Les Hinton

Leslie Frank Hinton (born 19 February 1944) ^[3] is a British-American journalist, writer and business executive whose career with Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation spanned more than fifty years. ^[4] Hinton worked in newspapers, magazines and television as a reporter, editor and executive in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States and became an American citizen in 1986. ^[5] He was appointed CEO of Dow Jones & Company in December 2007, after its acquisition by News Corp. Hinton has variously been described as Murdoch's "hitman"; one of his "most trusted lieutenants"; and an "astute political operator". ^[6] He left the company in 2011. His memoir, The Bootle Boy, was published in the UK in May 2018, and in the US under the title An Untidy Life in October of the same year. ^[7]

Contents

• Early life
• Murdoch and News Corporation
• Phone hacking and British parliamentary hearings
• Personal life
• See also
• References
• External links

Early life

Hinton, the son of a British Army chef and a seamstress, was born in the docklands of Bootle, a working-class area of Lancashire, now Merseyside. He travelled with his family as his father was posted around the world, attending Army schools in Egypt, Ethiopia, Libya, Germany, and Singapore, as well as Liverpool. ^[6] He had little formal education after failing his Eleven-plus, and left his Liverpool school in 1959, aged 15. In the same year, he emigrated to Adelaide, Australia. ^[8]

Murdoch and News Corporation

Except for a few years in London in the 1960s, Hinton spent his entire career with Rupert Murdoch and News Corporation. ^[9] He began work as a copy boy in 1959 at the Adelaide News in South Australia, where 28-year-old Murdoch was managing director. One of his first tasks was to bring Murdoch his lunchtime sandwiches. ^[10] After finishing his training as a journalist, Hinton moved to London, where he worked as a reporter at United Press International, ^[11] and the then-broadsheet newspaper The Sun , before Murdoch acquired it in 1969. As a reporter, Hinton was injured while covering the Northern Ireland conflict ^[12] and in 1976 he was appointed foreign correspondent for the group's newspapers and moved to New York. Hinton later worked as associate editor of the Boston Herald and editor-in-chief of Star .

In 1990, Hinton became president of Murdoch Magazines and then president and chief executive officer of News America Publishing, responsible for the company's US publishing operations. In 1993, he was appointed chairman and CEO of Fox Television Stations.

He returned to London in 1995 as executive chairman of News Corp subsidiary News International, publisher of The Times , The Sunday Times , The Sun , The Times Literary Supplement , The Times Educational Supplement and the now defunct titles Today and The News of the World where he stayed for eleven years.

In 2007, Hinton returned to the United States to become CEO of Dow Jones & Company and publisher of The Wall Street Journal . In 2009, in a speech to the World Association of Newspapers in Hyderabad, Hinton criticized Google and the "false gospel" of the Internet, and called for the newspaper industry to charge for digital content: "Free costs too much. News is a business and we should not be afraid to say it. These digital visionaries...talk about the wonders of the interconnected world, about the democratization of journalism...Well, I think all of us need to beware of geeks bearing gifts." ^[13]

Hinton later admitted in an interview with London's Daily Telegraph that some Journal staff were wary when News Corp bought the newspaper, but said: "If you believed everything you read about the attitude towards us that was alleged to exist, you would have been expected to wear a damn flak-jacket when you came in to the building." ^[14]

In an article for British Journalism Review in 2015, Hinton described Murdoch as: "a driven businessman with heavy boots who has bruised a lot of people in the last half century." ^[15] He went on to say: "As a boss, he can be hands-off or autocratic, charming or irascible, forgiving or fierce, and sometimes just a comprehensive pain."

In May 2018, Hinton's memoir The Bootle Boy: an untidy life in news was published by Scribe in the United Kingdom, Australia and the USA. Although it was described as "an epic story… and a penetrating insight into the mind of Murdoch" that "vividly captures the rise and fall of the press", one British newspaper reported that: "despite the close relationship between the men, Murdoch is not spared: he could be unfair, capricious and exasperating… And Hinton is candid about the brutal firings he himself carried out in the companies he ran in the US". ^[16]

