“Instead of taking a tough stand on crime and corruption, the Government buckled to appease Mr Murdoch and other press owners and executives.”

On the Government’s decision to direct advertising funding to large publishers instead the independent press:

“Earlier this year, it was no surprise when the Government funnelled £35 million pounds into the coffers of the largest newspapers in a COVID advertising deal, including Murdoch’s titles of course, while their independently-owned competitors were left to rot”

On IPSO, the complaints-handler controlled by the press:

“Instead of implementing the Leveson recommendations for an independent regulator, the Prime Minister has done nothing while Murdoch’s papers persist with IPSO – a sham complaints-handler controlled by press executives, with close links to the Government… Its closeness to Government is more befitting of a dictatorship than a liberal democracy.”

 

Rupert Murdoch 'Not Fit' to Run News Corp., U.K. Parliamentary Committee Finds

Brent Lang  1 May 2012

Rupert Murdoch 'Not Fit' to Run News Corp., U.K. Parliamentary Committee Finds

 

The 121-page report examined whether or not News Corp. executives had lied to the committee during its 2009 investigation into phone-hacking and found that both the corporation and three of its former executives had misled parliament.

It paints a picture of a dangerously detached collection of executives, extending all the way up to the Murdoch family, that were more concerned with brushing thorny legal and ethical issues under the rug than they were with rooting out the people engaging in hacking and bribery.

 

"Corporately, the News of the World and News International misled the Committee about the true nature and extent of the internal investigations they professed to have carried out in relation to phone hacking; by making statements they would have known were not fully truthful; and by failing to disclose documents which would have helped expose the truth," the report reads.

"Their instinct throughout, until it was too late, was to cover up rather than seek out wrongdoing and discipline the perpetrators, as they also professed they would do after the criminal convictions," it adds.

In a statement, a spokesman for News Corp. said that the company was currently reviewing the report and would respond shortly, but offered an apology to the hacking victims.

Also read: Can Chase Carey Steer News Corp. Out of Scandal?

"The Company fully acknowledges significant wrongdoing at News of the World and apologizes to everyone whose privacy was invaded," News Corp. said.

The executives cited for misleading the committee were Les Hinton, who oversaw News International from 1995 to 2007; Colin Myler, editor of News of the World from 2007 to its closure in 2011; and Tom Crone, legal manager of News Group Newspapers for 20 years.

The 10 person committee approved the report by a vote of six to four. Conservatives on the committee reportedly disapproved of language saying that Rupert Murdoch was unfit to lead News Corp.

Related Articles:

James Murdoch Out at BSkyB: News Corp. Succession Slips Away

James Murdoch Denies Lying to Parliament, Refutes Mafia Comparison (Video)

A Rupert Murdoch Peer: He's 'Dead Money'; A New Police Resignation in London

 

Also read: James Murdoch Out at BSkyB: News Corp. Succession Slips Away

 

The Shit Palace Demands Cleanliness: Murdoch's mafia, Daniel Morgan, and British Media's dangerous hypocrites

Bashir is good box office for the British press, but its complicity with corrupt police officers is the story that we should be focused on.

MIC WRIGHT  23 MAY 2021

 

Previously:
1 Glasshouses all the way down: As the British press throws rocks over Bashir and Princess Diana, the BBC hands them more
2 The Phoneys War: The British media's worst bastards bash the BBC... and ignore 25 years of their own bullshit

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Of all the hypocritical cant published since the release of Lord Dyson’s report on how Martin Bashir secured his 1995 interview with Princess Diana — and the British media is full of hypocritical cants — the examples tripping from the keyboards of columnists employed by Rupert Murdoch are arguably the worst.

I woke up at 4.30 am and the first newspaper headline I read was on a piece by the pompous ping-pong player Matthew Syed — The BBC, the NHS and Oxfam have a bad case of institutional narcissism. It took enormous effort not to sit up and exclaim loudly, “You. Work. For. Fucking. Rupert Murdoch.” I managed it though, predominantly through fear of waking up my partner, who would not have looked kindly on this interruption. As I type, she’s still soundly asleep.

But I’m wide awake and, as is so often the case when I write these newsletters, I am Howard Beale-style mad as hell. As I wrote on Friday, I’m not here to praise or even defend Martin Bashir and the BBC. He was a liar then and he’s a liar now. The issue comes when employees of the Murdoch empire — an organisation that produces lies and distortion on an industrial scale — present themselves as the moral guardians of all that is good and true about journalism.

Syed opens his column by quoting Oscar Wilde. I suppose we should be grateful he’s not reached for Orwell yet again but it’s equally as route one. He writes…

Oscar Wilde, a man who knew a thing or two about the contradictions of human nature, penned an article in 1891 that I have been thinking about a lot in recent days. In it he wrote: “Charity creates a multitude of sins.” His point was that while bodies set up for the public good are often admirable, good intentions alone are not sufficient to inoculate them against the dangers of vice, nor to obviate the need for checks and balances. Indeed, sometimes the quest for moral purity can exaggerate human frailty.

