It’s getting worse and worse for the international media maven and politically powerful Rupert Murdoch: a newspaper claims the News of the World wanted to hack into the cell phones of 911 victims:
A New York police officer has claimed besieged British tabloid the News of the World attempted to hack into the voicemails of victims of the 9/11 terror attacks, as Rupert Murdoch arrived in London for emergency talks aimed at diffusing the international crisis surrounding his media empire.
Rival red-top newspaper the Mirror reported the officer was contacted by News of the World journalists who said they would pay him to retrieve the private phone records of the dead.
Now working as a private investigator, the ex-officer claimed reporters wanted the victims’ phone numbers and details of the calls they had made and received in the days leading up to the atrocity.
The voicemails would likely include harrowing messages from desperate loved ones trying to make contact with their relatives caught up in the 2001 terror strikes on the World Trade Center, in which thousands perished.
A source told the newspaper: “This investigator is used by a lot of journalists in America and he recently told me that he was asked to hack into the 9/11 victims’ private phone data. He said that the journalists asked him to access records showing the calls that had been made to and from the mobile phones belonging to the victims and their relatives.
“His presumption was that they wanted the information so they could hack into the relevant voicemails, just like it has been shown they have done in the UK. The PI said he had to turn the job down. He knew how insensitive such research would be, and how bad it would look…”
When a story this breaks all kinds of new details come out. Murdoch will not lose his empire but he may find some of his seemingly ever-growing power is curtailed in expanding it.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.