Things are only getting worse for News Corp. and executive James Murdoch in the ongoing phone hacking scandal after documents released today show the media giant agreed to pay more than a million dollars to an early hacking victim after the company’s lawyers realized that evidence from the case was “fatal” to its claims of innocence, Reuters reports:

On Tuesday, the newly released evidence suggested that lawyers for News Corp agreed to a huge pay-off to the victim, soccer players’ union boss Gordon Taylor, in 2008 because they realized the position was now “perilous”. [...]

“Our position is very perilous,” [Tom] Crone, the inhouse lawyer, told editor [Colin] Myler in the briefing notes. “The damning email is genuine and proves we actively made use of a large number of extremely private voicemails from Taylor’s telephone.”

The large payout to Taylor of around 750,000 pounds ($1.2 million) was agreed at a meeting between Crone, Myler and James Murdoch on June 10.

The new evidence seems to contradict what Murdoch had told the British Parliament when he claimed he had only had a short meeting about the issue in June. It also suggests that Murdoch understood the company was culpable, though he denies this. Former News Corp. outside counsel Julian Pike, asked at a Parliamentary hearing earlier this month if Murdoch had “mis-recalled the sequence of events,” replied, “I think so, yes.”

Moreover, the new details show that outside lawyers hired by the company had warned: “There is a powerful case that there is (or was) a culture of illegal information access used at NGN (News Group Newspapers) in order to produce stories for publication.”

Murdoch — the son of News Corp. founder Ruper Murdoch and heir apparent — has been at the center of the scandal, which has shaken investor confidence and led to law enforcement investigations on both sides of the Atlantic. After inconsistencies emerged in Murdoch’s story, he has been called back by Parliament to testify again. Nonetheless, the younger Murdoch was recently given a raise.

James Murdoch, the son of News Corporation CEO Rupert Murdoch and the company’s deputy chief operating officer, has been at the center of News Corp.’s phone hacking scandal, which has sparked investigations into the company’s practices in both the United States and Great Britain. Murdoch, along with his father, appeared in front of the British Parliament as part of an inquiry into the News of the World scandal that rocked Britain after the paper’s reporters were accused of bribing public officials and hacking into voice mail systems to get scoops on stories. Scandal eventually spread to other News Corp. subsidiaries, including the European division of the Wall Street Journal.

Despite those scandals, BSkyB, a British broadcaster where Murdoch serves in a non-executive chairmanship position, announced this week that it was giving him a £1,300 raise. The announcement, the Telegraph reports, made no mention of the scandals that have enveloped News Corp. since early this summer:

The increase, which brings Mr Murdoch’s pay for the non-executive role to £88,000, was revealed in an annual report from BSkyB that made no mention of the News of the World phone hacking scandal that has rocked News Corp and BSkyB, and ultimately derailed the deal.

Earlier this year, News Corp. submitted a bid to take over the 61 percent of BSkyB it does not already own, but the Murdochs pulled the bid amid the growing phone hacking scandal. The cost of aborting the deal cost BSkyB £16 million.

The raise is likely to further enrage News Corp. shareholders, who made a push to remove Rupert Murdoch and his relatives from their board and chairmanship positions at its annual meetings earlier this month. The Murdochs prevailed due to their holding a majority stake in the company, allowing James Murdoch to keep his seat on the BSkyB board and take home a handsome raise despite the troubles plaguing the family empire.

ThinkProgress filed this story from Los Angeles, California.

Today, a British parliamentary commission announced that it will summon James Murdoch for a second time to question him about News Corp.’s phone-hacking scandal. So far, the British inquiry has not yet initiated similar investigations in the United States.

In September, ThinkProgress followed up on a report by the Guardian that detailed the story of Robert Emmel, a former News Corp. employee. Emmel gave the U.S. Senate a 58-page whistleblower tip alleging that his company carried out a vicious hacking campaign against its competitors, including a company called Floorgraphics. We found that Sen. Chuck Grassley’s (R-IA) staffer had received the document (and said he would act on it), but never followed through with a referral to the Justice Department or a congressional inquiry. Emmel was subsequently crushed with a legal harassment campaign and the victims of News Corp.’s domestic hacking were silenced with $655 million in settlements and buyouts.

