Think Again: The Murdoch Empire’s Heart of Darkness

Back in April I wrote in The Nation that, journalistically speaking, Rupert Murdoch was “an enabler and purveyor of lies, hatred and criminal activity in the service of his ideological, financial and personal interests. A man like this deserves to be shunned, à la Bernie Madoff or Mel Gibson. That he is celebrated as some sort of hero by people who need not worry about their reputations tells you almost all you need to know about the insanity that grips our benighted political culture.”

I tried to make the same point upon receiving this year’s Mirror Award for Best Digital Commentary at the Plaza Hotel last month where I argued that to treat Fox News (and other Murdoch properties) as simple, legitimate news organizations was to invite the pollution they introduced into the media ecosystem.

Of course I knew, like most people who follow Murdoch closely, that his properties in the United Kingdom were part of a phone-tapping scandal. The New York Times Magazine ran a cover story on September 1, 2010, that turned out to be only the tip of the proverbial iceberg, and Nick Davies of The Guardian has been covering the story relentlessly—almost a feat that puts him in a historical category with the likes of Woodward and Bernstein in their lonely quest to discover the truth about the criminal operations emanating from Richard Nixon’s White House.

But like almost everyone on the planet who was themselves not directly involved with the wiretapping, blackmailing, obstruction of justice, and corruption of both law enforcement and the political process in which Murdoch employees and acolytes so regularly engaged, I never imagined just how black the heart of this operation was. Read through the coverage in The New York Times, which has been quite good; The Guardian, which has led the pack and kept this story alive; or The Columbia Journalism Review, which done a nice job collating it all. Pick any aspect of the scandal you like: the hacking of the missing child’s phone and the false hope given when the messages were deleted or the hacking of the phones of 9/11 victims.

See link for rest of commentary - http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2011/07/ta071411.html

Rec

Wake-up call for the Fox viewers to put on the life-preservers, the dirty rats.