Murdoch

Nesster · 08-02-2011, 05:41 AM

Oh, and here's another interesting article -

Frank Rich: How Rupert Murdoch Hacked America Too -- New York Magazine

Quote:

This defense is a smoke screen. The real transgressions of the Murdoch empire are not its outré partisanship, its tabloid sleaze, its Washington lobbying, or even what liberals most love to hate, the bogus “fair and balanced” propaganda masquerading as journalism at Fox News. In fact, these misdemeanors are red herrings—distractions from the real News Corp. corruption that now threatens to bring down its management and radically reconfigure and reduce its international corporate footprint. The bigger story is this: An otherwise archetypal media colossus, with apolitical TV shows (American Idol), movies (Avatar), and cable channels (FX) like any other, is controlled by a family (and its tight coterie of made men and women, exemplified by the recently departed Rebekah Brooks) that countenances the intimidation and silencing of politicians, regulators, competitors, journalists, and even ordinary citizens to maximize its profits and power and to punish perceived corporate, political, and personal enemies. And, as we now know conclusively, some of this behavior has broken the law.

This ethos would never be tolerated for long at most public companies, but News Corp. is a faux-public company thanks to the Murdochs’ special tier of controlling shares. What’s being illuminated daily by the News of the World revelations in London are the broad parameters, still sketchily filled in, of News Corp.’s definition of business-as-usual: the compulsive lying (James Murdoch’s testimony before Parliament is of a piece with that interview Rupert gave to the Times in 1976); the wholesale buying of police and politicians; the thuggery employed to invade the privacy of cheesy celebrities and the 13-year-old murder victim Milly Dowler alike to pump newspaper sales; and the dizzying array of cover-ups, from the sham News Corp. “investigations” and “independent committees” to the hush money that rains down on victims, discarded employees, and cops. It’s not happenstance that many watching the Murdochs’ testimony on television were struck by the resemblance to the Senate hearing in The Godfather: Part II, with James Murdoch starring as Michael Corleone and Joel Klein in the supporting Robert Duvall role of the consigliere Tom Hagen. Students of pop culture know an epic family business when they see one.

As in Godfather II, it’s useful to flash back briefly to what really happened after the patriarch’s splashy arrival in New York. Even in embryo, the corporate DNA was snapping into focus.

Contrary to Cuozzo’s account, it was not tabloid excesses or conservative ideology that drove the exodus of many Post reporters in late 1976 and 1977. In truth, the paper’s tabloid voice hadn’t fully differentiated itself from the one Schiff left behind, even if the headlines were better (though the immortal HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR was still six years away). Nor, in those early days, had the paper’s politics undergone their hard shift rightward. When 50 of the Post’s 60 reporters infuriated their new boss by publicly protesting the paper’s slanted news coverage during the local 1977 political campaign, that coverage was tilted in favor of Ed Koch and Carol Bellamy—both then unabashed liberal Democrats, running for mayor and City Council president. It was the Post’s journalistic corruption that enraged those reporters—the editorials run as news stories (including on page one), the endless parade of fawning features on the favored candidates—not the fungible ideology of Murdoch’s opportunistic partisanship. (His reason for supporting Koch over Mario Cuomo in that race, he explained, was that there were “two-and-a-half million Jews in New York and 1 million Italians.”) This corruption had seeped quickly even into my own soft-news beat. I left the Post soon after a newly installed Murdoch underling informed me that I had to “take the views of our advertisers into consideration” when reviewing movies.

In retrospect, those were the good old days. To appreciate where we’ve traveled since, few words are more evocative than those of Graham Foulkes, who recently learned that his 22-year-old son, killed by a suicide bomber in London in 2005, may have had his cell phone hacked by Murdoch goons. “You think it’s as dark as it can get,” Foulkes told the BBC, “then you realize there’s someone out there who can make it darker.”

