Chase Carey May Replace Murdoch as News Corp CEO [REPORT]

by Jolie O'Dell

Current News Corp. COO Chase Carey may be the company’s next CEO, following the long reign of media mogul and News Corp. founder, chairman, and current CEO Rupert Murdoch.

Both the titan himself and the media company have been somewhat beleaguered of late, surrounded by scandal and failure on all sides. Sources of Bloomberg said whether Murdoch stays or goes may depend on his performance in an upcoming hearing.

News Corp. independent directors named Carey as a possible new CEO in meetings yesterday but did not come to a final decision, according to Bloomberg.

News Corp. is the parent company of News of the World, which itself has been the center of a scandal involvingphone hacks and one dead whistleblower. Both Murdoch and his son have been asked to give testimony about the matter to a British parliamentary committee next week.

In the meantime, the incident has triggered a string of attacks on related websites, including a false report of Murdoch’s death.

And then there’s MySpace, the company’s flagship digital property, which had to be sold last month at a loss of hundreds of millions of dollars. It’s unknown whether MySpace’s failure is tied to the rumors of Murdoch’s replacement, but it’s most certainly related to the slump in News Corp.’s stock prices.

Murdoch’s Sun Newspaper Hacked by LulzSec

 by Chris Taylor

Hacker group LulzSec, which previously announced it was disbanding, has evidently decided to come out of retirement.

The site managed to redirect the homepage of what is now News International’s best-selling newspaper, The Sun — sister paper to theNews of the World — to the LulzSec Twitter account.

Minutes earlier, the hacker group reportedly managed to redirect the Sun’s homepage to a fake news story on the sudden death of Rupert Murdoch. That hack was widely reported, though few sources save the UK-based Guardian actually saw the hack with their own eyes.

The hacks apparently began taking place as news was breaking about the ongoing News of the Worldwhistleblower scandal. Former NOTW reporter Sean Hoare had exposed the publication’s hacking of source’s phones to The New York Times, the BBC, and international audiences last fall and again last week. Today, it was revealed that Hoare had been found dead. The LulzSec attack, although not explicitly stated as such on the LulzSec Twitter account, would ostensibly a retaliation for any possible involvement on Murdoch’s part.

The Sun, a tabloid with more than 3 million readers, was launched in the late 1960s and quickly became infamous for its scantily-clad “Page 3″ girls. It was credited with swinging the UK’s 1992 election to the Conservative party — which it bragged about in the front page headline “It’s The Sun Wot Won It.” Five years later, it backed Labor leader Tony Blair, who won in a landslide.

LulzSec has previously hacked the websites of the CIA, the U.S. Senate, Sony Entertainment and several others. The hacker collective also seems to have brought down the official website of News International.