Eideard

Rupert Murdoch faces revolt from his own staff…after journalists angry at the arrest of five senior colleagues accused the company of throwing them to the wolves.

The 80-year-old media mogul is due to fly into Britain this week to address workers at his Wapping plant and reassure them of his commitment to his remaining UK newspaper titles. But he is likely to receive an angry reception after five more journalists on The Sun were arrested as part of Operation Elveden – the police investigation into allegations of bribery.

The arrests early on Saturday morning were the second batch in a fortnight and sources close to the investigation have indicated that they are unlikely to be the last.

Journalists at The Sun yesterday accused the company’s Management Standards Committee (MSC), which handed a huge amount of information to detectives, of allowing a “witch-hunt” to take place.

One angry journalist said the MSC were behaving like “reptiles” in order to protect the reputation of Mr Murdoch’s parent company in the United States.

Ten senior journalists on the paper have now been arrested and bailed as detectives probe allegations that they illegally paid police officers and other public officials for information. But staff at the paper said many of the allegations were “pathetic” and related to matters many years ago where reporters had bought drinks for contacts in the pursuit of legitimate stories…

One source at Wapping said: “There is a real feeling of anger, deepening anger but also defiance about what is going on. But there is not the mood for a strike, as people are loyal to the paper but perhaps not the people who run it…”

It has also now emerged that the Sun’s parent company News Corp could face an investigation by officials under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The law allows American companies to be fined hundreds of millions of dollars for illegal activities overseas.

It would be pleasant change in political practices on the part of governments in both the US and UK to offer Murdoch something more than a powder puff spank on his poo-poo. He probably owns more politicians in the British Parliament than Exxon-Mobil does in the US Congress.

Rupert Murdoch, the chairman and chief executive of News Corporation, has tweeted about how his company “screwed up MySpace in every way possible”…

It is the first time Murdoch has tweeted about the social network and his experience of owning MySpace for six difficult years, since joining the microblogging platform. It was in the context of several technology-related tweets he has written about the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, which has been going on all week.

Murdoch tweeted: “CES again. Big three, Apple,Google and Amazon, and maybe Facebook dominant now and growing. Plenty of others good, but not in same league.”

He then wrote: “CES coming to a close. Seems like more innovation than ever, some great, all disruptive. Traditional coys [companies] feeling digital tornado.”

Murdoch has spoken out before about how difficult owning MySpace was, after finally selling it off to advertising company Specific Media and Justin Timberlake last year, for approximately $35m – just six per cent of what News Corporation paid for the business. Murdoch’s business is understood to have retained a small undisclosed stake in the social network, but is not involved in the day to day running of it…

MySpace, which started as a site on which users could share their interest in pop and rock bands, has in the last four years been totally eclipsed by the explosive growth of competitor Facebook.

“This was a good example of how to turn $580 million into a lot less virtually overnight,” said Michael Gartenberg, an analyst at Gartner, a technology research firm, at the time of the sale to Specific Media last year. “In many ways, it was a failed merger.”

Murdoch proved, once again, that corporate executives with their brain stuck in last century solutions and methods – will run modern Web exterprises as badly as the worst of their existing/declining ventures.

Murdoch proved incapable of innovation, unable to keep up with the crowded field of peers in the world of geek dynamism. And he wasn’t bright enough to hire someone who could.

Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

One of Rupert Murdoch’s most senior European executives has resigned following Guardian inquiries about a circulation scam at News Corporation’s flagship newspaper, the Wall Street Journal.

The Guardian found evidence that the Journal had been channelling money through European companies in order to secretly buy thousands of copies of its own paper at a knock-down rate, misleading readers and advertisers about the Journal’s true circulation.

The bizarre scheme included a formal, written contract in which the Journal persuaded one company to co-operate by agreeing to publish articles that promoted its activities, a move which led some staff to accuse the paper’s management of violating journalistic ethics and jeopardising its treasured reputation for editorial quality.