Wilde’s point is a subtle one, but it has deep echoes in recent psychological research. A 2017 paper by economists at Chicago University found that working for a socially responsible company increased the tendency of people to act unethically…

Nothing says respect for the reader like explaining the quote you have chosen to them like you’re teaching philosophy to a class of 8-year-olds. And what do the Chicago University economists have to say about socially irresponsible companies like News UK?

davidallengreen @davidallengreen

The whole of the phone hacking scandal *only* came to light because phones of royals were hacked - and so were investigated by the diplomatic police rather than the parts of Met where the press had a better 'relationship' The problem was media-wide - not just BBC, not just press

9:48 AM ∙ May 22, 2021

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Elsewhere in The Sunday Times, Rod Liddle — a former Today programme editor and current writer of offensive things for money, says:

The BBC’s claims to a moral high ground have always been false and are now demonstrably so. Why should we still pay for it?

Rod Liddle not only does not occupy the moral high ground but cannot even glimpse the moral high ground from the earth’s core-touchingly deep cesspit where he dwells. Liddle is the man who…

• Began a Spectator column by asking, “So — Harriet Harman, then. Would you? I mean after a few beers obviously, not while you were sober."

• Wrote in another Spectator column that he was offering readers “a quick update on what the Muslim savages are up to…”

• Became the first journalist to be censured by the Press Complaints Commission over a blog post after distorting crime stats in a piece that included the line, “The overwhelming majority of street crime, knife crime, gun crime, robbery and crimes of sexual violence in London is carried out by young men from the African-Caribbean community… in return, we have rap music, goat curry and a far more vibrant and diverse understanding of cultures which were once alien to us. For which, many thanks.”

• Opined that “my own view is that there is not nearly enough Islamophobia within the Tory party”.

• Posted antisemitic and racist ‘jokes’ on a Millwall forum and later said he didn’t regret doing it.

• Breached reporting restrictions by claiming that the trial of two men accused and later convicted of the murder of Stephen Lawrence would not be fair. The Spectator didn’t contest the case and was required to pay a derisory sum of £5,625 in compensation and costs.

• Was censured by ISPO over two Sun columns in which he made jokes about a blind, transgender electoral candidate.

• Wrote “I would have thought that the requirement for amyl nitrate to relax the sphincter muscle and lube to accommodate entry was God's way of telling you that what you're about to do is unnatural and perverse…” in homophobic a Spectator column castigating the gay Tory MP Crispin Blunt which was published not in 1986 or 1996 but 2016.

• Was arrested for common assault against his partner who was 20 weeks pregnant at the time. He admitted the offence and accepted a caution but later claimed he only did so because it was the quickest way to be released.

… and that’s just a partial list of reasons why Rod Liddle is a howling embodiment of moral emptiness, bigotry and spite. It also serves as a list of reasons that he fits in so well as a News UK employee.

Sir Harold Evans wrote in the 2012 preface to his book Good Times, Bad Times about watching Rupert Murdoch as he gave evidence to a parliamentary committee in 2011 — the “most humble day of my life” appearance. Evans worked up a beautiful metaphor inspired by the name of the venue where the proceedings took place — Portcullis House:

A portcullis is a defensive latticed iron grating hung over the entrance of a fortified castle. It’s a perfect metaphor for News Corporation, which perpetually sees itself as beset by enemies. The company’s normal style is to soak assailants in boiling oil, but this time Murdoch, its chairman and only begetter of the giant multimedia enterprise had little choice between defending the indefensible and denying the undeniable. He chose humility, the honest man betrayed by vassals.

Evans was a giant of true campaigning public interest journalism — his efforts on behalf of the Thalidomide victims and their families would have been enough to secure his place in history — and he pins down Murdoch’s modus operandi with the precision of a lepidopterist:

Of course, [Murdoch’s] direct competitors have hardly been free of the excesses typical of tabloid circulation battles — invasions of privacy with not a shred of justification in the public interest; entrapment, fabrication, malicious gossip; and the occlusion of facts that may stand in the way of a good story.

But News International [the News Corp subsidiary

1

] practiced the worst of these vices on an industrial scale, invented new ones in bribery and intimidation, and came to consider itself above the law.

 

When Syed correctly writes in his column that…

… the institutional reflex of the BBC was to disbelieve that somebody so vile could have risen so high in an institution so pure.

… I can help but reply that the institutional reflex in the News Corp world has often been to promote the vilest people as they are the ones willing to do ‘whatever it takes’ to get the scoop.

