has been able to project to remarkable effect.

E-mail: carr@nytimes.com;

Twitter.com/carr2n

[John Simkin]

Poster's notte: This interview is not to be missed. Chris Bryant is one courageous individual.

You are right about Bryant. It is important not to forget the role that Tom Watson and Nick Davies have played in the exposure of this story. Another figure that deserves praise is Ed Milliband. When he first became Labour leader he followed the example of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown and tried to get on Murdoch's right side. He was warned by Rebecca Brooks that he would be destroyed by News International if he made anything of the phone-hacking case. He went along with this at first but a couple of months ago he changed his mind and used it to relentlessly attack Cameron. It could be argued that he only did this when Murdoch was down. However, he made sure he was unable to get back on his feet.

[Douglas Caddy]

Report: Rebekah Brooks still on Murdoch payroll

www.rawstory.com

By David Edwards

Monday, August 8th, 2011 -- 10:25 am

Weeks after Rebekah Brooks resigned as CEO of News International, it appears that she may still be on Rupert Murdoch's payroll.

A report published in The Telegraph Saturday indicated that Brooks would continue to get a paycheck from the media mogul for at least the next year.

"My understanding is that Rupert has told her to travel the world on him for a year and then he will find a job for her when the scandal has died down," a source told The Telegraph's Tim Walker.

Blogger "Dephormation," writing on No DPI, found that Brooks continues to be listed as director of News International.

By law, News International would have had to notify Companies House before July 29 if Brooks had resigned on July 15 as reported.

"Rebekah Brooks resigned as CEO of the company on 15th July 2011," a News International spokeswoman told The Guardian Monday. "The process for her to resign as a director of the Company is currently underway and will be filed at Companies House shortly."

But when asked if Brooks would continue to be paid by Murdoch as she travels the world for a year, her personal publicist at Bell Pottinger declined to respond.

"We’re offering no comment on your query regarding Rebekah," Bell Pottinger's Steve Double told Walker.

(H/T: The Daily Beast)

[Douglas Caddy]

'NOTW' staff offered lucrative severance pay

The Independent

By Ian Burrell, Media Editor

Tuesday, 9 August 2011

Former staff at the News of the World are being offered lucrative "early leaver" settlement packages worth tens of thousands of pounds in what appears to be a U-turn on a promise by Rupert Murdoch that all employees of the defunct newspaper would be found work within his media empire.

Staff have been given until the end of the month to accept an offer which could amount to the equivalent of a year's pay for former senior executives on the newspaper. The offer by Mr Murdoch's News International was made on Friday in an email to around 280 former employees.

The news came as News International refused to comment on stories that the former chief executive Rebekah Brooks was receiving financial support for her legal and public relations bills from her former employer. The company did deny that she was still a director, saying documentation of her resignation was in the process of being registered by Companies House.

News International may be unsettled by the potential to be sued by former NOTW employees, scores of whom have been preparing a class action for stigma damages after Ms Brooks branded the paper "toxic" and the paper was suddenly closed down. Admissions by Mr Murdoch before MPs that things had gone wrong at News International are thought to add to the strength of potential legal actions brought by former staff.

The enhanced redundancy terms offered under the "early leaver option" include a bonus of 25 per cent on top of their existing redundancy terms. Even the most junior staff will be offered a minimum of £5,000 on top of redundancy packages.

In addition the package includes a 2.5 per cent annual pay rise, the offer of a £1,000 lump sum in lieu of the company's annual performance-related pay system, and a further £1,000-worth of skills training, including offers of courses in multi-media journalism and use of Photoshop. Staff will also be offered career advice, including interviewing skills.

The package will be seen as an indication that News International wants to be seen as a good employer but also wishes to part company with large numbers of former NOTW staff, all of whom were put on a 90-day period of gardening leave which ends on 6 October. Attempts to find them alternative employment within the company have been largely unsuccessful and many are deeply unhappy after being offered positions at outposts of the News Corp empire including Siberia and Bulgaria.

News International said that it was still committed to Mr Murdoch's pledge to MPs last month that it would make "every effort to see that those people will be employed in other divisions of the company". But NOTW insiders told The Independent that many former staff were likely to take the offer. "I think there will be a rush out of the door after this," said one. "A lot of people think they don't stand a chance of being re-employed within the company and will take the money and leave."

[John Dolva]

and no doubt sign some sort of silence doc in turn (sop)

[John Dolva]

re first media coup in another post. I think that is misleading or simply ignoring matters to contain the perfidity of Rupert Murdoch.

''The Dismissal'' was a Murdoch conspiracy which skirted the bounds of legality and likely beyond.

I don''t think a full understanding of this Scumbag can be had without looking at his early efforts in Oz.

I think the studied avoidance of it will continue to water down this issue and prevent a perception that nothing has changed. He's the same as then and will be the same in the future.

The money he flings around is chickenfeed to him and his ilk but may very well serve the purpose of this going on and fizzling out just as then.

He should be stripped of all assets and tarred and feathered and railroaded out of town with a handful of coins in a pocket with holes.

[Douglas Caddy]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/video/2011/aug/09/michael-wolff-rupert-murdoch-video

[Douglas Caddy]

I think one reason that there are riots now in London, which may spread to other U.K. cities, is that there is growing public contempt for law and order because Scotland Yard has been revealed to have engaged in criminal corruption pursuant to its intimate relationship with the Murdoch criminal empire.

To Scotland Yard should be added public figures at the highest levels of government who were willing accessories to Murdoch's criminal schemes.

