When Rupert Murdoch meets with staff members at his popular, British tabloid The Sun this week, he will be wading into the middle of “what amounts to a civil war within News Corporation,” according to a former editor at the newspaper.
Readers of The Sun were given a clear sense of the anger inside the newsroom in a column published in Monday’s edition of the paper. Under the headline, “This Witch Hunt Has Put Us Behind Ex-Soviet States on Press Freedom,” the tabloid’s associate editor, Trevor Kavanagh, denounced the recent arrests of journalists as part of a police investigation into bribery of public officials. Reporters and editors, he said, “are being treated like members of an organized crime gang.”
Mr. Kavanagh also raged against what he called heavy-handed tactics and a waste of police resources in the investigation of tabloid journalists.
They are subjects of the biggest police operation in British criminal history — bigger even than the Pan Am Lockerbie murder probe.
Major crime investigations are on hold as 171 police are drafted in to run three separate operations. In one raid, two officers revealed they had been pulled off an elite 11-man antiterror squad trying to protect the Olympics from a mass suicide attack.
Instead of being called in for questioning, 30 journalists have been needlessly dragged from their beds in dawn raids, arrested and held in police cells while their homes are ransacked.
Mr. Kavanagh expanded on his column in an interview with Sky News, a satellite news channel which is also owned in part by Mr. Murdoch’s News Corporation.
Video posted online by The Sun, a London tabloid, of the paper’s associate editor explaining anger over the recent arrests of reporters and editors.
A controversial headline from 1982.Asked to comment on Mr. Kavanagh’s column, Roy Greenslade, a Guardian media blogger who worked at The Sun when Mr. Murdoch prowled its newsroom during the Falklands war, endorsing sensational headlines, told BBC Radio 4: “it’s an overt attack on the police, but the covert message is the most interesting one. It’s clearly an attack, in the end, on Rupert Murdoch and his stewardship on the company, and it is the clearest evidence we have of the extent of what amounts to a civil war within News Corporation.”
Mr. Greenslade suggested that Sun journalists were outraged by what they see as an attempt to deflect blame onto reporters and editors by executives at their parent company, News Corporation, who are now cooperating with the police investigation.
Mr. Greenslade’s theory seemed to be borne out by remarks made by Mr. Kavanagh in a live interview with BBC Radio 5 later on Monday. Asked, “Do some people at The Sun feel as though the parent company has hung them out to dry?” the associate editor replied: “Well, there is certainly a mood of unhappiness that the company proudly, certain parts of the company” are “actually boasting that they are sending information to police that has put these people I have just described into police cells.”
Mr. Kavanagh then made it clear that he was referring to News Corp.’s new Management and Standards Committee. As The Guardian explained, the committee “was set up last year in the wake of the phone-hacking scandal to cooperate with police investigations into hacking and allegations of corrupt payments to public officials. The arrests of Sun journalists comes after the MSC reconstructed an e-mail archive of 300 million messages and turned over parts of that archive to the police.”
Reuters noted on Tuesday that the committee, which includes a former editor of the rival Daily Telegraph, operates independently and works in soundproofed offices searching for evidence of corruption inside the British newspaper division of News Corp.
Another former Murdoch employee, Andrew Neil, who edited the prestigious Sunday Times of London, told Reuters: “The Sun has turned against Rupert Murdoch. He has put in place things he cannot stop. The Sun was the most loyal to Murdoch. It was closest to his heart. Now Sun journalists believe he has launched a witch hunt to protect himself. He won’t be welcomed. They won’t believe his promises. They’re sullen. They’re resentful. They feel betrayed.”
