Rupert Murdoch's journalists were trying to bribe police officers as long as 30 years ago, a reporter at the now defunct News of The Worldyesterday told the Leveson inquiry into the culture, practice and ethics of the press in Britain.
Jeff Edwards, now the president of the crime reporters association but then a reporter on the News of the World, said an editor at the newspaper asked him to pay a police office for information for publication.
“I thought it was indicative of the culture of that particular organisation at that point in time,” Edwards told the inquiry, led by Judge Brian Leveson. “There was an element in there that had a tendency toward questionable, unethical behavior that manifested itself in a variety of ways.”
A commissioner at Scotland Yard, headquarters of the London Metropolitan police has already told the inquiry that a culture of bribing public officials existed within the Murdoch organisation.
Meanwhile, Former News International executive chairman James Murdoch told MPs in a letter released yesterday that he accepted his share of the blame for not uncovering phone hacking at the News of the World sooner. But he denied he had misled Parliament. – (Bloomberg/PA)