Rumours are now swirling around London that The Sun will also be hung out to dry by News Corp., despite the company’s insistence on business as usual.
The tight-knit and fiercely loyal culture of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. Ltd. is threatening to unravel, as an overlapping series of British police investigations that sparked the closing of the company's News of the World last summer and hit The Sun tabloid over the weekend prompted one high-ranking editor to blame the company for not protecting its employees.
After five Sun journalists were arrested Saturday as part of an investigation into allegations of bribing government officials, associate editor Trevor Kavanagh penned a sharply worded attack of the "witch-hunt" atmosphere in which he argued that journalists "are being treated like members of an organized crime gang."
And he suggested it was the parent company itself which had dropped a dime on some of its employees. "A large number of extremely good journalists who've worked very loyally for the company for a very long time … are often in police cells for long periods of time on the basis of evidence provided by the company," he told the BBC on Monday. (The company responded to a Globe and Mail request for an interview by saying Mr. Kavanagh would not immediately be speaking again on the matter.)
Much of the evidence that police are using in their investigations emerged from internal probes conducted by News Corp.'s Management and Standards Committee, which the company created to short-circuit potential accusations it might be obstructing justice. Indeed, one of the most damning pieces of evidence – an e-mail to Mr. Murdoch's son James, the head of News International, whose existence suggested he was better informed about the phone hacking scandal than he'd told a U.K. parliamentary committee – was deleted from company computers and only surfaced after an extensive search through paper documents in a warehouse.
Rumours are now swirling around London that The Sun will also be hung out to dry by News Corp., despite the company's insistence on business as usual. Mr. Murdoch is headed to London to reassure the paper's staff this week, and Mr. Kavanagh remarked on Monday that the notion of it closing was "preposterous."
But after the company's fast pivot from supporting to shutting News of the World last summer, employees at the remaining tabloid are skeptical.
News Corp. needs to get out in front of the scandal as much as it can, or its U.S.-based executives could be vulnerable to charges of "willful blindness" in ignoring the rot within the company. Federal authorities in the United States are believed to be probing the company, with the possibility that the Justice Department could open a corruption investigation.
The weekend's arrests came only days after London's Metropolitan Police said it "accepts that more should have been done by police in relation to those identified as victims and potential victims of phone hacking."
There are three continuing police investigations: Operation Weeting, which continues to look into phone hacking; Operation Elveden, looking into bribery; and Operation Tuleta, which is probing computer hacking. In total, 169 investigators are involved, which Mr. Kavanagh argued was a disproportionate response to any possible crime his colleagues may have committed.
There is also the wide-ranging Leveson inquiry into the practices of the press, which, since launching last September, has provided numerous opportunities for celebrities to complain about the tabloids, and other critics to air long-standing grievances about their pet issues, such as sexism in the press.
Over the past couple of months, many top editors appearing before the Leveson inquiry agreed with the emerging consensus that the hacking scandal had demonstrated the need for a new regulatory system for the British press. Mr. Kavanagh's broadside suggests, though, that not everyone is willing to give up hard-won freedoms.
News Corp. (NWSA)
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Simon Houpt