More Brits whining

John Burns has an article in The New York Times about Murdoch:

As Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper empire published full-page ads in every national newspaper in Britain under the words “We are sorry,” the government of Prime Minister David Cameron released information documenting the prime minister’s close ties to Murdoch company executives that continued, even as the phone-hacking scandal grew.
The apology by Murdoch’s News Corporation was a U-turn from his previously defiant handling of the crisis. The banner headline in Saturday’s editions of The Times of London read Day of Atonement, and it was all the more striking for the fact that it ran in the 226-year-old newspaper that is the flagship of the print empire that Murdoch has assembled in Britain over the past forty years.
At the end of a week that rocked the interwoven worlds of the press, politicians and the police in Britain, and spread across the Atlantic with the opening of an FBI investigation into allegations of associated abuses in the United States, penitence was the buzzword far beyond the London headquarters of Murdoch’s British-based newspaper subsidiary, News International.
The crisis seemed far from over for Murdoch, as the scandal that began over illegal phone hacking by one of his newspapers, The News of the World, now defunct, widened to include a second newspaper in his stable, The Sunday Times, officials said.
Nor was the crisis abating for Cameron. As presses rolled Friday night with the Murdoch bid for redemption in the “sorry” ad, and with front-page stories telling of his face-to-face, head-hanging apology to the parents of a murdered girl whose cellphone voice mails were hacked, Cameron’s aides released a diary of his meetings with executives and editors of News International.
The diary shed light on what Cameron acknowledged last week was the “cozy and comfortable” world in which politicians, the press, and the police in Britain have functioned for decades, one he said had to yield to much greater public scrutiny. The diary showed that, since taking office in May of 2010, Cameron has met 26 times with Murdoch executives, including Murdoch himself; his son James, the top official of News International; and Rebekah Brooks, the former chief executive of the British subsidiary and editor of The News of the World, who resigned recently. Her resignation was quickly followed by that of Les Hinton, the News Corporation executive and former chief of News International who had been publisher of The Wall Street Journal, another Murdoch property, since 2007. All four executives are expected to testify before a parliamentary oversight committee.
Most of the meetings cited in the diary took place at the prime minister’s London headquarters at 10 Downing Street, or at Chequers, his official country residence northwest of London. His meetings with the Murdoch officials exceeded all those with other British media representatives put together. Brooks was the only person on the guest list for Chequers who had been invited there twice. Another guest was Andy Coulson, the former News of the World editor who resigned as Cameron’s Downing Street media chief under the pressure of the phone-hacking scandal in January. That visit occurred in March, two months after he resigned.
Downing Street officials noted that Brooks and her husband have a country home near Chequers. As for Coulson, they said, he and his family had been invited for an overnight stay to thank him for his work for the government and the Conservative Party, where he held a similar post before the election. The list did nothing to assuage the questions about Cameron’s judgment in maintaining close ties with executives of a media enterprise that has been under a faltering police investigation for years and has come under intense scrutiny. The ties to Coulson, in particular, have been assailed by the Labour opposition leader, Ed Miliband, but have also spread dismay among Cameron’s Conservatives.
Foreign Minister William Hague defended those ties, telling the BBC that inviting Coulson to Chequers was “a normal, human thing to do” and that it was “not surprising that in a democratic country there is some contact” between political leaders and media officials. “Personally I’m not embarrassed by it in any way,” he said.
Cameron hired Coulson in 2007, shortly after he resigned at The News of the World and against the strong urging of some other Conservatives. His defense has been that Coulson deserved “a second chance”, and he has said that if Coulson’s assurances of guiltlessness in the phone-hacking scandal prove to have been false, he should be prosecuted.
While the police investigation has largely centered on cellphone hacking by journalists at The News of the World, it has now spread to the investigative unit of The Sunday Times, a person familiar with internal News Corporation discussions said. That person, as well as a person with knowledge of the scope of the inquiry, said the investigation would expand to include hacking into email accounts and other online privacy invasions. One target of the investigation is Jonathan Rees, a private detective employed by The News of the World with ties to corrupt police officers and a criminal record. Tom Watson, a Labour member of Parliament who has been briefed on the inquiry, said the police had evidence that Rees was paid by News International and that he had claimed to have met with members of The Sunday Times investigation unit.

Rico says it's all so British and cosy...