Phone hacking and British parliamentary hearings

On 15 July 2011, Hinton resigned as publisher of The Wall Street Journal ^[17] as a result of the unfolding journalistic ethics scandal at News International – phone hacking – where Hinton had been executive chairman. In his resignation letter to Murdoch, Hinton said that although he was "ignorant of what apparently happened...I feel it is proper for me to resign". ^{[18] [19]} In an interview for Reuters, Peter Burden, author of a 2008 book about The News of the World said: "The person that I think is most of a problem for Murdoch is Les Hinton. He was definitely around when it was going on... and for him to be seen to be mixed up in that whole tacky situation would be very, very damaging indeed." ^[20]

Upon his departure, The Wall Street Journal ran an editorial praising Hinton's contribution to returning the paper to profitability "amid a terrible business climate". ^[21] The New Yorker ran a poem praising Hinton's hair ^[22]

In a climate later described by The Wall Street Journal as "a political frenzy" ^[23] on 1 May 2012, the House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee, chaired by Conservative MP John Whittingdale and including Labour members Tom Watson and Paul Farrelly, published a report in which it accused Hinton and others of misleading it during its enquiries into the phone hacking scandal. It also said that Hinton had been 'complicit in the cover-up' at News International. ^[24] In a 'robust rebuttal letter' ^[25] to the Committee, Hinton denied both allegations, describing them as 'unfair, unfounded and erroneous' and based on 'a selective and misleading analysis of my testimonies'. ^[26]

During a debate on 22 May 2012, the House of Commons refused to endorse the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee's report, and referred the case to its own ethics watchdog, the Standards and Privileges Committee, for further investigation. ^[27]

On 14 September 2016, Parliament's ethics committee, the Committee of Privileges, published its own report ^[28] exonerating Hinton and refuting the original Whittingdale report. The Committee of Privileges stated that the evidence had failed to: "meet the standard of proof" required by Parliament and went on to conclude: "there is no evidence that [Hinton] misled the [Culture, Media and Sport] Committee". In a statement, Hinton described the findings as "too little and too late", saying he had been "vilified". Hinton also said: "Parliament has a back-to-front idea of justice and fairness ... after allowing the sham trial and free-for-all character assassination I experienced in 2012." ^[29]

In an editorial three days later ^[23] The Wall Street Journal said: "Les Hinton must be wondering to which office he should go to get his reputation back. The question was first asked by former Secretary of Labor Ray Donovan after he was acquitted of trumped-up fraud charges in 1987. But it applies to Mr. Hinton, who was CEO of our parent company Dow Jones until he resigned amid questions about his involvement in the phone-hacking scandal that took down Britain's News of the World tabloid in 2011." The newspaper went on to say that the British Parliament's [Culture, Media and Sport] committee's false report about Hinton "should be a warning of the damage that political frenzies can do to the lives and careers of honorable men."

Personal life

Hinton and his long-time partner Katharine Raymond – a former adviser to British Home Secretary David Blunkett and Prime Minister Gordon Brown – married at a private ceremony in London in 2009. The wedding celebration was attended by politicians and journalists including Tessa Jowell, David Blunkett, Margaret McDonagh, Sarah Brown, Kay Burley, and Rebekah Brooks. They live on Manhattan's upper east side. ^{[30] [31] [32] [33] [34] [35] [36]}

See also

• News Corporation
• The Wall Street Journal

Related Research Articles

Keith Rupert Murdoch is an Australian-born American business magnate, media proprietor, and investor. Through his company News Corp, he is the owner of hundreds of local, national, and international publishing outlets around the world, including in the UK, in Australia, in the US, book publisher HarperCollins, and the television broadcasting channels Sky News Australia and Fox News. He was also the owner of Sky, 21st Century Fox, and the now-defunct News of the World. With a net worth of US$21.7 billion as of 2 March 2022, Murdoch is the 31st richest person in the United States and the 71st richest in the world according to Forbes magazine.

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The Wall Street Journal is an American business and economic-focused international daily newspaper based in New York City. The Journal is published six days a week by Dow Jones & Company, a division of News Corp. The newspaper is published in broadsheet format and online. The Journal has been printed continuously since its inception on July 8, 1889, and is regarded as a newspaper of record, particularly in terms of business and financial news. The newspaper has won 39 Pulitzer Prizes, the most recent in 2023.

