Yes, it can get worse.
Journalists from across News International repeatedly targeted the former prime minister Gordon Brown, attempting to access his voicemail and obtaining information from his bank account, his legal file as well as his family’s medical records.
There is also evidence that a private investigator used a serving police officer to trawl the police national computer for information about him.
The comparison to Watergate just got a little stronger.
Alyssa Rosenberg reports that the growing scandal is also causing recursions.
According to Bloomberg’s Lizzy O’Leary, the Murdochs have withdrawn their bid to take over the BSkyB network. That seems prudent. I doubt that as the phone hacking scandal spread, the bid would have been approved in any case. And the extent to which that practice was used raised critical questions about the wisdom of company leaders and internal decision-making standards. I don’t know what it’ll take for the Murdochs to clean house after this disaster of judgment, but it’ll be intriguing to see if reevaluations of the company’s news-gathering practices end up impacting the Murdoch family’s holdings on this side of the Atlantic.
