News Corp. In Crisis Once Again

Five more News Corporation employees arrested in the Murdoch phone hacking/police bribery scandal today - bringing the total number arrested in the scandal to 30.

This time, five senior journalists at The Sun were taken into custody after News Corporation provided evidence to police that these employees had engaged in criminal activity.

The Sun is now in crisis, with employees at the Murdoch-owned paper railing against News Corporation and wondering who will be thrown under the bus next in the scandal.

The Guardian reports that Sun employees are "stunned" and "angry" about the turn of events, with News Corporation itself turning employees in to the police.

Reuters reports that News Corp. employees at The Sun feel there is a witch hunt against them by their employer who formerly celebrated their work but now is tossing them to the wolves to save his own ass.

Rupert Murdoch and his consilgiere in the scandal, Joel Klein, have flown to London together to deal with the crisis.

According to Murdoch biographer, Michael Wolff, Klein is now calling all the shots in News Corporation's scandal containment strategy.

This Bloomberg Businessweek piece on Murdoch from February 9 says pretty much the same thing.

Klein's strategy for dealing with the widening strategy seems to be three-fold:

"Take Old News Corp. Employees."

"Call Police."

"Have Police Arrest Them."

Only thing is, the strategy has now, in the words of Michael Wolff, created such internal acrimony in the company that employees are turning on each other.

Rupert and Joel Klein have flown to London not to reassure employees, as BSkyB reported, but rather to stanch the damage from the still-widening scandal.

In Wolff's estimation, the future fall-out from the scandal includes:

Murdoch faces...his son's arrest; DOJ investigation; more bribe revelations; more hacking fallout; challenge to BskyB control

That means they may be getting ready to close The Sun and fire all those employees as damage control.

Expect the older News Corporation employees to strike back against both Murdoch and Klein, dishing dirt off the record.

The Guardian has a little of that:

The mood amongst reporters is, in the words of one, "stunned" – which is probably an understatement – coupled with a worry as to where this will end. Could a tip-fee paid five years ago now be considered a bribe? There is no shortage of anger, too. Some of it is directed at the Guardian, stemming from the newspaper's earlier exposé of the News of the World phone-hacking scandal, although much is aimed at the company's Management and Standards Committee that has been providing information to the police which led the Elveden squad to make all its arrests.

...

The scale of uncertainty is such that it is impossible to predict with confidence what will happen next. But if the Elveden investigation is not yet over: one thing is clear – a punch-drunk Sun is owned by an organisation that is at war with itself.

Michael Wolff says the Obama DOJ now has direct cause to look very closely into News Corporation here in the United States.

If the hacking, bribery and corruption perpetrated by News Corp. employees in Britain was so widespread amongst Murdoch's newspapers and many of those same British journalists eventually ended up working here in the U.S. at either the NY Post or the Wall Street Journal, there is no reason to think they were not continuing their criminality here.

And yet, as I have noted before, the Obama DOJ doesn't seem all that interested in going after Murdoch on this.

You have to wonder if Obama and Murdoch haven't made some kind of deal through intermediaries - you don't go too hard on us with the phone hacking/bribery stuff, we won't go too hard on you in 2012.

Reuters reported earlier in the week that the feds so far have found no evidence of hacking in the U.S., though the DOJ is looking into "possible violations by employees of Rupert Murdoch's media empire of a U.S. law banning corrupt payments to foreign officials such as police and law enforcement."

We'll see if that investigation goes anywhere.

So far, the only crimes the Obama DOJ seems less eager to investigate than the Murdoch scandal are the tortures ordered by Bush administration officials and the crimes committed by Wall Streeters, so I have doubts that the Obama people are going to do anything of substance here.

Still, none of that is going to help Murdoch and Klein if News Corp employees in Britain go to full scale war against them internally and start leaking damaging items to the press.

I bet Rupert isn't thinking too closely about the Cuomo-imposed teacher evaluations deadline this weekend.

He's trying too busy trying to save his own wrinkled ass.

A Culture of Illegality At Murdoch's Papers

Some amazing revelations in the Murdoch hacking scandal yesterday:

Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson have been branded "the scum of journalism" in a series of allegations from a former News of the World deputy features editor at the UK inquiry into press standards.

Paul McMullan accused Coulson of introducing "wholesale" phone hacking when he appointed editor of the News of the World in 2003, and described Brooks as "the criminal-in-chief".

In a dramatic two-hour testimony before the Leveson inquiry in London on Tuesday, McMullan made allegations about a "culture of illegality" that stretched from "the little men, the reporters" to senior police officers and politicians.

