“He got it entirely wrong.” That is Rupert Murdoch’s response to Gordon
Brown’s singular account of his relationship with the Murdoch press. “The Browns were always
friends of ours,” Murdoch added in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, in which he promised
to set the record straight on the “lies uttered in parliament” when he appears before a select committee next Tuesday. It is going to be a moment of the most gripping political theatre.
Murdoch also uses the interview to defend News Corp’s handling of the phone hacking crisis. He concedes that ‘minor mistakes’ have been made, but, fundamentally, all is well with the Kingdom. However, he still feels the need to conduct an independent inquiry into each and every of the allegations, which seems to imply the opposite.
Murdoch is contrite, albeit in a forthright manner. “When I hear something going wrong, I insist on it being put right,” he says. But there is a clear note of bloody-minded defiance amid his anguish. “I’m just getting annoyed. I’ll get over it. I’m tired.”
Life is going to get much more tiring for Murdoch now that the FBI will investigate News Corp’s activities in America, specifically the allegation that the victims of 9/11 and their relatives were hacked. The reverence due to those who died on 11 September 2001 in America is such that, were the allegations proved to be true, it has the potential to break Murdoch’s already shaken media empire, rocked as it is by a battle over corporate governance. Shares in News Corp are likely to fall as the FBI proceeds. A spokesman for the agency spoke to the Today programme earlier this morning and vowed to go “as far up the ladder as is necessary”.
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