Second Scotland Yard Official Quits

Today a second official of Scotland Yard — London’s Metropolitan Police — has resigned in the wake of a broadening scandal involving phone hacking and collusion between police, politicians and tabloid journalists. Yesterday Sir Paul Stephenson, head of Scotland Yard, stepped down just hours after former News Intl. exec Rebekah Brooks was arrested. Today, John Yates, the number two person in the department and the head of counter-terrorism, offered his resignation.

These resignations involve how a former editor of the embattled News of the World tabloid, which closed last week, was hired by the Metropolitan Police as a communications consultant. Scotland Yard is also accused of sitting on 11,000 pages of evidence for several years that — since it was opened up recently — has resulted in 10 arrests of News Intl. journalists and the resignations of three of Murdoch’s top executives. The scandal is growing closer to Prime Minister David Cameron. One of Cameron’s former aides, also a former News of the World editor, was arrested a week ago as well, bringing the scandal up to the top level of British government. –efc

Here is today’s article from The Wall Street Journal — one of Rupert Murdoch’s papers. Les Hinton, head of Dow Jones (which publishes The Wall Street Journal), resigned Friday, likely in an effort to prevent that newspaper from being tainted by the scandal in the event of Hinton’s arrest.

If you’re trying to map out who is who and what is what, here is a graphic from The New York Times that lists the key players and their roles.

You can read my coverage by emailing pholus@planetwaves.net. You’ll receive an autoreply with a link to the article.

4 thoughts on “Second Scotland Yard Official Quits”

  2. Fully expect that diagram to grow as the story moves. After reading the NYT excerpt, you can’t be surprised about Murdoch’s business model: it’s a shark that consumes other entities and making them their product model. This increases revenue for their sale of lies, gossip and innuendo.

    They need that ad revenue to pay off whoever they need to keep the Lie Industrial Plant open. This is one of the reasons Glenn Beck had to leave, no longer a profit center, thanks to Color of Change’s campaign to de-sponsor Beck’s show.

    There has to be a greater force of that kind on financial takedown, so as to take down the core of that poison tree.

  3. that graphic at the Times site is brilliant. i noticed they didn’t mention prince william’s knee injury, just his message to harry about a strip club. 🙂 the ny times knows sex sells just as well as any other paper, i guess.

  4. from today’s New York Times

    Time and again in the United States and elsewhere, Mr. Murdoch’s News Corporation has used blunt force spending to skate past judgment, agreeing to payments to settle legal cases and, undoubtedly more important, silence its critics. In the case of News America Marketing, its obscure but profitable in-store and newspaper insert marketing business, the News Corporation has paid out about $655 million to make embarrassing charges of corporate espionage and anticompetitive behavior go away.

    That kind of strategy provides a useful window into the larger corporate culture at a company that is now engulfed by a wildfire burning out of control in London, sparked by the hacking of a murdered young girl’s phone and fed by a steady stream of revelations about seedy, unethical and sometimes criminal behavior at the company’s newspapers.

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