The phone-hacking scandal: profits, power and corruption
The Leveson inquiry into phone hacking has gone to
the heart of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, exposing its thoroughly
rotten and corrupt workings. Now, Rebekah Brooks, former editor of The
Sun and News of the World, has been charged with conspiracy to pervert
the course of justice. PETER TAAFFE reviews a new book detailing the
scandal and its consequences.
Dial M for Murdoch: News Corporation and the corruption of Britain
By Tom Watson and Martin Hickman
Published by Allen Lane (2012), £20
THE SCANDAL OF mass phone hacking, the violation of
the privacy of countless individuals by Rupert Murdoch and his empire,
and the complicity of the whole of the British establishment has the
potential to become Britain's equivalent of Watergate. That event and
its repercussions brought down the US president, Richard Nixon, the
‘most powerful man in the world’. He had come to office with a massive
electoral majority and seemed impervious to any subsequent challenge.
Yet the break-in at the Democratic Party headquarters in 1972 was the
distant fluttering of a butterfly's wings which, eventually, led to the
office of president of the United States and his resignation in August
1974.
In contrast to Nixon, David Cameron just sneaked
into power with the assistance of the Liberal Democrats. But his toxic
connection with Murdoch and his main cohorts – the discredited Rebekah
Brooks and Andy Coulson – now threatens the same result in Britain: the
abrupt ending of Cameron’s premiership and possibly that of the
government itself. Certainly Robert Redford, the star of All the
President’s Men, Hollywood’s take on Watergate, seems to think that this
is possible because he says he is interested in making a film about the
Murdochgate saga!
To reinforce the point, Carl Bernstein, one of the
reporters who exposed Nixon, sees the parallel when he states, in Dial M
for Murdoch: "Too many of us have winked in amusement at the
salaciousness without considering the wider corruption of journalism and
politics, promulgated by Murdoch Culture on both sides of the Atlantic".
If Cameron was to be mortally wounded by this scandal, it would be in no
small measure down to the sheer determination and doggedness of Tom
Watson who, together with Martin Hickman, has co-authored this quite
remarkable book.
Given Watson’s previous history on the right wing of
the Labour Party – he moved the motion to formally wind up the
predominantly Marxist and socialist Labour Party Young Socialists in
1992 – few could have predicted that he would, in time, produce such a
searing indictment not just of Murdoch but of the whole of the
capitalist ‘free’ press. He also takes to task the police who connived
with Murdoch, the toothless Press Complaints Commission, the Director of
Public Prosecutions, and the Tory party and its leadership for accepting
payoffs from Murdoch for writing in his newspapers. In particular,
Watson exposes the close collaboration and support of the Tories for
Murdoch's attempts to undemocratically control the great majority of
Britain's media.
Nor is he hesitant in his condemnation of all the
leaders of the three main political parties, including the leadership of
his own party, New Labour. He describes how Tony Blair fawned on Murdoch
– even secretly becoming the godfather of Murdoch’s child with his third
wife Wendy Deng. Gordon Brown also bent the knee to Murdoch despite he
and his wife being reduced to tears in 2006 by the decision of the Sun
to produce photographs of his sick son. Ed Miliband continued the
tradition of New Labour leaders ingratiating themselves by attending
Murdoch’s summer gatherings of the great and good.
Murdoch most foul
BUT, AS WATSON makes clear, he underwent a change
through his experience in the whip’s office in parliament during the
Labour government, particularly as a result of the mounting deaths in
Iraq and Afghanistan. He was also disillusioned by Blair whose wife,
Cherie, even charged the Labour Party for haircuts! But it was Blair's
refusal to timetable his departure which reinforced Watson’s support for
Brown to replace him.
This brought him into collision with the Sun
newspaper, which continued to back Blair. Watson then discovered what
many workers and others had experienced before him: what it was like to
be on the receiving end of the wrath of the ‘Sun King’, Murdoch, and
those who enjoyed his support. The Sun called Watson the ringleader of a
"plotting gang of weasels" opposed to Blair. The Sun’s political editor,
George Pascoe-Watson, warned Brown: "My editor [Rebekah Brooks] will
pursue you for the rest of your life. She will never forgive you for
what you did to her Tony".
The antagonism grew as the Murdoch empire swung over
to support the new Tory leader, Cameron. Other events brought Watson
into collision with Murdoch and the Sun’s gutter journalists, who
denounced "Treacherous Tom Watson – a tub of lard who is known without
affection at Westminster as ‘Two Dinners’ Tommy". A Sun journalist
subsequently confessed that he had been forced to "write knocking
stories about Watson that he knew were ‘bollocks’."
