Arrests leave Sun journalists feeling cast off by Rupert

An angry and bewildered veteran of that newspaper explained that it wasn't so much the arrests themselves that alarmed him and his colleagues, it was the part played in the episode by the Management and Standards Committee - the unit created by Murdoch.

That arm of News Corporation has been given the task of cleaning things up at the UK division, News International, and it appears to be taking its job more seriously than many of the journalists expected.

It should not have been too great a surprise because it is simply sticking to its brief. But Sun journalists now fear the worst, viewing the committee's latest act as confirmation of their deepest fear - that Murdoch might be willing to let their newspaper go.

Until now, I have argued strongly against those who have aired such suggestions. Murdoch has been emotionally attached to the Sun since he bought it in 1969. It was the essential cash cow from which he was able to expand from Australian parvenu into global media magnate.

Though Murdoch is not overly sentimental, the Sun happens to represent his own political, cultural and social ethos. It is unapologetically anti-Establishment, unashamedly irreverent and unblinkingly forthright.

But the backwash of the phone-hacking scandal has had an extraordinary effect on both Murdoch and, more pertinently, on his company's executives and investors in America. Some believe there is no point in cleaning the Augean stables; better rather to quit the stables altogether.

I happen not to think of the paper in such terms, nor as a "swamp" as one source linked to the MSC inelegantly put it. The Sun, whatever its faults, whatever Scotland Yard and the prosecuting authorities eventually decide, is nothing like as mucky as the thankfully now-defunct News of the World.

The problem for the Sun, which continues to be profitable and remains Britain's largest-selling title, is that it is tainted by association with its deceased ugly sister. And the results of the MSC's inquiries into its internal correspondence are tending to damage its image still further.

Seen in this context, especially when viewed from the US, the Sun could be seen as expendable. Its fate is therefore in the balance.

That is only one part of the story, however.

Though the Sun arrests imply that the MSC is doing its job with the kind of rigour which suggests that it is an independent entity, its very existence is baffling.

It is a creature of News Corp. It was set up specifically to deal with the fallout from the hacking case, police payments and "all other connected issues". It is answerable to the company's board through an executive director - Joel Klein - and an independent director, Viet Dinh, who is a law professor.

That sounds fine enough. But what's the point? In reality, the MSC is a sort of "middle man" standing between the company and the police. It has privileged access to millions of emails and it appears to be trawling through them in order to discover allegedly illegal behaviour.

It gives the MSC the power to filter the information and then decide what messages and memos should, and should not, be passed to the police. Therefore, there is no transparency.

Even if we accept that the MSC is being scrupulously fair - and it is being led by the irreproachable Lord Grabiner QC, a respected deputy high court judge - it is a strange body.

Why not hand the whole email cache to Scotland Yard and let its officers do the job? Why must a corporate unit get in the way?

The Sun arrests, on "evidence" provided by the MSC, add to the bizarre nature of the exercise. In a message aimed at calming the paper's increasingly nervous staff, News International's chief executive, Tom Mockridge, informed them that the company had provided the arrested quartet with "legal support".

In other words, News Corp's MSC is playing prosecutor while its UK publisher, News International, is providing the defence.

It is little wonder that befuddled Sun journalists are wondering whether Murdoch has lost the plot.

How, they ask, did the world's largest news media tycoon get himself into such a fix?

Roy Greenslade is Profesor of Journalism, City University London and writes blog for the Guardian

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