Murdoch Faced With ‘Civil War’ After Arrests at London Tabloid

By ROBERT MACKEY
NYT

When Rupert Murdoch meets with staff members at his popular, British tabloid The Sun this week, he will be wading into the middle of “what amounts to a civil war within News Corporation,” according to a former editor at the newspaper.

Readers of The Sun were given a clear sense of the anger inside the newsroom in a column published in Monday’s edition of the paper. Under the headline, “This Witch Hunt Has Put Us Behind Ex-Soviet States on Press Freedom,” the tabloid’s associate editor, Trevor Kavanagh, denounced the recent arrests of journalists as part of a police investigation into bribery of public officials. Reporters and editors, he said, “are being treated like members of an organized crime gang.”

Mr. Kavanagh also raged against what he called heavy-handed tactics and a waste of police resources in the investigation of tabloid journalists.

They are subjects of the biggest police operation in British criminal history — bigger even than the Pan Am Lockerbie murder probe.

Major crime investigations are on hold as 171 police are drafted in to run three separate operations. In one raid, two officers revealed they had been pulled off an elite 11-man antiterror squad trying to protect the Olympics from a mass suicide attack.

Instead of being called in for questioning, 30 journalists have been needlessly dragged from their beds in dawn raids, arrested and held in police cells while their homes are ransacked.

(More here.)