{"id":84365,"date":"2013-10-18T20:20:10","date_gmt":"2013-10-18T19:20:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rt.com\/usa\/thomson-news-corp-scandal-387\/"},"modified":"2013-10-18T21:37:52","modified_gmt":"2013-10-18T20:37:52","slug":"former-wsj-editor-accused-of-keeping-news-corp-hacking-scandal-out-of-paper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/latest-news\/former-wsj-editor-accused-of-keeping-news-corp-hacking-scandal-out-of-paper\/","title":{"rendered":"Former WSJ editor accused of keeping News Corp hacking scandal out of paper"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
A new book on Rupert Murdoch\u2019s media empire suggests that a former Wall Street Journal editor-turned-News Corp CEO stymied attempts by that paper\u2019s reporters to accurately cover the company\u2019s role in a high-profile phone hacking scandal.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Murdoch\u2019s News of the World publication ended its almost
\n200-year-run in 2011 after it was proven that the paper hired a
\nprivate investigator nearly a decade earlier to unlawfully access
\nthe voicemails messages of Milly Dowler, a high school girl who
\nwas went missing for several months in 2002 and was eventually
\nfound murdered.<\/p>\n

News of the World ultimately ceased publication in 2011 amid
\nreports of the scandal, and Murdoch stepped down as CEO of its
\nparent company a year later and in turn installed then-Wall
\nStreet Journal managing editor Robert Thomson to take over.
\nAccording to allegations in a new book by National Public Radio
\nmedia reporter DavidFolkenflik, however, Thomson\u2019s tenure at the
\nJournal was not without incident.<\/p>\n

Capital New York reporter Joe Pompeo obtained a copy of
\nFolkenflik\u2019s new book, Murdoch’s World: The Last of the Old
\nMedia Empires,<\/em> and in it, he says, is never before published
\ninformation about how Thomson tried to downplay News Corp\u2019s role
\nin the Dowler scandal before being promoted.<\/p>\n

According to a copy of the book previewed by Pompeo, Journal
\nreporters working under Thomson when the hacking scandal surfaced
\nattempted to cover it as it unfolded, but “told colleagues of
\nstories that were blocked, stripped of damning detail or context
\nor just held up in bureaucratic purgatory<\/i>.\u201d<\/p>\n

In one instance mentioned in the book, Journal employees
\ndiscovered that News of the World altered a 2002 article about
\nthe Dowler case which originally contained detailed quotes from
\nvoicemails later determined to be hacked by the paper\u2019s private
\ninvestigator. A second printing of that paper, however, scrubbed
\nmost references to the messages and, as the Journal eventually
\nreported in August 2011, instead \u201ccontained only one passing
\nreference<\/i>\u201d to a single voicemail.<\/p>\n

In Pompeo\u2019s book, it\u2019s alleged that even getting that much
\ninformation into the pages of the Journal proved to be difficult.<\/p>\n

“Thomson tried to kill the story several different times<\/i>,”
\nFolkenflik writes. “As a fallback strategy, several reporters
\nand editors believed, Thomson was intentionally trying to set
\nimpossible standards so the story would not see the light of
\nday.”<\/i><\/p>\n

“The process was so painful<\/i>,” one of the journalists
\ninvolved in the 2011 WSJ story told Folkenflik. “If we hadn’t
\nfought, Robert would have been happy for us not to run it at
\nall.”<\/i><\/p>\n

Speaking to New York Capital of Thomson\u2019s apparent activities at
\nthe helm of the Journal, Folkenflik said “He intervened in a
\nvery telling way at a very telling moment.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n

“There’s this notion that you take care of your guys. It’s a
\nreal Australian thing. Murdoch embraces that. It’s him and his
\nguys against The [New York] Times and the BBC and the world. They
\nreally have this idea that they’re the anti-elite,\u201d<\/em> he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A new book on Rupert Murdoch\u2019s media empire suggests that a former Wall Street Journal editor-turned-News Corp CEO stymied attempts by that paper\u2019s reporters to accurately cover the company\u2019s role in a high-profile phone hacking scandal. Murdoch\u2019s News of the World publication ended its almost 200-year-run in 2011 after it was proven that the paper […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1213,"featured_media":84369,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487,18],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-84365","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-breaking-news","8":"category-latest-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84365","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1213"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=84365"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84365\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/84369"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=84365"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=84365"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=84365"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}