LONDON — Media baron Rupert Murdoch shuttered one of his signature British newspapers Thursday amid a spreading “phone hacking” scandal that has damaged his reputation and threatened the globe-spanning conglomerate he has assembled over nearly six decades.
Murdoch’s News Corp. took the extraordinary step of announcing the closure of the News of the World, the company’s racy Sunday tabloid, in an attempt to stem the fallout from the newspaper’s prying into the voice-mail and cellphone accounts of hundreds of British citizens.
The 168-year-old News of the World, the widest-read in the English-speaking world, has acknowledged that it hired “investigators” who hacked into the phone accounts of politicians, celebrities and ordinary Britons in an attempt to develop stories.
The targets of the paper’s hacking apparently included the families of British troops killed in Afghanistan, victims of London’s 2005 subway bombings and a 13-year-old girl who was killed.
Murdoch, 80, has weathered criticism and crises before, most notably the near bankruptcy of News Corp. in 1990. But the phone-hacking scandal is easily the most dire public-relations debacle of the Australian-turned-American’s storied business career.
Public outrage over the phone tapping has led to rare condemnation of Murdoch in the British Parliament and even from Prime Minister David Cameron, who has enjoyed Murdoch’s political support.
Murdoch’s role shaken
Although there is no evidence that Murdoch was aware of the News of the World’s illegal behavior, the scandal has shaken his dominant role in the British media establishment and has tarnished his stewardship of an empire that includes such U.S. properties as the Fox TV network, The Wall Street Journal, New York Post and the 20th Century Fox movie studio.
The scandal also has threatened to derail News Corp.’s bid to gain control of British Sky Broadcasting, the largest pay-TV provider in Britain. News Corp. owns 39 percent of the satellite company and is trying to gobble up the balance in a deal worth about $12 billion. Regulatory approval of its bid is pending, and the outcome could be an indicator of public sentiment over the newspaper’s behavior.
Some observers suggested Thursday that the scandal could affect who succeeds Murdoch at the top of his company, which he built into a colossus after inheriting two small Australian papers from his father 58 years ago. Murdoch’s heir apparent, son James, oversees the company’s British newspaper division and announced the tabloid’s demise in its London newsroom.
Many are calling for the dismissal of Rebekah Brooks, a former News of the World editor who is chief executive of its immediate parent company, News International.
Brooks was editor of the paper in 2003 when a private detective working on its behalf allegedly hacked into the voice mail of slain teenager Milly Dowling and erased one of the messages. But both Rupert and James Murdoch have remained loyal to Brooks.
“I am satisfied in her leadership, that her standard of ethics, standard of conduct is very good,” the younger Murdoch told BBC News in an interview.
Rupert Murdoch has blamed “wrongdoers” for the hacking but has not identified any of them. He and his executives will probably face hearings into the matter in Parliament, which could subject him to testimony under oath.
Murdoch this week appointed two Americans — News Corp. executive Joel Klein, the former chancellor of New York’s public schools, and company board member Viet Dinh, a Georgetown University law professor and assistant attorney general under President George W. Bush — to investigate the phone-hacking scandal, which began in 2003.
A tactical move
Word on the News of the World’s fate came late in the afternoon in London, and talk radio shows were soon filled with news of the tabloid’s closing.
Many described the shuttering of the paper as a tactical move to head off further criticism and said it would have a negligible effect on News Corp.’s bottom line.
“The Murdochs have decided that the limb had gone gangrene, and so they had to cut it off to save the body,” said John Lloyd, director of journalism at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford. “The matter decided itself. . . . Closing it is a mixture of boldness and inevitability.”
In London, some of the 200 reporters and editors who will lose their jobs with the paper’s demise described their newsroom as being in a daze.
“It was as if a nuclear bomb had blown up,” a political editor told the BBC.
Londoners expressed sympathy for the staff members, who will produce the last edition Sunday, but not necessarily for the paper itself. At a Westminster pub called the Speaker, Roland Brown literally rejoiced.
“Couldn’t have happened to a better lot of hacks,” Brown said.
About News of the World
Rupert Murdoch acquired the News of the World in 1969. The paper became Murdoch’s British beachhead and generated so much profit that he was able to buy, in succession, the Sun, Times of London and Sunday Times, accounting for nearly half of Britain’s newspaper market.
Although its current circulation of 2.8 million is a third of its postwar peak, the paper is still larger than the most widely circulated U.S. newspaper (the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal, at 2.1 million) — a fact made even more impressive considering that Britain’s population is roughly one-fifth that of the United States. The Washington Post
