Gawker Will Go to Court in Fox Investigation

Gawker, the popular blog based in New York, is going to court to investigate the relationship between the Fox News chairman, Roger Ailes, and Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey.

On Monday, the company and one of its reporters, John Cook, plan to file a civil suit against Mr. Christie’s office to try to obtain records of the communications between the two men. Mr. Cook, who regularly uses freedom of information and open public records acts to ferret out information for his Gawker articles, said the court action represents the first lawsuit filed by Gawker to obtain information.

The lawsuit has its origins in a New York magazine story in May which reported that Mr. Ailes had called Mr. Christie and “encouraged him to jump into the race” for president earlier this year. The report piqued the attention of people like Mr. Cook who believe that Mr. Ailes, a former Republican strategist who has run Fox News since its founding in 1996, still has a hand in politics. Mr. Christie has repeatedly ruled out running for president in the current election cycle.

In an interview with The Daily Beast weeks later, Mr. Ailes denied urging Mr. Christie to run, but acknowledged having dinner with him last summer.

By then, Mr. Cook had already sent a request to Mr. Christie’s office for any letters, logs of phone calls or records of meetings between Mr. Ailes and Mr. Christie. Mr. Cook asserted that that communications trail should be available under the state’s open public records act, but in mid-June, Mr. Christie’s office said that the records, if they exist, would be exempt upon “executive privilege and well-settled case law.”

To Mr. Cook, this was an implication that Mr. Ailes is a confidential adviser to Mr. Christie. After he said so in an article, the New Jersey chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union approached him and offered to take the case.

The lawsuit to be filed on Monday states, “A strong public interest exists in knowing whether the executive in charge of the nation’s most-watched cable news channel is acting as a political consultant to a prospective Republican presidential candidate.”

At the time that the records request was rejected, Mr. Ailes told Gawker through a representative, “Whatever the governor wants to do is his business.”

For Mr. Cook, the lawsuit may be a way to document the personal political engagement of Mr. Ailes, a person whom he has labeled a “propagandist” in repeated articles.

In an interview, he asserted that the public has come to recognize that Fox News is an ideological outlet. “The next thing that I would like to be publicly acknowledged is not just that they’re ideological — they’re not just the TV equivalent of The Weekly Standard or something — they are actually a power base within the Republican Party,” he said.

Through the lawsuit, Mr. Cook hopes to either obtain the records of contacts between the two men, or, alternatively, to have Mr. Christie’s office explain to a judge why each of the records is confidential. “That,” he said, “would be, in and of itself, a newsworthy outcome.”

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Congressmen Call for U.S. Investigation of News Corporation

Two members of Congress are calling for government inquiries in the United States into the conduct of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, which is enmeshed in a deepening hacking scandal in Britain.

Senator Frank R. Lautenberg, Democrat of New Jersey, said in a letter Wednesday that the News Corporation may have violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in the United States. He said media reports indicated that reporters for a company subsidiary, News International, “paid London police officers for information, including private telephone information, about the British royal family and other individuals for use in newspaper articles.” Because News Corporation is based in the United States, even employees in other countries may be bound by the act, which forbids payments to foreign officials.

On Tuesday another senator, John D. Rockefeller, Democrat of West Virginia, called more generally for inquiries into the phone hacking claims. “The reported hacking by News Corporation newspapers against a range of individuals — including children — is offensive and a serious breach of journalistic ethics,” Mr. Rockefeller said in a statement. “This raises serious questions about whether the company has broken U.S. law, and I encourage the appropriate agencies to investigate to ensure that Americans have not had their privacy violated.”

Mr. Rockefeller concluded, “I am concerned that the admitted phone hacking in London by the News Corp. may have extended to 9/11 victims or other Americans. If they did, the consequences will be severe.”

In the letter to the heads of the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission, Mr. Lautenberg said the media reports have raised “serious questions about the legality of the conduct of News Corporation and its subsidiaries,” and added, “further investigation may reveal that current reports only scratch the surface of the problem at News Corporation.” He asked both agencies to examine whether formal investigations into the alleged payments were appropriate.

Both senators have been critics of subsidiaries of News Corporation in the past. Mr. Rockefeller last year singled out the company’s Fox News Channel and one other channel, MSNBC, as polarizing forces in politics. Mr. Lautenberg earlier this year accused the company’s local television station in New Jersey of failing to live up to its public service obligations.

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