Taru @taru_sisko

While Murdoch, Johnson and their gang are "shocked" about BBC and 25year old Diana interview, shall we see how shocked everyone else are when Daniel Morgan's murder report is released?

8:51 AM ∙ May 22, 2021

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The BBC is a bureaucratic beast beset by arse-covering, blame-shifting, and corporate cowardice, but when it gets caught out, its journalists — usually the ones not guilty of any failure — indulge in orgies of self-flagellation. The aim seems to be for the BBC to be crueller to itself than even its many critics can conceive of being.

But as Evans wrote, when News Corp is on the ropes, a very different and dangerous instinct kicks in:

… only when cornered did the company start offering damage money for its intrusions. In the meantime, it did not confine itself to rebuttals. It hired private investigators to build a dossier on its pursuers.

Confronted by a critic, the cry in News International seems not to have been ‘is there anything to this allegation?’ but ‘what have we got on him?’

 

At a subsequent parliamentary committee session where James Murdoch appeared without his father, Tom Watson indulged in a piece of theatre that’s worth revisiting:

Tom Watson (TW): You’re familiar with the word ‘mafia’…

James Murdoch (JM): Yes, Mr Watson.

TW: Have you ever heard the word ‘omerta’, a Mafia term they use for the code of silence? …would you agree that it means a group of people who are bound together by secrecy, who together pursue their groups business objectives with no regard for the law using intimidation, corruption, and general criminality?

JM: I… err.. again, I’m not familiar with the term particularly, I’ve heard it vaguely.

TW: Would you agree with me that this is an accurate description of News International in the UK?

JM: Absolutely not. I frankly think that’s offensive and it’s not true.

TW: There are allegations of phone hacking, computer hacking, conspiring to pervert the course of justice, perjury facing this company… and all this happened without your knowledge?

JM: As I’ve said to you, Mr Watson, and to this committee on a number of occasions: It is a matter of regret that things went wrong at the News of the World in 2006. The company didn’t come to grips with those issues fast enough, I think we all recognised that.

And I’ve also acknowledged that evidence to this committee was given without full possession of the facts. And that’s something I’m very sorry for. What I can tell you though is that when evidence came to light and when we finally achieved the transparency that is appropriate, we have acted and the company has acted with great zeal and diligence to get to the bottom of issues, to improve the processes to make sure they don’t happen again…

… and to make sure with the police, with this committee, and the like is such that we can bring any wrongdoers — if they are proven to be so — to account.

TW: Mr Murdoch, you must be the first mafia boss in history that didn’t know he was running a criminal enterprise…

There was a category error at the heart of Watson’s rhetoric; James Murdoch who has now left the family business and is attempting to rehabilitate himself by speaking out about its coverage of climate change was not the mob moss. He was his father’s fall guy, the world’s most unconvincing consigliere.

The News of the World was closed in July 2011 as Murdoch Snr. attempted to move on from the scandals like a rogue government concreting over a nuclear waste dump. But the radiation is still there and it seeps out from every crack in the edifice of the Murdoch empire.

This week, as The Sun, The Times, and The Sunday Times were luxuriating in the Bashir story, Home Secretary Priti Patel demanded to review the report by the independent panel investigating the murder of Daniel Morgan before it is allowed to be published. The panel has subsequently refused to hand over its 1,000-page report — which was at the printers when the Home Office made its unexpected and suspect intervention.

Nick Davies @Bynickdavies

The Morgan inquiry had to check claims that Murdoch journos colluded w bent detectives and even organised surveillance of the straight detective investigating Morgan's death; and that Murdoch execs knew this. Why is Priti Patel 'reviewing' the report?

11:11 AM ∙ May 19, 2021

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As detailed in the book Who Killed Daniel Morgan? by Daniel’s brother Alastair Morgan and Peter Jukes, Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers were intimately connected with the case and made extensive use of private detectives. Morgan and Jukes recount early in their book:

Murdoch himself was heard to admit that, when he took over the News of the World in 1969, he was told that the company safe was full of cash to pay off police officers on Saturdays before the paper went to press. ‘We’re talking about payments for news tips from cops: that’s been going on a hundred years, absolutely,’ Murdoch told Sun journalists in 2013.

Byline Times Podcast @BylineTimesPod

"The cover-up has been going on 34 yrs. The longer it goes on, the more corruption taints. Now, it laps around the Government..." @peterjukes @Hardeep_Matharu from @BylineTimes discuss the #DanielMorgan murder @BylineTimesPod @GoldbergRadio

pod.foBYLINE TIMES PODCAST

8:05 PM ∙ May 22, 2021

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Raju Bhatt, solicitor to the Morgan family, told The Guardian:

The failure is not just the police, the Home Office is complicit in these failures. We are suspicious about the motives for the Home Secretary’s unwarranted and late intervention…

And they have good reason to be suspicious. Patel attended Rupert Murdoch’s 2016 wedding to Jerry Hall and listed her last publicly declared meeting with him on September 14 20202 as “a private dinner [with] the Executive Chairman of News Corp”.

