Criminal law, Free Speech, Politics, Society

Rage Against The Machine

Submitted By Mark Esposito, Guest Blogger

Has the Emperor of Gotcha' Been Got?

Britain’s largest weekly tabloid, News of the World,  closes today, but not from lack of advertisers or readers. Instead, the Rupert Murdoch led tabloid succumbed to its own excesses amid shocking allegations of  interceptions of cellphone voice mails of the families of a murdered 13-year-old girl, servicemen and women slain in Afghanistan, and victims of  the 2005 London terrorist bombings.  Glenn Mulcaire, a private investigator who worked for News of the World,  is accused of the electronic hacking.

One of the victims, Graham Foulkes, whose son, David, died in the 2005 London attack, said “Janet and I were obviously having very intimate personal phone calls with friends and family. To think that when you’re at the lowest time in life that somebody, for the sake of a cheap story, is maybe listening to you, it’s just beyond words.”

The outrage from the British public has been complete and has political overtones.  Perhaps not too surprisingly, Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron has been almost alone in not calling for the paper’s editor, Rebekah Brooks, to resign. Murdoch’s News International syndicate was a tireless and enthusiastic supporter of Cameron in last year’s British parliamentary elections. The cozy relationship between Brooks and the PM resulted in Cameron spending the Christmas holiday with Brooks and her family.

Criticism for the PM’s reluctance is growing and Cameron has moved to call for a complete investigation. Cameron is also dealing with the fact that his Director of Communications, Andy Coulson, is a former editor of NOW. Coulson  resigned in January citing another  scandal as a “distraction,” but the British public is all too aware that Coulson, while editor, was accused of  paying police tens of thousands of pounds from NOW funds.

James Murdoch, son of the undisputed guru of sensationalist journalism, said the scandal will result in punishments for the newspaper’s culpable employees. “Wrongdoers turned a good newsroom bad and this was not fully understood or adequately pursued.” He pledged that “those who acted wrongly will have to face the consequences.” NOW has published for 168 years and is wildly profitable. The closing has real effects on the Murdoch  Empire and is the most serious challenge to the what some regard as the voice of conservatism on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond. Murdoch’s Fox News is a vocal backer of conservative candidates in the U.S. as well, and has faced its own share of criticism in that enterprise.

As for Murdoch, Sr., he seems to realize the gravamen of the situation deciding to fly to London and axe the paper in an attempt to stem the wave of criticism. The mogul may be the victim of his own doing as well. Many newspaper scandals in the past have been ameliorated by the presence of strong and independent boards of directors who act immediately to discharge the offending editors and restore the paper’s image. Not so with Murdoch’s companies, whose boards show a disturbing lack of resistance to Murdoch’s will. Simon Duke, a financial writer for the UK’s “This is Your Money” website puts it this way, “All too often, Murdoch Sr has been able to bend the board to his will with embarrassing ease. The directors all appear to rub along very smoothly; so much so that the 80-year-old has been able to rail-road through a series of deals that, to the outside world, look a lot like pandering to the whim of the chief executive.”

Is this a “Rosebud” moment for the all-powerful tabloid mogul? Only time will tell, but what is beyond doubt is that the drive for sensationalism has shaken to the foundation the once unassailable House of Murdoch.

Sources: This Is Your Money;  Washington Post

~Mark Esposito, Guest Blogger

146 thoughts on “Rage Against The Machine”

  1. Here’s an interesting passage from the editorial page of the Boston Phoenix entitled Rupert Murdoch’s Watergate: Defining deviancy:

    Murdoch is a tycoon of darkness. Aside from his handful of quality publications — the Wall Street Journal, the Times of London, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Australian — his News Corporation specializes in smears, sensationalism, and mendacity.

    Murdoch’s enterprise, the totality of his career, has been spent “defining deviancy down.” That was a phrase used by the late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan in arguing that increases in deviant behavior redefine social norms in ways that make what was once unacceptable merely commonplace.

    In Massachusetts, we get a daily dose of this phenomenon in the Boston Herald, which hasn’t been owned by Murdoch for years, but still traffics in the salacious and news shorn of meaningful context.

    Those traits, for the most part, also characterize Murdoch’s Fox News, the brainchild of (surprise) a former Nixonian, Roger Ailes. Nationally, Fox News sponsors the organized ignorance of the Tea Party, the bingo-hall-style politics of Sarah Palin, and the distortions, half-truths, and outright lies of Republicans such as Eric Cantor.Nowhere, however, is deviancy more apparent than in Murdoch’s British tabloids: the Sun and the now-defunct News of the World, the remnants of which are expected to be folded into the Sun in the coming weeks and months.

