Rebekah Brooks, former Chief Executive of News International

LONDON (AP) — British police made six arrests early Tuesday in the British media’s phone hacking scandal, including Rebekah Brooks, the former top executive of Rupert Murdoch’s News International, The Associated Press has learned.

Police did not identify those arrested, but a person who had been briefed on the details said Brooks and her husband, a prominent horse breeder and a friend of Prime Minister David Cameron, were arrested at their house.

The six people were arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, police said in a statement. The charge is an indication that investigators may be focusing on a possible coverup of the scope of phone hacking.

The investigation stems from widespread wrongdoing at Rupert Murdoch’s now-closed News of the World tabloid. The victims have ranged from celebrities and major politicians to the families of crime victims.

News International, which operates Murdoch’s British newspapers, confirmed that its head of security, Mark Hanna, was also one of those arrested. A spokeswoman, speaking on condition of anonymity, said she had no information about where he was arrested.

The Metropolitan Police said five men and a woman were arrested in various locations in and around London in a series of raids conducted between 5 a.m. and 7 a.m. Tuesday.

Police said a 43-year-old woman was arrested at her home in Oxfordshire. In addition, police said a 49-year-old man was also arrested in Oxfordshire at his home. Brooks, 43, and her husband, horse trainer Charlie Brooks, live in Oxfordshire in the town of Chipping Norton.

Cameron has recently described Charlie Brooks as “a good friend” and neighbor. The two have gone riding together in the countryside outside Chipping Norton.

Police also arrested a 39-year-old man in Hampshire, a 46-year-old man in West London, a 38-year-old man in Hertforshire and a 48-year-old man in East London.

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Rupert Murdoch - said to believe "coloreds" like American sports

Roger Simon, who wrote a telling piece for Politico, provides fascinating insight into Rupert Murdoch‘s formula for success when purchasing and running a company… at least to those of us outside of Murdoch’s inner circle of evil.

Simon and his wife worked for the Chicago Sun-Times prior to Murdoch buying the company. Soon after, Simon and his left, but not after witnessing first-hand racist remarks from the media magnate.

SIMON: I had a conversation with him about various sections of the paper. “I don’t understand anything about American sport,” [Murdoch] told me breezily, “but I know the coloreds like it.”

I told him that in America we no longer used the word “coloreds,” that it was considered insulting.

He looked at me the way Queen Victoria might have looked at a footman who had told her she was using the wrong fork to eat her pheasant.

Murdoch had apparently told employees and management at the Sun-Times that he intended to maintain the quality and integrity of the paper. Simon said everyone knew it was a lie. Within months, there were mass resignations and dismissals and Murdoch brought on his own “thugs” and “stooges.” He sold the paper, but the damage had been done.

Murdoch and his goons also know what damage can be caused to a political career and exactly how to do it using harassment, printing sexist remarks and photo editing…

Sarah Lyall of The New York Times wrote last week about Clare Short, a Labour member of Parliament, who once mentioned “in passing that she did not care for the photographs of saucy, topless women that appear every day on Page 3 of the populist tabloid The Sun,” owned by Murdoch.

The Sun attacked swiftly with the headline: “‘Fat, Jealous’ Clare Brands Page 3 Porn.” The paper also sent a busload of “semi-dressed” models to Short’s home to jeer at her and stuck a picture of Short’s head on the body of a topless woman in the paper.While powerful politicians often privately deplored the behavior of the British tabloids, they were “afraid to say so publicly, for fear of losing the papers’ support or finding themselves the target of their wrath,” the Times article said.

The editor of The Sun at the time of the attack on that “fat, jealous” member of Parliament was Rebekah Wade, now Rebekah Brooks, who has been arrested in the phone-hacking scandal and who testified Tuesday before a parliamentary committee right after Murdoch finished.

While Fox News may not be as blatantly sexist in their harassment of public officials in the United States, the results are basically the same… We saw the backlash that the Obama administration received when they called out Fox News for their BS. I wonder how many of those journalists who defended Fox News will realize they were on the wrong side of history when it’s all said and News Corp. is done.

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Not sure if you’re on a web site owned by Rupert Murdoch / News Corp.? If you’re a Firefox or Chrome user, you can install a handy plugin that will warn you when you are! The one for Firefox is called Murdoch Alert and there’s Murdoch Block for Chrome.

Of course, you can always check FNB’s list of News Corp Properties (updated).