The Post would not be my last brush with Murdoch’s minions. An emissary tried to rehire me for his other new purchase in New York—this magazine, which he wrested unscrupulously from its founder, Clay Felker, in 1977 and owned until 1991. (I declined.) Years later, when I became a Times columnist who frequently criticized various Murdoch organs, I was harassed by a “blind” fictional “Page Six” item that had me leaving my wife for a Broadway director. That was a mere warm-up for a full-frontal assault from Bill O’Reilly. After I came to the less-than-novel judgment that Mel Gibson and his 2004 movie The Passion of the Christ were anti-Semitic, O’Reilly, whose one novel had been optioned by Gibson for a film, attacked me on six different installments of his prime-time Fox News show, The O’Reilly Factor, sometimes displaying my photograph. I would have laughed off his blowhard provocations—“Hollywood and a lot of the secular press are controlled by the Jewish people” was a *typical hypothesis—had they not incited the most explicitly violent and virulently anti-Semitic threats of my career. It was only one of two times in seventeen years as a Times columnist that I sought security advice. (The other was when I wrote critically about Scientology some years earlier.)

As a figure in Murdochian history, I hasten to add, I am merely a footnote—like countless other News Corp. journalistic nemeses. Even a Times reporter who wrote a routine news story on a Fox News ratings lull was punished by having his headshot distorted into an anti-Semitic caricature worthy of Der Stürmer for display on the morning show Fox & Friends (a misnomer if ever there was one). Other victims have had it far worse, including the often-*defenseless obscure citizens who cross O’Reilly’s radar screen because they have views he abhors, at which point his producer stalks them for an on-camera ambush. (It was left to the Post, however, to trash a former O’Reilly Factor producer with whom he settled a sexual-harassment suit in 2004.) O’Reilly’s now-departed tag-team partner in Fox News vigilantism, Glenn Beck, excoriated the nearly 80-year-old CUNY sociologist Frances Fox Piven so often in the past few years (mostly for an essay she had written about poverty in 1966) that she had to fend off death threats. George Tiller, the Wichita abortion doctor who was called a “baby killer,” among other epithets, on 29 episodes of The O’Reilly Factor, was assassinated while at church in 2009.

...

Most, if not all, of these British horrors have precise counterparts in Murdoch’s American history. What we don’t know yet, because few have looked, is which pieces of the corruption may have crossed the line into illegality.

The wholesale buying of elected officials is such a staple at Fox News we don’t think twice about it anymore. While it has long been routine for retired politicians, former officials, and semi-retired campaign operatives to join the ranks of American print and television journalism—whether on ABC (George Stephanopoulos), CNN (Donna Brazile, William Bennett), or MSNBC (Chris Matthews), or in the Times (from William Safire to Peter Orszag)—only at Fox were four active potential presidential candidates literally on the payroll (Palin, Huckabee, Gingrich, Santorum) for chits that can be cashed in should any of them end up in or near the White House. (And you can bet if any of them do, Murdoch will not be entering through the back door.) Karl Rove, who has held sinecures at both Fox and The Wall Street Journal since leaving the Bush administration, is hardly comparable to, say, James Carville and Mary Matalin bloviating on NBC’s Meet the Press once their respective campaign duties for Clinton and Bush the First were over. Unlike them, Rove remained a major political player after his White House tenure, presiding over political fund-raising organizations that assembled $71 million in 2010, including $25 million spent on some 30,000 ads attacking Democratic candidates and supporting Republican ones. (He’ll be even more active in 2012.) John Kasich, elected governor of Ohio last year, is a former Fox News host who made 42 Fox appearances as he contemplated running and another sixteen appearances as an active candidate, thereby making him, as Tim Dickinson of Rolling Stone put it, “the first candidate of the Fox News Party.” Fox routinely publicized tea-party rallies at its inception even as News Corp. donated $1.26 million to the Republican Governors Association. This isn’t mere partisanship—which *MSNBC also practices*—but tantamount to a GOP–Fox News merger.

Fox News is far from the only American division of News Corp. to be pressed into service, checkbook in hand, when Murdoch’s interests—financial at least as much as ideological—are at stake. One classic example occurred in 1995, after the Federal Communications Commission questioned whether Murdoch had misled it in 1985, when News Corp., then based in Australia, secured Fox broadcast licenses despite a federal law limiting foreign ownership of local stations to 25 percent. The matter died soon after the News Corp. book division HarperCollins offered the then–Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, a $4.5 million advance. True to form, Murdoch claimed to have no idea that the book deal was ever in the works—even though he conceded having met with Gingrich just a few weeks earlier to discuss the FCC inquiry. (The ensuing ruckus shamed Gingrich into forgoing the advance.)

