This morning Rupert Murdoch is being linked to a scandal in the UK (where he owns the News of the World and The Sun) that’s much bigger than a leaked Wolverine tape. The Guardian reports:
Rupert Murdoch’s News Group Newspapers has paid out more than £1m to settle legal cases that threatened to reveal evidence of his journalists’ repeated involvement in the use of criminal methods to get stories.
What were they hoping to hide exactly? The suppressed evidence from three cases that revealed that journalists were “using private investigators who illegally hacked into the mobile phone messages of numerous public figures to gain unlawful access to confidential personal data, including tax records, social security files, bank statements and itemised phone bills.”
Expect a thorough (and well-deserved) witch hunt and plenty of coverage of this story in The Daily News. The full story from the Guardian, including the names of some powerful organizations this could spell trouble for here.
1. Rupert Murdoch says the future of newspapers is digital and there may be a time when you “get it on a panel which would be mobile, which will receive the whole newspaper over the air, (and) be updated every hour or two.” [Via Breitbart]
2. Coldplay’s Chris Martin “has been hit by a run of stinking bad luck that is blighting the band’s world tour.” [Via The Sun]
3. Pixar’s latest, Up, opens today. The New York Times‘ says it starts off strong but “the story grows progressively more formulaic. And cuter.” [Via NYT]
4. Moot? “A well-placed magazine source tells Page Six that [Adam] Lambert will be coming out officially on the next cover of Rolling Stone.” [Via NYP]
5. ABC has given the green light to Crash Course — which will feature 5 couples competing in extreme driving challenges — for a late summer run. [Via THR]
Even if the following Wolverine story is an urban legend like Hollywood Elsewhere’s Jeffrey Wells suggests, how cool would it be if it was true?
“A reasonably well-connected guy with a friend on the 20th Century Fox who’s said to have regular contact with Fox Filmed Entertainment chairman Tom Rothman (and who was questioned yesterday by an investigator regarding the Wolverine piracy) has been told that ‘within the last few days’ — i.e., prior to the Wolverine work print appearing online — ‘Rupert Murdoch received a package at his New York office that contained a DVD copy of the leaked Wolverine.’” Read More »
Tech Crunch got their hands on a draft of Julia Angwin’s forthcoming MySpace tell-all, and they’ve excitedly spilled a few juicy beans.
“Tom Anderson’s real age and youthful hacker activities are well documented in the book. Anguin talks about an obsession Anderson had with ‘an attractive Asian-American in the finance department’ that led to a request that Anderson work from home for months. She also says Anderson was involved in an Asian-focused porn site even after MySpace was acquired by News Corp., a potential PR nightmare, but that Rupert Murdoch (CEO) and Peter Chernin (COO) brushed aside concerns and swept the incident under the rug.”
Read More »
