Murdoch to Close Tabloid Amid Fury Over Hacking
By SARAH LYALL and BRIAN STELTER
NYT
LONDON — The media titan Rupert Murdoch sought to stanch damage from a deepening phone-hacking scandal on Thursday by sacrificing the mass-circulation British weekly The News of the World, in a bid to protect his News Corporation empire. The paper will publish its final issue on Sunday.
The saga turned yet more disturbing Thursday with suggestions that the paper had broken into the voice mail not only of a 13-year-old murder victim but also of relatives of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that the paper had paid tens of thousands of dollars in bribes to police officers for information.
The scandal had been taking a toll on the News Corporation, driving down its stock price. Some advertisers were fleeing The News of the World, and new doubts emerged about Mr. Murdoch’s proposed $12 billion takeover of the pay-television company British Sky Broadcasting, in which he already owns a large stake. Many legislators have now criticized the deal, and it appears unlikely that the government will decide before the end of the summer whether to let it go ahead.
The Guardian, which has been in the forefront in covering the scandal, reported that Andy Coulson, who was a News of the World editor in the mid-2000s, had been told he would be arrested on Friday. Mr. Coulson resigned from the paper in 2007 after an earlier phone-hacking investigation, but was quickly hired as the Conservative Party’s chief spokesman, and when David Cameron became prime minister last year, he was installed as the government’s chief spokesman. In January he resigned from that job, too, when it became clear that phone hacking was a regular practice when he was The News of the World’s editor. He is now facing accusations of paying the police for information.
(More here.)
NYT
LONDON — The media titan Rupert Murdoch sought to stanch damage from a deepening phone-hacking scandal on Thursday by sacrificing the mass-circulation British weekly The News of the World, in a bid to protect his News Corporation empire. The paper will publish its final issue on Sunday.
The saga turned yet more disturbing Thursday with suggestions that the paper had broken into the voice mail not only of a 13-year-old murder victim but also of relatives of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that the paper had paid tens of thousands of dollars in bribes to police officers for information.
The scandal had been taking a toll on the News Corporation, driving down its stock price. Some advertisers were fleeing The News of the World, and new doubts emerged about Mr. Murdoch’s proposed $12 billion takeover of the pay-television company British Sky Broadcasting, in which he already owns a large stake. Many legislators have now criticized the deal, and it appears unlikely that the government will decide before the end of the summer whether to let it go ahead.
The Guardian, which has been in the forefront in covering the scandal, reported that Andy Coulson, who was a News of the World editor in the mid-2000s, had been told he would be arrested on Friday. Mr. Coulson resigned from the paper in 2007 after an earlier phone-hacking investigation, but was quickly hired as the Conservative Party’s chief spokesman, and when David Cameron became prime minister last year, he was installed as the government’s chief spokesman. In January he resigned from that job, too, when it became clear that phone hacking was a regular practice when he was The News of the World’s editor. He is now facing accusations of paying the police for information.
(More here.)
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