[BITList] a bloody sorry state of affairs

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    Tentacles of Phone-Hacking Scandal Grow Tighter Around Cameron
    By JOHN F. BURNS

    LONDON — The banner headline in Saturday’s editions of the Times of London read “Day of Atonement,” and it was all the more striking for the fact that it ran in the 226-year-old newspaper, the flagship of the print empire in Britain assembled over the past 40 years by Rupert Murdoch. 

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    Lefteris Pitarakis/Associated Press
    David Cameron disclosed his meetings with News International editors and executives. 

     Graphic 
    Rupert Murdoch’s Empire
    Related
      a.. 2 Top Deputies Resign as Crisis Isolates Murdoch (July 16, 2011) 
    If papers in the Murdoch stable were previously accused of soft-pedaling the phone-hacking scandal that has humbled Mr. Murdoch and his fellow executives at the News Corporation, whose worldwide network of media assets has stumbled into ever-deepening crisis in the past 12 days, it was no longer true on a day when every national newspaper in Britain ran a full-page Murdoch advertisement under the words “We are sorry.” 

    At the end of a week that rocked the interwoven worlds of the press, politicians and the police in Britain, and spread across the Atlantic with the opening of an F.B.I. investigation into allegations of associated abuses in the United States, penitence was the buzzword far beyond the London headquarters of Mr. Murdoch’s British-based newspaper subsidiary, News International. 

    While the crisis seemed far from over for Mr. Murdoch, so it was for others, including Prime Minister David Cameron. As the presses rolled on Friday night with the Murdoch bid for redemption in the “We are sorry” ad, and with front-page stories telling of his face-to-face, head-hanging apology to the parents of a murdered girl whose cellphone voice mails were hacked while her parents were clinging to the hope that she was still alive, Mr. Cameron’s aides released a diary of his meetings with executives and editors of News International, owner of the now-defunct News of the World tabloid newspaper that has been at the center of the scandal. 

    The diary shed light on what Mr. Cameron acknowledged last week was the “cozy and comfortable” world in which politicians, the press and the police in Britain have functioned for decades. It showed that since taking office in May 2010, Mr. Cameron has met 26 times with Murdoch executives, including Mr. Murdoch; his son James, the top official of News International; and Rebekah Brooks, the former chief executive of the British subsidiary and editor of The News of the World, who resigned on Friday. 

    Her resignation was quickly followed by that of Les Hinton, the News Corporation executive and former chief of News International who had been publisher of The Wall Street Journal, another Murdoch property, since 2007. 

    Most of the meetings took place at the prime minister’s London headquarters at 10 Downing Street, or at Chequers, his official country residence northwest of London. His meetings with the Murdoch officials exceeded all his encounters with other British media representatives put together. Ms. Brooks was the only person on the guest list for Chequers who had been invited there twice. 

    Another guest was Andy Coulson, the former News of the World editor who resigned as Mr. Cameron’s Downing Street media chief under the pressure of the phone-hacking scandal in January. That visit occurred in March, two months after he resigned. 

    Downing Street officials noted that Ms. Brooks and her husband have a country home near Chequers. As for Mr. Coulson, they said, he and his family had been invited for an overnight stay to thank him for his work for the government and the Conservative Party, where he held a similar post before the election. 

    The list did nothing to assuage the questions about Mr. Cameron’s political judgment in maintaining such close ties with executives of a media enterprise that has been under a faltering police investigation for years over phone hacking and has come under intense scrutiny in the past few months. The ties to Mr. Coulson, in particular, have been assailed by the Labour opposition leader, Ed Miliband, who has seen a sudden change in his own political fortunes with the pressures he has brought to bear on Mr. Cameron and Mr. Murdoch since the scandal escalated. 

    The Coulson links — starting with the fact that Mr. Cameron hired him at all in 2007, shortly after he was forced to resign at The News of the World and against the strong urging of other Conservatives — have also spread dismay in Mr. Cameron’s ranks. 

    His defense has been that Mr. Coulson deserved “a second chance,” and he has said that if Mr. Coulson’s assurances of guiltlessness in the phone-hacking scandal prove to have been false, he should be prosecuted. 

    What Conservatives are more reluctant to say publicly is that Mr. Coulson provided the government with a bridge to the mass-market audience that is tapped by the Murdoch tabloids. Many commentators believe that Mr. Murdoch helped swing the 2010 election to the Conservatives when his papers dropped Labour after 13 years and backed the Conservatives. 

    On Tuesday, the Murdochs will appear before a parliamentary oversight committee under duress of a rarely used parliamentary summons. The session will feature Rupert and James Murdoch, Ms. Brooks and Mr. Hinton. 

    Both Murdochs had previously said they would not attend. Their U-turn on Thursday has led to predictions of a barnburner of a session, if the lawmakers succeed in wringing further admissions from the executives of wrongdoing at The News of the World and other Murdoch newspapers. 

    But just as likely, media and legal analysts in Britain say, the three will appear with lawyers and say they are limited in what they can say because of the continuing police inquiry into the abuses, and the separate investigation, under a senior judge, Sir Brian Leveson, that Mr. Cameron approved on Wednesday. 








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