• Bloomberg Businessweek, Thursday, February 9, 2012 3:04 PM

Last May, Rupert Murdoch held a fateful dinner party -- one where he discussed with News Corp. principals and "legal heavyweights" how to "handle the phone-hacking scandal that had been hanging over the company for months and was suddenly spinning out of control," writes Greg Farrell. 

Murdoch was deciding that night whether to have New York headquarters do a separate investigation, or to stick with the London office's "effort to quarantine the scandal," writes Farrell. Murdoch chose the lattter approach, which led to a "slew of allegations, arrests, and public outrage."

Farrell was able to reconstruct the events of that night by interviewing four participants who asked to remain anonymous, and this account fills in some of the blanks competently, in less-than-dazzling prose (we were kind of hoping for more lively scene-setting). There's also a pretty good summary of other key events in the scandal.

Note that this article, which appeared in appeared in Bloomberg Businessweek, is careful to include this disclosure:"Bloomberg L.P. competes with several units of News Corp."

Read the whole story at Bloomberg Businessweek »