Like feudal overlords, the Murdoch clan expected its
orders to be carried out to the letter even by the government of the
day. Brooks (then known by her maiden name, Wade) texted someone close
to Brown to urge him to sack Watson. The Sun did a mock-up of Watson
with other supporters of Brown as threatening characters from the film
Reservoir Dogs. By his own admission, this had a devastating effect on
him. He recounts walking along a beach, "in tears".
This has happened to many other people, some of them
‘celebrities’ and others who were not. They were usually reduced to
emotional wrecks and gave up any resistance to the Murdoch juggernaut.
In Watson's case, it led to the breakup of his marriage. But it did not
have the desired effect in cowing him. Instead, it led to an admirable
determination to confront the Wapping monster. Watson could have turned
away and quietly got on with his life. He recounts that many of his
friends, while recognising that he had done a good job in exposing
Murdoch’s scandals, urged him to back away.
Battling the Murdoch empire
BUT HE STOOD up to Murdoch, drawing in other
well-known anti-Murdoch figures, such as Nick Davies of the Guardian and
his co-author Martin Hickman of the Independent. He was spurred on by
the revelation that phone hacking was taking place on "an industrial
scale". This term is used numerous times throughout by different
sources, indicating the sheer scale of phone hacking. There are
literally thousands of cases of phone hacking under investigation and,
at present, at least eleven different inquiries.
One of the most telling features of the book is the
support that Watson gives to Tommy Sheridan in his battle with the
Murdoch empire, which subsequently led to Tommy’s imprisonment. Tommy
had won his first case against Murdoch and the News of the World. Watson
writes approvingly: "Sheridan likened his win to the equivalent of
football minnows Gretna beating Real Madrid on penalties, adding: ‘They
are liars and they have proved they are liars’." He instinctively
recognises and supports Tommy Sheridan, who was seeking to confront the
anti-union, anti-working class Murdoch machine. What a contrast between
those erstwhile ‘socialists’ and former ‘comrades’ of Tommy Sheridan in
the Scottish Socialist Party, who appeared as key witnesses for the
prosecution, and the principled stand of Watson!
As is widely known, Murdoch appealed, with the
additional charge of perjury levelled against Tommy and his wife, Gail.
A key issue was whether the News of the World had hacked Sheridan’s
phone and withheld information about its financial dealings with
witnesses who testified against him. On 17 November 2010, Bob Bird,
editor of the Scottish edition of the Sun, told the court that many
e-mails about Sheridan had been lost while being transferred from
storage to India. Watson, "who had been following the case closely, had
knowledge of data protection from his spell at the cabinet office". He
briefed Tommy’s legal team on phone hacking, which helped in the
three-hour interrogations conducted by Tommy of Coulson, at the time
still the prime minister’s spokesman. Coulson denied, predictably, all
knowledge of e-mails relating to the case.
However, the BBC television’s Panorama team began
its special investigation on phone hacking. This was the first time that
the BBC was really involved in the issue. Other broadcasting outlets
followed up and this led, finally, to Coulson being interviewed by the
police. This process set in motion events which resulted, ultimately, in
Coulson being forced to resign as Cameron's communications’ director.
Watson writes that he "feared that Sheridan had gone to jail because of
misleading evidence, and decided to make contact with him".
If Coulson is now found to have been guilty of lying
under oath – and that is a real possibility – then the trial and
sentencing of Tommy Sheridan will be seen for what it is: a shameful
chapter of illegal conspiracies, involving the Murdoch empire, the
police and the judiciary in Scotland, against the man who was an heroic
symbol of the anti-poll tax struggle. The ruling class, including
Murdoch, never forgave him or the millions of working men and women who
defeated the poll tax and Margaret Thatcher. They sought revenge for
this, almost two decades later. Tom Watson declared unequivocally at a
press conference in Glasgow, while Tommy was still in jail: "Tommy
Sheridan may be an innocent man".
Colossal concentration of power
THE POWER, INFLUENCE and reach of the Murdoch empire
have been documented before. But it is still shocking to read this
account of the seemingly unstoppable rise of Murdoch and the colossal
concentration of power in the hands of Murdoch and his family. This
would not have been possible without the support, indeed the connivance,
of capitalist politicians including Blair, who tried to smooth the way
for Murdoch to take over part of Silvio Berlusconi's media outlets in
Italy. The present Con-Dem government – and Cameron personally – has
been completely compliant with Murdoch’s plans. Only because of public
outrage has Murdoch’s power been checked.
