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Britain Phone Hacking Scandal

March 27, 2012 by · Comments Off on Britain Phone Hacking Scandal 

Britain Phone Hacking Scandal, PBS Frontline’s motto may not be “All the news that’s fit to air,” but you can bet more than a few news insiders and media types will be glued to the set tonight, when Frontline tackles the U.K. phone-hacking scandal in a program labelled, “Murdoch’s Scandal.” Fair and balanced? You decide.

The venerable, Emmy Award-winning newsmag takes a new look at media mogul Rupert Murdoch and the battle for the heart, soul, and future, of Murdoch’s News Corporation.

The program – which was made available in advance to a select number of TV reviewers through the kind of online firewall usually reserved for state secrets and classified documents – opens with the sound of a ringing phone, followed by an answering machine.

This is followed in short order by the Guardian’s Nick Davies telling the camera that the first he heard of the phone-hacking scandal was when somebody called him from the proverbial out-of-the-blue.

Davies broke the story for the Guardian, a rival newspaper to Murdoch’s wildly successful News of the World, and is now at work on a book with the working title, Hack Attack: How the Truth Caught Up with the World’s Most Powerful Man.

Britain Phone Hacking Scandal

March 5, 2012 by · Comments Off on Britain Phone Hacking Scandal 

Britain Phone Hacking Scandal, Developments in a phone-hacking scandal involving British newspapers owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.:

November 2005: News of the World royal reporter Clive Goodman writes story saying Prince William has a knee injury. Buckingham Palace complaint prompts police inquiry.

August 2006: Goodman arrested along with private investigator Glenn Mulcaire for suspected hacking into voicemails of royal officials.

January 2007: Goodman jailed for four months; Mulcaire given six-month sentence. News of the World editor Andy Coulson resigns but insists he had not known about the hacking.

May 2007: Conservative Party leader David Cameron taps Coulson to be his media adviser.

July 2009: Coulson tells parliamentary committee he never “condoned use of phone hacking.”

September 2009: Rebekah Brooks, former editor of the News of the World and its sister paper The Sun, named chief executive of News International, News Corp.’s British arm.

February 2010: Parliamentary committee finds no evidence that Coulson knew about phone hacking but states it’s “inconceivable” that no one apart from royal correspondent Goodman knew about it.

May 2010: Cameron becomes prime minister; Coulson named communications chief.

Jan. 14, 2011: British police reopen investigation into phone-hacking charges against News of the World.

Jan. 21: Coulson resigns from Cameron’s office amid claims he had sanctioned phone hacking. Coulson continues to deny any wrongdoing or any knowledge of hacking.

April 5: Police arrest two journalists, including Ian Edmondson, the tabloid’s former news editor, on suspicion of intercepting voicemails. More than a dozen arrests of journalists and some police would follow in the coming months as inquiries into phone hacking and police corruption continued.

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