Here are some screenshots of the plugins…

Murdoch Alert plugin for Firefox

Murdoch Block plugin for Google Chrome

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Sean Hoare, News of the World whistleblower

As news of the phone hacking by News Corp. owned News of the World spreads and the story grows to include the arrest of News International chief executive Rebekah Brooks and the resignations of police officials, Sean Hoare, the NoW whistleblower has been found dead. Hoare first made the claims in a New York Times investigation into the phone-hacking allegations.

Police are still investigating his death and have not ruled it suspicious.

“At 10.40am today [Monday 18 July] police were called to Langley Road, Watford, following the concerns for the welfare of a man who lives at an address on the street. Upon police and ambulance arrival at a property, the body of a man was found. The man was pronounced dead at the scene shortly after.”The death is currently being treated as unexplained but not thought to be suspicious. Police investigations into this incident are ongoing.”

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News International chief executive Rebekah Brooks

Rebekah Brooks, chief executive of News International, the UK arm of Rupert Murdoch‘s News Corporation has been arrested on charges of suspicion of corruption and conspiring to intercept communications. Brooks resigned on Friday.

Mrs Brooks’s arrest is the 10th made by Operation Weeting police, who are conducting the current investigation into phone hacking.

She was released on bail until October.

Others arrested and bailed have included ex-NoW editor Andy Coulson, ex-NoW assistant editor Ian Edmondson, ex-NoW chief reporter Neville Thurlbeck, senior ex-NoW journalist James Weatherup, freelance journalist Terenia Taras, Press Association journalist Laura Elston, an unnamed 63-year-old man, and ex-NoW royal editor Clive Goodman.

Officers from Operation Elveden were also involved with this latest arrest. They are investigating allegations of inappropriate payments to police, under the supervision of the Independent Police Complaints Commission.

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Rupert Murdoch

British tabloid News of the World, owned by News International, a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch‘s News Corporation (who, as you know, also owns Fox News Channel) is entangled in a series of hacking allegations in the UK.

News International, parent company of Britain’s top-selling News of the World tabloid, said on Friday it would admit liability and pay compensation in eight cases — although many more people believe they were targeted.

The admission was an about-turn from the media group’s previous denial that it knew journalists were hacking the phones of the royal family, politicians, celebrities and sports stars, blaming a handful of “rogue reporters” for the scandal.

According to TechDirt, the hacking wasn’t limited to politicians and celebrities, but also included a murdered teenage girl whose voicemails were tampered with (some deleted), and families of soldiers who died while fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. There is also suspicion that the hacking aided two people under investigation for murder by supposedly spying on the detectives involved in the case.

While settling the cases could cost tens of millions of dollars, the damage to Murdoch’s empire is also being seen in more lost advertisers. Ford, among other companies, have pulled ads from News of the World. In a few days, that won’t matter…

It was announced on 7 July 2011 that, after 168 years in print, the newspaper would print its final edition on 10 July 2011 following revelations of the ongoing phone hacking scandal, with the loss of 200 jobs.

No advertisements will run in this weekend’s paper – instead any advertising space will be donated to charities and good causes.

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News Corp., Fox News‘ parent company, has recently made an extremely unfair and unbalanced $1,010,450 contribution to the Republican Governors Association (RGA). The next largest contribution was made by the Republican National Committee (RNC).

Typically, when a media company donates to a political group, it donates to both sides, as News Corp. has done in the past. For example, General Electric, which owns NBC, and Time Warner, which owns CNN, have donated comparatively near-equal amounts to both  Republican and Democratic campaigns. News Corp. reportedly has not made any contribution to the Democratic Governors Association.

Nathan Daschle, executive director of the DGA, called it “stunning” that a media company would make such a large, partisan investment in politics. “The people owning Fox News have made a decision that they want to see Democratic governors go down to defeat,” said Daschle. “It’s a jaw-dropping violation of the boundary between the media and corporate realm.”

“‘Fair and Balanced’ has been rendered utterly meaningless,” Hari Sevugan, the DNC’s national press secretary, said in a statement. “Any pretense that may have existed about the ties between Fox News and the Republican Party has been ripped violently away.

“No Republican who appears on Fox can be seen as answering to an independent press and all should appear with a disclaimer for who they truly are – the favored candidate of the corporate-friendly network. No Fox News political coverage can be seen as impartial and all of it should have a disclaimer for what it truly is – partisan propaganda.”

