LONDON (MCT) — Britain’s bestselling tabloid launched a blistering attack on the police Monday for arresting five of its journalists over the weekend in an investigation into media corruption and unethical practices in the wake of the country’s phone-hacking scandal.
Scotland Yard is treating reporters at Rupert Murdoch’s The Sun “like members of an organized crime gang,” complained Trevor Kavanagh, the paper’s associate editor. He lashed out at what he called a police “witch hunt,” warned that Britain was falling behind former Soviet bloc countries in terms of press freedom and criticized police raids on journalists’ homes during which officers sifted through “intimate possessions, love letters and entirely private documents.”
His broadside came as Murdoch, whose media empire has been badly tarnished by the hacking scandal, is expected back in London this week to visit his British holdings. He has reportedly given his full assurance that The Sun, with its famous photos of topless women, will not suffer the same fate as The News of the World, which was summarily shut down last July at the height of public outrage over the hacking debacle.
