According to the testimony of former News of the World editor Andy Coulson, he spoke to Rupert Murdoch in 2006 shortly after police have arrest one of its own journalists. Murdoch is the chairman of the tabloid's parent company, News Corp.
In his recollection of the conversation, Coulson revealed that he told Murdoch about the arrest of News of the World reporter Clive Goodman by police for intercepting voicemail messages of the British royal family's employees.
He said during his fifth day of testimony in London, "Rupert Murdoch said something in that conversation that I kept in mind until my resignation. He said that the most valuable thing that a newspaper had is the trust of its readers and that is something that stuck in my mind."
Bloomberg said that Coulson resigned from his post months after Goodman was sentenced in prison for phone hacking charges. Coulson later went on as a media adviser to Prime Minister David Cameron until the phone-hacking scandal at the UK tabloid resurfaced in 2011.
Goodman and Coulson are among the seven people facing criminal charges, including voice-mail interception and bribing public officials while at the UK newspapers of News Corp. News Corp's British unit managed to carry on for five years until Murdoch decided to close shop over the public outrage surrounding the hacked voicemail messages of a murdered 14 year-old girl allegedly done by News of the World journalists.
Coulson also responded to Goodman's claims, who testified earlier in the trial that the former editor had offered him a job right after the latter's imprisonment to keep him quiet about the scale of phone hacking done at the company, Bloomberg said.
"I was concerned for the paper and the company that I had worked for many, many years. I was concerned about the impact for me as the editor but I also concerned for Clive and this meeting was about that," Coulson said.