Lord Justice Leveson at times had to interject to warn McMullan that he risked incriminating himself while he was rattling off claims about alleged criminal wrongdoing during his time at News International's Sunday tabloid, which was closed at the height of the public outcry over phone hacking in July.

Asked whether his NoW editors knews that voicemail messages were being intercepted, McMullan said: "Yes ... I could go a bit further than that. We did all these things for our editors, for Rebekah Brooks and for Andy Coulson. You only have to read Coulson's column in Bizarre ... it was blatant and obvious. I don't think anyone realised that anyone was committing a crime at the start."

He added: "Andy Coulson brought that practice [phone hacking] wholesale with him when he was made deputy editor. They should have had the strength of conviction to say, 'Yes, sometimes you have to stray into black or grey illegal areas' ... instead they said we didn't know they were doing it. They should have been the heroes of journalism ... They're the scum of journalism for trying to drop me and my colleagues in it."

He later said: "For 21 years you have a culture of illegality of phone hacking and fiddling your expenses and so on. What you have is a future prime minister cosying up and being moulded by the arch-criminal, Rebekah Brooks, the criminal-in-chief."

The Guardian reports this morning that a seventeenth person has been arrested in connection with the hacking scandal and that one of Tony Blair's former aides is saying that he has been threatened by News International executives for publicly supporting the hacking inquiry.

The Telegraph reports the person arrested was another former Rupert Murdoch employee:

Former News of the World journalist Bethany Usher has been arrested on suspicion of phone hacking.

Miss Usher, a former reporter at the newspaper, was arrested in the north east at 6.35am this morning and is currently at a police station in Northumbria.

She worked for the News of the World from 2006 to 2007 and currently lectures in journalism at Teesside University.

In 2006 she was arrested while at the News of the World after applying for a job in the royal household.

At the time the News of the World confirmed that Miss Usher was one of its reporters and said that she was "engaged in the legitimate journalistic exercise" of investigating security at the palace.

Usher showed her true colors in the hacking matter yesterday when she tweeted to another former Murdoch employee, testifying about the crimes at the Murdoch-owned News of the World, to shut up about them:

Yesterday the 31-year-old Tweeted throughout the testimony of Paul MCMullan, a former reporter at the News of the World who claimed hacking was commonplace.

On her account she wrote: "For god sake Paul McMullen, shut your sickening trap."

Yes, why tell the lurid tales of how the Murdoch Empire operates?

Be like the Murdoch-owned newspapers and TV stations here and just ignore the whole damn thing.

What hacking?

What bribery?

What blackmail?

What extortion?

What espionage?

What conspiracy to cover up a crime?

We dunno what you're talking about.

And hey, look over there - OWS protesters are dirty and need a bath!

These people at the Murdoch papers and stations truly are "the scum of journalism."

FOX's Roger Ailes To Be Indicted?

The NY Times reported that Ailes urged Judith Regan to lie to federal investigators about her relationship to Bernie Kerik when they were vetting him for DHS.

Barry Ritholtz says the scuttlebutt has Ailes getting indicted this week on that charge.

Apparently Ms. Regan taped her conversations with Ailes and this has the lie on tape.

One of the commenters at Barry's site notes:

This would just be so sweet, given Fox News’ war on women and minorities through (doctored) tape recordings!

They do tend to do that, don't they?

Well, maybe they'll claim this tape, if it really exists, is doctored too and show us just how they do the deed at FOX News every night...

Klein Cashes In

The road to online education hell is paved with gold - for Joel Klein:

Jan 4 (Reuters) - News Corp (NWSA.O) will pay former New York City Education Chancellor Joel Klein more than $4.5 million if he meets targets set in his new role as chief executive of the media company's new education unit.

Klein starts in his new role this month after a decade overseeing New York City's schools where he was paid around $250,000 a year.

His base salary with News Corp will be eight times that at $2 million plus a cash signing-on bonus of $1 million. He has also been set an annual bonus target of not less than $1.5 million, according to regulatory filings.

From July Klein will also be able to take part in the company's stock option awards scheme.

News Corp Chief Executive Rupert Murdoch tapped Klein to run his company's new education unit in November. The media mogul has become an increasingly vocal advocate of public school system reform.

$4.5 million from Murdoch - who bought the online educrap company that produces Klein's favorite education program, School of One.

You know, the program used by the NYCDOE and now promoted on PBS with a push from Bill Gates.

Nice work if you can get it.

Klein belongs in jail with the CityTime crooks.

So does Gates.

And don't get me started on that GMO shit he's feeding people in Africa.