The Home Office has reached for the government’s usual excuse for bringing the gears of justice to a grinding halt — “national security concerns” — but a source with knowledge of the five Metropolitan police inquiries into Morgan’s murder again told The Guardian:

There are no national security issues involved. There are national embarrassment issues.

Jonathan Rees, Daniel Morgan’s partner in Southern Investigations — the private detective agency that Nick Davies called “the cradle of the dark arts” in his book Hack Attack — was one of three men tried and acquitted of Morgan’s murder in 2009. In 2011, it was revealed that he earned £150,000 a year from the News of the World alone for supplying illegally obtained information.

Rees used a network of corrupt police officers to get hold of confidential data like bank records, telephone logs, and car registration details. He’s also alleged to have commissioned burglaries on behalf of journalists.

Rees was jailed for perverting the course of justice after he planted cocaine on a woman to discredit her during divorce proceedings. When he was released, he was immediately rehired by News of the World editor, Andy Coulson — David Cameron’s future comms chief, who was later jailed for conspiracy to intercept voicemails aka phone hacking.

Nick Davies @Bynickdavies

It is very hard to think of any innocent reason why Priti Patel has decided to delay and potentially censor a report about corruption in the Met police and the Murdoch press.

Andy Davies@adavies4

NEW: Extraordinary statement from Daniel Morgan Independent Panel [set up 8 yrs ago to investigate, inter alia, police conduct re one of Britain’s most notorious unsolved murders] - accuses Home Office of ‘unnecessary’ intervention effectively in breach of Panel’s independence https://t.co/HL0vUJeDxE

6:38 PM ∙ May 18, 2021

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What possible reason could Priti Patel, Murdoch wedding guest and private dining companion, have to sit on a report that digs into the tightly wound connections between corrupt police officers and News Corp journalists? I’m sure she’s just doing her best, just like Matt Hancock was when, as Culture Secretary, he scrapped plans for ‘Leveson 2’ — an inquiry which would have explored the relationships between public officials, especially the police.

Byline TV @BylineTV

After Priti Patel delayed the long-awaited report into the murder of Daniel Morgan, @Bynickdavies explains what we know so far about the case and the uncomfortable connection between Rupert Murdoch's News of the World and police corruption in the UK 

12:02 PM ∙ May 22, 2021

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Watch the moralising and grandstanding by Murdoch employees very carefully now, because they will go very silent when the Daniel Morgan inquiry panel’s work is finally made public. News UK will find ways to distract and deflect from the depths of depravity that Murdoch’s newspapers have sunk to time and time again to get their ‘scoops’. Bashir was bad, but the murkiest corners of Rupert Murdoch’s empire make him look like a particularly devout choirboy.

Don’t look to people on the Murdoch payroll like Syed and Liddle to tell you what is wrong in the British media. Read the words of Daniel Morgan’s son, also called Daniel, who was 3 at the time of his father’s murder:

In 34 years we have never had anywhere near a satisfactory level of closure on the events before, during and after my father’s death.

What remains most sickening is the failure of the institutions of the state to do what was required of them: the failure to address the police corruption that has protected those responsible for the murder from justice; and the repeated failure to confront that corruption over the decades; a failure of the police hierarchy at the highest ranks; the failure of the Home Office which is supposed to be responsible for the police.

My family have been collateral damage in this. Our pain and suffering seems to count for nothing. A generation of grief.

What should be the bigger story — the underhand and unethical way a hack got an interview that Princess Diana was always going to give 25 years ago? Or the continuing efforts of the establishment to deny a family justice 34 years on?

 

The Cover-Up, Not the Crime, Brings Down James Murdoch | Media | FRONTLINE | PBS

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/media/the-cover-up-not-the-crime-brings-down-james-murdoch/ 

 

Photo: James Murdoch (left) and Rupert Murdoch giving evidence to the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee in the House of Commons in central London on the News of the World phone-hacking scandal. James Murdoch is to step down as executive chairman of News International to focus on expanding international TV businesses, the company announced today. Issue date: Wednesday February 29, 2012. See PA story CITY Murdoch. PA Wire URN:12923472 (Press Association via AP Images)

 

March 1, 2012, 3:30 pm ET by Gretchen Gavett Zachary Stauffer and Hannah Mintz

 

FRONTLINE’s Lowell Bergman appeared on The Takeaway this morning to reflect on the news that James Murdoch, son of media titan Rupert, stepped down from his role as CEO of News International, the British press arm of News Corporation. The younger Murdoch has slowly been transitioning to the company’s New York offices.