Collusion between journalists and top-level politicians is hardly a new phenomenon in our history, but News Corp. has set a new standard in scale for the mass-media era. And here, as in England, what drives Murdoch is not politics so much as money and power. Just as he could segue effortlessly from Margaret Thatcher to Tony Blair, so he has ponied up for Democrats when he needed them, including hosting a fund-raiser for his newfound friend Hillary Clinton during her presidential run.

shooz · 08-02-2011, 07:54 AM

A little more fuel for the fire.

Murdoch?s knife in the heart of journalism | Dailycensored.com

shooz · 11-04-2011, 09:41 AM

It seems Murdock has nothing but contempt for the rule of law, and aside from his contempt for the truth.

News Corp scandal spreads with Sun reporter arrest | Reuters

fisheye freak · 11-04-2011, 07:48 PM

Other outfits also engage in this sort of illegal behavior. The Murdoch press just happened to get caught out. . Interesting, left-leaning outfits were not taken to task.

Wheatfield · 11-04-2011, 08:14 PM

Originally posted by fisheye freak

Other outfits also engage in this sort of illegal behavior. The Murdoch press just happened to get caught out. . Interesting, left-leaning outfits were not taken to task.

Name a few that should be.

larryinlc · 11-04-2011, 08:32 PM

Originally posted by Wheatfield

Name a few that should be.

And please, no conjecture.

jeffkrol · 11-05-2011, 04:33 AM

Originally posted by fisheye freak

Other outfits also engage in this sort of illegal behavior. The Murdoch press just happened to get caught out. . Interesting, left-leaning outfits were not taken to task.

sounds more condoning than condemning.. any morals left anywhere?

shooz · 11-05-2011, 08:15 AM

That was pretty much the excuse the "right" gave on Nixon too.

It wasn't true then it's not true now. Besides our entire court system is set up to deal with those who get "caught".

Too bad we don't use it.

