Sky News, part of Rupert Murdoch's media empire, said on Thursday it had hacked into emails on two occasions but insisted it had acted in the public interest, as the channel's parent company faces an investigation by British regulators. The potentially damaging admission came two days after Murdoch's son James quit as chairman of Sky News's parent BSkyB in an attempt to limit the spread of a phone-hacking scandal that has already forced the closure of one of Murdoch's main British newspapers.
Public uproar compelled Murdoch to shut down the News of the World last year after it was revealed that the tabloid had hacked into voicemails of a murdered teenager, and to call off a bid to buy the 61 percent of BSkyB it did not already own. Whether BSkyB is "fit and proper" to hold a broadcast licence is now being scrutinised by Britain's television regulator, Ofcom, which is considering the conduct of its owners and directors. Sky News said it had authorised a journalist in 2008 to access the emails of people suspected of criminal activity in the so-called "canoe man" case of a Briton who faked his own death after paddling out to sea.
The channel said it had shared the material with police and that it had helped secure the conviction of the man's wife, who had been living with her husband for part of the time in Panama, and was sentenced to six years in jail. In the second hacking episode, a journalist 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.
"We stand by these actions as editorially justified and in the public interest," the head of Sky News, John Ryley, said in a statement. Email hacking is a criminal offence under Britain's Computer Misuse act, for which there is no public-interest defence. But public prosecutors do act as a filter by questioning whether a prosecution itself would be in the public interest. "So although there isn't a public interest defence, in practical terms there is," said Jonathan Coad, a London-based media partner at law firm Lewis Silkin.
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