Worldwide, News Corporation encompasses 200
newspapers and 52,000 employees bringing news to a billion people daily.
Then there are the books, magazines, TV shows and films which chalk up
annual sales of $33 billion. In Britain, Murdoch controls 40% of
national newspaper circulation and 70% of newspaper markets in
Australia. In his adopted United States, he owns the New York Post, Wall
Street Journal and the über-rightwing Fox News TV channel. Through these
outlets, he exercises great political pull. Murdoch, as is well-known,
lent his unswerving support to Thatcher in a holy war against the trade
unions. In 1981, Thatcher had facilitated his purchase of the Times
newspaper which, in turn, facilitated his successful battle against the
trade unions at Wapping in 1986. He expected similar results from
Thatcher’s heir, Cameron, this time smoothing the way for Murdoch’s
acquisition of all the shares in BSkyB.
The culture secretary Jeremy Hunt – who replaced
Vince Cable after the latter was ‘outed’ by the Daily Telegraph as an
opponent of Murdoch’s proposal to capture the whole of BSkyB – was quite
prepared to nod Murdoch’s plans through. The texts and emails discovered
later, revealing the close relationship and almost daily contact with
Murdoch’s people, threatened to wreck Hunt’s career. He was saved
temporarily because an assistant acted as a ‘human shield’, taking the
blame for the texts that came to light. It is unlikely to save him in
the long run.
The authors paint a vivid portrait of the warped
character of those who worked for Murdoch, particularly those employed
on his tabloid newspapers, which are unfortunately typical of the
reptile breed who infest journalism. Unbelievably, the muckraking gutter
journalists employed on the News of the World, with Coulson as its
editor at the time, won the Newspaper of the Year accolade at the
British press awards three years running. The judges declared that this
newspaper, which has now been forced to shut down following the outcry
over the revelations that it hacked the mobile phone of the murdered
schoolgirl, Milly Dowler, had earlier "shown vitality and originality"
in exposés of David Beckham and David Blunkett!
An awards event at the Hilton Hotel in London was a
"raucous affair". Journalists booed and jeered the handing of gongs to
rivals. As the Sun accepted the award for popular journalism, the Live
Aid founder, Bob Geldof, stormed the stage. "He told the guests that a
visit to the lavatory had confirmed that rock stars ‘have bigger knobs
than journalists’." Jeremy Clarkson, the TV personality, punched Piers
Morgan. These are the ‘opinion formers’ whom the British people are
supposed to hold in awe! In reality, the ‘red tops’ are viewed today
with a mixture of fear – particularly if you are on the receiving end of
their poison – and contempt.
Above the law?
LIKE A PEBBLE which begins an avalanche, the hacking
scandal really erupted with the jailing of a reporter, Clive Goodman,
who was revealed to have hacked members of the royal family. The hacking
of phones and later of computers had been widely practised before this,
but had not been revealed widely up to then. Bestselling newspapers and
magazines were driving a black market in illegal data, receiving
ex-directory numbers, car registration numbers, health and criminal
records. "The targets ranged from glamorous actresses such as Elizabeth
Hurley to the families of victims of newsworthy crimes, such as the
parents of Holly Wells, a child murdered by the paedophile Ian Huntley
at Soham, Cambridgeshire, in 2002".
When these practices were brought to the attention
of the police, they were "wilfully blind". Only Goodman and Glenn
Mulcaire, a former part-time footballer with AFC Wimbledon, were charged
with hacking offences. The police were themselves intimidated by News
Corporation. Goodman had been convicted in 2006. Following this, the
police decided to visit Goodman's desk in Wapping to seize material and
financial records.
But they were "confronted with photographers, some
from other parts of News International, and these were taking
photographs of the officers". A tense stand-off subsequently ensued,
with the police barred by News International employees from entering the
building to take forensic tests. A detective inspector Pearce feared
that the News of the World staff "may offer some form of violence
against the small police team in the building". In other words, Murdoch
and his empire considered that they were beyond the law. It is
inconceivable that such behaviour would have been tolerated by the
police in any other circumstance.
Subsequent investigation of Mulcaire's notes
revealed the existence of "thousands of names, phone numbers and PIN
codes… In all, there were 11,000 pages". Among those listed were cabinet
ministers, Boris Johnson – who, ironically, had described the phone
hacking scandal as "codswallop" – as well as George Galloway and RMT
leader Bob Crow. Goodman, even after his arrest, received his full
salary and was used on other stories until he was jailed. Eventually,
this led to the resignation of Coulson from News International,
implausibly professing that he had not known about hacking. The myth
persisted that Goodman was a lone hacker. When that story was
discredited, the Murdochs fell back on the excuse of "the rogue
newspaper" (News of the World), which was closed in an attempt to save
the skin of Rupert Murdoch and his son, James (deputy chief directing
officer of News Corp).