Murdoch Post Shills Rumors

Not a surprise that the Murdoch Post has backed off its criticism of Bloomberg for the Bloomberg Blizzard Disaster of 2010 and begun criticizing the people who are REALLY at fault - unionized government workers.

Of course, these are just rumors about the alleged slowdown by workers angry over budget cuts at the sanitation agency.

But rumors are good enough for the Murdoch Post, which ran the story on the front page of its website.

This will be the strategy of the Bloomberg administration going forward - blame the mess not on the lack of planning foresight of the administration, not on cost-cutting, not on the refusal of Bloomberg to declare a snow emergency.

Nope - blame it on the unions.

And of course the usual media shills will be there to hawk this - starting with the Murdoch Post and the Murdoch Street Journal.

So far, Bloomberg is himself denying that a work slowdown was behind the slow snow removal, and relying on allies like Dan Halloran and the Murdoch media empire to spread the rumors.

And the sanitation workers themselves say the rumors are NOT true:

Sanitation workers - usually hailed as the heroes of snow removal - found themselves the subject of some ugly rumors about work slowdowns and job actions.

That infuriated Harry Nespoli, head of the Uniformed Sanitationmen's Association, which represents rank and file workers.

"Our people are out there on 14-hour shifts," said Nespoli, who went to City Hall yesterday to clear the air with Deputy Mayor Stephen Goldsmith. "You don't do a job action and put your workforce to work. We're going to get through this thing."

...

On its website, the Sanitation Officers Association has this to say about Goldsmith:

"Although it may be hard to comprehend, this one individual in a futile attempt to save money will be spending more this winter and risking lives unnecessarily."

One sanitation supervisor said any blame for the cleanup rests on the shoulders of the city and not workers.

"They were so unprepared for this storm," said the supervisor. "They were scrambling like crazy on Christmas Day calling people and trying to get them to come in."

But Nespoli said that was not the problem."The manpower was in place," he said. "At 7 a.m. Sunday morning, we had half the force in."

But Nespoli admitted morale was low among workers and supervisors alike.

"When you start doing things like demoting people, it's not the right thing to do," he said

Whether or not the work slowdown is true (and remember that as of now, these are UNSUBSTANTIATED rumors DENIED by the sanitation workers and hawked by a Republican ally of Bloomberg), the real blame for this mess lies with Bloomberg and Deputy Mayor Stephen Goldsmith, who had it within their power to declare a snow emergency, get all vehicles off the main roads, get buses off the roads and make sure the city was clear for emergency vehicles and snow plows.

Joel Klein's New Business Is Full Of Crooks

Joel Klein has moved into the K12 online for profit education business now that he's working for News Corp.

Leaving aside the conflict of interest generated by Murdoch's buying an online for profit education company that does business with the NYCDOE and has been promoted by Chancellor Klein as the future of education (indeed, his biggest regret as chancellor was NOT doing more business with this company) right after Klein joined Murdoch's company, one wonders how well the for profits do at educating people.

The Education Trust found they do not do well at all, though the for profit companies themselves do quite well:

A new report on graduation rates at for-profit colleges by a nonprofit research and advocacy group charges that such colleges deliver “little more than crippling debt,” citing federal data that suggests only 9 percent of the first-time, full-time bachelor’s degree students at the University of Phoenix, the nation’s largest for-profit college, graduate within six years.

The report, “Subprime Opportunity,” by the Education Trust, found that in 2008, only 22 percent of the first-time, full-time bachelor’s degree students at for-profit colleges over all graduate within six years, compared with 55 percent at public institutions and 65 percent at private nonprofit colleges.

Among Phoenix’s online students, only 5 percent graduated within six years, and at the campuses in Cleveland and Wichita, Kan., only 4 percent graduated within six years.

“For-profits proudly claim to be models of access in higher education because they willingly open their doors to disadvantaged, underprepared students.” said José L. Cruz, a vice president for the trust. “But we must ask the question, ‘Access to what?’ ”

Since the first-time, full-time students tracked in the federal statistics are the most likely to graduate, the report said, these figures may actually overstate the graduation rates.

...

The report acknowledges that for students seeking associate degrees, for-profit colleges’ three-year graduation rate of 60 percent is considerably higher than the 22 percent rate at public community colleges.

There is still cause for concern, the report said, because for-profit students graduate with so much more debt than community college students. Many either default on their loans, or struggle to make payments but find that their lives are taken over by debt.

In a separate study also released Tuesday, the Pew Research Center reported that almost one-quarter of those who received bachelor’s degrees at for-profit schools in 2008 borrowed more than $40,000, compared with 5 percent at public institutions and 14 percent at not-for-profit colleges. Over all, the Pew report found that students who earned a bachelor’s degree in 2008 borrowed 50 percent more, in inflation-adjusted dollars, than those who graduated in 1996. Those who earned an associate degree or certificate in 2008 borrowed more than twice as much as their 1996 counterparts.

