UK satellite broadcaster BSkyB is “fit and proper” to hold a broadcasting licence but its former chairman James Murdoch was spared no criticism after local regulator Ofcom slammed his handling of the phone hacking scandal.
While Ofcom said there was…
UK satellite broadcaster BSkyB is “fit and proper” to hold a broadcasting licence but its former chairman James Murdoch was spared no criticism after local regulator Ofcom slammed his handling of the phone hacking scandal.
While Ofcom said there was no evidence that Murdoch knew of wrongdoing at the News of the World newspaper, or that he was complicit in a cover-up, it hit out at his failure to uncover the problems earlier.
It said: “We consider James Murdoch’s conduct, including his failure to initiate action on his own account on a number of occasions, to be both difficult to comprehend and ill-judged.”
Ofcom carried out a review of BSkyB after James Murdoch and News Corporation, which owns 39% of its shares, were engulfed in the phone hacking scandal that led to the closure of News Corp’s News of the World. Ofcom found no evidence that BSkyB was directly or indirectly involved in any of the wrongdoing either admitted or alleged.
James Murdoch – son of media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who controls News Corp – has since resigned as chairman at BSkyB in a bid to distance the broadcaster from the scandal, claiming he had become a “lightning rod” for bad publicity. He remains a non-executive director of BSkyB and an executive director at News Corp.
He apologised for his conduct in a letter to the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee in March, when he said he should have “asked more questions, requested more documents and taken a more challenging and sceptical view of what I was told”.
Murdoch had no involvement with News International until the end of 2007, which was almost a year after the sentencing of the News of the World’s royal editor Clive Goodman and private investigator Glenn Mulcaire for phone hacking. But after he took over as CEO, he received an email suggesting that criminal activities were more widespread, although he claimed he failed to read the correspondence fully.
Ofcom added: “We consider that the events set out above raise questions regarding James Murdoch’s competence in the handling of these matters and his attitude towards the possibility of wrongdoing in the companies for which he was responsible.”
The regulator’s ruling lifts a cloud from BSkyB, which welcomed the decision and said the regulator was right to conclude that it was a fit and proper broadcaster. It said in a statement: “As a company, we are committed to high standards of governance and we take our regulatory obligations extremely seriously. As Ofcom acknowledges, our track record of compliance in broadcasting is good.”
