Mark Lennihan/Associated Press
Rupert Murdoch at The Wall Street Journal newsroom in December 2007 as he completed his takeover of its parent company.
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Magazine Preview: Why Tyrants Love the Murdoch Scandal (July 31, 2011)
Jonathan Player for The New York Times
John Witherow, editor of The Sunday Times of London, whom Mr. Murdoch says he phones most Saturday nights.
Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times
Piers Morgan, a former News of the World editor, wrote that Mr. Murdoch's way of doing business was “quite scary.”
The articles, in May 2009, shook up Parliament and shamed lawmakers. They also irritated Rupert Murdoch, the chairman of the News Corporation, for the simple reason that two of his own newspapers, The Times of London and The Sun, had been offered the chance to buy the information that led to the exposé, but had turned it down.
“There was anger wafting across the Atlantic,” said a former reporter for one of Mr. Murdoch’s papers here.
At News International, Mr. Murdoch’s British newspaper arm, executives scrambled to deflect responsibility. The blame fell largely on an in-house lawyer who had cautioned against paying some $450,000 for a stolen disc containing the parliamentary expense records. (A few months later, the lawyer was asked to leave News International, where he had worked for 33 years, apparently after another disagreement over advice.)
While it is not clear whether Mr. Murdoch played a direct role in the matter, there is little question that The Telegraph’s scoop remained a sore point for him and that his feelings seeped down through various layers of his company. Soon afterward, The Wall Street Journal, his flagship American newspaper, did its own investigation of American lawmakers’ expenses.
And the editor of the rival Telegraph who got the scoop, William Lewis, a former business editor at The Sunday Times of London, was then rehired by Mr. Murdoch as News International’s group general manager, in charge of all the company’s print publications in Britain. The expenses story was still on Mr. Murdoch’s mind two years later: it was the one big British story he mentioned by name at last week’s parliamentary hearing on phone hacking....read more
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/26/world/europe/26murdoch.html?_r=1&seid=auto&smid=tw-nytimes&pagewanted=all
