Murdoch takes a beating
REPORT: News Corp. boss ruled ‘unfit’ to hold broadcast licence next?
LONDON — News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch is “not a fit person” to lead a major international company, U.K. lawmakers said Tuesday, after his British unit misled Parliament about the extent of phone hacking at its News of the World tabloid.
Murdoch “turned a blind eye and exhibited wilful blindness to what was going on in his companies,” the 11-member House of Commons culture committee said in a report Tuesday that split lawmakers along party lines on critical findings.
The report may increase the likelihood that U.K. regulator Ofcom concludes News Corp. is unfit to hold a broadcasting licence and asks it to reduce its 39-per-cent stake in British Sky Broadcasting Group Plc.
The phone-hacking scandal prompted News Corp. to abandon a $12.7-billion US bid for the rest of BSKYB, the U.K.’S biggest pay-tv provider, last year.
About a dozen reporters at the Sun have been arrested, though not charged, in a police investigation into bribery. “We certainly should have acted more quickly and aggressively to uncover wrongdoing,” Murdoch said.
Three executives at the News International unit — Les Hinton, Tom crone and colin myler—gave misleading testimony to the committee in 2009, the panel said in London. The company failed to disclose documents and made statements that “were not fully truthful,” and Murdoch, 81, and his son James must ultimately take responsibility, the lawmakers said.
The member committee has been working on its report since July, when the Murdochs were summoned to testify about their roles in the scandal.
“The News of the World and News International misled the committee about the true nature and extent of the internal investigations they professed to have carried out in relation to phone hacking,” the panel said.
The six Labour and Liberal Democrat lawmakers on the committee voted to conclude Rupert Murdoch is “not a fit person” to lead a major international company. The four members of Prime Minister David Cameron’s Conservative Party voted against it.
The division along party lines may lead to further suggestions that Cameron and his Conservatives are too close to Murdoch. Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt is under pressure to resign after the publication of emails showing his office had provided information to News Corp. about the government’s position on the BSKYB bid.
The report was skeptical of Murdoch’s claim the hacking and the cover up had all been at too low a level for him to know about. Murdoch “has demonstrated excellent powers of recall and grasp of detail, when it has suited him,” the committee said.
Ofcom has asked News Corp. to provide documents from civil phone-hacking lawsuits as it decides whether the matter has compromised the company’s ability to run BSKYB.
Police probes into phone and computer hacking and bribery have led to about 45 arrests, including former News of the World editors Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson, once Cameron’s communications chief. News Corp. closed the Sunday tabloid in July and later replaced it with a Sunday edition of the Sun.
Parliament as a whole will be asked to vote on whether the men are guilty of contempt. Committee chairman John Whittingdale said it wasn’t clear what the punishment could be, because no one has been found guilty of it for decades.