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 For decades Rupert Murdoch held an iron grip on British journalism and politics. But in five years, the phone hacking scandal at the News of the World has brought the media mogul's UK empire to its knees.In The Dogs of Wapping REBECCA shows that the dark arts practiced by Murdoch journalists goes back a long way. When Piers Morgan was editor of the News of the World back in the 1990s, the paper got access to a highly confidential Scotland Yard investigation report about anonymous calls made by Princess Diana. It was a story that Rupert Murdoch, who took a close interest in what was happening at one of his most profitable papers, became personally involved in. Then there are the new revelations in The No 1 Corrupt Detective Agency. This long investigation reveals that a staggering amount of confidential police information was being peddled through the agency, Southern Investigations, to tabloids like the News of the World and the Sunday Mirror. Now there are allegations that the News of the World became involved in attempts to derail a murder investigation into the convicted criminal who ran the detective agency.  The REBECCA investigation The Case of the Flawed Tribunal questions some of the key conclusions of one the largest judicial inquiries into child abuse Britain has ever seen. In
the mid 1990s North Wales was swamped by a tide of rumour about child
abuse. There was talk of a child abuse ring protected by police and
freemasons. Fourteen
million pounds and five years later the North Wales Child Abuse
Tribunal concluded that there was no ring, there was no masonic
involvement and the police had done everything they should have done.  But
REBECCA reveals that a key witness wasn't heard. He claims that he went
to the police more than ten years before the main police investigation
began.And journalists who wanted to broadcast what he had to say were threatened with contempt proceedings. That interview finally sees the light of day in the documentary A Touch of Frost. The programme is based on the Silent Witness article. In the comment piece Who Fixed The Tribunal? we ask who was responsible for these shortcomings.  For decades scandal has been a feature of the political landscape on the island of Anglesey.There have been several attempts to clean up the authority but nothing seems to last. The
latest attempt — a rare intervention by central government that's
already cost a poor community more than half a million pounds — has also
foundered. A highly-paid troubleshooter has failed to change the inbred
political culture. REBECCA's probe into This Septic Isle opens with the article Bowled Out which gives an insight into one of the most troubled councils in Britain. REBECCA publishes Britain’s first ever Masonic Directory. The Committee said that "it is obvious that there is a great deal of unjustified paranoia about freemasonry" but added that "nothing so much undermines public confidence in public institutions as the knowledge that some public servants are members of a secret society one of whose aims is mutual self-advancement – or a column of mutual support, to use the masonic phrase." The
committee voted 6 votes to 3 "that police officers, magistrates,
judges, and crown prosecutors should be required to register membership
of any secret society and that the record should be available
publicly." The United Grand Lodge ignored the call. The Labour government promised to bring in a register but the Blair cabinet got cold feet.
Freemasonry is just one
of the subjects REBECCA
believes that there isn’t enough scrutiny of the way the 43 police
forces in England and Wales carry out two of their most sensitive duties
– Another
article gives a short history of the troubled attempts to root out
corruption in Britain’s biggest force, London's Metropolitan Police.
The first target is the ambitious plan, fronted by Lord Attenborough, to build a major Hollywood-style studio. It
was billed as an historic development that would bring thousands of
jobs to a local authority desperate for jobs. But years later very
little has been built and three of the companies involved have gone
bust.
Finally, the Archive
reprints some of the major stories that appeared in REBECCA between
1973 and 1982. There’s a history of the magazine and the key articles in
the magazine’s battle with the Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan.
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Sir
Ronald Waterhouse was the former High Court judge who presided over a
flawed investigation into allegations of masonic influence. 
The
man on the left is Steve Christopher. He's the former chief inspector
who claims he was persecuted by his force because he was too effective
as boss of the anti-corruption unit. He discovered that the force tried
to persuade a relative to spy on him. 