The News of the World was a weekly national red top tabloid newspaper published every Sunday in the United Kingdom from 1843 to 2011. It was at one time the world's highest-selling English-language newspaper, and at closure still had one of the highest English-language circulations. It was originally established as a broadsheet by John Browne Bell, who identified crime, sensation and vice as the themes that would sell most copies. The Bells sold to Henry Lascelles Carr in 1891; in 1969, it was bought from the Carrs by Rupert Murdoch's media firm News Limited. Reorganised into News International, a subsidiary of News Corporation, the newspaper was transformed into a tabloid in 1984 and became the Sunday sister paper of The Sun.

News Corp UK & Ireland Limited is a British newspaper publisher, and a wholly owned subsidiary of the American mass media conglomerate News Corp. It is the current publisher of The Times, The Sunday Times, and The Sun newspapers; its former publications include the Today, News of the World, and The London Paper newspapers. Until June 2002, it was called News International plc. On 31 May 2011, the company name was changed from News International Limited to NI Group Limited, and on 26 June 2013 to News UK.

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Rebekah Mary Brooks is a British media executive and former journalist and newspaper editor. She has been chief executive officer of News UK since 2015. She was previously CEO of News International from 2009 to 2011 and was the youngest editor of a British national newspaper at News of the World, from 2000 to 2003, and the first female editor of The Sun, from 2003 to 2009. Brooks married actor Ross Kemp in 2002. They divorced in 2009 and she married former racehorse trainer and author Charlie Brooks.

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Nicholas Davies is a British investigative journalist, writer, and documentary maker.

The News International phone hacking scandal was a controversy involving the now-defunct News of the World and other British newspapers owned by Rupert Murdoch. Employees of the newspaper were accused of engaging in phone hacking, police bribery, and exercising improper influence in the pursuit of stories.

The News Corporation scandal involves phone, voicemail, and computer hacking that were allegedly committed over a number of years. The scandal began in the United Kingdom, where the News International phone hacking scandal has to date resulted in the closure of the News of the World newspaper and the resignation of a number of senior members of the Metropolitan Police force.

In mid-2011, out of a series of investigations following up the News of the World royal phone hacking scandal of 2005–2007, a series of related scandals developed surrounding other News Corporation properties—where initially the scandal appeared contained to a single journalist at the News of the World, investigations eventually revealed a much wider pattern of wrongdoing. This led to the closure of the News of the World on 10 July 2011, an apology by Rupert Murdoch in an advertisement in most British national newspapers, and the withdrawing of News Corporation's bid to take over the majority of BSkyB shares it did not own.

William Alan O'Neill (born May 22, 1936) is the Australian-American former media executive who, in a 50-year career, held multiple positions within News Corporation, including two separate terms as head of News International, a Director on the company's main board, and Executive Vice President of News Corporation with global responsibility for human resources.

By 2002, the practice of publications using private investigators to acquire confidential information was widespread in the United Kingdom, with some individuals using illegal methods. Information was allegedly acquired by accessing private voicemail accounts, hacking into computers, making false statements to officials to obtain confidential information, entrapment, blackmail, burglaries, theft of mobile phones and making payments to officials in exchange for confidential information. The kind of information acquired illegally included private communication, physical location of individuals, bank account records, medical records, phone bills, tax files, and organisational strategies.

This is a chronological list of key newspaper articles that made significant new public disclosures about the illegal acquisition of confidential information by news media companies.

The second incarnation of News Corporation, stylized as News Corp, is an American mass media and publishing company headquartered in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. It was formed on June 28, 2013, following a spin-off of the media outlets of the original News Corporation as 21st Century Fox (21CF). Operating across digital real estate information, news media, book publishing, and cable television, News Corp's notable assets include Dow Jones & Company, News UK, News Corp Australia, REA Group, Realtor.com, and book publisher HarperCollins.

References

External links

• Profile at Dow Jones & Company and WSJ CEO Council
• Les Hinton collected news and commentary at The Guardian
• Les Hinton collected news and commentary at The Independent
• Les Hinton collected news and commentary at The New York Times
• Les Hinton tells newspapers – 'Beware geeks bearing gifts', Laura Oliver, Journalism.co.uk, 2 December 2009
• Audit Notes: Les Hinton, Translating Murdoch Jr., UK Tabloid Culture, Ryan Chittum, Columbia Journalism Review , 8 July 2011
• Les Hinton, Resignation letter Les Hinton to The Wall Street Journal staff, 15 July 2011
• Les Hinton, Resignation letter Les Hinton to Rupert Murdoch, 15 July 2011