News Corp.

Former News International executive Rebekah Brooks and her racehorse trainer husband Charlie were arrested Tuesday in dawn raids that also netted four other suspects in the spreading phone hacking scandal.

In the midst of a scandal that reaches new lows every day, Rupert Murdoch’s reactions have ranged from the canny and shrewd to the absurd. Given his tight control over News Corp., don’t expect any changes soon.

News Corp. said today that James, the youngest son of 80-year-old media mogul Rupert Murdoch, has relinquished his position at News International to concentrate on expanding the company’s television business. The 39-year-old James will still remain deputy chief operating officer of News Corp. but the move plucks the one-time heir apparent to his father’s global empire away from a firestorm over his credibility and his role in Britain’s expanding phone-hacking scandal.

“Ratings today are a bit disappointing,” and the show needs “freshness and excitement and originality,” Chase Carey today told an investor conference that also questioned him about a potential spin-off of the conglomerate’s newspaper business, the L.A. Dodgers and the phone hacking scandal.

Rupert Murdoch will address hostile journalists at his Sun and Times newspapers on Friday, many of them fearful after the recent arrests of senior staff over apparent widespread criminality at the British titles.

News Corp. is dealing with the fallout of the British tabloid phone-hacking scandal. The company’s global affairs will be led by Michael Regan, executive vice president for government affairs and head of its Washington operations.

Last week’s eight arrests in England sharply increase the danger to News Corp. of potential multimillion dollar fines by U.S. authorities as part of the continuing investigation into alleged bribery of public officials under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA). The threat of prosecution under the FCPA constitutes the greatest danger of the phone-hacking scandal for Rupert Murdoch’s media empire. It could expose the company to tens of millions of dollars in fines and the risk of imprisonment of its executive officers.

What happened on the fateful night last May when Rupert Murdoch decided how News Corp. would manage its phone-hacking scandal?

Executives from News Corp., NBCUniversal, the Walt Disney Co. and the National Association of Broadcasters met with officials at the FCC on Monday to express their displeasure at proposed public interest rules that would force TV networks to share details online about political advertising, including the rates that political campaigns pay for ad time.

That includes both the Fox network and TV stations. The gains were driven by network ad revenue and a greater than 100% increase in retransmission consent revenues.

U.S. authorities are stepping up investigations, including an FBI criminal inquiry, into possible violations by employees of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire of a U.S. law banning corrupt payments to foreign officials such as police, law enforcement and corporate sources say.

Don’t tell Wells Fargo Securities’ Marci Ryvicker that Big Media are washed up as infotainment power shifts to tech giants such as Google and Apple. The long-time analyst of broadcasting and pay TV companies says that CBS, News Corp., and Time Warner are likely to outperform the overall market while Disney and Viacom keep pace.

News Corp. will lose its head of communications next month, the company said Monday, as Teri Everett becomes the latest senior executive to depart the media conglomerate on Feb. 11.

The criminal investigation into British tabloid skullduggery turned full force on a second Rupert Murdoch publication Saturday, with the arrest of four current and former journalists from The Sun on suspicion of bribing police. A serving police officer was also held.

Jon Miller, the chief digital officer for News Corp., described his company’s digital strategy today as very “focused on video,” with a view that even properties that come from a print tradition should be producing more video content than they are today.

Amid the scandal at the company’s British newspaper unit, Chase Carey, News Corp.’s president, has increased his influence, presenting a steady and less polarizing figure. Some regard him as the emerging face of the company.

Rupert Murdoch’s British newspaper company on Thursday agreed to pay damages to 36 high-profile victims of tabloid phone-hacking.

News Corp.’s Fox unit on Tuesday signed a nondisclosure agreement with bankers handling the sale of the storied baseball franchise, the Wall Street Journal reports today, citing people with knowledge of the process. The move formally makes News Corp. a potential bidder for the Los Angeles team, and it is the latest indication that the company, which owned the Dodgers from 1998 to 2004, plans to do whatever it can to hang onto the team’s valuable media rights. Journal subscribers can read the full story here.

Fox Broadcasting Co., Fox News Channel, IGN Entertainment and the Wall Street Journal will launch apps for Xbox this year.

News Corp. is expected to name veteran Washington attorney Gerson Zweifach as its next general counsel, filling what is likely to be a sensitive role as the media conglomerate deals with the fallout of the phone-hacking scandal that erupted this summer.

In an eagerly awaited appearance before the U.K.’s media ethics committee, Piers Morgan, who replaced Larry King on CNN, was visibly tense, sometimes hostile and often rejected characterizations of his actions made by inquiry lawyers as “nonsense.”

LONDON (AP) — CNN star interviewer Piers Morgan will talk about his former job as editor of one of Britain’s troubled tabloids at a judge-led inquiry into the practices of Britain’s scandal-tarred press. Morgan will give evidence via videolink Tuesday to the Leveson inquiry in London. The inquiry was set up following the disclosure that […]

British police on Wednesday made their 18th arrest in connection with the phone hacking scandal that has rocked Rupert Murdoch’s media business.

You wouldn’t know that the Hulu auction was a failure based on the way News Corp COO Chase Carey describes the owners’ plans. They decided to hang on to the digital video service because its value to them “dwarfed some of the values that were being put on it” by bidders including Dish Network and Google.

James Murdoch has resigned as director of News Group Newspapers Ltd. — publisher of The Sun — and Times Newspapers Ltd. — publisher of The Times and Sunday Times.

Lawyers for Scotland Yard and News Corp. disputed the suggestion that at least 28 employees of News Corp.’s U.K. newspaper unit as people who may have requested illegal voice-mail intercepts.

Called back to Britain’s Parliament after former News Corp. employees challenged his credibility, senior executive James Murdoch insisted he’d been kept in the dark about widespread phone hacking at his now-defunct News of the World tabloid, blaming two of his senior lieutenants for failing to warn him of the paper’s culture of criminality.

Evidence has mounted that top News International executives knew phone hacking was pervasive, casting doubts on James Murdoch’s previous testimony.

Jamie Pyatt, an award-winning editor at Rupert Murdoch’s The Sun, has been arrested on suspicion of police corruption. An ethics scandal at the Sun could mean further legal and financial problems for Murdoch’s global media empire, which has already had to write off $91 million in restructuring costs linked to the closure of its now-defunct News of the World tabloid.

The increase is attributed to stronger ad sales and a “greater than two-fold increase in retransmission consent revenues.”

New documents show Rupert’s former heir apparent had been told of the gravity of the phone-hacking scandal. Staying alive at News Corp. will require a Houdini trick.

The two sides are at odds over a new distribution agreement that would keep News Corp.-owned cable channels including FX on DirecTV. If an agreement is not reached by Nov. 1, DirecTV has said it will stop carrying the channels. In a letter to the FCC, DirecTV took issue with some of the advertisements News Corp.’s Fox has run to alert people to the dispute. Specifically, DirecTV accused the company of misleading consumers.

The results released Monday from the News Corp. annual meeting last week suggest that most shareholders not affiliated with the family are opposed to one of Murdoch’s children taking control of the media conglomerate when its 80-year-old leader steps down.