A legacy of Watergate, which saw the U.S. President engaged in a ciminal coverup, is that the public has much less respect for law and order. Criminal activity is rampant at all levels of American society these days. Observance of a code of ethical behavior is virtually non-existent.

-------------------------------------

From James Hilton’s 1933 novel, “Lost Horizons”, courtesy of recent review by Gary North:

The book was written during the darkest phase of the Great Depression. One character in the novel confronts an American, whose company went bust. The police had been after him. The book never says that he was crooked. He may have been. He defends himself.

"Which is a darned difficult thing to do when the whole game's going to pieces. Besides, there isn't a soul in the world who knows what the rules are. All the professors of Harvard and Yale couldn't tell you 'em."

Mallinson replied rather scornfully: "I'm referring to a few quite simple rules of everyday conduct."

"Then I guess your everyday conduct doesn't include managing trust companies."

Edited August 9, 2011 by Douglas Caddy

[John Dolva]

I think this type of apparently un-organised hooliganism by rioters and police drowns out the voices of reason and there I mean the organised left. These types of individual acts are as early marxists said it to be : an infantile disorder of the far left which is by it's vulnerability as elements lumpens a right wing act, so it speeds up the, now, seemingly reasonable efforts to restore order so when the s..t really hits the fan there is probably hope that people will hesitate before taking to the streets.

Mitcheners Kent State seems worth reading.

On a lighter note (and off topic a bit, but I think the issue here is very much The Media, in this case the media being film) : Titanic II is an interesting piece of emotive opportunistic amalgam of tits, global warming, thrill, goodness, love, tits and the folly of humanity. What starts off as something kinda promising devolves into a mis-focused triumph where the sun rises and life goes on.

Could it be said to be deliberate anti-environmentalist pablum or just another b-grade fun movie, both or neither?

Is it indicative of a trend in ''modern'' film?

[Douglas Caddy]

August 9, 2011, 11:45 am

The New York Times

News Corp.’s Independent Directors Have Strong Ties to Murdoch

By JEREMY W. PETERS

When the News Corporation board convenes on the 20th Century Fox Studios lot Tuesday for its first meeting since a phone hacking scandal overseas plunged the company into turmoil, the participants will include many people with deep and personal ties to Rupert Murdoch.

One is a former Goldman Sachs president who helped News Corporation broker mega deals. Another is godfather to one of Mr. Murdoch’s grandchildren. Another ran Mr. Murdoch’s Australian subsidiary, News Limited.

And those are just some of the News Corporation’s independent directors, designated as such because they meet criteria intended to ensure that companies maintain a layer of objective oversight.

News Corporation considers nine of its 16 directors independent. Many owe their careers to Mr. Murdoch. Others made millions of dollars making him richer. Those include:

Roderick Eddington, the former chief executive of British Airways, who became deputy chairman of Mr. Murdoch’s Australian subsidiary, News Ltd., in 1997, a year after he was chosen to run Ansett Australia, the airline in which News Corporation owned a 50-percent stake.

Natalie Bancroft, the opera singer whose family agreed to sell Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal to Mr. Murdoch in 2007, and who made a sizeable fortune of her own from News Corporation’s $5 billion purchase.

Ken Cowley, who was chief executive and chairman of News Limited for nearly 20 years in the 1980s and 1990s.

Viet Dinh, a former senior official in George W. Bush’s Justice Department and the principal author of the Patriot Act. Mr. Dinh is also godfather to a son of Lachlan Murdoch, the oldest of Mr. Murdoch’s children. He is ultimately responsible for the independent internal investigation going on into the phone hacking scandal at News Corporation’s British subsidiary, News International.

Andrew Knight, who was executive chairman of News International from 1990 to 1994.

John L. Thornton, the former Goldman Sachs president, who advised News Corporation in a number of major deals, including its $1 billion purchase of Star TV, the Asian satellite service. The arrangement brought him and Goldman Sachs millions in fees.

News Corporation’s board is hardly the only one in corporate America that is stacked with independent directors who have close relationships with the companies that shareholders have elected them to serve. But corporate governance experts said that the long history between News Corporation and many of its independent directors is a glaring example of how chumminess in the boardroom can allow and even contribute to mismanagement.

“I keep watching this and thinking that they don’t realize we can see them,” said Lucy P. Marcus, chief executive of Marcus Venture Consulting who writes about corporate governance issues for the Harvard Business Review blog network. “The reason we have corporate governance is not because it’s a nice thing to do. It’s because if you actually have a robust board, it can be beneficial. I don’t think News Corp. would be in the same trouble that they are in now if they had an independent board.”

In order for an overhaul on the News Corporation board or any other corporate board, the rules governing who is eligible to serve as a director would need to change. And right now News Corporation is in full compliance of the rules set by the Nasdaq, the exchange on which its stock is traded, and federal law.

Nasdaq’s rules state broadly that independent directors cannot have a relationship that “would interfere with the exercise of independent judgment in carrying out the responsibilities of a director.” Specifically, the Nasdaq excludes anyone who was employed the company in the past three years. The rules do allow, however, for former employees collecting retirement benefits to serve as independent directors.

Some News Corporation shareholders have already started to press the issue. Wespath Investment Management, a division of the board of pension and health benefits for the United Methodist Church and owner of about 1.1 million News Corporation Class A shares, wrote to the board objecting to, among other things, the board’s seeming lack of independence.

“As shareholders interested in preserving the long-term value of the company, it is important that the board of directors act quickly to improve its governance standards,” the letter said.