“I don’t think it’s really that significant a move, he’s been back in the United States for quite a while,” says Bergman. “He’s never really expressed, apparently, that much interest in the newspaper business. His real interest is in BSkyB TV and other broadcasting … aspects of News Corporation.” 

This move doesn’t mean James is going to disappear into the Manhattan streets. Investigations into his role covering up crimes at News International are ongoing. “Revelations that keep coming out of this Leveson Inquiry … continue to show that the cover-up, as usual, is worse than the crime,” notes Bergman.

For years, in public and in testimony to British Parliament, James and other executives claimed that phone hacking and other illegal behavior was limited within the company. Revelations in the last year have undercut those claims.

The question remains: who knew what, and when? While neither James nor Rupert Murdoch have given in-depth interviews to the press (“I’m holding my breath,” jokes Bergman, after an extended radio silence), questions swirl: Did James tell the truth to parliament in July about his lack of knowledge about the widespread phone hacking? What about the 2008 “for Neville” email, in which a News of the World editor told James that one particular case looked bad?

“Unfortunately, it’s as bad as we feared,” Myler wrote.  “No worries,” James replied.

In that case, James reportedly approved a settlement of over $1 million not long after reading the e-mail. Business continued as usual at News International until last July, when it was revealed that News of the World hacked into the voicemails of Milly Dowler, a missing schoolgirl who was later found murdered.

It goes way beyond, James, Bergman notes — and it’s shaking up Britain’s core. “We’re talking about the involvement of every prime minister in Britain for the last quarter century,” says Bergman. “Equivalent of the White House, the FBI and the largest press organization or media organization in the country, all colluding, money changing hands, cover-up and all kinds of black arts in between.”

These arts are the subject of Lowell Bergman’s upcoming FRONTLINE film Murdoch’s Scandal, slated to air March 27.

Rupert Murdoch's American Scandals

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/rupert-murdochs-american-scandals-243127/ 

Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Popular on Rolling Stone

Rupert Murdoch would like you to believe that the voicemail-hacking scandal at the News of the World “went against everything that I stand for.” In his recent testimony before Parliament, the 80-year-old billionaire insisted that the criminal wrongdoing at the London tabloid betrayed the 53,000 “ethical and distinguished professionals” he commands from the pinnacle of News Corp. — the world’s second-largest media empire. Besides, he claimed, the scandal at the News of the World involved “a tiny part of our business,” which he helpfully quantified as “less than one percent of our company.”

At first glance, the systemic campaign of bribery and wiretapping at the News of the World certainly does seem extraordinary. Reporters and editors at what was the largest-circulation Sunday paper in the English-speaking world stand accused of bribing police, hacking the private voicemails of everyone from the royal family to the parents of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and paying more than $2 million in gag settlements to victims — allegedly with the full knowledge of Murdoch’s son and heir apparent, James.

But the corruption exposed at the News of the World is not the work of a “rogue” element within News Corp. — it’s a reflection of the lawless culture that defines the company. As CEO, Murdoch not only tolerates employees and executives who push the boundaries of legality and good taste, he celebrates them — at least until the cops show up. “There’s a broader culture within the company,” Col Allan, editor of Murdoch’s New York Post, crowed in 2007. “We like being pirates.” Whatever veneer of integrity News Corp. may have accrued after its purchase of The Wall Street Journal the very same year masks an ingrained corporate ethos that believes integrity is for suckers. The attitude passed down from the top, says one veteran of Murdoch’s tabloids, is aggressive and straightforward: “Anything we do is OK. We’re News Corp. — so fuck you and fuck your mother.”

Indeed, an examination of Murdoch’s corporate history reveals that each of the elements of the scandal in London – hacking, thuggish reporting tactics, unethical entanglements with police, hush-money settlements and efforts to corrupt officials at the highest levels of government – extend far beyond Fleet Street. Over the past decade, News Corp. has systematically employed such tactics in its U.S. operations, exhibiting what a recent lawsuit filed against the firm calls a “culture run amok.” As a former high-ranking News Corp. executive tells Rolling Stone: “It’s the same shit, different day.”

HACKING AND HUSH MONEY 

News America Marketing, a News Corp. subsidiary based in Connecticut, has been accused of engaging in “illegal computer espionage,” repeatedly hacking a rival firm’s computer system between 2003 and 2004 — a period that happens to coincide with NOTW‘s voicemail hacking in London. According to a lawsuit against News America, which dominates the lucrative market for ads on supermarket shelves and shopping carts, the Murdoch subsidiary grew alarmed when a competitor called Floorgraphics Inc. entered the market in the late 1990s with a novel concept — ad decals pasted on supermarket aisles. Paul Carlucci, the CEO of News America, responded by convening a meeting with FGI executives and allegedly delivering a Mafia­like ultimatum: Sell to Murdoch or be destroyed. “I work for a man who wants it all,” Carlucci warned, “and doesn’t understand anyone telling him he can’t have it all.”

