MURDOCH AND CO. FACE NEW SCANDALS

While it is unlikely that any coordinated planning was involved, several news outlets yesterday and today (Tuesday) rolled out investigative projects targeting Rupert Murdoch and News Corp, — among them Britain’s BBC, the London Independent, and America’s PBS. The BBC report claimed that the News Corp software company NDS cracked the access codes used by ONdigital, the now-defunct satellite broadcaster owned by the then-ITV companies Granada and Carlton, for its settop receivers and then secretly funneled them to a website called The House of Ill Compute (THOIC). Lee Gibling, the then-operator of THOIC, told the BBC program Panorama that he was paid up to nearly $100,000 a year by Ray Adams, NDS’s head of security. The Independent tells a remarkably similar story about how NDS allegedly brought down rivals to Murdoch’s Sky Italia satellite broadcasting company via smart-card hacking. Meanwhile PBS’s Frontline tonight is launching a series titled “Murdoch’s Scandal,” which deals with the investigation into alleged voicemail hacking and bribery of police and other public officials by reporters for News Corp-owned newspapers in the U.K. Both News Corp and NDS, which was acquired by Cisco Systems earlier this month for $5 billion, have denied the allegations, insisting that they are at the forefront of the anti-piracy battle.