Internal emails and documents suggest the scam was promoted by Andrew Langhoff, the European managing director of the Journal’s parent company, Dow Jones and Co, which was bought by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation in July 2007. Langhoff resigned on Tuesday.

The highly controversial activities were organised in London and focused on the Journal’s European edition, which circulates in the EU, Russia, and Africa. Senior executives in New York, including Murdoch’s right-hand man, Les Hinton, were alerted to the problems last year by an internal whistleblower and apparently chose to take no action. The whistleblower was then made redundant…

This stinks like someone digging up the bodies of Wall Street barons from the 19th Century and using them for reanimation experiments. Zombie subscribers and counterfeit editions of the Wall Street Journal indeed.

RTFA for the details of the elaborate money-laundering, phony reconstruction of circulation numbers for a once-great newspaper.

For nearly four years they lay piled in a Scotland Yard evidence room, six overstuffed plastic bags gathering dust and little else.

Inside was a treasure-trove of evidence: 11,000 pages of handwritten notes listing nearly 4,000 celebrities, politicians, sports stars, police officials and crime victims whose phones may have been hacked by The News of the World, a now defunct British tabloid newspaper.

Yet from August 2006, when the items were seized, until the autumn of 2010, no one at the Metropolitan Police Service, commonly referred to as Scotland Yard, bothered to sort through all the material and catalog every page, said former and current senior police officials.

During that same time, senior Scotland Yard officials assured Parliament, judges, lawyers, potential hacking victims, the news media and the public that there was no evidence of widespread hacking by the tabloid. They steadfastly maintained that their original inquiry, which led to the conviction of one reporter and one private investigator, had put an end to what they called an isolated incident.

After the past week, that assertion has been reduced to tatters, torn apart by a spectacular avalanche of contradictory evidence, admissions by News International executives that hacking was more widespread, and a reversal by police officials who now admit to mishandling the case.

Assistant Commissioner John Yates of the Metropolitan Police Service publicly acknowledged that he had not actually gone through the evidence. “I’m not going to go down and look at bin bags,” Mr. Yates said, using the British term for trash bags.

At best, former Scotland Yard senior officers acknowledged in interviews, the police have been lazy, incompetent and too cozy with the people they should have regarded as suspects. At worst, they said, some officers might be guilty of crimes themselves.

NSS. Supervising coppers covering up for their mates in the tabloid press should not shock anyone. It’s the kind of corruption that has always lived on a 2-way street.

RTFA for pages of detail – of exactly the sort of corruption you already expect.

Les Hinton, Rupert Murdoch

Les Hinton, the head of News Corp’s flagship American newspaper and a trusted, long-serving executive, resigned on Friday over his role in the phone-hacking scandal that has rocked Rupert Murdoch’s global media company.

He became the first high profile casualty of the controversy in the United States, where he had been chief executive of the Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones, a financial news service, since Mr Murdoch’s takeover in late 2007.

In his resignation letter, Mr Hinton, 67, apologised for the “pain caused to innocent people” by repeated illegal intrusions by News of the World reporters and private detectives.

Mr Hinton was in charge of News International, Mr Murdoch’s British newspaper division, from 1997 to 2007, when most of the egregious cases of phone tampering that have come to light occurred…

He continued: “When I left News International in December 2007, I believed that the rotten element at the News of the World had been eliminated, that important lessons had been learned and that journalistic integrity was restored.

Sounds as if his departure was the event that removed the rotten element at the News of the World.

Mr Hinton had worked continuously for Mr Murdoch since joining one of the Australian newspapers that were the foundation of the News Corps operation as at the age of 15.

Few people were closer to the tycoon, and he held a variety of senior posts, including leading the Fox television station network and the American newspaper division, which includes The New York Post, before the highly prized capture of the Wall Street Journal.

