We will continue to support Anthony in every way we can, and our thoughts are with him during this incredibly tough time.

These were the promises made to Sun staff arrested for paying public officials for stories. The first came from Rupert Murdoch himself, secretly taped during a meeting with his journalists in March 2013. The second in an email from News UK chief executive Mike Darcey last year when crime reporter Anthony France was told he must face trial.

So what happened?
Most of the journalists were cleared - or at least not convicted - and the Crown Prosecution Service retreated from most of the outstanding cases, leaving former head of news Chris Pharo and reporter Jamie Pyatt alone in facing a retrial on a single count after a jury could not reach a verdict.
But one conviction stands - that of Anthony France, who was given a suspended prison sentence by a judge who described him as a decent man of solid integrity. 
Judge Pontius made an order that France should pay £34,618 towards the prosecution costs - on the understanding that News UK would foot the bill.
Six weeks later France was back in court to hear his lawyer tell the judge that the company would not pay - and not only that, it was also considering disciplinary proceedings against him.
The judge was not pleased. Sun journalists routinely paid for stories, France had "inherited" his police contact, and the company had funded his defence "at considerable expense":

The judge reduced the order to £3,461 and a crowd-funding appeal raised the money within six hours.
But why did News UK refuse to cough up?
In that, it was being consistent. It did not pay Nick Parker's costs after his conviction for handling a mobile phone and it has said that it will not contribute to the hacking trial prosecution costs - Mr Justice Saunders made orders of £150,000 against Andy Coulson and £75,000 against Ian Edmondson last week.
There is a difference, though, between phone hacking - which everyone accepts was wrong - and paying contacts for stories, which has proved more of a grey area.
In that covert tape from 2013, later released by Exaro, Murdoch tells the staff:arrested under Elveden that he didn't know of anyone who had done anything "that wasn't being done across Fleet Street and wasn't the culture...Payments for news tips from cops, that's been going on for a hundred years". 
Rebekah Brooks had previously told a Commons select committee that her papers had paid police for information, and several respected journalists piped up with anecdotes confirming that such payments had been common practice. Rival news organisations joined the condemnation of the Operation Elveden prosecutions and the celebration of acquittals.

There is obviously more to this than money: the hacking scandal and its fallout have cost News Corp hundreds of millions of dollars, a few thousand more here or there wouldn't make a lot of difference to the business or to shareholders. So why hang out junior staff to dry?
The clue probably lies in the pauses in that Murdoch tape from two years ago; the hesitation when confronted with the question: what if we're convicted?

He has already told the gathering that anyone who was released or acquitted "would just continue", but in the event of a conviction "I've been told that I must not give guarantees, but I can give you something.". 
Graham Dudman, the former managing editor who went on to be cleared of some charges and to have others against him dropped, pushes the point:
"Will News International be allowed to make a decision on whether somebody is retained in employment with the company or will that be taken by people in New York?"
Darcey, who has been asked this question in previous meetings, interjects: "We don't know what you mean by 'people in New York'. Were you specifically referring to the MSC?"
[The MSC was the Managements and Standards Committee set up in the panic after the Milly Dowler story broke, which went on to hand over millions of documents to the police, and which in turn prompted the broadening of the initial hacking investigation into payments to public officials.]
Dudman comes back: "The MSC or a News Corp lawyer who says 'No, Rupert, you can't do that. You've got to do this."
Murdoch assures him: "We all take legal advice. I'll take that decision. I'll take responsibility. Absolutely."
Pressed further by Dudman: "So you, as chairman, would be prepared to go against legal advice if you felt that was appropriate?", Murdoch replies: "Sure."

The question now is what advice Murdoch is getting in New York and whether he feels it is appropriate.
For, as he admitted himself, the whole MSC and its messy aftermath was the product of panic, a frantic attempt to protect the business - a business run from New York. And whatever Murdoch's protestations, there remains a
near-universal belief that fear of corporate governance and malpractice litigation in the US has driven every News Corp move over the past four years. To appear to condone law-breaking, whether by paying prosecution costs or by keeping a convicted journalist on the staff, is fraught.
One insider told SubScribe: 

Then there is Murdoch's anti-establishment cussedness: he will not have taken kindly to the suggestion that his organisation should reimburse the Exchequer for the prosecution of his staff - especially when he believes, as he says, that they have been "picked on" in retribution for Sun activities over the past forty years.
We may yet see further examples of that obduracy. 