When FGI rebuffed the takeover bid, according to a lawsuit the company filed in 2004, News America embarked on a campaign of “illegal, anti-competitive and unfair business practices.” After hacking into FGI’s database, the suit alleged, News America used the information to steal away top clients like Safeway, effectively destroying its rival’s business. FGI petitioned Chris Christie, then a U.S. attorney, to launch a criminal investigation into the alleged hacking, but the future governor of New Jersey refused to file charges. By then, the damage was done. News America was able to snap up FGI for $30 million — not only achieving Murdoch’s original goal of market domination but also quashing FGI’s lawsuit in the process.

News Corp. shareholders have paid far more to hush up other complaints about News America’s monopolistic abuses. To box out two more rival firms, Valassis Communications and Insignia, News America used its market position to hike ad rates for supermarket clients who refused to also advertise in Murdoch newspaper circulars. “It feels like they are raping us and they enjoy it,” an executive at Sara Lee complained. In 2009, a Michigan court awarded Valassis $300 million for News America’s illegal attempt to corner the market. News Corp. eventually silenced the affair with a $500 million payment to Valassis that blocked the threat of further litigation. It also reached a $125 million settlement with Insignia. The combined settlements of $655 million more than wiped out the profits News Corp. reaped from its record box-office smash Avatar.

THUGGISH REPORTING 

Instead of firing the man responsible for the legal and financial fiasco at News America, Murdoch promoted him. In addition to serving as CEO of News America, Carlucci was tapped in 2005 to become publisher of Murdoch’s flagship American tabloid, the New York Post. Under Carlucci’s leadership, the two businesses appear to have drawn inspiration from a similar source: organized crime. Carlucci reportedly encouraged teamwork at News America by showing his salesmen a clip from The Untouchables in which Al Capone brains a disloyal deputy with a baseball bat. And shortly after Carlucci arrived at the Post, the newspaper was rocked by a scandal in which a star Page Six reporter allegedly attempted to shake down billionaire Ron Burkle for “protection” from the gossip sheet, telling him, “It’s a little like the Mafia.”

Burkle secretly recorded Page Six reporter Jared Stern offering to go easy on him in the gossip sheet in exchange for a hefty payoff. “We know how to destroy people,” Stern reportedly threatened. “It’s what we do.” To shield himself from character assassination, Stern allegedly suggested, Burkle could make a one-time payment of $100,000, followed by monthly installments of $10,000.

News Corp. axed Stern, dismissing him as a rogue reporter and calling his behavior “highly aberrational.” But according to a 2007 affidavit by a fellow Post veteran, the alleged shakedown was an integral part of the company’s culture. “The spineless hypocrites in senior management at the New York Post and News Corp. have always used ‘expendable’ employees as scapegoats for the misdeeds of its senior executives,” Post reporter Ian Spiegelman testified. Spiegelman revealed that Page Six’s top editor Richard Johnson and two others had accepted cash from a restaurateur whose business had received a positive mention the day before. Johnson also allegedly accepted a $50,000 all-expenses-paid bachelor party to Mexico from Joe Francis, the founder of Girls Gone Wild, whom the Post subsequently hyped as “the next Hugh Hefner.” Spiegelman further charged that Col Allan, the Post‘s top editor, received free lap dances at the strip club Scores in return for favorable coverage by the paper.

News Corp. conceded that Johnson had accepted a $1,000 “gift,” but Murdoch let the editor off with a reprimand. Indeed, as Murdoch biographer Michael Wolff later observed, the incident only served to enhance Johnson’s reputation. “The bribery business actually seemed to confirm Johnson’s status for Murdoch as an old-time, walk-on-the-wild-side, dangerous, rule-bucking, proudly cynical newsman,” Wolff concluded. Insiders make clear that the worst impulses exhibited by the Post and other News Corp. publications come directly from the top. “Murdoch tries to wash his hands of everything when it’s convenient and pretend he has no involvement in the day-to-day running of the paper — which is just nonsense,” says a former Post reporter. “He’s always been very hands-on. There were no major decisions taken, even at Page Six, where Murdoch’s interests would not be considered.”

POLITICAL CORRUPTION Murdoch has built News Corp. into a media empire second only to Disney by horse-trading editorial support for political favors, repeatedly persuading officials at the highest levels of government to bend, break or rewrite rules meant to safeguard the public interest. “Murdoch has made himself almost a partner of certain political movements,” says Reed Hundt, who tried to rein in monopolistic practices by media giants like News Corp. as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. “Politicians believe he’s going to win in the end, so why tangle with him?”

