Murdoch's Crazy Gang

L to R: Brad Barket / Getty Images, Fiona Hanson / AP Photo His tabs are accused of wiretapping major celebs and the editor who presided over two of his papers has just been promoted to run his entire British newspaper group. But Andrew Neil says no one seems to care.

When Rupert Murdoch, squirreled away with the rest of the U.S. media elite at their annual gathering in Sun Valley, Idaho, was contacted by Bloomberg about the astonishing claims being made back in London about the bizarre behavior of his two British tabloids, the Sun and the News of the World, he replied that he knew nothing about it.

Since the story involved the tabloids paying a $1.6 million out-of-court settlement to keep embarrassing information secret—“That couldn’t happen without me knowing,” averred Mr. Murdoch—only two conclusions were possible: Either he was being economical with the truth or the old man had finally lost control of his wayward tabloid offspring. When tackled about it on his own Fox News, he had stopped the denials—he just refused to talk about it (the interviewer, not surprisingly, didn’t push him).

The famous names who think they’ve had their privacy violated are being encouraged to bring what in America would be called a class-action suit against the Murdoch papers.

“Maybe the lunatics really have taken over the asylum,” one former Murdoch tabloid editor mused to me. Perhaps so. Certainly lunatic things have been happening, especially in the newsroom of the News of the World, a raunchy Sunday tabloid which sells more copies—more than 3 million every week—than any other newspaper in Britain.

Last week the Guardian, the country’s leading liberal-left newspaper and therefore an old enemy of the Murdoch press, claimed that the News of the Screws (as it is known in Fleet Street because of its penchant for revealing sexual misdemeanors) had been systematically using private investigators to invade the privacy of celebrities and other famous folks to gather dirt on them.

Everybody knew something along these lines had been happening because two years ago the paper’s royal correspondent had been jailed for hacking into the mobile-phone voicemails of the royal family, along with the PI who’d done the hacking for him. At the time, however, Murdoch’s London executives and editors dismissed this as the unauthorized work of a rogue journalist and a rogue PI. They even testified to that effect in front of a parliamentary investigation.

In direct contradiction of that testimony, the Guardian claims that, far from that being an exception, the News of the World has resorted to the use of potentially criminal invasions of privacy on an industrial scale to gather stories. Up to 3,000 celebrities and other famous folk had been targeted, from the former deputy prime minister (John Prescott) to Elle Macpherson to Gwyneth Paltrow to London Mayor Boris Johnson to Posh Spice and David Beckham.

The modus operandi was to attempt to access messages on their voicemail, which is easier than you might think since most people apparently don’t change the factory default setting of 1234 or 0000. So we’re not talking James Bond here; but it is, nevertheless, illegal. A separate report by Britain’s official information commissioner had revealed that some of the country’s newspapers—the News of the World is not in this alone—had used PIs to access, illegally, ex-director's phone numbers, addresses, driver’s license details and even health records. In other words, British newspapers were awash in an epidemic of illegality—with the News of the World in particular out of control.

At the heart of the Guardian’s claims are two pillars of Murdoch’s British Establishment: Rebekah Wade, flame-haired editor of the News of the World and then the Sun, when illegality was supposedly rampant in both newsrooms; and Andy Coulson, her deputy at the News of the World and the man who succeeded her when she left to take over the Sun.