Scandal at Murdoch's Scandal Factory

“It was such good fun,” said Paul McMullan. “I mean, how many jobs can you actually have car chases in?” The scene was a public hearing in London on Nov. 29, and McMullan, a former newspaper reporter, was fondly reminiscing about his time, in the mid-’90s and early aughts, working for Rupert Murdoch’s Sunday tabloid, News of the World. Exposing the secret drug usage and sexual dalliances of London’s celebrities, citizens, and politicians was a grueling, if financially rewarding, challenge, McMullan explained. It was a job that required all sorts of derring-do. Nobody, after all, wanted to land with his pants down on the front page of a paper with 5 million weekly readers. So you had to be more cunning than your subjects and more cutthroat than your rivals.

Over the years, McMullan said, he’d chased celebrities in cars, posed as a prostitute, wooed a randy priest, ran in his underwear through a nunnery, bought cocaine, propositioned a lady panhandler, hacked phones, stolen photographs, cultivated a “mole” at a rival paper, paid off tipsters, repurposed topless pictures of women from obscure fashion magazines, been knocked in the head with a piece of concrete, and had his surveillance van set on fire. All told, he had written roughly 300 stories for News of the World. The subject of one of his stories committed suicide. Another overdosed on drugs. But he never lost a single libel suit. He had always been careful to get everything on tape. He credited Murdoch, the chairman and chief executive officer of News Corp., for creating an office environment where expenses were never an issue. “That was the joy of working for Murdoch,” said McMullan. “We had a big, big pot of money.”