Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Tuesday Round-Up (UPDATED BELOW)

Lots going on in the Murdoch hacking scandal - thought I'd put a few links together for those of you watching the scandal.

Frontline has a nice round-up of News Corporation/Murdoch links - including James Murdoch going before the Leveson inquiry today and Rupert Murdoch going before the inquiry tomorrow and Thursday.

The Guardian reports that British investigators have opened another official hacking inquiry into a Murdoch-owned media outlet. Sky News, partly owned by News International, has admitted to hacking into email accounts on at least two separate occasions.

The Guardian also takes a closer look at the allegation that former News of the World editor and current New York Daily News editor-in-chief Colin Myler tried to intimidate those investigating hacking in 2009 by sending reporters to dig up dirt on them.

New York Magazine takes a close look at Myler's journalism career and previous missteps - including lying to the official inquiry looking into hacking charges against the Murdoch-owned News of the World back in 2009.

Michael Moore says he thinks FOX News will eventually be drawn into the hacking scandal.(Moore also criticized Davis Guggenheim for scapegoating public school teachers and unions in his pseudo-documentary Waiting for Superman.)

The Daily Beast reviews Labor MP Tom Watson's book (co-written with Martin Hickman) Dial M For Murdoch and finds it a part Hitchcockian thriller, part All the President’s Men.

Finally, if you're so inclined, you can watch the Murdoch go before the Leveson inquiry here.

UPDATE: James Murdoch goes before the Leveson inquiry and says

when he took over the family’s British newspaper outpost in 2007, responsibility for the journalist ethics of The News of the World, the now defunct Sunday tabloid at the heart of the scandal, lay with its editor and legal manager.

The “ethical risk was something that was very much in the hands of the editor,” he said. “I wasn’t in the business of deciding what to put into the newspaper.”

“The newsroom governance was really an issue for the editor and the legal manager,” he said.

...

As he has in the past, Mr. Murdoch said he did not recall in detail many aspects of the scandal and believed that he was not fully briefed on it because, if he had been, “I would say: cut out the cancer, and there was some desire not to do that” on the part of senior newsroom executives.

“There wasn’t a pro-active desire to bring me up to speed on these things,” he said.

In other words, James Murdoch is saying former News of the World editor and current New York Daily News editor Colin Myler and former News of the World legal affairs manager Tom Crone did not tell him the extent of the hacking and criminal activity at News of the World, nor were they too eager to get to the bottom of it all.

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