The Tories’ News Corp links
EVEN AFTER THESE events, when Coulson's culpability
was clear to anybody who cared to examine what had happened, Cameron
employed Coulson as his communications director. It has now been
revealed there was no real check of Coulson’s background or the fact
that he has admitted holding £40,000-worth of News Corporation shares
while acting as Cameron’s spokesman. George Osborne was particularly
warm towards Coulson because of a "highly controversial story that could
have wrecked his career". Watson reveals that Osborne, at the age of 22,
had known a dominatrix "who was expecting the baby of one of his
friends". The News of the World published the story but with
"sympathetic" noises towards Osborne.
Phone hacking was rife at the News of the World, as
Watson and Hickman make clear. But a widespread cover-up took place
despite the huge amounts News Corporation was compelled to pay out in a
series of well-known cases that have been aired in the press. However,
while this was going on, it did not stop newspaper groups applying
pressure on government ministers to scrap the law specifying custodial
terms for those journalists involved in breaches of the Data Protection
Act. Watson informs us: "On 11 February 2008, the Justice Secretary,
Jack Straw, who like most cabinet ministers sought to maintain a warm
relationship with the press, informed [the information commissioner]
that the clause introducing the option of a custodial sentence was
likely to be dropped". Brown, in effect, accepted this even though he
had suffered brutally at the hands of Murdoch over the death of his son.
In opposition, Cameron and the Tory party grew
closer and closer to Rupert Murdoch. Hunt, then shadow culture
secretary, claimed that the Tories would abolish the BBC Trust, the
governing body of the corporation. This was directly in line with
Murdoch’s agenda, spelt out by James Murdoch in his infamous MacTaggart
lecture extolling the virtues of profit in all things good, particularly
the news media.
At the same time, the close collaboration between
the police and News Corporation became evident. A number of policemen
were, in effect, organically linked to News International. It was
revealed that the chief of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Paul Stephenson,
regularly met Murdoch and other representatives of News Corporation, and
enjoyed their lavish hospitality. Stephenson and his wife accepted a
20-day free stay at the £598 a night Champneys health spa in
Hertfordshire from an acquaintance of Murdoch luminary, Rebekah Brooks,
and her husband, Charlie. This is a case of corruption of the police
force.
The Tories fed from the same trough. William Hague,
while in opposition, received £195,000 a year for his column in the News
of the World and around £300,000 from Murdoch's HarperCollins publishing
company between 2002 and 2006 for the biographies of William Pitt the
Younger and William Wilberforce. Michael Gove, who has heaped praise on
News International and Murdoch personally – "a force of nature", a
"great man" – was paid an unspecified advance by HarperCollins for a
biography of the 18th-century politician Viscount Bolingbroke. Between
2005 and 2009, Gove was paid £60,000 to 65,000 a year for articles in
the Times.
This hospitality grew exponentially after the 2010
general election when one quarter of all such hospitality provided to 10
Downing Street staff in the first seven months of the coalition
government came from News International. In the 14 months following the
formation of the coalition government, when News Corporation was seeking
to take over BSkyB, Cameron met News Corporation editors and executives
15 times, and attended five events and three parties organised by the
company.
Paranoid and dictatorial
IT IS CLEAR from this book and the newspaper reports
and articles which have followed in the wake of the scandal, that the
newspaper ‘barons’ – not just Murdoch but those who control the rest of
the press – possess colossal unchecked political power which they do not
hesitate to wield to achieve their aims. In particular, they will be
ruthless in using this to denigrate and attack any force, organisation
or personality which in any way threatens them and their system.
The Financial Times admits: "Mr Murdoch is hardly
the first media baron to exert influence over Downing Street; Lords
Rothermere and Beaverbrook set the template, wielding what a despairing
prime minister Stanley Baldwin famously described as ‘power without
responsibility... the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages’."
(28 April 2012)
Murdoch expresses the same point less prosaically: "
".
Who is influencing whom? It is clearly a question of
the press exerting pressure on the elected prime minister to carry out
their demands rather than vice versa. Dial M for Murdoch, with its
forensic analysis and numerous examples, spells this out. So did
Cameron, who admitted during this crisis that "we all" were in fear
that, if they stood up to Murdoch and the rest of the press, they could
expect the full force of his power to be turned on the government. Much
better to kowtow to the ‘Dirty Digger’ than to go into opposition to
him. This is a virtual admission that parliamentary elections and the
whole panoply of democracy is a sham.