Tom Watson, a British member of Parliament, helped break open the News Corp. phone-hacking scandal. Watson traveled to Los Angeles on Friday to attend the News Corp. shareholder meeting and rally demonstrators against the company. A few hours after sparring with Rupert Murdoch, Watson told ThinkProgress in an interview that in his opinion, “when you’ve got a concern that the law is being breached,” the matter should be always be reported to police authorities:

FANG: Speaking of computer hacking, ThinkProgress broke the story that an employee at News Corp gave a 58-page dossier detailing the different computer hacking that News Corp used against its United States competitors, including Floormarketing, a company based in New Jersey. He gave that to the United States Senate, including Republican Senator Chuck Grassley. They sat on it. It’s been five years now, there’s been no action. They never referred it to the Justice Department; they haven’t opened their own investigation. What’s your message to the United States Senate? What should they be doing?

WATSON: Look it’s not up to me to tell the United States Senate what they should do. I’m a UK lawmaker and the Senate can make its own decisions. I just know with my own experience in the UK with the hacking scandal, there’s a lot of whistleblowers that come forward. You have to sift through serious concerns and those that are erroneous. But when you’ve got a concern that the law is being breached, then I’ve always taken a view that I should report it to the police as quickly as I can.

Watch it here:

Watson said he was unfamiliar with the specifics of the case, and had been under the impression that the Emmel tip had eventually found its way to American authorities. Unfortunately, that is not the case.

Not only has the Senate refused to refer the Emmel tip to the Department of Justice or open its own investigation, but the Department of Justice failed to act even on the advice of the FBI. New York Times media reporter David Carr noted that FBI agents, after reviewing the “excellent paper trail” left by News Corp. while allegedly breaking into the computers of competitor Floorgraphics, contacted the U.S. Attorney’s Office in New Jersey to consider a criminal investigation. At the time, the U.S. attorney was a Bush appointee named Chris Christie, now the governor of the state. Christie was a confidant of Roger Ailes, the head of News Corp. subsidiary Fox New, and as Carr noted, the FBI case “died a slow death” in Christie’s office.

Investors in News Corporation, the scandal-plagued parent company of Fox News owned by Rupert Murdoch, are calling for a shake-up ahead of the company’s annual meeting in Los Angeles later this week that includes removing Murdoch as CEO and voting him and his sons off of the company’s 15-member board of directors. Proxy advisory firms in Britain and the United States, as well as large pension funds in both countries, have advised shareholders to vote against the Murdochs and other sitting board members at a board meeting Friday, ABC News reports:

Proxy advisory firm Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS), whose clients are investors including pension and mutual funds, recommended that shareholders vote against the re-election of 13 News Corp. board members at the board meeting Friday in Los Angeles.

ISS said in its report: “The company’s phone hacking scandal, which began its public denouement in July 2011, has laid bare a striking lack of stewardship and failure of independence by a board whose inability to set a strong tone-at-the-top about unethical business practices has now resulted in enormous costs.”

The California State Teachers’ Retirement System and California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS), both invested in News Corp., have also called on Murdoch to step down, and Britain’s Local Authority Pension Fund Forum issued a similar call. CalPERS is the largest pension fund in the country with $225 billion in assets and about 1.45 million News Corp shares.

Last week, reports surfaced that scandal had spread to News Corps. flagship newspaper, The Wall Street Journal. The Journal’s European division reportedly pumped up circulation numbers artificially, leading to the resignation of Andrew Langhoff, the European director of Dow Jones and Co., a News Corp. subsidiary that owns the Journal. News Corp., meanwhile, continues to face investigations from both the British and American governments for phone-hacking scandals and potential violations of American law that ensued, as well as allegations that its reporters hacked into phones used by the families of 9/11 victims.

News Corp. responded to the ouster calls, saying ISS and other investors were putting a “disproportionate focus” on the scandals and that it is taking the investigations “very seriously.” “However,” the company said in a statement, “our broad, diverse group of businesses across the globe is extremely strong today.”