    What is paradoxical, in the United States as well as in Great Britain, is that Murdoch’s operations are, for the most part, down-market, aimed at the lower rungs of wage earners, while the political positions espoused by his papers tend toward economic royalism, favoring big business and big corporations.

    Murdoch styles himself a small “R” republican, which in Britain means an enemy of inherited privilege who is also unenthusiastic about — if not outright hostile to — the monarchy.

    This is, of course, a charade. Murdoch is a billionaire oligarch whose publically stated aim is to pass control and management of his News Corporation media empire on to his children, especially his son, James, who runs the group’s UK and Asian operations. Murdoch is opposed to privilege, as long as it does not interfere with his own. Queen Elizabeth is a bit of a piker when compared with the Australian-born Murdoch.

  4. Then you provide the specific links, kderosa.

    Your claim being wrong?

    “This monopoly is legally committed to ‘balance,’ but is in fact the propaganda arm of the British state (along with the Guardian, which survives on government advertising).”

    A claim which you copied from your linked source on Jerry Pournelle’s blog. Let’s examine this premise:

    Survival means the continuation of life or existence.

    As long as the Scott Trust can fund the operations of the paper, the survival of the paper is not contingent upon ad revenues but rather the capacity of the Trust to pay for their operations.

    Let’s set aside the Trust issue and assume that the paper’s survival is premised on sufficient ad revenues to cover their expenses.

    To survive as a business, the Guardian’s operations must be paid by advertising revenues.

    If the Guardian’s survival is contingent upon government advertising revenues paying for their operating expenses, then the British government would be the majority ad purchaser for the Guardian if their survival was contingent upon government purchased ads.

    Either you have proof of this claim or you don’t.

    Any proof you may have is countered and/or offset by the existence of the Scott Trust.

    Your claim was accurately represented as you repeated it.

    The real issue here isn’t the Guardian. It’s your being upset over News Corp. being investigated for criminal activity. Once again, if you think this is selective prosecution, then take it up with the CPS.

    If you are so certain of News Corp.’s innocence, then you should not be concerned with an investigation and trial. If your defense of News Corp. is premised on “Johnny did it too”, Rupert should be very glad you aren’t on his defense team because the potential or actual illegal actions of others is not a good defense and with some vary narrow exceptions such as self-defense or the defense of others from immanent harm, it is not a valid defense either.

    I submit what bothers you most about the Guardian is that unlike so many media outlets, they have a lesser dependence on both governmental and corporate ads precisely because they are backed by a trust. This makes them one of the last remaining independent voices in the media landscape. It is that very independence that forced the hands of the British politicians in light of the public outrage it generated. If the BBC had reported the story, the Home Office could have simply called up and had the story retracted or modified. However, since they had no such control over the Guardian there was no way to close the barn door once the horse escaped. Concurrently, since the British government does have so much control over the BBC, had they been purposefully orchestrating some kind of vendetta against News Corp. or Murdoch, it would have been much easier to tell the BBC to break the story than try to strong arm a private paper under no duty to follow their orders as part of the free press.

    If you want to argue about the barn door some more? Bring your proof of government coercion over the Guardian or go elsewhere. The issue here is the horse, plain and simple.

    That horse is the potential criminal acts of News Corp. employees and this upsets you is besides the point.

    Spoon? There is no spoon. It, like your proof of your claim, isn’t really there.

  7. I just read this and I like it:

    “Do not argue with an idiot. He will drag you down to his level and beat you with experience.”

  9. Why Don’t we start our very own Bastille Day……

    Viva La France!

    On July 14, 1789, angry French citizens stormed Paris’ Bastille prison and fortress — then an enduring symbol of royal oppression. The defiant siege marked the beginning of the French Revolution and the country’s eventual transition from a monarchy to a republic. More than 200 years later, the people of France continue to commemorate the seminal event on July 14 with military parades, air shows and more. Go inside for a peek at the 2011 festivities. Above: Jets fly above the famous Arc de Triomphe.

