Murdoch’s News of the World publication ended its almost
200-year-run in 2011 after it was proven that the paper hired a
private investigator nearly a decade earlier to unlawfully access
the voicemails messages of Milly Dowler, a high school girl who
was went missing for several months in 2002 and was eventually
found murdered.
News of the World ultimately ceased publication in 2011 amid
reports of the scandal, and Murdoch stepped down as CEO of its
parent company a year later and in turn installed then-Wall
Street Journal managing editor Robert Thomson to take over.
According to allegations in a new book by National Public Radio
media reporter DavidFolkenflik, however, Thomson’s tenure at the
Journal was not without incident.
Capital New York reporter Joe Pompeo obtained a copy of
Folkenflik’s new book, Murdoch’s World: The Last of the Old
Media Empires, and in it, he says, is never before published
information about how Thomson tried to downplay News Corp’s role
in the Dowler scandal before being promoted.
According to a copy of the book previewed by Pompeo, Journal
reporters working under Thomson when the hacking scandal surfaced
attempted to cover it as it unfolded, but “told colleagues of
stories that were blocked, stripped of damning detail or context
or just held up in bureaucratic purgatory.”
In one instance mentioned in the book, Journal employees
discovered that News of the World altered a 2002 article about
the Dowler case which originally contained detailed quotes from
voicemails later determined to be hacked by the paper’s private
investigator. A second printing of that paper, however, scrubbed
most references to the messages and, as the Journal eventually
reported in August 2011, instead “contained only one passing
reference” to a single voicemail.
In Pompeo’s book, it’s alleged that even getting that much
information into the pages of the Journal proved to be difficult.
“Thomson tried to kill the story several different times,”
Folkenflik writes. “As a fallback strategy, several reporters
and editors believed, Thomson was intentionally trying to set
impossible standards so the story would not see the light of
day.”
“The process was so painful,” one of the journalists
involved in the 2011 WSJ story told Folkenflik. “If we hadn’t
fought, Robert would have been happy for us not to run it at
all.”
Speaking to New York Capital of Thomson’s apparent activities at
the helm of the Journal, Folkenflik said “He intervened in a
very telling way at a very telling moment.”
“There’s this notion that you take care of your guys. It’s a
real Australian thing. Murdoch embraces that. It’s him and his
guys against The [New York] Times and the BBC and the world. They
really have this idea that they’re the anti-elite,” he said.