+ - News Corp Under Fire for Hacking Dead Girl's Phone 1
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Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes "Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. came under pressure from UK Prime Minister David Cameron to respond to "really appalling" allegations that its News of the World tabloid hacked into the voicemail of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler and printed a story based on a voicemail left on Dowler's mobile phone on April 14, 2002, when she had been missing from her home in Surrey, southwest of London, for more than three weeks. According to a Guardian newspaper report, a private detective working for the tabloid gained access to Milly Dowler's phone messages after she was abducted in March 2002 and the detective, Glenn Mulcaire, is alleged to have deleted voicemail messages on Dowler's phone, giving her parents "false hope" she might still be alive and thereby complicating the police investigation. According to one source, when her friends and family discovered that her voicemail had been cleared, they concluded that this must have been done by Dowler herself and, therefore, that she must still be alive. "Doing something illegal, the phone hacking in the first place, was bad enough," says Charlie Beckett, director of the media institute Polis at the London School of Economics. "But if you're doing it and then interfering with the course of justice, that's a double crime." Labour's Chris Bryant says the News of the World was "not just a paper out of control, that's not just a paper believing it's above the law, it's a national newspaper playing God with a family's emotions.""
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News Corp Under Fire for Hacking Dead Girl's Phone