Last year, just as Republicans swept state legislatures across the country and became poised to implement an education privatization agenda, New York City school chancellor Joel Klein announced he was moving to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. As the New York Times reported, his move signaled News Corp.’s aggressive bid to enter the for-profit education business. The company even purchased a digital learning company called Wireless Generation to buttress its K-12 product line.

This worried some education advocates, who are concerned that the conservative politics of News Corp. will bleed into its education services. For instance, News Corp.’s Fox News subsidiary is well known for its revisionist history, smears campaigns against scientists, and ignorance of basic math.

So, at former Florida governor Jeb Bush’s education privatization conference, held today and yesterday in the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, ThinkProgress approached Klein to ask if there are any internal firewalls between the executives at Fox News and News Corp’s education business.

TP: With News Corp’s new education business, is there any internal firewall between the executives at Fox News and executives working in the education business that are serving children? Is there any internal firewall?

KLEIN: Uh, I’ve got a meeting to go to.

TP: I mean you’ve avoided all the questions today.

KLEIN: I’ve got a meeting. [...]

TP: Mr. Klein, is there any internal firewall between the executives at Fox News and the education side of News Corp? Sir, is there any reason you’re avoiding this question?

Watch it:

At the time ThinkProgress caught up with Klein, he was casually chatting with attendees at the event.

Before ThinkProgress spoke to Klein, Klein had participated in a panel discussion about local school boards. A reporter asked Klein a question about News Corp’s expected profit margins from its forays into the education industry, but was rebuffed. The panel informed the reporter and others in the room that Klein would take questions after the event.

One of the top executives at the European branch of the Wall Street Journal, the flagship newspaper at Rupert Murdoch-owned News Corporation, has resigned amid a growing scandal that has called into question the paper’s journalistic ethics and jeopardized its reputation. Adding to the scandals News Corp. is already facing in Europe — alleged phone hacking, bribing of public officials — and a potential criminal investigation by the U.S. Justice Department, the Guardian reported today that Andrew Langhoff, the European director of Dow Jones and Co. (the subsidiary of News Corp. that owns the Journal), oversaw a massive scam that artificially inflated the circulation numbers in Europe in order to avoid losing investors, readers, and advertisers.

The scam was organized in London and focused on the paper’s European edition, and even when top executives in New York were alerted, they failed to do anything about it, the Guardian reports:

The Guardian found evidence that the Journal had been channelling money through European companies in order to secretly buy thousands of copies of its own paper at a knock-down rate, misleading readers and advertisers about the Journal’s true circulation.

The bizarre scheme included a formal, written contract in which the Journal persuaded one company to co-operate by agreeing to publish articles that promoted its activities, a move which led some staff to accuse the paper’s management of violating journalistic ethics and jeopardising its treasured reputation for editorial quality.

Internal emails and documents suggest the scam was promoted by Andrew Langhoff, the European managing director of the Journal’s parent company, Dow Jones and Co, which was bought by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation in July 2007. Langhoff resigned on Tuesday.

According to the Guardian, the Journal contracts charged as little as one cent per copy, meaning a company like Executive Learning Partnership (part of one of the biggest deals) could sponsor 3.1 million copies at a cost of only 31,080 euros. The deals began to blow up when ELP and other organizations complained about not receiving their fair share of coverage, despite multiple pages of exclusive stories throughout the paper. When the deals appeared to falter, the Journal, led by Langhoff, funneled money through a middleman, effectively using its own cash to pay for the copies of the paper so as to avoid an immediate 16 percent drop in circulation, which would have scared advertisers, shareholders, and readers.

The scam only adds to the growing perception that News Corp. is a company out of control after a tumultuous summer in which it was caught in scandal after scandal involving its journalistic practices in both Europe and the United States. Fraud investigations were opened and British MPs called Murdoch and his son, James, to appear before Parliament to discuss details of the company’s phone hacking scandal came to light. The FBI and Department of Justice both opened investigations into the company over violations of American laws, and details emerged of News Corp. reporters hacking into the phones of families of 9/11 victims. Now, scandal seems to have spread to the company’s most prestigious publication.