Long before the rise of Fox News, Murdoch used News Corp. to influence friends in high places. Shortly after purchasing the Post in 1977, he plucked Ed Koch out of obscurity and used the tabloid to propel him into Gracie Mansion. “I couldn’t have been elected without Rupert Murdoch’s support,” Koch said later. “Suddenly I was mayor of New York.” In 1980, when Jimmy Carter was battling Ted Kennedy for the Democratic nomination and badly needed a primary win in New York, the Post endorsed the president. Six days later, Murdoch received a $290 million loan from the federal government to bail out one of his Australian companies. News Corp. received an even bigger payoff after it gave House Speaker Newt Gingrich a $4.5 million book deal in 1994 — just as Congress began debating a new law that removed federal restrictions on Murdoch’s media holdings. Under George W. Bush, who owed his election in large part to the inaccurate and biased reporting of Fox News, the FCC blocked the sale of DirecTV to a News Corp. rival, then rubber-stamped its acquisition by Murdoch.

But Murdoch’s coziest political bond has been with Rudy Giuliani. In 1994, Giuliani was elected mayor of New York by a narrow margin, thanks largely to the full-bore support of the Post. With Giuliani in office, the Post continued to back the mayor so slavishly that Rep. Charlie Rangel took to calling it the City Hall Post. News Corp. even hired Giuliani’s wife, Donna Hanover, as a Fox television reporter, quickly quadrupling her salary to $123,000.

Giuliani was not shy about rewarding his media patron. When Murdoch moved News Corp. into its current Midtown headquarters, the mayor secured the company a tax break worth more than $20 million. Then, when Time Warner tried to keep Murdoch out of the New York market in 1996 by refusing to give Fox News a spot in its cable lineups, Giuliani threatened to revoke Time Warner’s cable franchise and offered to air Fox News on one of the city’s public-access channels. A federal judge blocked the move, upbraiding the mayor for acting “to reward a friend and to further a particular viewpoint.” But the rank political favoritism paid off: During Giuliani’s first term, according to a study by researchers at the University of Southern California, not a single negative editorial about him appeared in the Post.

POLITCAL ENTANGLEMENTS Just as the News of the World scandal toppled the head of Scotland Yard, News Corp. also brought down one of America’s top cops. In 2001, one of Murdoch’s publishing chiefs, Judith Regan, signed New York Police Commissioner Bernie Kerik to a book advance worth six figures. In an affair worthy of Page Six, the News Corp. executive was soon literally in bed with the police czar, meeting for sex in an apartment overlooking Ground Zero that was intended to house exhausted recovery workers. Before long, Kerik was tasking NYPD officers as if they were Regan’s personal bodyguards, at one point reportedly dispatching them to track down the publisher’s lost cellphone.

According to a source familiar with details of the affair, the relationship soured when Regan tried to break it off. Unable to call the cops, she confided in fellow News Corp. executive Roger Ailes, the head of Fox News, hoping he could get Giuliani to rein in Kerik. But Ailes was more concerned about the political fallout. According to legal filings by Regan, Ailes anticipated the damage the scandal could cause the mayor and personally confronted Murdoch, telling him that Regan was “out of control.” Ailes grew even more concerned in 2004, when President Bush nominated Kerik — by then a senior vice president in Giuliani’s national security firm — to head the Department of Homeland Security. If Regan disclosed her tawdry ties to the former commissioner, Ailes feared, it might harm Kerik’s nomination and “more importantly, Giuliani’s planned presidential campaign.”

To keep the affair hush-hush, Ailes “advised Regan to lie to and withhold information from investigators,” and even coached her on limiting her disclosures “as is typically done when Fox News on-air talent receive their ‘talking points.'” The alleged obstruction of justice by Ailes has since made headlines, but Regan also fingered “another News Corp. executive,” whom she claimed advised her “not to produce clearly relevant documents in connection with a governmental investigation of Kerik.”

Regan laid these allegations bare in a wrongful-termination lawsuit she filed in 2007. As it did with its accusers in London, News Corp. moved to paper over the matter by reaching a settlement with Regan worth more than $10 million. The only one punished in the Kerik affair was Kerik himself, who was sentenced to four years in prison for lying to federal investigators and failing to report income from a News Corp. book advance to the IRS.

Murdoch may soon find himself in even deeper trouble for his dealings with New York police. The Justice Department is currently investigating allegations that News Corp. reporters tried to bribe a New York cop, seeking to hack the phones of 9/11 victims — a charge that has outraged even the staunchest Fox News Republicans. “It is revolting to imagine that members of the media would seek to compromise the integrity of a public official for financial gain in the pursuit of yellow journalism,” Rep. Peter King of New York wrote in a letter to FBI director Robert Mueller, demanding that any wrongdoing be met with the “harshest sanctions available under law.”