There’s no way Rupert Murdoch and News Corp. could have seen this as being anything but politically biased. Obviously they don’t care.

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Prince Alwaleed bin Talal al-Saud of Saudi Arabia, the largest shareholder of News Corp outside the Murdoch family, offered his opinion on Rupert Murdoch’s replacement.

ALWALEED: I met with Mr. Rupert Murdoch and Mr. James Murdoch. We are always in touch. I’m second biggest shareholder there. And no doubt that News Corp is moving on all the fronts. You’ve seen how FOX rating is skyrocketing. … James is now managing Europe and Asia. … I’ll be the first one to nominate him to be the successor of Mr. Rupert Murdoch, god forbid if something happens to him. … I have full confidence in [James], full trust in him, and he’s capable. He’s really Rupert Murdoch in the making, and he’s almost there now.

With the recent Supreme Court ruling, is there is a question of who will be aided by Alwaleed’s financial support?  Alwaleed, King Abdullah’s nephew, has been a friend of the Bush family for 30 years, the richest person in Saudi Arabia, the 22nd richest person in the world and he holds large stakes in many American companies, including Citi, who received billions of dollars in bailout money.

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Rupert Murdoch, CEO of News Corp., the parent company of Fox News, has issued another idle threat in response to what Murdoch perceives to be theft of information. Apparently, he wants News Corp. content removed from Google, because Google is not paying him to index content, and in connection with his idea of requiring visitors to pay to access said content. According to Google, this is not a problem…

Obvious to nearly anybody who has run a web site, it’s easy to block referrers and search engines from indexing sites. News Corp. could simply block Google via a robots.txt file. That would be step one for Murdoch. But, it seems, he would rather issue a public statement declaring his ignorance about the Internet.

And, in a statement issued by Google, all he had to do was ask…

“News organisations [sic] are in complete control over whether and how much of their content appears in search results,” it said said in a statement issued in London.

“Publishers put their content on the web because they want it to be found, so very few choose not to include their material in Google News and web search. But if they tell us not to include it, we don’t.”

It added: “If publishers want their content to be removed from Google News specifically all they need to do it tell us.”

Google also mentioned that not only are they in full compliance with copyright laws, but they also provide a huge amount of free publicity and traffic to such news organizations, “about 100,000 clicks every minute.”

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“Who are our enemies? Who are our friends? This is a question of the first importance for the revolution.” -Mao Zedong

It’s one thing to attack the President of the United States and other news outlets, made fun of a woman’s miscarriage, etc. But, will the $#!* hit the fan now that Glenn Beck has essentially called Fox, News Corp and Rupert Murdoch Maoists? Beck has lost sponsors, put the network’s revenue in jeopardy and now includes the CEO of the company he works for in his attacks. Genius!

BECK: When you’re watching TV this week, you might notice a common theme on some of your favorite TV shows — service and volunteerism. You might think if you’re an average viewer, “Gee, that’s a coincidence. Look at how much it’s popping up.”

[...]

Well, this is fantastic. It’s almost like we’re living in Mao’s China right now. But Mitch Metcalf, an EIF board member and NBC executive — my God, it can’t be. Come on, Anita, call me. Lookit, Chairman Mao is right there ready to take your phone call. Go ahead. Call me on that one.

Beck may be eating those words. In attacking NBC et al. for being connected to the Entertainment Industry Foundation, he has inadvertently attacked Fox Broadcasting Co., owned by News Corp., who also owns Fox News Channel. They are also participating in EIF’s volunteer initiative. Furthermore, Rupert Murdoch sits on EIF’s “honorary board of governors.” Oops.

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A new page has been added to the Resources section to show other properties owned by Fox News parent company, News Corp.

• Filmed Entertainment
• Television
• Cable Programming
• Direct Broadcast Satellite TV
• Magazines & Inserts
• Newspapers & Information Services
• Books
• Other Assets

Click here to view News Corp Properties

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Fox News parent company News Corp saw a more than 95% drop last fiscal quarter in operating income for television and newspaper segments. Total income fell 47% to $755 million and revenue fell almost 16%. Unfortunately, Fox News Channel almost doubled their income compared to the same quarter the previous year due to increased ad rates, which likely rose because their ratings were up. It is also a sign that the economy may be taking a turn for the better – people are spending more money and companies can spend more to advertise.

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