Cold day in The Sun

Rupert Murdoch's UK empire has finally admitted to unlawful activity at The Sun but a real reckoning will never come.

Previously: Trump Stakes
Reviewing UK coverage of Donald Trump's second inauguration so you don't have to...

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July 19, 2011, was “the most humble day” of Rupert Murdoch’s life, or so he claimed to the parliamentary committee investigating phone hacking. But Murdoch was not humbled by that grilling or the pie in the face he received later in the same hearing. In the years since, News UK, the British arm of his media empire, has spent more than £1.5 billion on phone hacking settlements, attempting all the time to place all the blame on the rapidly shuttered News of the World and to protect The Sun.

Yesterday, News Group Newspapers (NGN), the News UK subsidiary responsible for its print operation, agreed to another last-minute settlement. But the case pursued by Prince Harry and Lord Watson forced the company to admit finally to unlawful activities at The Sun. The key paragraph in its apology to Prince Harry reads:

NGN offers a full and unequivocal apology to the Duke of Sussex for the serious intrusion by The Sun between 1996 and 2011 into his private life, including incidents of unlawful activities carried out by private investigators working for The Sun.

In a statement outside court, David Sherbourne, legal counsel for Prince Harry and Watson, said:

The truth that has now been exposed is that NGN unlawfully engaged more than 100 private investigators over at least 16 years on more than 35,000 occasions. This happened as much at The Sun as it did at the News of the World, with the knowledge of all the editors and executives, going to the very top of the company. 

What’s even worse is that in the wake of the 2006 arrest of a royal correspondent, there was an extensive conspiracy to cover up what had been going on and who knew about it. Senior executives deliberately obstructed justice by deleting over 30m emails, destroying backup tapes, and making false denials — all in the face of an ongoing investigation. They then repeatedly lied under oath to cover their tracks, both in court and at the Leveson public inquiry. 

At her 2014 trial — which found her not guilty of conspiracy to hack voicemails, two counts of conspiracy to pay public officials and two counts of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice — Rebekah Brooks, the former editor of The Sun and now CEO of News UK, said she “ran a clean ship” at the paper. It now seems clearer than ever that the decks were covered in detritus and she was well aware of where it came from.

On his “most humble day”, Murdoch claimed to have had no knowledge about unlawful activity at his UK companies. Despite yesterday’s apology, it continues to follow the line that bosses saw no evil, heard no evil, and spoke no evil. In a further statement, NGN denied that evidence was destroyed in 2010/11 and said it would have put up a “significant challenge” to the allegation if the case had gone to trial.

The company also tried to massively narrow the scope of its admission of unlawful activities at The Sun:

Today, our apology to the Duke of Sussex includes an apology for incidents of unlawful activities by private investigators working for The Sun, not by journalists, during the period 1996-2001. 

There are strong controls and processes in place at all our titles today to ensure this cannot happen now. There was no voicemail interception on The Sun. 

So who hired and tasked those private investigators if it wasn’t journalists at The Sun? Did they just materialise out of thin air? And are we meant to believe that hacks at The Sun, who shared the same offices as The News of the World, and competed intensely with their colleagues there never heard about the phone hacking methods or used them too? What about when staff moved from one paper to the other? Were they suddenly cleansed of the tendencies?

The final paragraph of NGN’s statement shows just how unhumbled the organisation remains despite the £1.5 billion bill it’s paid in its attempt to make past sins go away:

The Sun today can face the future and continue its proud record of award-winning public interest journalism, investigations and campaigning on behalf of its readers.

It’s not surprising that the Murdoch empire feels that for all the financial costs it’s got away with it. When Byline Times asked the Prime Minister’s official spokesman about the case and a further inquiry to replace the second part of Leveson which was killed by Matt Hancock in 2018, he replied:

Obviously, there’s a settlement which I can’t comment on. More broadly, newspapers play a vital role in a functioning democracy. Clearly, they must operate within the bounds of the law and certain codes. You’ve got the government’s plans as set out in the manifesto [on] not going ahead with a new inquiry. 

The so-called ‘Leveson 2’ inquiry was planned as an investigation into the relationship between journalists and the police. It never happened. Successive governments have given in to press pressure to just move on and not look any closer. Some relatively junior hacks were punished but the big bosses have sailed on with their influence on British politics and society far less diminished than it should have been.

As with the many settlements that came before the conclusion of Prince Harry and Lord Watson’s case, NGN benefitted from the structure of English law. Even if they had won in open court, Harry and Watson would have been required to pay the legal cases of both sides unless the judge awarded them an amount equal to what NGN had offered in the settlement. Murdoch’s deep pockets once again prevented the embarrassing light of legal scrutiny on what really went on within his companies.

Outside court yesterday, Watson said the claimants intend to provide the police with a “dossier exposing wrongdoing”. The aim is to put pressure on the Prime Minister and the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, to take further action. They won’t. NGN has been battered and bruised by the 1,300 phone hacking cases it has fought to stifle over so many years but it’s ultimately managed to buy silence.

At the beginning of the phone hacking saga, NGN tried to pin the blame on “one rogue reporter”. We now know that the story is one of widespread corruption and it’s a corruption that continues. Back in 2021, I wrote that “Murdoch’s money exempts him from justice” but that “Prince Harry’s pockets might be deep enough to change that”. The claimants got close but the truth has still not been brought out into the open and it looks like it may never be. A rogue corporation is still getting away with it.

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