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He admitted he and his colleagues hacked into people's phones and paid police officers for tips. He confessed to lurking in unmarked vans outside people's houses, stealing confidential documents, rifling through celebrity garbage and pretending he was not a journalist pursuing a story but "Brad the teenage rent boy," propositioning a priest. After Paul McMullan, a former deputy features editor at Rupert Murdoch's now-defunct News of the World tabloid, had finished testifying at a judicial inquiry Tuesday, it was hard to think of any dubious newsgathering technique he had not confessed to. Nor were the practices he described limited to...

Publishing giant HarperCollins, a unit of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., has signed a deal to buy Thomas Nelson from private-equity firm Kohlberg & Co. for an undisclosed sum. The purchase, which is expected to close later this year, will bring 213-year-old Thomas Nelson under the umbrella of one of the world's media groups and the owner of fellow Christian-oriented publisher Zondervan. Company officials on Monday said both companies will maintain separate operations, but did not comment on possible layoffs at Thomas Nelson, which employs about 600 people.

Rupert Murdoch must have imagined Steve Jobs would be a feisty dinner guest. Even still, the News Corp. chairman couldn't have foreseen that, in one night at the mogul's Carmel, California ranch, Jobs would call his tech people incompetent, get a guy fired, and say that Fox News was literally destroying the world. Walter Isaacson's new biography of the Apple co-founder says Jobs railed against the conservative news channel and tried to convince Murdoch to shut it down. His comments came at the 2010 iteration of News Corp.'s annual management retreat. Isaacson writes: In return for speaking at the retreat,...

Rupert Murdoch wasn't in attendance at Fox News' 15th anniversary party at Chelsea Piers in New York on Wednesday night for Roger Ailes' speech. *snip* "I begged him not to because I've seen you drink," Ailes joked. "And, frankly, it's a nightmare." No matter. Ailes, the founder and chief executive of Fox News was this party's real star. Not Bill O'Reilly, who was also in attendance, but didn't speak. *snip* Murdoch aside, the biggest star not in attendance was Fox News contributor Sarah Palin, who continues to tease the electorate, insisting she has not made up her mind on a...

U.S. prosecutors have sent News Corp. a letter seeking information about possible payments made by its U.K. tabloid newspapers to British policemen, according to people familiar with the matter. The letter of request, sent last week, is part of a Justice Department investigation, these people said, into whether the company violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, a U.S. law that prohibits companies from bribing foreign officials. The fact the Justice Department chose to issue a "letter of request" rather than a criminal subpoena suggests the department has opted for a less confrontational approach to the matter, legal experts say.

U.S. prosecutors have sent News Corp. a letter seeking information about possible payments made by its U.K. tabloid newspapers to British policemen, according to people familiar with the matter. The letter of request, sent last week, is part of a Justice Department investigation, these people said, into whether the company violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, a U.S. law t hat prohibits companies from bribing foreign officials. The fact the Justice Department chose to issue a "letter of request" rather than a criminal subpoena suggests the department has opted for a less confrontational approach to the matter, legal experts say....

Leading UK polar scientists say the Times Atlas of the World was wrong to assert that it has had to re-draw its map of Greenland due to climate change. Publicity for the latest edition of the atlas, launched last week, said warming had turned 15% of Greenland's former ice-covered land "green and ice-free". But scientists from the Scott Polar Research Institute say the figures are wrong; the ice has not shrunk so much. The Atlas costs £150 ($237) and claims to be the world's "most authoritative". The 13th edition of the "comprehensive" version of the atlas included a number of...

The liberal-Left has many vices. But surely the most noisome one of all (in a crowded field) is its rank hypocrisy. If you’re going to take the moral high ground – as Lefties will insist on doing at every opportunity – the very least you owe the world in return if you have a shred of compunction, decency or intellectual consistency is to demonstrate more integrity than those you are impugning. And if you can’t do that, then bloody well shut up. In the last few months, you can’t have helped noticing, the liberal-Left media, led by the BBC and...

Fox News off and then on again at Escondido gym Fitness devotee Dianne Lowe's best exercise in recent days may be standing up for what she says is free speech. The five-year member of the LA Fitness club on El Norte Parkway in Escondido was outraged last week when she went to turn on the right-leaning cable channel while working out and found it wouldn't come in. Lowe talked to a gym attendant, who she said told her that LA Fitness officials had ordered it shut down. "They told me, 'We are not allowed to turn on Fox News,' and...

