• James Murdoch out as News International chairman

    David Moir / Reuters

    James Murdoch, pictured above, has stepped down as the executive chairman of News Corp.'s publishing arm.

    By Msnbc.com staff and wire

    Under increasing pressure from a phone-hacking scandal, James Murdoch has resigned as executive chairman of News International, the company's parent, News Corporation, announced Wednesday.

    “We are all grateful for James' leadership at News International and across Europe and Asia, where he has made lasting contributions to the group's strategy in paid digital content and its efforts to improve and enhance governance programs,” said Rupert Murdoch, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, News Corporation, in a statement.

    James Murdoch will focus on the company's international TV business, his father said. Tom Mockridge, Chief Executive Officer of News International, will retain his job and report to News Corp. President and COO Chase Carey.

    James Murdoch, Rupert's youngest son, was once seen as heir apparent for News Corp's top job. He has been under pressure in Britain since last summer following the phone-hacking scandal that erupted at the unit which he oversaw.

    His resignation comes after a new spate of embarrassing revelations in London at the judge-led Leveson Inquiry into press standards, which was ordered by British Prime Minister David Cameron in the wake of the phone-hacking scandal.

    A police officer heading three criminal inquiries into reporting practices at News International testified on Monday that there was a "culture of illegal payments" to corrupt public officials at the company's flagship Sun newspaper.

    The Inquiry also brought to light an email from a top in-house lawyer at News International that showed senior managers had been told as far back as 2006 that illegal phone-hacking was not confined to one "rogue reporter", as the company maintained for years afterwards, but was likely to have been far more widespread, as later proved to be the case.

    Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

  • Emails warned James Murdoch of phone hacking by tabloid

    By msnbc.com staff and news services

    LONDON - A British parliamentary committee on Tuesday published a sequence of emails which raised questions about the story News Corp's James Murdoch told to legislators about what he knew about phone hacking allegations involving the now-defunct News of the World and when he knew it.

    In the email sequence, dated Saturday, June 7, 2008, James Murdoch was advised by Colin Myler, then News of the World editor, that the paper's legal position regarding a legal threat from professional soccer union executive Gordon Taylor was "as bad as we feared."

    Attached to this message was an email exchange between Myler and Tom Crone, the News of the World's principal in-house lawyer, in which Crone mentioned a "nightmare scenario."

    The Independent newspaper on Wednesday published the email exchange between James Murdoch and Colin Myler, as well as the email exchange between Tom Crone and Colin Myler.

    Crone explained that this scenario related to the fact that "several voicemails" on an email addressed to News of the World reporter Ross Hindley were "taken from" a phone used by Joanne Armstrong, a lawyer for the Professional Footballers Association union, which Taylor led.

    The Guardian newspaper reported Tuesday that James Murdoch had written to British members of parliament, saying he had received the email chain over a weekend which was partly why he "did not review the full email chain at the time or afterwards."

    The email sent to Hindley, which, in a reference to the News of the World's chief reporter, was headed "For Neville", is regarded by investigators and lawyers as one of the first pieces of evidence to reach the public domain demonstrating that phone hacking was a practice which extended beyond a single "rogue" journalist.

    'Slipshod manager'
    Executives of News International, the British newspaper publisher headed by James Murdoch at the time of the email exchange, initially claimed in public statements and testimony to parliament that phone hacking was limited to Clive Goodman, a News of the World journalist who was jailed in 2007 for hacking into the voice mails of aides to members of Britain's Royal Family.

    In parliamentary testimony earlier this year, James Murdoch maintained that while he was aware of the existence of some kind of email, he was not informed in 2008 that it constituted possible evidence of widespread phone hacking by News of the World journalists other than Goodman.

    James Murdoch's handling of the phone hacking crisis has raised questions about his status as presumptive heir to his father, News Corp founder and chairman Rupert Murdoch.

    Chris Bryant, a member of parliament for Britain's Labour Party who was a target of phone hacking, told Reuters on Tuesday that at a minimum, the email sequence newly published by the committee "says to me that James Murdoch is a remarkably slipshod manager .... He's been slipshod and News International have been slippery."

    In a letter also made public by the parliamentary committee on Tuesday, James Murdoch told the panel "I was not aware of evidence that either pointed to widespread wrongdoing or indicated that further investigation was necessary." Nonetheless, he said he wished to "apologize" that this material had "only now come to light" in a late stage of the Parliamentary inquiry.

    Tom Watson, another Labour Party member of parliament and a leading member of the Media Select Committee, was skeptical, the Independent reported, saying, "How can the company have just found this important email trail?"

    The Culture, Media and Sport committee is scheduled to publish a report on its phone hacking investigation sometime in the next few months.

    A spokesperson for News International said the company had no comment beyond the statements made by James Murdoch in his latest letter to the Parliamentary committee.

    Reuters contributed to this report.

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