News Corp. Subsidiary Under Fire For Hacking Dead Girl's Voicemail

Hugh Pickens writes "Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. came under pressure from UK Prime Minister David Cameron to respond to 'really appalling' allegations that its News of the World tabloid hacked into the voicemail of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler. The tabloid printed a story based on a voicemail left on Dowler's mobile phone on April 14, 2002, when she had been missing from her home in Surrey, southwest of London, for more than three weeks. According to a Guardian newspaper report, a private detective working for the tabloid gained access to Milly Dowler's phone messages after she was abducted in March 2002 and the detective, Glenn Mulcaire, is alleged to have deleted voicemail messages on Dowler's phone, giving her parents 'false hope' she might still be alive and thereby complicating the police investigation. According to one source, when her friends and family discovered that her voicemail had been cleared, they concluded that this must have been done by Dowler herself and, therefore, that she must still be alive."

Comments

Re:Newscorp isn't in the business of news

[Artifakt]

In 2002, Columbia School of Journalism studied how various news sources handled titles and signifiers. For example, if somebody was described as a retired Major, Columbia checked to see if both they were commissioned and made rank, and if they had enough time in to count as retired. If somebody was described as a psychiatrist, did they really have the full MD related degree, or were they maybe a psychologist instead. Sources that got titles and related right got higher scores. For this study, Columbia ignored everything else, just this one measure of accuracy, one that has few or no subjective components. NPR and the BBC both did pretty well, about 4.0 on a 1 to 5 scale. Incidentally, PRI did a bit worse than NPR, at about 3.2, which also put it about on par with the Christian Science Monitor. MSNBC, CBS News, the New York Times, and such all fell about in the middle of the pack - with the Times doing a little better than the Washington Post, but all scoring pretty close to 2.5. Fox and Al-Jazeera tied for last place at 1.2.
      There've been other studies, from Columbia on other subjects, one from MIT on information science related reporting, one from somebody I don't recall offhand on whether the news source attributes famous quotations correctly, and various other types, and Fox invariably does no better than average, usually much worse. The titles study stuck in memory because once the study's authors decided how to count a few things (i.e. Is calling the assistant dean of women's studies at Stanford just "Dean So and So" in the scrolling bit at the bottom a hit or a miss?), there wasn't a lot of room for errors and political biases.