Editors, who run newspapers on behalf of their
owners, display the same paranoid dictatorial tendencies. A dismissed
Sun reporter commented on their behaviour to the Leveson inquiry: "Some
that I worked for often became pampered peacocks who only wanted to hear
the word ‘yes’ and would shout and scream if they heard anything else.
An example was when one editor I worked for sent his chauffeur 50 miles
back to his home to pick up a bow tie he had left behind. No doubt the
power and lucrative lifestyle that gives them front-row seats and free
holidays helped to corrupt them – so that some editors totally lost
sight of reality… As a result of this aggressive and grotesque
arrogance, those in charge – the proprietors and the editors – came to
believe that they could do and say whatever they wanted and remain
untouchable".
Inherently undemocratic
AT THE END of Dial M for Murdoch, Watson and Hickman
draw devastating conclusions that Murdoch is running a ‘shadow state’.
In effect, what we have had in Britain is a Stasi-type outfit which has
suborned big elements of the state, the police, journalists and
broadcasting outlets – all of this with the full collusion of the
present government. They state: "Many institutions failed – but there
were individual failures too. The holders of high office failed in their
duty to protect the public: the Scotland Yard detectives who ignored the
bulk of wrongdoing; the PCC chairwoman who did not understand how the
press actually operated; the Assistant Commissioner [of the Metropolitan
Police] who did not open the bags of evidence; the Director of Public
Prosecutions who did not read all the paperwork; the London mayor, who
did not demand action from his police force; the Queen’s solicitors who
knowingly continued to act for a lying corporation; the national
newspaper editors who persistently avoided the story; the BBC executives
who failed to devote resources to a national scandal; the cabinet
minister who did not take into account a history of broken promises when
supporting a £7 billion takeover; the Prime Minister who did not listen
to warnings about his new director of communications, and whose
government prostrated itself in front of a foreign tycoon".
And who is responsible for this? The authors
conclude: "All prime ministers from Margaret Thatcher to David Cameron
turned a blind eye when they should have intervened and allowed his
dominance to rise, deal by deal, election by election".
All of this is true and is devastating stuff. But
when the dust settles, even after the Leveson inquiry has reported, the
power relationship between the press and the government – any government
which remains within the framework of capitalism – will be fundamentally
untouched. A few miscreants may go to jail, some ‘reforms’ introduced,
but that will not guarantee a ‘democratic’ press. The questions must be
posed in the debate over the scandal: how do we remove the undemocratic
power of those who own the media and how do we transform the press into
a voice for working-class people?
As we have pointed out previously (see: The Media
Lie Factory, Socialism Today No.117, April 2008), only by taking
printing press facilities and the media in general out of the hands of
millionaires and billionaires and putting them in the hands of ‘the
public’ – the working class, supported by the labour movement – will it
be possible to establish a really liberated press and media. We do not
want a government with a ‘state-controlled press’. We opposed, for
instance, the takeover by the Portuguese government of the República
newspaper in 1975, during the revolution. This was the newspaper
supporting Mário Soares and the Portuguese Socialist Party at that time.
The proposal to take it over – backed by the Communist Party and
sections of the army – created the impression of a totalitarian takeover
of the press. This was grist to the mill of the counter-revolution at
the time. Nor did we approve of the takeover of oppositional press and
television by Hugo Chávez in Venezuela more recently.
We do not want to own and control the Sun newspaper
or the Daily Express, Telegraph, etc. If printing press and media
facilities were democratically nationalised, this would allow full
access to the press to all political parties and trade unions – perhaps
in proportion to the number of votes they get in elections. This would
be a vast improvement on the current position where, in the recent local
elections in Britain, there was a virtual blackout of news of those
candidates who stood for the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition.
Minorities presently denied a voice would have access to the press and
media. This is the only way to guarantee, in reality, a ‘free press’.
The book by Tom Watson and Martin Hickman is proof
of the inherently undemocratic character of the capitalist press in
general and the barbaric Murdoch empire in particular. Murdoch is on the
run. His company faces economic difficulties, and News Corp was forced
to withdraw its application to take over BSkyB. It is not excluded that
Murdoch and his family will be removed from control of News Corporation.
This is only the beginning. We must remove the undemocratic control of
the 1% who deny to the 99% a voice in the media.
