Breaking from Reuters:
Sky News, part of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp media empire, admitted on Thursday it had hacked into emails on two occasions but said the actions had been editorially justified and were in the public interest.
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Sky News, BSkyB'S news channel, said that on one occasion it authorized a journalist to access the emails of people suspected of criminal activity in the so-called "canoe man" case of a man who faked his own death by paddling out to sea.
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Sky did not say what the second hacking episode was, but media reports said the said journalist accessed the email accounts of a suspected pedophile and his wife in an investigation that did not lead to any material being published or broadcast.
http://www.reuters.com/...
This might explain the timing of James Murdoch's resignation as chairman of BskyB yesterday. Since the scandal broke, I think this is the first time we've heard that a TV arm of the tentacular Murdochtopus was engaged in hacking. It leads one to wonder what Roger Ailes was/is doing at Fox News in the United States.
A bit more detail from The Guardian:
Gerard Tubb, the broadcaster's northern England correspondent, accessed emails belonging to John Darwin, the "canoe man" accused of faking his own death, when his wife, Anne, was due to stand trial for deception in July 2008. The reporter built up a database of emails that he believed would help defeat Anne Darwin's defence; her husband had pleaded guilty to seven charges of deception before her trial.
The same reporter accessed the email accounts of a suspected paedophile and his wife in an investigation that did not lead to any material being published or broadcast, according to a statement sent to the Guardian by Sky, which is part-owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation.
Both instances of hacking were approved by Simon Cole, the managing editor of Sky News.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/...