In an inadvertent blasphemy this morning, a BBC news anchor described the leadership of the Murdoch empire as “The father, son, and Rebekah Brooks”. The unholy trinity has been broken now it seems.
I am not surprised that Brooks resigned, but I am surprised she went today. This morning the Guardian was forced to apologise for saying that the Sun had gained illegal access to medical records. There was a chance then to make it look as if all the allegations relating to Murdoch’s other UK titles, the Sun, Times, and Sunday Times, were nothing but the personal vitriol of failed PM Gordon Brown, and that therefore the problem was confined to – and died with – the News Of The World.
Today would have been the day to fight back, but instead she surrenders. It leads one to speculate that scapegoating the NOTW is a tactic they know is going to fail, that it will soon become obvious that the rot spreads further through News International.
And into its parent News Corp, owner of Fox and Dow Jones? What we need to know now is whether her journalistic methods were condoned by the father himself – and it’s hard to imagine it being otherwise. Even if he somehow managed to remain carefully uninformed about the details of practices at News International, it beggars belief to think that someone with his experience couldn’t tell.
It will be made out that he was too busy with his American and other enterprises to pay any real attention to his UK holdings. But just as questions of illegal actions by other UK Murdoch titles make it look like Brooks was the rogue element, comparable practices in the US or Australia would make it inescapable that Murdoch himself is the common factor.
We await the conclusions of the FBI with interest.