ABC.net: 24/02/2012 - Johnathan Holmes
On Friday last week, on opposite sides of the world, two emails were sent from News Corporation bosses to their troops.
The first (by a few hours) was from Kim Williams, the recently-installed CEO of News Ltd, News Corp's Australian arm: more on that in a minute.
The second was from the big kahuna himself, the chairman, Rupert Murdoch, to the staff of The Sun in London.
Murdoch's email came just in time to avert a full-scale mutiny at his favourite newspaper. Ten of The Sun's most senior journalists had been arrested in dawn raids, and their houses searched by teams of rozzers, after their own employers had handed over evidence to the police that they may have been involved in paying public officials. They weren't warned, or confronted, with the evidence against them.
Worse still, in what seemed to many inside and outside The Sun as a betrayal of one of the most fundamental tenets of the profession, their sources' names had been handed over too, and several of them - policemen, a defence official, an army officer - have also been arrested.
By promising to reinstate the arrested journalists until and unless they are proven guilty of breaking the law, Murdoch's email last Friday went a long way to hosing down an incipient revolt. When he announced days later that The Sun on Sunday is to be launched this coming weekend, it seemed to many of his staff at The Sun - who had always felt that they were Murdoch's most favoured sons and daughters - that the old boss was back.
-Presenter of Media Watch
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