To most news Web sites, what happened at the White House on Thursday night was a private 50th birthday party for President Obama. To an editor at Fox News, it was something a little different. “Obama’s Hip-Hop BBQ Didn’t Create Jobs,” read the headline on an article on The Fox Nation,a conservative arm of FoxNews.com, which is owned by the News Corporation. Below the headline were photos of Mr. Obama and, separately, three black celebrities who attended the party, the basketball player Charles Barkley, the comedian Chris Rock and the rapper Jay-Z. Not pictured were any attendees of other racial...

As unreason triumphs in the US, a similar paranoia and refusal to accept scientific fact threaten to invade British politics. Tea Party madness has brought the US to the brink of economic mayhem, risking taking much of the world with it. In the face of obdurate unreason, the president of hyper-reasonableness was forced to surrender. The economic credibility of the country that holds the global reserve currency has wobbled. The political credibility of the world's beacon of democracy has failed in the face of an insurgency of unreason. Facts, evidence, probability, possibility – none of that matters to a movement...

Mr Morgan, a former News of the World and Daily Mirror editor who is now a high-profile television presenter in the US, has spent the past week categorically denying ever printing material derived from phone hacking. He spoke out after being accused by a Conservative MP and political bloggers of being involved in the phone hacking scandal that has engulfed Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, for which he used to work. “For the record, in my time at the News of the World and the Mirror, I have never hacked a phone, told anyone to hack a phone, or published any...

A senior judge has been arrested on rape charges after his alleged victim secretly filmed him carrying out the attack. Judge Albert Murdoch was also allegedly caught on the hidden tape boasting that he was above the law and would use his police contacts to make any charges go away. His arrest has led to authorities in New Mexico to look into many of the cases he presided over during a 25-year career. Murdoch, a 59-year-old criminal judge for the Second Judicial District Court in Bernalillo County in Albuquerque, was arrested on rape charges based on the hidden tape. Police...

The scandal involving NewsCorp head Rupert Murdoch's British tabloid empire continues to widen, bringing scrutiny to, of all places, Grand Rapids and the Zondervan publishing company.

Long story short, hacking is noble if you’re a powerful left-winger, but sinful if you’re allegedly rightwing. It’s also acceptable for powerful left-wingers to tap the phones of less powerful left-wingers, in order to cement their leadership ambitions. The first and most important principle to keep in mind though is to have an unbalanced worldview, bordering on schizophrenic. Don’t worry. There’s a proud history here you should be aware of. Take Democrat Obama’s hero Democrat FDR. The historian Paul Johnson reminds us in Modern Times (page 650): The tradition of presidential skulduggery had begun with Franklin Roosevelt. He had created...

MEDIA MOGUL CHARGED WITH FIRST-DEGREE MURDOCH July 20, 2011In December 1996, a Florida couple, John and Alice Martin, who sounded suspiciously like union goons, claimed to have inadvertently tapped into a phone conversation between then House Speaker Newt Gingrich and House Republican leadership. According to these Democratic and union activists, they were just driving around with a police scanner in their car, picked up a random phone conversation and said to themselves, "Wait a minute! I could swear that's Dick Armey's voice!" Luckily, they also had a tape recorder and cassette in their car, so they proceeded to illegally...

"There is not a shred of evidence whatsoever that the U.S. side of News Corporation has been involved in any of these scandals."

Political donations by News Corp., its employees and their families were evenly split between Democrats and Republicans, with President Obama the all-time leading recipient, according to a report from the Sunlight Foundation. The transparency watchdog noted Tuesday that Democrats received 51 percent of contributions while Republicans received 49 percent, despite the firm's highly publicized links to the GOP, such as a $1 million donation to the Republican Governors Association in August. News Corp. is the parent company of The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post and Fox News, among others. The firm is currently under scrutiny in both the...

Robert Murdoch threatened the monopoly of the BBC...and boy are they taking the rope now that one of his companies were caught with their pants down. But as Simon Jenkins at The Guardian writes, when does this become more than just reporting? When does this become a hysterical sideshow? Britain has gone mad, or at least the tiny patch of Britain round Westminster. The Pentagon would call it a clusterfuck, an all-embracing, uncontrollable chain reaction that appears unable to cease. The new ecstasy theorists call it "whooshing", when reason loses out to passion, and thought to imagination. As after...