Given the industrial scale of phone-tapping, bribery and other misconduct now acknowledged by the company, media experts questioned how Mr Hinton did not know what was going on…

No less culpable than Nixon or Bush – or Conrad Black and Bernie Madoff – of the crimes they committed.

Well, not really, not now

News International announced on Thursday that it is closing the News of the World after this Sunday’s edition, with no end in sight to the political and commercial fallout from the phone-hacking scandal after 72 hours of mounting crisis.

Sunday’s edition of the paper will be the last, News International chairman James Murdoch told News of the World staff on Thursday afternoon.

Murdoch told employees at the 167-year-old title: “The News of the World is in the business of holding others to account. But it failed to when it came to itself”…

It is the first national newspaper to close since Rupert Murdoch shut News International mid-market tabloid Today in 1995.

The News of the World was Rupert Murdoch’s first UK newspaper acquisition in 1968 and its profits helped him build his publishing and broadcasting empire in this country and the US.

A spokesman for the company would not comment on whether News International will continue to publish a tabloid title on a Sunday. I imagine they will.

Murdoch told staff some of them would be leaving the company and said that was a matter of regret. He paid tribute to their “good work”.

There will be no adverts in Sunday’s edition and any money already received will be donated to good causes…

Labour MP Tom Watson, who has been highlighting the phone-hacking scandal at the paper for two years, said: “Rupert Murdoch did not close the News of the World. It is the revulsion of families up and down the land as to what they got up to. It was going to lose all its readers and it had no advertisers left. They had no choice.”

RTFA for the details. More and more of the truly dirty details are still coming out – which is an essential part of the decision by the Murdochs – Daddy Rupert and James – to bail before the tsunami crushes them altogether.

Myspace was once the Internet’s equivalent of the hottest nightclub in town. In its heyday, the world’s dominant social network attracted some 3 million bands, 8,000 comedians and countless filmmakers and wannabes who came to see and be seen.

Now, Myspace is seemingly no place — a digital castoff that corporate parent News Corp. sold for $35 million in cash and equity to an Orange County digital media firm specializing in online advertising. That’s a fraction of the $580 million that the media giant controlled by Rupert Murdoch paid to acquire the site a scant six years ago, and well shy of its one-time $65-billion valuation.

Its dramatic fall is both a consequence of the fickle nature of today’s Internet generation as it is a tale of mismanagement, missed opportunities and miscalculations. Myspace’s decline — hastened by its failure to match the innovations of its chief rival, Facebook, speaks to what can happen when a mainstream media company seeks to capture technological lightning in a bottle…

The decision to acquire the hot social networking site landed Murdoch on the cover of Wired magazine, where he was lauded for embracing the Internet ahead of his old-media rivals, although critics ridiculed him for overpaying…

But Myspace’s red-hot success was short-lived.

The number of monthly visitors in the United States peaked in October 2008 at 76.3 million, according to measurement firm ComScore Digital Analytix. Over the last two years, the social network has shed an average of 1 million users a month, and its monthly traffic had dwindled to about 35 million users by May.

As Myspace’s users headed for the exits, so did the advertisers. Researcher EMarketer projects Myspace’s ad revenue at $184 million this year, down from $470 million in 2009. Myspace proved a drag on News Corp.’s earnings, with the division that includes the social network posting a profit only once in the last six years…

Murdoch knows how to leverage sports coverage in depth into profit in print media. He did the same with business news with the Financial Times. Dicking around with content, policy and politics at the Wall Street Journal may yet put that venerable paper into irreversible decline. All of his print acquisitions were worth siphoning capital from – while adding in deeper coverage of shallower topics when needed.

The folks who bought MySpace for 6% of what Murdoch paid have a sensible chance to turn it into a moneymaker, again. That’s good enough. Whether they wish to go farther than that – and can – is another tale, a different opportunity.

Most Americans probably aren’t aware of the growing scandal involving one of the leading UK newspapers owned by that idol of journalism, Rupert Murdoch. It’s called illegal wiretapping.

