Osborne had 16 meetings with Murdoch execs - Reuters UK

LONDON | Tue Jul 26, 2011 5:51pm BST

LONDON (Reuters) - Chancellor George Osborne has met executives from Rupert Murdoch companies 16 times since the general election in May 2010, according to data published on Tuesday.

The details were published by government departments in response to a phone-hacking scandal at one of Murdoch's newspapers, which turned the spotlight on the close relationship between politicians and media organisations, in particular Murdoch's News Corp.

A list of Osborne's meetings with proprietors, editors and senior media executives since May 2010 shows he met News International chief executive Rebekah Brooks, who resigned this month in the wake of the hacking scandal, five times.

He met Rupert Murdoch twice for "general discussion" and his son James Murdoch four times. Osborne met media executives from other organisations on 38 occasions.

Business Secretary Vince Cable, stripped of power to regulate the media sector for saying he had declared war on Murdoch, records two meetings with News Corp papers: a general discussion with James Harding, editor of The Times, and a business lunch with the Sunday Times.

Jeremy Hunt, the Culture Secretary who took over responsibility for overseeing the proposed takeover of BSkyB by News Corp from Cable, met James Murdoch twice in January to discuss the process around the proposed bid. The bid was scrapped in the wake of the phone-hacking furore.

Prime Minister David Cameron, Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg and Labour leader Ed Miliband have already published details of their meetings.

The scandal at the News of the World newspaper, in which investigators accessed the voicemail messages of celebrities, crime victims and others in the pursuit of scoops, erupted after it emerged an investigator hacked into the phone of a missing schoolgirl to access her messages.

Subsequent revelations about activities at the paper forced Murdoch to close the News of the World and prompted the resignation of the country's two most senior police officers.

Now questions are being asked as to whether the scandal went beyond News Corp papers.

Trinity Mirror, publisher of the Daily Mirror mass-market tabloid, said on Tuesday it had launched a review of its editorial controls and procedures.

A spokesman said one of the purposes of the internal review expected to be completed by mid-September was to make sure that the provenance of any story was understood by senior managers.

Newspaper group Daily Mail & General Trust said it had not published any stories based on hacked messages. Presenting quarterly results, Chief Executive Martin Morgan told journalists on a conference call that the company saw no need for an internal investigation into its newsgathering practices.

(Reporting by Jodie Ginsberg; editing by Robert Woodward)