LONDON - Her husband was in the hot seat, but Wendi Deng has emerged as the unlikely star of a British hearing into phone hacking at Rupert Murdoch's newspapers. Video of 42-year-old Deng jumping forward to smack a protester with a pie aimed at Murdoch's face quickly went viral, and numerous fan pages quickly popped up on social networking sites such as Facebook praising her quick rapid reflexes. For the better part of the hearing, Deng - Murdoch's third wife - sat behind her husband and stepson, James, as they answered questions from British lawmakers. When a protester approached Rupert...

Video showing what happened when Rupert Murdoch got attacked by the pie. The person who did the attacking is man who does both comedy and activism, named “Jonnie Marbles”. Overall, this is simply an outright show trial of the worse type and also the pie throwing incident just simply shows how low the radical left will go.

Breaking NOW

How does this year's phone hacking scandal at the now-defunct British tabloid News of the World . . . compare with last year's contretemps over the release of classified information by Julian Assange's WikiLeaks and his partners at the New York Times, the Guardian and other newspapers? At bottom, they're largely the same story. . . . Both, in short, are despicable instances of journalistic malpractice, for which some kind of price ought to be paid. So why is one a scandal, replete with arrests, resignations and parliamentary inquests, while the other is merely a controversy, with Mr. Assange's name...

Rupert Murdoch's News Limited is the most powerful media organisation in Australia, but has come under unprecedented scrutiny in the wake of the UK phone hacking scandal. Some have questioned its domination of the newspaper industry and are demanding an official investigation into News Limited's operations, although it has yet to find any evidence of wrongdoing. Here is some of the fighting talk that has come from Australia's leading politicians: Communications Minister Stephen Conroy, on Australian radio: "It's [News Limited] decided it wants to have an election. Ignore the fact that we had an election nine or 10 months ago....

Death of Sean Hoare – who was first named journalist to allege Andy Coulson knew of hacking – not being treated as suspicious Sean Hoare, the former News of the World showbiz reporter who was the first named journalist to allege Andy Coulson was aware of phone hacking by his staff, has been found dead, the Guardian has learned. Hoare, who worked on the Sun and the News of the World with Coulson before being dismissed for drink and drugs problems, is said to have been found dead at his Watford home. Hertfordshire police would not confirm his identity, but...

Critics: WSJ edit is suck-up to Murdoch By: Reid J. Epstein July 18, 2011 09:38 AM EDT Safe to say the Wall Street Journal’s defiant editorial page defense of News Corp. in the growing phone hacking scandal did not convince anyone in the liberal blogosphere or the Journal diaspora. The scathing editorial, which attacks the Guardian, the New York Times, ProPublica and politicians who have called for investigations into News Corp., drew outrage from both inside the Journal newsroom – anonymously, of course – and from former Journal reporters. “(The) WSJ Editorial is sad,” wrote Sarah Ellison, former Journal reporter...

Labour leader urges for new media ownership rules saying News Corporation chief has too much power in the UK.( Ed Miliband) has demanded the breakup of Rupert Murdoch's UK media empire in a dramatic intervention in the row over phone hacking.n an exclusive interview with the Observer, the Labour leader calls for cross-party agreement on new media ownership laws that would cut Murdoch's current market share, arguing that he has "too much power over British public life". Miliband says that the abandonment by News International of its bid for BSkyB, the resignation of its chief executive, Rebekah Brooks, and the...

Breaking news - headline only so far

Former News International chief executive Rebekah Brooks has been arrested in connection with an investigation into phone hacking and bribery. The 43-year-old was arrested by appointment by Operation Weeting police at a London police station. Met Police said she is currently still in custody. This is the 10th arrest made by police investigating hacking allegations by the News of the World newspaper. She was arrested on suspicion of conspiring to intercept communications and on suspicion of corruption allegations. The Operation Weeting team is conducting the current investigation into phone hacking.

The parent company of Fox News — News Corp. — paid the U.S. government $4.8 billion in taxes over the last four tax years (2007-2010). GE, which owned most of MSNBC until late last year, paid zero taxes in 2010.In fact, GE received a $3.2 billion welfare check from Uncle Sam.From Pulitzer Prize winner David Cay Johnston: (Reuters) — Readers, I apologize. The premise of my debut column for Reuters, on News Corp’s taxes, was wrong, 100 percent dead wrong.Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp did not get a $4.8 billion tax refund for the past four years, as I reported. Instead,...