But the “revolting” practice that King describes is actually at the core of Murdoch’s business model. Until the News of the World scandal became public, deplorable judgment and even outright criminal behavior have not been firing offenses for Murdoch’s top deputies, either in London or New York. A willingness to push the boundaries of the law and common decency, in fact, is what has made Murdoch a billionaire nearly eight times over. Murdoch himself has bragged of possessing files, replete with photographs detailing the sexual escapades of prominent liberals. You know, for leverage. All of which makes laughable Murdoch’s claim before Parliament that “I’m the best person to clean this up.”

The phone-hacking scandal engulfing News Corp. has led members of the extended Bancroft clan that sold The Wall Street Journal to Murdoch to repent of their decision — even though they received what amounted to a $3 billion overpayment from News Corp. for the paper. “Murdoch thinks he is completely above the law, as he always has,” former top shareholder Bill Cox III recently told ProPublica. “We made a deal with the devil.”

The sharks are already circling in England, where politicians long cowed by Murdoch’s bullying now appear determined to curb News Corp.’s influence. Labor Party leader Ed Miliband, decrying Murdoch for having “too much power over British public life,” has called for a breakup of his U.K. holdings. Here in the United States, institutional shareholders filed suit in July, seeking to change News Corp. from the inside by reforming its board of hand-appointed cronies. The board, the suit claims, has “abdicated its fiduciary duties” by enabling Murdoch to run the publicly-traded News Corp. “without any restraints on his pursuit of his political and personal agendas, which has led the company to engage in improper and illegal conduct.”

The lawsuit highlights Murdoch’s outrageous pay: He’s pocketed $75 million in compensation over the past three years, even as News Corp.’s stock has yielded a negative return. It also blasts his “rampant nepotism,” noting the extravagant overpayment he made to acquire his daughter Elizabeth’s production company, Shine — a deal that made her $250 million richer at the expense of the company. But even as Murdoch’s children have come back into the News Corp. fold, his dreams of creating a media dynasty have never been more troubled. As the fallout from the hacking scandal continues in London, the News of the World’s former editor is accusing heir apparent James Murdoch of lying to Parliament about his knowledge of the hush money paid to hacking victims.

As each News of the World revelation exposes the root and branch of corruption at News Corp., the increasingly desperate Murdoch has responded by hacking off branches. In removing Les Hinton, the publisher of The Wall Street Journal, he cut off an executive he once said he would trust his life to. In getting rid of Rebekah Brooks at News of the World, he abandoned a deputy he favored like a daughter. Son James now looks like the next branch to go. But until Rupert Murdoch sees fit to remove himself, the root of all that’s vile at News Corp. will remain the same.

This story is from the August 18, 2011 issue of Rolling Stone.

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‘The emperor lost his clothes’: Rupert Murdoch, News of the World and journalistic boundary work in the UK and USA

Matt Carlson and Dan BerkowitzView all authors and affiliations

Volume 15, Issue 4

https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884913477280

‘The emperor lost his clothes’: Rupert Murdoch, News of the World and journalistic boundary work in the UK and USA - Matt Carlson, Dan Berkowitz, 2014

Abstract

Episodes of journalistic deviancy become moments of reflection for the journalistic interpretive community, at times assuming international proportions. This study examines the construction of appropriate journalistic norms through reactions to the phone hacking scandal that led to the abrupt closure of the British Sunday tabloid the News of the World on 10 July 2011. A comparison of reactions in US and UK newspapers reveals how boundary work articulates appropriate practices through defining deviant behavior. Rather than isolating the troubles to a single newsroom, what emerges is a form of synecdochic deviancy in which the significance of the scandal expands to larger normative questions among journalists in both nations.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1464884913477280?icid=int.sj-abstract.similar-articles.2

 

The emperor lost his clothes’: Rupert Murdoch, News of the World and journalistic boundary work in the UK and USA - Matt Carlson, Dan Berkowitz, 

 

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Biographies

Matt Carlson is Assistant Professor of Communication at Saint Louis University. He is the author of On the Condition of Anonymity: Unnamed Sources and the Battle for Journalism (University of Illinois Press, 2011). His research examines the discursive construction of journalism in a changing media landscape.

Dan Berkowitz is Professor of Journalism and Mass Communication and Associate Dean in the Graduate College at the University of Iowa. His research interests are in cultural approaches to the study of news production, including aspects of mythical narratives and collective memory. He is editor of two readers, Social Meanings of News and Cultural Meanings of News.

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Biographies

Matt Carlson is Assistant Professor of Communication at Saint Louis University. He is the author of On the Condition of Anonymity: Unnamed Sources and the Battle for Journalism (University of Illinois Press, 2011). His research examines the discursive construction of journalism in a changing media landscape.

Dan Berkowitz is Professor of Journalism and Mass Communication and Associate Dean in the Graduate College at the University of Iowa. His research interests are in cultural approaches to the study of news production, including aspects of mythical narratives and collective memory. He is editor of two readers, Social Meanings of News and Cultural Meanings of News.

 

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