One can now officially field a soccer team with arrested current or former News of the World employees who have come under scrutiny in the now-shuttered newspaper’s phone-hacking scandal. Today, former managing editor Stuart Kuttner, who essentially controlled the budgets at the paper during his tenure there from 1987-2009, was picked up on suspicion of conspiracy to intercept communications and corruption allegations, according to a police statement. The move comes as part of two probes into the News Corp-owned paper — dubbed Operation Weeting (focused on the phone-hacking investigation) and Operation Elveden (focused on potential bribery of police officials by News of the World employees). According to the Financial Times, investigators say that Kuttner’s purse-strings extended to Glenn Mulcaire, the private detective who was jailed for phone-hacking in 2007.


This whole story feels like a tornado.
All of a sudden what appears to be a storm that might blow over…becomes a rampaging destructive force moving at extraordinary speed in what seems like seconds.
And, much like a tornado, the aftermath of this scandal has left a pile of destruction with the total impact still unknown while the time consuming search for the dead and missing continues through the rubble…
That’s a very good analogy, Tom, but, if anything, this “rampaging destructive force” is only starting to ramp up. There is also now an investigation running into alleged computer hacking by the News of the World, to say nothing of what might come to light if the police turn their attention to other tabloid newspapers, including those not owned by News International / News Corp, such as the Mirror and Daily Mail.
Can you imagine News Corp. acting as if it was in business to create jobs, innovate, and build shareholder value?
Sadly, that’s probably what they thought they were doing.
They hacked into the phones of the dead, and erased messages from loved ones. These are people who entirely lost their moral compass and they should not have power, not over newspapers, or media, or governments.