In his first significant public comments on the tabloid newspaper scandal that has engulfed his media empire, News Corp. Chairman and Chief Executive Rupert Murdoch vigorously defended the company's handling of the crisis but said it would establish an independent committee to "investigate every charge of improper conduct." In an interview, Mr. Murdoch said News Corp. has handled the crisis "extremely well in every way possible," making just "minor mistakes." News Corp. owns The Wall Street Journal. The six-year saga centers on dubious reporting tactics at the company's News of the World tabloid in the U.K., a controversy that in...

4Share Change font size: A | A Vyan at Daily Kos is getting giddy in a post headlined “Could we soon see a world without Fox News?” It's apparently all over for FNC: "In less than a week the News of the World Wiretapping and Bribery Scandal has quickly metastasized into a Multi-Headed Dragon of Death for Murdoch Empire and simply lopping off one head, doesn't seem to be enough - the infection has already spread." Now that Fox-hating liberal interest groups, bloggers, and Democrat politicians are vowing to investigate, the Kosmonauts think Murdoch's "criminal enterprise" is about to collapse:...

NEW YORK (AP) -- A law enforcement official says the FBI has opened an investigation into allegations media mogul Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. sought to hack into the phones of Sept. 11 victims. The official spoke Thursday to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to speak publicly. New York City-based News Corp. has been in crisis mode because of a scandal that sank its U.K. newspaper the News of the World.

The New York Times has put several journalists on producing acres of newsprint detailing the impact of the story on British politics, on News Corp's stock price, on London police... No doubt the NYT is motivated by its ever-earnest search for “all the news that’s fit to print”. But there are other things going on here, too. Murdoch is more than just another proprietor: he’s a bitter enemy. He owns the Wall Street Journal, the NYT’s main upmarket rival. He owns the New York Post, its main downmarket rival. More to the point, Murdoch owns Fox News, the enormously profitable...

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has opened a probe into whether employees of News Corp. might have hacked or attempted to hack into the private calls and phone records of Sept. 11 victims and their families, according to people familiar with the matter. The investigation was opened Thursday morning, following a request a day earlier by Rep. Peter King (R., N.Y.) who heads the House Homeland Security Committee and whose Long Island district was home to many victims of the 2001 terrorist attacks. The investigation will try to determine whether employees of News Corp. illegally accessed the private calls, voice-mail...

Unlike Chappaquidick and the NYT/Guardian Wikileaks campaign nobody has been killed as a result of News of the World phone hacking. Yes it was unsavoury and seedy – but that is the nature of journalism. It’s a competitive dog eat dog world where you are only as good as your last story – just like Hollywood, politics and drug dealing. So the key to fighting the forthcoming onslaught is not to excuse the activities that took place several years ago under the Blair/Brown Labour government that refused to take action because at the time they were supported by the Murdoch...

Former Wall St Journal Owners: 'We Wouldn't Have Sold If We Had Known' Bancroft family members, who controlled Dow Jones & Company, say they would have resisted Murdoch bid in 2007 Richard Tofel, ProPublica 13 July 2011 A number of key members of the family that controlled the Wall Street Journal say they would not have agreed to sell the prestigious daily to Rupert Murdoch if they had been aware of News International's conduct in the phone-hacking scandal at the time of the deal. "If I had known what I know now, I would have pushed harder against" the Murdoch...

So the appearance of this article by Tom Geoghegan on the BBC website “Rupert Murdoch:Could his US empire be affected?” should be ringing alarm bells for conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic. For this is not really about the rather shady ethics of a few phone hacking tabloid journalists.

LONDON - Rupert Murdoch’s media empire was besieged yesterday by accusations that two more of his British newspapers engaged in hacking, deception, and privacy violations that included accessing former prime minister Gordon Brown’s bank account information and stealing the medical records of his seriously ill baby son.

Rupert Murdoch's News Corp could face probes by U.S. authorities for possibly violating bribery laws, compounding the media mogul's problems after a phone-hacking scandal in Britain. The Obama administration has significantly stepped up enforcement of anti-bribery laws in the last two years, winning big settlements from the likes of Daimler AG and BAE Systems Plc by focusing on bribes they paid to foreign officials to win lucrative contracts. Bribes for business have represented the bulk of these anti-bribery cases brought by the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission. It is unclear whether U.S. authorities would use scarce resources...

