Murdoch's World (35 page)

The
New York Times
's Joe Nocera took that article as inspiration to devote a column to
what he called the “Fox-ification” of the
Journal
. “The
Journal
was turned into a propaganda vehicle for its owner's conservative views. That's half the definition of Fox-ification,” Nocera wrote. “The other half is that Murdoch's media outlets must shill for his business interests. With the
News of the World
scandal, the
Journal
has now shown itself willing to do that, too.”

He pointed to Orwall's Murdoch interview as particularly damning. “There was no pushback against any of these statements, even though several of them bordered on the delusional,” Nocera wrote. “The
Journal
reporter had either been told not to ask those questions, or instinctively knew that he shouldn't. It is hard to know which is worse.” Mea culpa, Nocera wrote. Back in 2007, Nocera had been one of the commentators to declare Rupert Murdoch would be a savior of the
Journal
.

Many news staffers at the
Journal
privately considered Nocera's column terribly unfair. Murdoch hadn't volunteered himself for an interview. He had telephoned to harangue an employee. Orwall leveraged the call into remarks he could put in print, at a time when Murdoch proved an elusive quarry. If anything, Murdoch's own paper allowed him to damage himself by making comments that galled many people following the story.

True, Murdoch could not control how he sounded: when asked what truth there could be found in rumors he would split his newspapers
from the rest of the company, or sell them altogether, Murdoch replied, “Pure and total rubbish . . . give it the strongest possible denial you can give.” (Not such rubbish, as it turned out.) His journalists saw the paper's publication of those comments as forcing him on the record and, as it happened, allowing him to land blows against himself.

The allegation of “Fox-ified” coverage was particularly nettlesome. The
Journal
's partnership with NBC's financial cable channel, CNBC, predated Murdoch. Reporters dreaded the looming expiration of that deal in 2012. They feared they would be forced to collaborate with coverage on the Roger Ailes–led Fox Business Network.

Some
Journal
reporters and editors had found Nocera's fears overblown. “Oh, I think all of us, at the time the deal was announced, were
anxious what it might mean,” said Alan Murray, who was executive editor of the paper's online operations and deputy managing editor under Thomson through late 2012. “What [would] News Corp's control of
The Wall Street Journal
mean? Would it in any way affect the independence of the news department? Would we somehow be forced to carry some other corporate agenda news that News Corp has?”

“But none of that's happened,” Murray said.

Yet the taint was edging closer to home, and questions about corporate agendas arose, at least internally, with Les Hinton serving as the connective tissue between Murdoch's holdings on the two sides of the Atlantic. Hinton, the publisher of the
Journal
and CEO of Dow Jones, had been CEO of News International when hacking occurred. Further, Hinton had reassured MPs in testimony that he personally believed the violation of cell phone messages by
News of the World
to be limited to a single case. His words soothed roiling waters at the time. He carried gravitas in the UK; he had even served as the chairman of the enforcement panel of the Press Complaints Commission, an industry-led, self-regulatory body that was intended to field the public's concerns like a state bar or medical association.

In hindsight, Hinton's testimony
reads as though it had been carefully couched to help the company smother bad headlines while avoiding legal liability down the line. By 2011 Hinton could duck the heat no longer, despite five decades of service to Murdoch. The chairman delivered the news personally: Hinton had to leave the
Journal
, Dow Jones, and News Corp.

The editorial page of the
Wall Street Journal
shifted into high gear.
In a blistering editorial, the
Journal
blamed the tabloid scandal almost exclusively on the failure of police to investigate. And it turned its wrath onto another target: the paper's journalistic rivals. “We also trust that readers can see through the commercial and ideological motives of our competitor-critics,” the paper wrote. “The Schadenfreude is so thick you can't cut it with a chainsaw. Especially redolent are lectures about journalistic standards from publications that give Julian Assange and WikiLeaks their moral imprimatur. They want their readers to believe, based on no evidence, that the tabloid excesses of one publication somehow tarnish thousands of other News Corp journalists across the world.”

Those remarks were directed squarely at the
Guardian
and the
New York Times
. The liberal British paper had been episodically reporting on the culture of tabloid corruption for eleven years by that point, while in 2010
the
Times
had published its own exposé based in large part on leads provided by the
Guardian
. Murdoch's aides at News Corp called the story a setup: the two papers were colluding to try to damage him.

The
New York Times
piece was particularly damning because it included sources that were on the record. One of them, Sean Hoare, a former
News of the World
reporter who admitted his own actions, was discovered dead at his home the day of the
Journal
's editorial. Authorities ruled out foul play: His death was later attributed to a drug overdose. But former colleagues said he had been traumatized by the scandal.

Many
Journal
critics refused to believe it, but the paper's news staff and its editorial staff had little or no influence over each other. And no one took the
Journal
's editorial page editor, Paul Gigot, as a stooge for Murdoch. He had adopted a firm conservative line for the paper well before its takeover by News Corp and, if anything, outflanked Murdoch on his ideological right.
Gigot had also pledged to colleagues that he would quit if Murdoch meaningfully interfered to further his business or political interests. Still, the editorial was a remarkable piece of corporate patriotism. It sounded as though it could have sprung from Thomson's mind to the printed page.

The defensiveness in that editorial also was given full voice by the company's supporters and treated seriously by other reputable news organizations.
Washington Post
media reporter Paul Farhi wrote an article that
raised the specter of media bias both by Murdoch's publications and by those covering the accusations against News Corp's British journalists, citing “corporate loyalties and entanglements [that] have raised suspicions about news organizations' independence and objectivity.”

