Hacked Off calls on Culture Committee to recall Murdoch
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The Associate Director of Hacked Off, Dr Evan Harris, has written to the Chair of the Commons Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee, John Whittingdale MP, to urge the Committee to recall Rupert Murdoch, after new evidence emerged casting doubt on the reliability of his testimony to the Committee two years ago.
Referring to the secret recordings of an internal meeting at News International, leaked to the Exaro news website and Channel Four News, Dr Harris’s letter states:
“There is a strong prima facie case that Mr Murdoch may have committed contempt of Parliament by misleading your committee over his true response to the police investigations into phone hacking and bribery of public officials.
“As far as the victims of phone hacking are concerned, the appropriate course of action is for the Committee to recall him at the earliest available opportunity to explain the discrepancies between the expressions of remorse he made to you and the defiant and unrepentant tone of his private remarks earlier this year.
“Your Committee has been wise in swiftly recalling any witnesses who may have appeared to mislead it in the past and trust that this important convention will be maintained on this occasion.”
Commenting on the revelations, Jane Winter, a victim of computer hacking said:
“This tape shows Rupert Murdoch in his true colours: unrepentant, above the law, and vengeful. It is clear that he has instructed his lawyers to obstruct the police investigation and that, in his arrogant contempt for the law of the land and for his victims, he is simply waiting for it all to blow over so that he can rebuild his empire.
“He has not been straight with Parliament, with the Leveson Inquiry, or with anyone, and has yet to be properly called to account.”
Full text of the letter to John Whittingdale MP:
Dear John,
I am writing on behalf of victims of press abuse by News International publications to urge you to recall Rupert Murdoch to give evidence to the Commons Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee.
When he came before your committee on 19th July 2011, the chairman of News Corp declared it was “the most humble day of my life” and insisted that he was not responsible for what he called “sickening and horrible invasions of privacy” committed by his company. Mr Murdoch claimed that he had been betrayed by disgraceful unidentified colleagues, telling you that those culpable were “the people I hired and trusted, and perhaps then people who they hired and trusted”.
Yet it now emerges, as a result of a leaked tape of a News International staff meeting of which you will be aware, Mr Murdoch has since raged against the police and claimed that the inquiry has been blown out of proportion.
He told NI staff in March: “I mean, it’s a disgrace. Here we are, two years later, and the cops are totally incompetent…. Why are the police behaving in this way? It’s the biggest inquiry ever, over next to nothing.”
Mr Murdoch is also heard to make thinly veiled threats against those who are investigating him. “It would be nice to hit back when we can”, one journalist suggests, and Mr Murdoch replies, “We will… We will”.
There is a strong prima facie case that Mr Murdoch may have committed contempt of Parliament by misleading your committee over his true response to the police investigations into phone hacking and bribery of public officials.
As far as the victims of phone hacking are concerned, the appropriate course of action is for the Committee to recall him at the earliest available opportunity to explain the discrepancies between the expressions of remorse he made to you and the defiant and unrepentant tone of his private remarks earlier this year.
Your Committee has been wise in swiftly recalling any witnesses who may have appeared to mislead it in the past and I trust that this important convention will be maintained on this occasion.
I am copying this letter to all members of the DCMS Select Committee.
Yours sincerely,
Dr Evan Harris
Associate Director, Hacked Off
1 Comment
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Thanks to you and all for keeping Hacked Off in action, now not only for the advance of press self-regulation, also for the ability of government to resist the frankest of bullying.
Perhaps only when our Government ‘manages’ to raise the issues of employment – and its conditions – to ‘Tahrir Square status’, will retrospect allow genuine press independence to be in the list of ‘popular demands’. Unlike poor Egypt though, we have some noble traditions, with still many principled interpreters, of ‘the rule of law’. Please continue to expect support for Hacked Off, a vital expression of decency and of demand for a press fit to dream itself democratic.
That which possesses our press, ‘like The Devil’ may never tire, but neither in truth will Mammon trouble directly to contest lost ground. For concession to be gained, we have only to know ‘our own minds’, the people engaged and decided ‘for reason’ and ‘for shareable morality’. We should be seeking to avoid not only more of the pursuit of individuals as victims, but also more of our disastrous fate as a global society, over this last century, dictated by ‘less inequality Right’ and ‘more equality Left’.
Though already patient too long with a vainly pragmatic ‘possibiism’, still risking more in single issue focus than in wider argument for change in social context, the hopes of Leveson are ‘towards’ rather than in closest possible approach to the ideal of a free press, and I appreciate this seems the best focus for Hacked Off at present.
Success should by now be yours, and I thank you for hosting ‘the wider argument’, perhaps with risk of complication. Our barons may yet risk bringing their own ideas of ‘democracy’ to the fore, a paradoxical service to humanity if we are ready to meet them with understanding of equal partnership.