    READ MORE

    http://www.life.com/gallery/62791/bastille-day-2011-photos#index/0

  10. @GeneH, you’re still being stupid. The links are loaded with article, many in the Guardian itself, how the UK government spends millions of dollars on advertising campaigns spread around the media outlets. Also, you got my claim wrong. Nice try though.

  12. kderosa,

    The only thing that is clear is that you don’t bother to read what you Google and when you do, you apparently misunderstand it. That search returns plenty of sites on how to advertise on the Guardian. The only link that was mildly pertinent to your gibberish was from Wired which details the troubles – common in all newspapers – as the Guardian tries to migrate from paper to digital publication including a workable ad schema that would preclude them needing to put up a paywall. Nowhere is there a link showing what you claim – that the government is the majority ad purchaser for the Guardian.

    I take your suggestions as seriously as I take anything you say, which is to say, not at all. If you have an issue with selective prosecution, take it up with the CPS when the investigation is concluded.

  14. @GeneH, so it’s now clear that the Guardian is very dependent on it’s revenue from the British government. Now Google — Guardian advertising Guardian UK — and have fun with all the links. What happened may have been criminal, but it was also apparently commonplace over in the UK. Doesn’t make it right, but it does suggest selective prosecution which was my only point.

  16. Blouise,

    I concur. The Bush family should be cut from the body politic like a cancer.

  17. The 24 year plan started the day Bush assumed his vice-presidential duties under that aging, pre-Alzheimer’s, “tear down this wall”, Reagan.

  18. kderosa,

    My bad and that’s what I get for multitasking, but so what? It’s a harmless error that in no way impacts the argument proper – namely that the Guardian is a privately owned, trust secured operation and as such are going to naturally less susceptible to the kinds of pressure that you allege with no proof. Newspapers everywhere are losing money as paper print media is a dying concern in general due to technological changes. It’s a sign of the times. The Guardian is fortunate to have a trust backing it. That I misplaced a decimal point does not change the rest of the argument or that your “evidence” is some other blogger’s opinion offered without substantiating proof. I offered plenty of proof of the Guardian’s independence and what makes it so in the form of their own records and ownership. You might as well have been citing Emeril Lagasse.

    Either you have proof that the Guardian is acting out of coercion by the British government applied in the form of threatening ad revenues in furtherance of some conspiracy against News Corp. or you don’t. Seeing that your idea of proof is a blogger who himself offers no proof, what you’ve got is unsubstantiated opinion. You’ve got a lot of that.

    Also, I do not take your assessments of the intelligence of others seriously any more than I take your conspiratorial defense of News Corp. seriously.

    It’s a criminal investigation instigated by an independent news organization’s report.

    Nothing more and nothing less.

  19. Bush was definitely the front for Cheney, but G.H.W. Bush was Cheney’s boss. Blouise is right Bush 1 is definitely a bad man. He learned at the knee of his Dad Sen. Prescott Bush, who not only tried to organize a coup to replace FDR, but also ran a bank that funded the NAZI’s.

  20. Elaine & SwM,

    President George H. W. Bush nominated Cheney for the office of Secretary of Defense immediately after the U.S. Senate failed to confirm John Tower for that position. The senate confirmed Cheney by a vote of 92 to 0 and he served in that office from March 1989 to January 1993. He directed the United States invasion of Panama and Operation Desert Storm in the Middle East. In 1991 he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Bush.

    Cheney persuaded the Saudi Arabian aristocracy to allow bases for US ground troops and war planes in the nation. This was an important element of the success of the Gulf War, as well as a lightning-rod for Islamists who opposed having non-Muslim armies near their holy sites. (Bush I and Cheney gave us all to Osama Bin Laden because Bush I’s CIA was deaf, dumb, and blind to the blow-back that would inevitably result from those bases.)

    I contend that for the eight years of Bush II’s presidency, Cheney was Bush I’s guy making certain that Bush II followed daddy’s dictates. Had Bush I won a second term then Dan Quayle would have run in 2000 and Cheney would have been his vice-president and little Georgie could have continued his partying uninterrupted. But Bush I’s team, headed by Jim Baker, badly underestimated their position and his big plans were thwarted. Baker made certain not to commit the same mistake in 2000 and headed the legal team that prevailed in the Florida recount.

    Bush I and his CIA had a 24 year plan to make the United States of America king of the world but Clinton messed it up for ’em. Thanks to 9/11, they got back on track quickly. Bush I was a benign, caretaker president like I’m the man in the moon.

    That’s my story … I can’t prove a word of it.

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