Scotland Yard detectives were on Friday attempting to track
down a secret recording of Rupert Murdoch admitting to Sun journalists that
payments to public officials were part of "the culture of Fleet
Street".
A police officer connected to the Operation Elveden
investigation into illicit payments from journalists has made a formal request
to Exaro News, the investigations website that broke the story, to hand over
the undercover tape.
DCI Laurence Smith told Exaro News that the police would
seek a production order compelling it to disclose the recording if it did not
do so voluntarily. It is understood the police have also approached Channel 4,
which aired a small part of the recordings.
The development is the clearest indication yet that police
in London are ready to examine Murdoch's private disclosures since the tapes
emerged on Wednesday night. Murdoch is recorded saying the culture of paying
police officers for stories "existed at every newspaper in Fleet Street.
Long since forgotten. But absolutely."
Mark Watts, the editor-in-chief of Exaro News, said he had
not handed any material to Scotland Yard and the force had not made clear
"what they want, or why exactly they want it".
He said: "We are making public everything that we have,
and I cannot see how else we can help. Like everyone else, they just need to
keep logging on to Exaro. One thing is for certain, unlike News International,
we will not – under any circumstances – betray confidential sources."
Although the 82-year-old media mogul did not admit knowing
that any of his employees specifically paid public officials, he was recorded
on two separate occasions describing the practice as part of the culture of
Fleet Street.
On one clip published by Exaro News, an unidentified Sun
journalist asks him: "I'm pretty confident that the working practices that
I've seen here are ones that I've inherited, rather than instigated. Would you
recognise that all this predates many of our involvement here?"
Murdoch replies: "We're talking about payments for news
tips from cops. That's been going on a hundred years, absolutely. You didn't
instigate it." Earlier in the tape, Murdoch tells the Sun journalists:
"I don't know of anybody, or anything, that did anything that wasn't being
done across Fleet Street and wasn't the culture."
News UK, formerly known as News International, has
maintained that Murdoch "never knew of payments made by Sun staff to
police before News Corporation disclosed that to UK authorities". Scotland
Yard, meanwhile, said it would not give a "running commentary" on Operation
Elveden.
The press law campaign group Hacked Off on Friday urged the
Commons culture, media and sport select committee to recall Murdoch, and said
he "may have committed contempt of parliament".
Evan Harris, the associate director of the group, wrote to
the cross-party committee's chairman, John Whittingdale MP, saying: "There
is a strong prima facie case that Mr Murdoch may have committed contempt of
parliament by misleading your committee over his true response to the police
investigations into phone hacking and bribery of public officials.
"As far as the victims of phone hacking are concerned,
the appropriate course of action is for the committee to recall him at the
earliest available opportunity to explain the discrepancies between the expressions
of remorse he made to you and the defiant and unrepentant tone of his private
remarks earlier this year."
The leaked recordings revealed for the first time the level
of bitterness harboured by arrested Sun journalists towards News Corporation's
management and standards committee (MSC), which was tasked with handing over
internal documents to the police. After the first arrests in early 2012, a
source close to the MSC described the operation as "draining the
swamp".
No comments:
Post a Comment