The Education Trust is financed partly by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. This month, Melinda Gates resigned from the board of the Washington Post Company, which gets most of its revenues from its for-profit higher-education unit, Kaplan Inc.

When Bill and Melinda Gates are even running away from the scandal of for profit education companies, you know they're bad.

But Joel Klein isn't running away from them at all.

He's running toward them to cash in his years at the DOE.

Frankly, the Murdoch purchase of the for profit online education company - Wireless Generation - that has done so much business with the DOE and was purchased just two weeks after Klein joined Murdoch's company, needs to be investigated.

Dunno if this is a job for John Liu or for Bill De Blasio, but somebody needs to take a real good look at this business deal Murdoch engineered, see what part Klein played in it, and if wrongdoing is found, expose it to the city and country at large.

And then charges should be filed and let's see if we can't throw Klein's crooked ass in jail.

How Come The Post Didn't Cover This Story?

The Murdoch Post never misses an opportunity to cover a "Perv Teacher" story when some teacher - one of 80,000 teachers, btw - is arrested on a sex charge.

They usually put these stories on the front page with a big headline like PERV TEACHERS across it, smearing all NYC public school teachers with the horrific doings of one.

Yet somehow, when one of Murdoch's own reporters at FOX 5 is arrested for child molestation, and when it becomes clear that even a preliminary investigation of his background indicates he had molested others in the past, and when child porn is found on his computer, somehow that story doesn't make it into the Post.

It does, however, make it into the Daily News:

A Fox 5 reporter already accused of molesting a 4-year-old New Jersey girl has been hit with an additional kiddie porn charge.

Charles Leaf's computer, which was seized when the Emmy-award winning newsman was arrested last month, was infected with perverted pictures, The Record newspaper reported Wednesday.

Leaf pleaded not guilty to the porn charge at a court hearing Tuesday after his lawyer tried unsuccessfully to get his $270,000 bail lowered.

The judge refused because Leaf has three drivers' licenses in three different states.

A father of two, Leaf molested the little girl inside his Wyckoff, N.J., home, prosecutors charged.

After Leaf was busted, his older sister came forward with claims that the newsman had molested two female relatives when he was younger.

Leaf, who later served in the Marines, was never prosecuted for allegedly fondling the girls. He and his wife, Monika, are the parents of a 7-year-old son and a 4-year-old daughter.

How come the Murdoch Post doesn't have a headline across the cover screaming PERV FOX JOURNALISTS covering this story?

After all, if Charles Leaf were a teacher at a middle school in Brooklyn instead of a reporter at FOX 5, you can be sure it would be on the front cover and perhaps even the editorial page.

How Come?

A colleague showed me the cover of the Murdoch Post today.

The lead story was entitled "Perv Teachers".

It detailed three DOE employees - one para, one sub, and one teacher (I guess "Perv DOE Employees" doesn't have the same juice as "Perv Teachers") who were arrested for inappropriate and/or sexually explicit contact with students on the Internet.

3 DOE employees out of 80,000.

I did the math on that and came up with the percentage of how many DOE employees were caught as "pervs" - 0.0000375%.

Meanwhile last month a FOX 5 News reporter named Charles Leaf was arrested for child molestation.

The Murdoch Post did NOT run that story on the front cover.

In fact, they barely ran that story at all.

They gave it two paragraphs.

The Daily News, good news people that they are, did give it some coverage.

They covered the original arrest, then did some homework and found out that the Fox 5 reporter had actually been accused of molesting family members in the past.

So the Murdoch Post, which was hawking the 3 DOE "pervs" story today and followed it up with a "Bloomberg says teachers who 'friend' students on Facebook should be fired" story this evening couldn't be bothered with covering the Fox 5 reporter arrested for molesting a four-year old and alleged to have molested family members in the past, but they could give front page space to the DOE story.

Today I went over to the Fox 5 website and counted 27 on air personalities.

I did the math on that.

I discovered that 0.037% of Fox 5 on air personalities are "pervs".

In other words, there are more pervs at Fox 5 News than in the DOE, at least if you are counting the latest tabloid stories.

How come the Murdoch Post isn't running that story?

Oh, right - Murdoch owns Fox 5 too.

Ironic, that.

Or just hypocritical.

I wonder how many other "pervs" are over at Fox 5?

Didn't Ernie Anastos say something about "plucking" chickens or something?