LONDON: Rupert and James Murdoch said on Thursday that they planned to appear before a parliamentary committee investigating Britain's phone hacking scandal – a sudden U-turn after an extraordinary rebuff of lawmakers seeking to question them.
A spokeswoman for Murdoch's New York-based News Corp. said that the pair were in the process of confirming their attendance on Tuesday.
“The intention is to go,” Miranda Higham said.
Hours earlier, the Murdochs refused to appear at the hearing before the culture, media and sport committee, which is probing allegations of phone hacking and bribery by employees of their newspapers.
The snub set up a confrontation between two of Britain's most powerful men and a Parliament once seen as easily bent to their will.
Britain's legislature had already forced the Murdochs to abandon their ambitions of purchasing highly profitable British Sky Broadcasting network on Wednesday after lawmakers from all parties united to demand that News Corp. withdraw its bid.
Witnesses are regularly called to appear before parliamentary committees, which quiz everyone from business leaders to prime ministers on a wide range of issues.
Defiance of a parliamentary summons is illegal, and can in theory be punished with a fine or jail time. In practice, such measures have been all but unknown in modern times; the House of Commons last punished a non-member in 1957.
Rebekah Brooks, the British chief executive of the Murdochs' British arm, News International, has already said she would appear before the committee Tuesday.
James Murdoch, the chief of his father's European and Asian operations, said he was not available Tuesday but offered to appear on Aug. 10 or 11, without explaining his inability to attend earlier. Rupert Murdoch said he would not appear at all, offering instead to speak before a separate inquiry initiated by Prime Minister David Cameron and led by a judge. He said he was willing to discuss alternative ways
of providing evidence to parliament.
John Whittingdale, who earlier said that the wait was “unjustifiable,” welcomed the change of course.
“It will be the first time that Rupert Murdoch and James Murdoch, and indeed, Rebekah Brooks will have answered questions about this,” he told Sky News television. “They will be appearing before a parliamentary committee so I would hope they would take it seriously and they will give us the answers that not just we want to hear but I think an awful lot of people will want to hear.”
Meanwhile, the criminal investigation into the Murdoch empire widenened as the former deputy editor of the News of the World was arrested by detectives probing phone hacking at the defunct tabloid.
The Metropolitan Police said Neil Wallis, deputy editor under Andy Coulson from 2003 to 2007, was arrested on suspicion of conspiring to intercept communications.
Police have so far arrested seven people for questioning in their investigation of phone hacking and two others in a separate investigation of alleged bribery of police officers. No one has been charged.
Coulson, Cameron's communications director from 2007 until January this year, was arrested on July 8.
Brooks was editor of News of the World in 2002 at the time of the most damaging allegation so far, that the paper hacked into the phone of teenage murder victim Milly Dowler in 2002 and may have impeded a police investigation into the 13-year-old's disappearance. Brooks has said she was unaware of any phone hacking at the time.
Murdoch's hope of making BSkyB a wholly owned part of his News Corp. empire collapsed on Wednesday in the face of what Cameron called a “firestorm” that has engulfed media, police and politicians.
Cameron has appointed a judge for a wide-ranging inquiry into the News of the World scandal and wider issues of media regulation, the relationship between politicians and media and the possibility that illegal practices are more widely employed in the industry.
Tablet news: newspaper of the future?
On Media Watch this week, we looked at whether pay-walls on the net, and paid-for apps on tablet computers, might come to the rescue of the beleaguered newspaper industry. The Apple iPad, and its competitor devices still in development, are causing intense excitement in the industry.
“A game-changer”, Marc Frons of the New York Times called it on our program.
“It may well be the saving of the newspaper industry,” Rupert Murdoch told the National Press Club in Washington this week.
Why? Well because, in the words of The Australian’s editor-in-chief, Chris Mitchell, a newspaper app on the iPad feels “very much like a traditional newspaper, so instead of just seeing a line on a website that refers to a story and you click on that, you’re getting display, you’re getting headlines that are not designed for search engine optimisation but have puns and traditional journalistic values in them…” And, of course, instead of hopping from one story to the next across cyberspace, you’ll be offered, for a price, a whole package – news, sport, fashion, gossip, opinion, the lot, all nicely wrapped up as The Australian, or The Herald Sun or The New York Times. Or so the newspapers hope.
But who will pay for this? Who wants it? Is this just the fantasy of old newspapermen (and women), desperate to salvage a way of packaging the news that has had its day? It’s electronic, yes. It may be convenient, yes. It’s energy efficient and cheap to deliver, yes. It will (eventually) have audio and video as well as print and pictures, yes. But in the end, it’s someone else’s (Chris Mitchell’s, for example) selection of what’s important that day served up to us for a few bucks a week.
Media commentator Frederic Filloux was adamant. “The idea of paying for news for a young person” he told me, “is just stupid.” The people who might be persuaded to pay will be “elderly, affluent, educated people – that’s it.”
But this isn’t just the difference between paying and not paying. It’s the difference between deciding on your own news agenda, or buying someone else’s.
Old news junkies like me, brought up with newspapers, might well love the tablet computer. We buy two or three newspapers now. We might well prefer to buy two or three newspaper apps instead, downloaded automatically to a tablet that we can prop up against the coffee pot and read over breakfast. Especially if it’s cheaper. We’ll just have to find something else to line the birdcage with.
But a lot of news junkies haven’t consumed media that way for years. Tech savvy young people use search engines, and social media, and a host of filters and applications to fashion their own news intake, from a wide variety of sources – ‘mainstream’ websites, and blogs, and aggregators, and friends.
Chris Mitchell gave a telling definition of what he saw as The Australian’s core function – the one that would survive, no matter what the technology. “The core of the business,” he told me in The Australian’s conference room, “is your ability to dream up ideas to create news – the things that we chase each day. We sit here every morning and we have an hour-long conference and we decide this is something we’re going to allocate a lot of resources to. And I think that the core of the newspaper that is involved in that will continue to be involved in that.”
And The Australian takes the business of ‘creating’ news – of deciding what stories to chase, and what to ignore, of what news to emphasise, and what emphasis to put on the news – very seriously. That’s evident on every front page.
But news editors in any mainstream medium – newspapers, radio, TV, even online – are in the business of selection. They decide what they think will most interest most readers each day.
Yet the true beauty of the internet, for those who know best how to use it (and that emphatically doesn’t include me), is that it allows news consumers to dispense with the services of gatekeepers like news editors. And I seriously wonder how many of them – and they, after all, are the consumers of the ‘quality news’ of the future, the people who are educated now, and in 30 years’ time will be elderly and affluent as well – will ever want to go back. If you cut yourself off from their daily intake, by putting your journalism behind a paywall, aren’t you simply cutting yourself off your own future?
And in that media future, perhaps, even more than the front-line journalist, it’s the editor whose job will be truly on the line. Publishers and editors everywhere desperately hope the iPad and its cousins will restore to them a power that’s gradually fading. In the immortal words of The Castle’s Dale Kerrigan, as his son read out ads from the pages of the Trading Post (long since transformed into an online only publication), “Tell ‘em they’re dreaming.”