Conditions et avenir d’une crise

Plus que le “scandale Murdoch”, l’affaire est devenue pour nous la “crise Murdoch”. L’événement est entré dans une phase plus structurée, pour ne pas dire presque institutionnalisée. On a rassemblé ici quelques éléments sur la “crise Murdoch”, dans deux domaines : le passé, avec la description d’un cas particulier d’une action de pression de News International, illustrative des méthodes du groupe, contre un parlementaire britannique à la suite d’un “impair” de celui-ci par rapport aux normes en vigueur avant le scandale devenue crise (une question dérangeante posée à Rebekah Brooks par ce parlementaire inconscient et imprudent, ou courageux, – ce qu’il n’aurait pas dû faire) ; et l’évaluation des conditions qui ont transformé un “scandale” de très low profile en une crise internationale. D’autre part, des indications sur l’avenir de cette crise, avec des déclarations d’un des parlementaires qui mènent les investigations contre Murdoch aux Communes.

• Dans le premier cas, offrant des précisions intéressantes sur les conditions d’intervention du groupe d’une part, sur la façon, dont le “scandale Murdoch”, version très soft, est devenu une crise aux dimensions internationales. Dans le premier cas, on dispose d’une image édifiante sur des comportements qui relèvent sans aucun doute d’une logique criminelle, de type “crime organisé”, prompte à terroriser les gens des milieux concernés, politiques notamment ; dans le second cas, il s’agit du paradoxe de voir comment l’affaire, qui avait été bien contrôlée par le groupe Murdoch avec ses multiples moyens de pression, l’a soudain complètement dépassé et l’a emporté. Le témoin ici est le journaliste Nick Davies, du Guardian, qui a conduit m’enquête depuis 2009. (Nick Davies interviewé sur Democracy Now !, le 21 juillet 2011.)

Democracy Now !: «Well, Nick Davies, many of us here in the United States who watched the hearings this week were really surprised at the extent to which the members of Parliament really were dogged in their questioning and fairly confrontational in their questioning. Could you explain to us the degree of change that’s occurred among these MPs versus how they treated the Murdoch empire in the past?»

Nick Davies : «OK, you look at it this way. For the last two or three years, while we’ve been trying to get this story out, there’s been a maximum of four members of Parliament who were willing to stand up and talk about it. That’s out of a total of about 630.

»Take as an example, there’s a guy called Chris Bryant. He’s been very good on this. Back in March 2003, he was a member of one of those parliamentary select committees. And he had in front of him, as witnesses, Rebekah Brooks, the then-editor of The Sun, previously editor of the News of the World, and her close friend and fellow editor, Andy Couslon, who’s the guy who goes to work for David Cameron. Way back there in March 2003, Chris Bryant asked a brave question. He said to Rebekah, “Have you ever paid the police for information?” And she, not considering the impact of her reply, said, “Yes, we have paid the police in the past.” Now this was dynamite. You’re not supposed to admit to paying bribes to police officers. OK, that was March.

»In December 2003, the Murdoch press exposed Chris Bryant. They accused him of what is in their ghastly moral framework a crime, which was that he was gay. And they published a photograph of him wearing a skimpy pair of underpants. They did that to humiliate that man, that politician, that elected politician, to punish him for daring to ask a difficult question and provoking a difficult answer. And that is a microcosm of why most of the rest of the 630 elected MPs stayed quiet and why the police go quiet and the news organizations go quiet. The Murdoch organization deals in power. And part of that power is about frightening people.» [...]

Democracy Now !: […] «Nick Davies […] did you ever think that the—though you’ve been covering this for quite some time, that your report on the hacking of the murder victim Milly Dowler’s voicemail by the News of the World would shake the Murdoch empire to the extent that it has?»

Nick Davies: «No. So, I’ve been working on this thing for three years, very slowly parceling out the truth. I mean, I think I’ve done 75 stories on it. But the Milly Dowler story was fantastically powerful. I mean, I knew when I filed it that it was the most powerful story we had done so far. But I never foresaw this extraordinary chain reaction of emotion, which just pummeled the entire Murdoch camp. And really very rapidly, within three days, it reached a point where nobody could be seen to be Murdoch’s ally anymore. And that’s a really, really extraordinary thing in this country, because for years the opposite has been the case, that nobody could be seen to be Murdoch’s enemy. It’s kind of like having a bully in the school playground. And once the bully has beaten up a few people, everybody else in the playground recognizes that the bully is there. The bully doesn’t even have to do anything particularly serious. All the other kids tiptoe around. And that means governments and police forces and other newspapers have all been tiptoeing around Murdoch, frightened to say anything against him. And this one story about this 13-year-old girl, at the end of this long sequence of stories, just broke through and changed the whole dynamic.»

• Quel est l’avenir du scandale ? L’un des hommes clef dans la divulgation du scandale, le député travailliste Tom Watson, estime qu’il y de très nombreuses révélations à venir et juge que le scandale, qui est en pleine vitesse de croisière depuis 2009, devrait encore durer au moins trois ans. Bien entendu, ces trois années devraient être complètement différentes des deux précédentes, dans la mesure où entretemps le scandale a pris des dimensions paroxystiques, avec des effets très importants, et que les phases à venir devraient bénéficier de cette exposition très affirmées. C’est UPI, reprenant des informations du Daily Telegraph, qui publie ces informations, le 22 juillet 2011.

«Illegal interception of e-mails could be the next scandal Britain experiences as a result of phone-hacking by a tabloid, Member of Parliament Tom Watson said. Watson, the Labor Party member who helped bring the phone-hacking to light, said he believes the illegal activities were limited to News International newspapers and weren't representative of the industry at large, The Daily Telegraph reported Friday.

»Watson's pursuit of News International, the British unit of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. media empire, for more than two years led to the revelation that the cellphone of slain schoolgirl Milly Dowler was hacked. He said he will try to “force the truth” from News International and predicted the scandal could expand into e-mail hacking, the Telegraph said. “[It] wouldn't surprise me one bit if it is discovered that there are people who know about how to plant Trojans [malicious programs] on hard drives on computers to obtain e-mail information, which in many senses is a far more serious crime,” Watson said.

»Watson said he thinks the scandal could be alive for “at least three more years.” He said the public likely would be shocked by more disclosures of phone-hacking. “I think there are many more clearly criminal invasions of privacy that will come out,” he told the Telegraph.»

Mis en ligne le 23 juillet 2011 à 16H51