The flurry of acquittals and the capitulation of the CPS may have been a cause for celebration, but they have brought a new set of problems: what to do with the journalists who are now free to resume their careers? You can't run a news organisation for two or three years without deputy editors, managing editors, news editors, picture editors, reporters. Others have stepped up to cover for the Elveden crew who have been catching up on their reading while suspended from work and on bail. And while Murdoch may have said that anyone acquitted would "naturally just continue", he probably wasn't expecting the process to drag on for a further two years.
So negotiations are underway at London Bridge. Older hands are looking for what are delightfully known as exit packages, younger journos with young families and big mortgages are looking to return, and those in the middle are trying to decide which way to jump.
Overlooking all of this is one Rebekah Brooks. Although she holds no official position, she remains close to Murdoch and is seen constantly at his side when he's in town. And while the lawyers are calling the shots in the negotiations, those who have met her have come away with the feeling that she has had some influence over the terms being offered.

What goes around comes around. 
Four years ago Murdoch had to abandon his bid to take over the bit of BSkyB that he didn't own because of the hacking fallout. The company has since expanded into Europe and is now called simply Sky, the name Murdoch first gave it in 1984, long before the merger with British Satellite Broadcasting. In the past month, 21st Century Fox (which took control of the network when News Corp was split) has rebuffed approaches from Vodafone and Vivendi for its 39% share of the business, saying it wanted £18 per share - it is currently trading at around £11.31. 
With a majority Tory government now in place, some analysts are predicting that Fox may be planning a fresh bid to take outright control.
The man who would ostensibly be in charge of any such bid would be the Fox chief executive: James Murdoch, former chief executive of BSkyB and - during its darkest days - of News International. 
James took the helm at Wapping in 2011 when Rebekah Brooks resigned. Her£16m payoff is reported to have included a clause promising her a job of equal status should she be cleared of any criminal charges - which indeed she was.
So there she is now, in her upper floor office in the Baby Shard with no formal title. Mike Darcey is understood to be leaving the company in the autumn and, despite initial disbelief, there is a widespread expectation that Brooks will get her old job back.
As one observer noted: "It would be such a Rupert thing to do - rubbing his enemies' noses in it."
Which doesn't help Anthony France as he knuckles down to his next 100 hours of community service.

This is Nick Parker in a Lee Thompson photograph taken shortly after a Hamas rocket attack destroyed two homes in the Israeli town of Sderot. 
Parkier is the Sun's chief foreign correspondent and in a 26-year career with the paper he has reported from Lockerbie, Iraq, Afghanistan, Bali and Beslan. 
He has not, however, worked for 34 months because he has been suspended on police bail since his arrest in February 2012 in the extended aftermath of the phone hacking scandal.
Today he is a convicted criminal, having been found guilty of handling a stolen mobile phone belonging to the Labour MP Siobhan McDonagh. Sentencing him to three months' imprisonment, suspended for a year, Judge Worsley told him:  "You were prepared to behave dishonestly in order to get a story...You over-stepped the line between investigate journalism and breaking the law."
This judgment suggests that any journalist offered information in less-than-straightforward circumstances must gamble on whether it is likely to be of public interest without even looking at it. 
That is not the same as making a decision on whether to accept the material by balancing its importance against the risk of prosecution. 
In 2009, James Harding and Rebekah Brooks were offered tapes detailing every MP's expenses claims. They looked at them, considered the issue of dealing in stolen goods, and turned them down. The material was offered to the Daily Telegraph, which paid £110,000 for it, and we all know the rest of that story.

Harding and Brooks, who knew the tapes were stolen and that they would have to pay to publish them, were guilty of criminally stupid journalistic judgment, but I have never heard anyone suggest that they were guilty of a crime.
Yet they behaved in almost exactly the same way as Parker: 
He knew the phone was stolen, he was told that it contained a text about bribery and he agreed to pay Michael Ankers, the student who had turned up with the BlackBerry, £10,000 if the story worked out.  
Like Harding and Brooks, he looked at the material, decided against using it, and returned it to the source. 

No one would today argue that the publication of MPs' expenses was anything other than in the public interest. Supposing the stolen (or found on the Underground) phone had contained evidence of MPs being involved in bribery. Would that not also have been in the public interest?

Yet today Parker is a criminal for looking to see if that were the case.
This means that journalists will be ever more circumspect about sources and that a whistleblower with important issues to raise may be shown the door if they don't "look right" or because an editor dares not risk checking out what they have to share. 
This Government has promised to look after whistleblowers, but the stream of people sacked or hounded out of their jobs for telling the truth flows unabated. 
Michael Ankers was not an honourable source trying to right a wrong, but are we to presume that every young man who says he has a story must be a chancer on the make and reject their material without a single, let alone a second, glance?

In an editor's blog for Press Gazette, Dominic Ponsford draws a parallel with the news that Metropolitan Police held on to 1,700 phone records to which they knew they were not entitled for seven months before returning them. It is well worth reading, which you can do here.