08-02-2011, 05:41 AM	#1
Nesster Veteran Member Join Date: Oct 2006 Location: NJ USA Photos: Gallery Posts: 13,072	Murdoch Oh, and here's another interesting article - Frank Rich: How Rupert Murdoch Hacked America Too -- New York Magazine Quote: This defense is a smoke screen. The real transgressions of the Murdoch empire are not its outré partisanship, its tabloid sleaze, its Washington lobbying, or even what liberals most love to hate, the bogus “fair and balanced” propaganda masquerading as journalism at Fox News. In fact, these misdemeanors are red herrings—distractions from the real News Corp. corruption that now threatens to bring down its management and radically reconfigure and reduce its international corporate footprint. The bigger story is this: An otherwise archetypal media colossus, with apolitical TV shows (American Idol), movies (Avatar), and cable channels (FX) like any other, is controlled by a family (and its tight coterie of made men and women, exemplified by the recently departed Rebekah Brooks) that countenances the intimidation and silencing of politicians, regulators, competitors, journalists, and even ordinary citizens to maximize its profits and power and to punish perceived corporate, political, and personal enemies. And, as we now know conclusively, some of this behavior has broken the law. This ethos would never be tolerated for long at most public companies, but News Corp. is a faux-public company thanks to the Murdochs’ special tier of controlling shares. What’s being illuminated daily by the News of the World revelations in London are the broad parameters, still sketchily filled in, of News Corp.’s definition of business-as-usual: the compulsive lying (James Murdoch’s testimony before Parliament is of a piece with that interview Rupert gave to the Times in 1976); the wholesale buying of police and politicians; the thuggery employed to invade the privacy of cheesy celebrities and the 13-year-old murder victim Milly Dowler alike to pump newspaper sales; and the dizzying array of cover-ups, from the sham News Corp. “investigations” and “independent committees” to the hush money that rains down on victims, discarded employees, and cops. It’s not happenstance that many watching the Murdochs’ testimony on television were struck by the resemblance to the Senate hearing in The Godfather: Part II, with James Murdoch starring as Michael Corleone and Joel Klein in the supporting Robert Duvall role of the consigliere Tom Hagen. Students of pop culture know an epic family business when they see one. As in Godfather II, it’s useful to flash back briefly to what really happened after the patriarch’s splashy arrival in New York. Even in embryo, the corporate DNA was snapping into focus. Contrary to Cuozzo’s account, it was not tabloid excesses or conservative ideology that drove the exodus of many Post reporters in late 1976 and 1977. In truth, the paper’s tabloid voice hadn’t fully differentiated itself from the one Schiff left behind, even if the headlines were better (though the immortal HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR was still six years away). Nor, in those early days, had the paper’s politics undergone their hard shift rightward. When 50 of the Post’s 60 reporters infuriated their new boss by publicly protesting the paper’s slanted news coverage during the local 1977 political campaign, that coverage was tilted in favor of Ed Koch and Carol Bellamy—both then unabashed liberal Democrats, running for mayor and City Council president. It was the Post’s journalistic corruption that enraged those reporters—the editorials run as news stories (including on page one), the endless parade of fawning features on the favored candidates—not the fungible ideology of Murdoch’s opportunistic partisanship. (His reason for supporting Koch over Mario Cuomo in that race, he explained, was that there were “two-and-a-half million Jews in New York and 1 million Italians.”) This corruption had seeped quickly even into my own soft-news beat. I left the Post soon after a newly installed Murdoch underling informed me that I had to “take the views of our advertisers into consideration” when reviewing movies. In retrospect, those were the good old days. To appreciate where we’ve traveled since, few words are more evocative than those of Graham Foulkes, who recently learned that his 22-year-old son, killed by a suicide bomber in London in 2005, may have had his cell phone hacked by Murdoch goons. “You think it’s as dark as it can get,” Foulkes told the BBC, “then you realize there’s someone out there who can make it darker.” The Post would not be my last brush with Murdoch’s minions. An emissary tried to rehire me for his other new purchase in New York—this magazine, which he wrested unscrupulously from its founder, Clay Felker, in 1977 and owned until 1991. (I declined.) Years later, when I became a Times columnist who frequently criticized various Murdoch organs, I was harassed by a “blind” fictional “Page Six” item that had me leaving my wife for a Broadway director. That was a mere warm-up for a full-frontal assault from Bill O’Reilly. After I came to the less-than-novel judgment that Mel Gibson and his 2004 movie The Passion of the Christ were anti-Semitic, O’Reilly, whose one novel had been optioned by Gibson for a film, attacked me on six different installments of his prime-time Fox News show, The O’Reilly Factor, sometimes displaying my photograph. I would have laughed off his blowhard provocations—“Hollywood and a lot of the secular press are controlled by the Jewish people” was a typical hypothesis—had they not incited the most explicitly violent and virulently anti-Semitic threats of my career. It was only one of two times in seventeen years as a Times columnist that I sought security advice. (The other was when I wrote critically about Scientology some years earlier.) As a figure in Murdochian history, I hasten to add, I am merely a footnote—like countless other News Corp. journalistic nemeses. Even a Times reporter who wrote a routine news story on a Fox News ratings lull was punished by having his headshot distorted into an anti-Semitic caricature worthy of Der Stürmer for display on the morning show Fox & Friends (a misnomer if ever there was one). Other victims have had it far worse, including the often-defenseless obscure citizens who cross O’Reilly’s radar screen because they have views he abhors, at which point his producer stalks them for an on-camera ambush. (It was left to the Post, however, to trash a former O’Reilly Factor producer with whom he settled a sexual-harassment suit in 2004.) O’Reilly’s now-departed tag-team partner in Fox News vigilantism, Glenn Beck, excoriated the nearly 80-year-old CUNY sociologist Frances Fox Piven so often in the past few years (mostly for an essay she had written about poverty in 1966) that she had to fend off death threats. George Tiller, the Wichita abortion doctor who was called a “baby killer,” among other epithets, on 29 episodes of The O’Reilly Factor, was assassinated while at church in 2009. ... Most, if not all, of these British horrors have precise counterparts in Murdoch’s American history. What we don’t know yet, because few have looked, is which pieces of the corruption may have crossed the line into illegality. The wholesale buying of elected officials is such a staple at Fox News we don’t think twice about it anymore. While it has long been routine for retired politicians, former officials, and semi-retired campaign operatives to join the ranks of American print and television journalism—whether on ABC (George Stephanopoulos), CNN (Donna Brazile, William Bennett), or MSNBC (Chris Matthews), or in the Times (from William Safire to Peter Orszag)—only at Fox were four active potential presidential candidates literally on the payroll (Palin, Huckabee, Gingrich, Santorum) for chits that can be cashed in should any of them end up in or near the White House. (And you can bet if any of them do, Murdoch will not be entering through the back door.) Karl Rove, who has held sinecures at both Fox and The Wall Street Journal since leaving the Bush administration, is hardly comparable to, say, James Carville and Mary Matalin bloviating on NBC’s Meet the Press once their respective campaign duties for Clinton and Bush the First were over. Unlike them, Rove remained a major political player after his White House tenure, presiding over political fund-raising organizations that assembled $71 million in 2010, including $25 million spent on some 30,000 ads attacking Democratic candidates and supporting Republican ones. (He’ll be even more active in 2012.) John Kasich, elected governor of Ohio last year, is a former Fox News host who made 42 Fox appearances as he contemplated running and another sixteen appearances as an active candidate, thereby making him, as Tim Dickinson of Rolling Stone put it, “the first candidate of the Fox News Party.” Fox routinely publicized tea-party rallies at its inception even as News Corp. donated $1.26 million to the Republican Governors Association. This isn’t mere partisanship—which MSNBC also practices—but tantamount to a GOP–Fox News merger. Fox News is far from the only American division of News Corp. to be pressed into service, checkbook in hand, when Murdoch’s interests—financial at least as much as ideological—are at stake. One classic example occurred in 1995, after the Federal Communications Commission questioned whether Murdoch had misled it in 1985, when News Corp., then based in Australia, secured Fox broadcast licenses despite a federal law limiting foreign ownership of local stations to 25 percent. The matter died soon after the News Corp. book division HarperCollins offered the then–Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, a $4.5 million advance. True to form, Murdoch claimed to have no idea that the book deal was ever in the works—even though he conceded having met with Gingrich just a few weeks earlier to discuss the FCC inquiry. (The ensuing ruckus shamed Gingrich into forgoing the advance.) Collusion between journalists and top-level politicians is hardly a new phenomenon in our history, but News Corp. has set a new standard in scale for the mass-media era. And here, as in England, what drives Murdoch is not politics so much as money and power. Just as he could segue effortlessly from Margaret Thatcher to Tony Blair, so he has ponied up for Democrats when he needed them, including hosting a fund-raiser for his newfound friend Hillary Clinton during her presidential run.

