Is this the beginning of the end of Rupert Murdoch's media empire?

News International chief Brooks resigns:

Rebekah Brooks, the chief executive officer of News Corp.’s News International UK publishing unit, has stepped down amid a phone-hacking scandal that resulted in the closure of the News of the World tabloid she once edited.

Brooks decided to step down as by staying in her post she was ‘‘detracting attention’’ from the company’s attempts to ‘‘fix the problems of the past,’’ she wrote in a letter to employees today, obtained by Bloomberg News. ....

Rebekah Brooks should still face MPs – David Cameron
Guardian.co.uk, Friday 15 July 2011 10.25 BST

PM welcomes resignation of News International boss but says Brooks must still face select committee over phone hacking....<cont>

James Murdoch is set to be questioned about the large sums he paid out to public figures whose phones were hacked.
[...]
The payments, which made to public relations chief Max Clifford and Gordon Taylor, who runs the Professional Footballers’ Association, were far in excess of subsequent payments to other hacking victims in the past year.

Mr Taylor received a settlement worth £700,000 in legal costs and damages on the condition that he signed a gagging clause to prevent him speaking about the case.

The payment was believed to have included more than £400,000 in damages.

Mr Clifford reportedly accepted £1million in exchange for dropping phone hacking allegations against the News of the World.

In contrast actress Sienna Miller and Andy Gray, the former Sky television football commentator have reportedly received £100,000 and £20,000 respectively in the past few months.

Paul Farrelly, a Labour MP of the committee, said that the MPs would be pressing Mr Murdoch about why such large payments were made in an apparent attempt to buy their silence.

He said: “In Gordon Taylor’s case we concluded that the settlement and confidentiality to the length of the sealing of the files in court left the distinct impression that their silence was bought.”

Mr Murdoch admitted making the payments last week when he closed down the News of the World. He said: “The paper made statements to Parliament without being in the full possession of the facts. This was wrong.

"The company paid out-of-court settlements approved by me. I now know that I did not have a complete picture when I did so. This was wrong and is a matter of serious regret.”
[...]

15 July 2011 Last updated at 11:35 GMT

What next for News Corp?
By Laurence Knight Business reporter, BBC News


Rupert Murdoch Octogenarian Rupert Murdoch is facing the biggest crisis of his business career

The damage to Rupert Murdoch's multi-billion-dollar global media empire, News Corp, has already become much more extensive than most would have imagined only two weeks ago.

The News of the World (NoW) - the UK's most read newspaper - has been shut down, pre-empting a boycott by advertisers and readers.

Under pressure from the entire British political establishment, Mr Murdoch has also dropped plans to buy out the rest of British Sky Broadcasting.

And on Friday he saw Rebekah Brooks resign, the chief executive of his UK newspaper business News International - the very executive who he explicitly wanted to keep in the job.

Now Mr Murdoch's business faces investigations in the UK and potentially the US and Australia, risking further revelations that could harm his reputation.

So where does News Corp go from here? .....<cont>

The NYT alleges that Neil Wallis was ‘reporting back to News International while he was working for the police on the hacking case.’

If that really is true - then the MET has been more than stupid.

...Inside was a treasure-trove of evidence: 11,000 pages of handwritten notes listing nearly 4,000 celebrities, politicians, sports stars, police officials and crime victims whose phones may have been hacked by The News of the World, a now defunct British tabloid newspaper.

Yet from August 2006, when the items were seized, until the autumn of 2010, no one at the Metropolitan Police Service, commonly referred to as Scotland Yard, bothered to sort through all the material and catalog every page, said former and current senior police officials.

During that same time, senior Scotland Yard officials assured Parliament, judges, lawyers, potential hacking victims, the news media and the public that there was no evidence of widespread hacking by the tabloid. They steadfastly maintained that their original inquiry, which led to the conviction of one reporter and one private investigator, had put an end to what they called an isolated incident. .....

Rupert Murdoch's empire must be dismantled – Ed Miliband

Labour leader urges for new media ownership rules saying News Corporation chief has too much power in the UK

Ed Miliband has demanded the breakup of Rupert Murdoch's UK media empire in a dramatic intervention in the row over phone hacking.

In an exclusive interview with the Observer, the Labour leader calls for cross-party agreement on new media ownership laws that would cut Murdoch's current market share, arguing that he has "too much power over British public life". ...<cont>

News Limited, the birthplace of Murdoch's global empire, in 2006 controlled 68 percent of the Australian metropolitan and regional newspaper market, according to the Press Council.

As well as owning eight of Australia's 12 metropolitan daily newspapers, Murdoch has extensive Internet assets, a stake in broadcasters Sky News and Fox Sports, and is angling to run the international Australia Network TV channel.

I never realised how much power he had in Oz.

Ed was talking about his UK assets, there's very little we can do about the rest of the world.

It keeps coming back to Milly Dowler though, that was what caused public revulsion and made the government take steps. All the other stuff had been known about, but it didn't really make people angry.