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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.

Already it holds 13,000 members – the intention is to keep adding names until all 250,000 masons in England and Wales are included.

Why does this matter? Aren’t masons simply men who like dressing up in strange costumes in the company of other men?

But the secrecy that surrounds the identity of many masons is a problem for a democratic society.

In 1997 the House of Commons’ Home Affairs Committee called for a register of masons in the police and judiciary to allay concerns about possible masonic influence.

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 committee added, however, "that the better solution lies in the hands of freemasonry itself. By openness and disclosure, all suspicion would be removed and we would welcome the taking of such steps by the United Grand Lodge."

The United Grand Lodge ignored the call. The Labour government promised to bring in a register but the Blair cabinet got cold feet.

The television programme Brothers in the Shadows underlines the need for an end to masonic secrecy. Click on the screen to see the full programme.

The film reveals the strange story of a masonic child abuser who has never been caught and investigates why masons and police have shown little appetite to try and find him.

The article on which this part of the programme is based, The Missing Masonic Child Abuser, is an example of REBECCA journalism. It's now in the Public Access area.

The programme also examines the failure of Britain’s biggest child abuse inquiry – the Waterhouse Tribunal of 1997 – to examine the role of masonry in North Wales.

Sir Ronald Waterhouse was the former High Court judge who presided over a flawed investigation into allegations of masonic influence.

The inquiry cost £14 million but it couldn’t even uncover the existence of a police lodge. A chief constable tried to persuade a local reporter that it didn’t exist.

Sir Ronald Waterhouse threw out a call for a register of masons involved in the inquiry. Yet he knew that the Tribunal’s own QC was a mason. The QC himself said nothing.

Freemasonry is just one of the subjects
REBECCA tackles.

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 –
public complaints against police and tackling corrupt officers.

OUT OF THE BLUE is the beginning of a series that digs deep beneath the public facade and drags some intriguing stories into the light of day.

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.

It's a view shared by some of the detectives who worked for him.

Another article gives a short history of the troubled attempts to root out corruption in Britain’s biggest force, London's Metropolitan Police.

The Muckraker column investigates stories in local and national government.

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.

REBECCA asks if the ambitious plans were just a giant film set to conceal a daring property development…

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.

REBECCA carried out a detailed investigation into Callaghan's business career during the period he was Prime Minister.

There’s more information about the philosophy behind REBECCA in the About Us section.

The same section contains an explanaton of how REBECCA came by its unusual name.

REBECCA is an expensive enterprise — we hope you'll support Britain’s first investigative website.

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