The
Journal
's schadenfreude editorial stood out for its incredibly poor sense of timing and judgment and badly misread the mood of the public. Its sister paper,
the
Times of London
, struck a tone of remorse, which alienated the editor in chief, James Harding, from his bosses at the paper's corporate headquarters in New York. But the
Journal
's editorial stance stoked fears of journalists inside the paper that in moments of crisis somehow they would be pressured to serve Murdoch's needs.

The extraordinary circumstances stirred the
Wall Street Journal
special oversight panel to action. On July 25
the committee published a statement in light of the hacking scandal, entitled, “What About the
Journal
?” The Special Committee wrote, “We have found nothing to even hint that the sort of misdeeds alleged in London have somehow crept into Dow Jones.” The panel acknowledged that some journalists (presumably inside the paper, but not specified) thought
Journal
reporters should test the honesty of former
Journal
publisher Les Hinton's testimony to British lawmakers. The panel's members said they had repeatedly asked staffers, “Is anybody putting political, ideological, or commercial pressure on you to influence your news judgment?” It concluded, “The broad and consistent answer we get is no.”

By and large, that rang true. But that
did not reflect life as it was experienced by a dozen
Journal
reporters and editors assigned to cover allegations of criminal activities by various News Corp employees and contractors in the UK. Several reporters and editors had told colleagues of stories that were blocked, stripped of damning detail or context, or just held up in bureaucratic purgatory.

The biggest clash occurred when the
investigative reporter Steve Stecklow uncovered a dissonance between the versions of a story on Milly Dowler published in different editions of the
News of the World
on April 14, 2002. At that time, the girl was missing but not yet known to be dead. In the early editions, Stecklow found detailed quotes from voice mail messages included in the article. The final edition of
News of the World
instead carried a lone, passing allusion to a voice mail. No one else appeared to have noted the telling switch.

The reporters and editors who worked on the story with Stecklow
thought it was a barn-burner. A reporter for
News of the World
had told the
Journal
that the tabloid had sent eight reporters and photographers to a factory in the British Midlands during Milly Dowler's disappearance in 2002, expecting to find the girl working there. An editor deployed the team based on a message left on her voice mail. The
Journal
learned that the person who sent the reporters north was the paper's chief reporter, Neville Thurlbeck. If true, this incident doubly contradicted News International's claims that everyone thought the hacking was confined to one reporter and a private eye until late 2010. First, Thurlbeck had not been publicly implicated in the hacking of the royals. Second, some
News of the World
editor or
company official must have called the news desk and ordered a change in the copy between editions because the paper's hacking was so blatantly revealed in the first version.

To their frustration, the
Journal
reporters couldn't pin down who had intervened (though suspicions focused on Tom Crone). Robert Thomson seized on that omission, saying the article hadn't met the standards expected of the
Journal. You guys didn't figure out why the story was changed
, Thomson told his subordinate editors.

The London bureau was led by Bruce Orwall, a journalist well known at his company's headquarters. As the
Journal
's Hollywood bureau chief,
Orwall had edited the front-page story in December 2000 documenting the path Wendi Deng had taken in becoming the third wife of News Corp's billionaire owner.

In July 2011, however,
Orwall could be seen holed up in his office engaging in shouting matches via phone with top news executives in New York over the
News of the World
coverage. Orwall had some allies in New York on the story, including Alix Freedman. Freedman was one of the paper's most respected senior editors and a holdover from Paul Steiger's tenure. But Thomson was adamant. The bureau had covered the lead-up to the London Olympics, the royal wedding of Prince William, the European debt crisis, and the tribulations of the euro. None had elicited a fraction of the interest from the top as had the scandal affecting its parent company.

Thomson tried to kill the story several different times. As a fall-back strategy, several reporters and editors involved believed, Thomson was intentionally trying to set impossible standards so the story would not see the light of day. Finally Thomson relented. On August 20, 2011, the
Journal
published a front-page piece on the
News of the World
and the telling changes between editions on the Milly Dowler story. In a compromise, the article did not lead with a hard-news approach, but a more anecdotal top. The revelation of the disparity
between editions was not disclosed until the ninth paragraph. Still, the story made it to print.

“The fact that [the
Journal
article] did run was good,” said one of the paper's journalists involved in the story. “But
the process was so painful. If we hadn't fought, Robert would have been happy for us not to run it at all.” Freedman left for Reuters the following month.

Covering the parent News Corp under duress was a test of the
Journal
's mettle in the Murdoch era. When hacking first came up, two years earlier, in July 2009, Rupert Murdoch had been in Sun Valley, Idaho, clustered with other media moguls at their annual deal-making retreat. During an interview by satellite on Fox Business, anchor
Stuart Varney gamely and vainly tried to get his boss to address the scandal. Murdoch shut him down. “I'm not talking about that issue at all today,” Murdoch quickly said, grimacing. “I'm sorry.”

Varney acquiesced swiftly. “No worries, Mr. Chairman. That's fine with me.”

In that July 2011 interview with the
Journal
's Orwall, Rupert Murdoch had blamed outside lawyers at Harbottle & Lewis hired by News Corp for making “a ‘major mistake' in underestimating the scope of the problem.” In 2007, News International executives including James Murdoch had pointed to the lawyers' review of internal documents to show the company had taken questions of impropriety seriously. When called by members of Parliament, Rupert Murdoch testified on July 20, 2011, that
he had been failed by people in whom his executives had put their faith. Murdoch said Les Hinton brought Colin Myler back to London from the
New York Post
to become editor in chief of the
News of the World
specifically “to find out what the hell was going on.” Myler, in turn, commissioned Harbottle & Lewis to do just that in 2007.