Something rather weird happened in London last week. For some time, the Guardian, a liberal, broadsheet, “respectable” newspaper, has been hammering the News of the World, a populist, tabloid, low-life newspaper, over its employees’ penchant for “hacking” the phones of royals and celebrities — Prince Harry and Hugh Grant, for example. This isn’t as forensic as it sounds: Until recently, most British cellphones were sold with the default password set to either 0000 or 1234, and most customers never bothered to change it. But last Monday it emerged that the News of the World had also hacked into the telephone...

James Murdoch and News Corp could face corporate legal battles on both sides of the Atlantic that involve criminal charges, fines and forfeiture of assets as the escalating phone-hacking scandal risks damaging his chances of taking control of Rupert Murdoch's US-based media empire.

Other than dedicated media watchers, readers in the United States will be at best only dimly aware of the “phone-hacking� scandal surrounding the News of the World, the UK Sunday tabloid owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News International, and said to be the most widely read newspaper in the English-speaking world. Well, you’ll be hearing a bit more about it over the next few days, as it’s been announced that the paper – known colloquially as the “News of the Screws� on account of its predilection for reporting on sex scandals involving politicians and celebrities – will close after this Sunday’s...

Murdoch Folds News Of The World Over Hacking This Sunday's News Of The World will be the last ever issue of the tabloid, News International chairman James Murdoch has announced. He said this newspaper would not run any commercial adverts this weekend, adding the advertising space would be donated to causes and charities.

New allegations have emerged of payments to the police as the row around the News of the World escalates. The paper's owners have passed to the police e-mails which appear to show that payments were authorised by the then editor, Andy Coulson. It comes as a solicitor representing some of the relatives of people who died in the 7/7 bombings says families may have been victims of hacking. MP's will hold an emergency debate in the House of Commons later. BBC business editor Robert Preston says the e-mail disclosure was "a significant development." He said it had an important political...

Several days ago, Steven Jones of Dow Jones Newswires – a News Corporation company – broke what may be the story of the Millennium, literally. According to 69 recent SEC filings that have now “vanished”, a Texan by the name of Johnny Earl Satterwhite claims to hold over $8 trillion in public companies like Microsoft, Exxon Mobil and City National Bank, among others. Jones also obtained documents that show Satterwhite falsely warranting his ownership of almost one trillion shares in Microsoft. This is 100% impossible, as Jones brilliantly notes... that's more than the 8.4 billion shares Microsoft has issued in...

SNIPPET: "There are some good reasons for allowing at least a few jihadi forums to operate." SNIPPET: "However, there are limits to our ability to exploit all the intelligence opportunities a forum may present. To put it another way, jihadi forums contribute to future terrorism in ways that are unpredictable and/or beyond our ability to control. This would be the view held by those other government agencies who prefer to seek out and destroy forums and to take down forum activists. For my part, I can live with keeping online those forums we have sufficient access to monitor and resources...

Al Gore Denounces Rupert Murdoch's 'Abuse of Power'By Adam Martin 01:03 PM ET Al Gore and Rupert Murdoch have never been best friends, but now they're locked in a very public clash, at the root of which sits Keith Olbermann, who recently joined Gore's Current TV. Gore took a swipe at Murdoch in the press today, telling the Guardian that it was an "abuse of power" for the News Corporation magnate to force his left-leaning Current TV off the air in Italy because it didn't fit his "idealogical agenda." Current got the abrupt word three weeks ago that the digital...

And you thought this weekend was going to be all about Donald Trump! Probably only one other lightening-rod VIP could have stolen the mogul’s buzz in the pro-am zeitgeist tournament known as the White House Correspondents’ weekend, and darned if she didn’t pull a surprise appearance. You betcha, she did. Sarah Palin walked into the Georgetown home of Mark Ein shortly before noon Saturday to dazzle a brunch crowd of Washington insiders and visiting luminaries. Black bell-sleeved summer dress, shiny hair. She and a clean-shaven Todd Palin posed for a few photos with hosts Wendi Murdoch and Susan Axelrod, then...

Guess who came to brunch? The hockey mom herself, Sarah Palin, attended Tammy Haddad's annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner brunch on Saturday. The former vice presidential candidate was immediately enveloped by a large crowd on a patio after making her entrance with Fox News anchor Greta Van Susteren. Palin spent some time posing for pictures with both Dems and R's alike. About an hour later, she took off with Van Susteren.