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08-02-2011, 07:54 AM	#2
shooz Site Supporter Join Date: Jul 2008 Location: Detroit Photos: Gallery \| Albums Posts: 3,491	A little more fuel for the fire. Murdoch?s knife in the heart of journalism \| Dailycensored.com

11-04-2011, 09:41 AM	#3
shooz Site Supporter Join Date: Jul 2008 Location: Detroit Photos: Gallery \| Albums Posts: 3,491	It seems Murdock has nothing but contempt for the rule of law, and aside from his contempt for the truth. News Corp scandal spreads with Sun reporter arrest \| Reuters

11-04-2011, 07:48 PM	#4
fisheye freak Senior Member Join Date: Jan 2008 Location: Bondi, Australia Posts: 206	Other outfits also engage in this sort of illegal behavior. The Murdoch press just happened to get caught out. . Interesting, left-leaning outfits were not taken to task.

11-04-2011, 08:14 PM	#5
Wheatfield Moderator Join Date: Apr 2008 Location: The wheatfields of Canada Posts: 15,975	Originally posted by fisheye freak Other outfits also engage in this sort of illegal behavior. The Murdoch press just happened to get caught out. . Interesting, left-leaning outfits were not taken to task. Name a few that should be.

11-04-2011, 08:32 PM	#6
larryinlc Veteran Member Join Date: Mar 2009 Location: Wisconsin USA Posts: 993	Originally posted by Wheatfield Name a few that should be. And please, no conjecture.

11-05-2011, 04:33 AM	#7
jeffkrol Veteran Member Join Date: Sep 2006 Location: Wisconsin USA Photos: Gallery Posts: 8,434	Originally posted by fisheye freak Other outfits also engage in this sort of illegal behavior. The Murdoch press just happened to get caught out. . Interesting, left-leaning outfits were not taken to task. sounds more condoning than condemning.. any morals left anywhere?

11-05-2011, 08:15 AM	#8
shooz Site Supporter Join Date: Jul 2008 Location: Detroit Photos: Gallery \| Albums Posts: 3,491	That was pretty much the excuse the "right" gave on Nixon too. It wasn't true then it's not true now. Besides our entire court system is set up to deal with those who get "caught". Too bad we don't use it.

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