Murdoch Is Caught In Media's Cross Hairs
Media: They call it Britain's Watergate, the "hacking scandal" in which some journalists raided cellphone messages of politicians, celebrities and ordinary citizens. Like our own Watergate scandal, this requires some perspective.
Pundits on both sides of the pond speculate the dirty business could bring down the government of Prime Minister David Cameron, as the original Watergate break-in toppled President Nixon.
That's because the Tory leader once employed as his communications chief a former editor of News of the World, now implicated in the scandal.
What many of those conjecturers devoutly hope is that the revelations of unsavory conduct - the tipping point was news that a deceased teenaged crime victim had her voice mail recordings hacked - would also crush the media empire of Rupert Murdoch.
The trans-Atlantic mogul built his reputation and financial success by challenging conventional media practices and biases - an unforgivable sin to many.
The Australian-born (now U.S. citizen) Murdoch first gave the willies to the media establishment when, in the 1970s, he purchased (and since sold) a daily newspaper in San Antonio, Texas. The publisher from Adelaide was known for selling papers with racy headlines and saucy photos - an affront to mainstream journalists trying to shed America's sensationalist past.
He was also an unabashed conservative - intolerable to the keepers of establishment liberalism, which was always fig-leafed with pretenses of objectivity.
Murdoch succeeded beyond their wildest fears. His News Corp. owns not only the Wall Street Journal, but the hugely successful Fox News Channel, this alone deserving a place in the media firmament for kicking the posteriors of the three dominant networks.
In the U.K. he picked up News of the World and the Sun, both tabloids, as well as the prestigious Times. Along the way he acquired influence with both the Tory and Labour parties, presumably aiming for approval of his bid for full ownership of the BskyB satellite television service.
Last week Murdoch's son James, in charge of News Corp.'s U.K. operations, announced the shuttering of the 168-year-old News of the World, where the scandal began. Critics saw the move as cynical and strategic, though the wording seemed sincerely remorseful.
On Wednesday News Corp. pre-emptively took the TV bid off the table before Parliament could demand it, leaving Murdoch's motives all the more mysterious.
CNBC's Simon Hobbs, himself a Brit with little sympathy for either Murdoch or his political and press critics, suggests that the battering that News Corp. shares took in the market might be overdone.
Indeed, we should never dismiss Murdoch's market savvy - nor count on his Nixonian demise. His partisan American critics hope the Obama administration will find a way to bring the scandal to this country.
Democratic Sen. Jay Rockefeller, with no evidence, wants hearings on whether Murdoch's U.S. journalists similarly violated the privacy of Americans. Some prefer an SEC probe under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which bars U.S. companies and their overseas affiliates from paying officials to do business.
This would be a new interpretation because some News Corp. journalists stand accused only of bribing British cops for information - checkbook journalism, as it's called in this country, and seldom prosecuted.
"You cannot hope to bribe or twist, thank God, the British journalist," wrote the doggerelist Humbert Wolfe, "but seeing what the man will do, unbribed, there's no occasion to." The observation no doubt applies to the American media as well.
The unbribed twisting, of course, is manifested by the massive ideological imbalance of the media, in which journalists nonchalantly work to boost the power of government over our lives. Rupert Murdoch's real sin, if you probed the mindset of his critics, is that he has successfully challenged that agenda.
We hope he can cleanse his company of deplorable practices. But for his larger offense of standing up to liberal media orthodoxy, he should be celebrated.