Ian Edmondson, left, and Neville Thurlbeck

The former news editor and current chief reporter from the News of the World are in police custody after being arrested on suspicion of unlawfully intercepting mobile phone voicemail messages…

“They remain in custody for questioning after being arrested on suspicion of conspiring to intercept communications, contrary to Section 1(1) Criminal Law Act 1977, and unlawful interception of voicemail messages, contrary to Section 1 Ripa [Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act] 2000,” the briefing added…

The arrests are the first salvo in Operation Weeting, whose tasks include establishing whether there are grounds for bringing further prosecutions in the phone-hacking scandal.

Edmondson and Thurlbeck will probably be released later this afternoon after the search of their homes is complete.

The two men have been implicated in the long-running scandal through documents seized from Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator employed by the newspaper…

Only one reporter, the former royal editor Clive Goodman, has been convicted of a crime as part of the scandal. He and Mulcaire were sentenced to jail terms in January 2007.

No other reporters or executives were questioned by the initial police investigation. It was only after a series of high court cases brought by the actor Sienna Miller, the football pundit Andy Gray and others that the Metropolitan police were forced to reveal material found on Mulcaire’s computer, during a 2006 raid of his home.

Last Friday, a high court judge ordered NoW to make available Mulcaire’s notes to the growing list of people suing the paper. Justice Geoffrey Vos, who is in charge of the hacking cases, ordered “rolling disclosure” to all claimants.

Hundreds of thousands of emails will now be handed over to alleged victims.

Rupert’s NewsCorp says they’re cooperating willingly with the police investigation. Five years after the initial arrests and denials that anyone remaining at the newspaper could possibly have been involved in the illegal electronic snooping on celebrity mobile phones.

UPDATE: Senior Journalist James Weatherup is a 3rd arrest in this case.

Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

With Republicans hoping to recapture a number of statehouses in November, the media conglomerate headed by Rupert Murdoch is inserting itself into the races in bold fashion with a $1 million donation to the Republican Governors Association.

The contribution from Mr. Murdoch’s News Corporation, which owns Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post and other news outlets, is one of the biggest ever given by a media organization, campaign finance experts said.

Democrats seized on the donation as evidence of the News Corporation’s conservative leanings, with Media Matters for America, a liberal group that has tangled often with the company, calling it “an appendage of the Republican Party…”

Jack Horner, NewsCorp spokesman [can you believe that's his name?], said that the company’s corporate side made the donation with no involvement by its news operation and that the gift would not have any impact on newsgathering operations. “There is a strict wall between business and editorial,” he added.

Officials at the governors’ association did not respond to requests for comment. The contribution, first reported by Bloomberg News, was made in June and is included in the Republican group’s most recent second-quarter filings…

The News Corporation and its political action committee, News America Holdings, have given donations over the years to both Democratic and Republican candidates and causes, but never in the amount approaching the June donation, records show…

Of course, the sleaziest end of the pool of American corporate scumbags always distributes largesse to a range of political lackeys. That’s how they’re paid to practice their lackeydom.

The donation generated significant buzz in Washington on Tuesday. Much of it focused on Fox News, whose stable of highly rated, conservative hosts have made it the frequent target of liberals [and anyone else who stands up for a Free Press], who accuse the network of blurring the line between news and opinion.

Newspaper publishers will now be able to set a limit on the number of free news articles people can read through Google.

The concession follows claims from some media companies that the search engine is profiting from online news pages.

Under the First Click Free programme, publishers can now prevent unrestricted access to subscription websites. Users who click on more than five articles in a day may be routed to payment or registration pages…

Google users may start seeing registration pages appear when they click for a sixth time on any given day at websites of publishers using the programme.

This will only affect websites that currently charge for content.

RTFA. Lots of woolgathering and foggy crystal ball-gazing. I think all the media sites have missed the point that Google just established:

You can still press the Back Button and return to your original search page – and click on to another media site offering their own take on the same content, no charge!