Like father, like child

I admit to some fascination concerning Rupert Murdoch and his media empire’s current troubles, particularly if Fox News somehow becomes embroiled in it; after all, Fox News—which network chief Roger Ailes still laughably calls “fair and balanced”—has never shown itself to be adverse to employing deliberate misinformation, malicious and juvenile language, and using deliberately deceptive and fraudulent material from people like Andrew Breitbart and James O’Keefe to destroy “liberal” persons and organizations. Of course, there are some strange bedfellows in the media business; I find it immensely amusing that Arianna Huffington—who is both “disgusted” and “amazed” at the News of the World scandal—is good friends with Breitbart, and still allows him a spot on the Huffington Post, only not so prominently after he called Van Jones (a former environmental adviser in the Obama administration) a "commie punk," a "cop killer-supporting, racist, demagogic freak," a "cockroach," and a "human toxin." Fox News has been criticized in some quarters for not reporting the scandal in the UK, although some have defended it by claiming that an employee cannot be expected to rat on its employer. But since News of the World is no longer a functioning concern, this shouldn’t be a rationale for Fox to keep its distance.

In her post on the subject I just alluded to, Huffington was critical of the various media responses (or in Fox’s case, lack thereof) to the phone-hacking scandal, and then incomprehensibly wandered off into social media and then the Caylee Anthony case, and finally to the unemployed; I wonder if the books she is trying fob-off do the same thing. So I have to try to figure things out for myself. What interests me about the case is how quickly the wall of protection surrounding the News of the World’s illegal and unethical activities crumbled after so long a gestation. Rebekah Brooks, the former editor of the paper who was recently arrested for complicity in the phone-hacking and police bribery activities, was only 32 when she was given the position by Murdoch in 2000. One wonders if someone that young has the experience and background to rightly judge where it is that the ethical line should not be passed. Brooks was in charge during the Milly Dowler incident, when a private investigator employed by the News, Glen Mulcaire—and then later its reporters—hacked into Dowler’s voicemail account, taking the time to erase messages so that they could be supplied with fresh bereavements. The very idea of it—quite apart from giving the false impression that Dowler was deleting the messages herself—disturbs. What did the paper expect to find of use from the missives of bereaved people? Or did they hope that the killer would actually come calling? And what did Brooks know and when did she know it? Or a better question is when did the police know? Surely they had access to the evidence of Mulcaire’s activities well before The Guardian did. In any case, it was not long after Dowler’s body was found that Brooks was transferred to The Sun, to be replaced by Andrew Coulson.

The News' activities were not exactly a secret even then; in March, 2003 Brooks admitted to Parliament that the News had engaged in payoffs to police officers. Accusations that British politicians were in bed with Murdoch proved to be well-founded, as nothing was done to punish or even stop the News’ activities—or at least not until the royal family became a complainant. A 2005 story in the News contained information that court officials claimed could only come from hacked royal family voicemail (a word-for-word quote from Prince William, ribbing his brother about the publicity from his visit to a strip club), and the following year Mulcaire the private investigator and the News’ royal family reporter were arrested for the crime.

Coulson resigned as editor of the News after the pair were sentenced to prison, although claiming that he knew nothing of their activities. Did he read his own paper, or were his ethical standards of such a low caliber he chose not to “notice” suspiciously “inside” information? Later testimony would suggest he did in fact know more than he was letting on. Surprisingly, as the editor of what essentially was a scandal sheet of the lowest form, Coulson was seen as fit material to become communications director of the Conservative Party; was this a measure of how entangled Murdoch and his media empire was in British politics, or was his particular “talents” deemed useful to advance the party’s right-wing agenda? One thing that it did signal was that the British government—and law enforcement—did not take the allegations against News of the World seriously enough. Colin Myler—formerly executive editor of the New York Post—replaced Coulson as editor of the News; his involvement in the scandal has yet to be fully understood.

Meanwhile, Brooks continued to rocket-up the News Corp. food chain. In 2009 she became CEO of its subsidiary News International; such was her position of power, that Labour prime minister Gordon Brown and his successor, conservative David Cameron, were honored guests at her marriage. Later that year, a competitor—The Guardian—reported that the News of the World was still hacking into the voicemails of public and private persons. It claimed that “senior staff” knew all about it, but the paper claimed that News International warded-off any adverse publicity by making substantial pay-offs to the victims of the News’ shenanigans—essentially hush money. This illegal activity was clearly an ongoing problem with the paper, yet there was no police investigation forthcoming. In February, 2010, a House of Commons’ committee report accused News management of having full knowledge of the “industrial scale” illegalities going in the paper. Despite the bad publicity, newly installed conservative prime minister Cameron still saw fit to appoint former editor Coulson as his chief of media operations. But Coulson’s days were numbered, despite the power of Murdoch; the New York Times Magazine subsequently reported allegations from former News staffers that Coulson not only knew about the widespread phone hacking, but gave it his implicit blessing. The Times also accused Scotland Yard of having a too cozy relationship with the News, exchanging exclusive information for thrilling stories of the Yard’s exploits.

From there, the end came fast and furious. Coulson resigned from the government. An embarrassed Scotland Yard began a new investigation, having discovered “new” evidence. Three senior members of the News’ staff were arrested; hoping to avoid complete calamity, the News admitted to only past misdeeds, and facing the prospect of massive lawsuits from victims of hacking set-up a large “hush” fund. One lawyer quoted in the Times story said that for people notified by police that their phones had been hacked, it was "Time to queue up at Murdoch Towers to get paid."

“Operation Weeting”—the code name for the Scotland Yard investigation—continued to trawl in more reporters accused of phone-hacking, The Guardian reported to have found evidence in private investigator Mulcaire’s papers of his activities in regard to the Dowler voicemail hacking; since this occurred during Rebekah Brooks’ tenure at the paper, she was implicated as well. Even more sordid tales came to the surface, with allegations that News reporters had not only hacked into phones of the 2005 victims of the London train bombings and the families of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, but in fact the hacking started even earlier than previously believed—with the victims of 9-11. Murdoch, facing ruin of his plan to control Sky, and thus virtually the entire UK media, dashed to London for damage control—including shutting down News of the World for good—but it was too late. Revelations that Coulson had paid bribes to Scotland Yard officials led to his arrest. Finding his trusted protégés under attack, Murdoch tried his best to save his most favored non-family member, Brooks. Disaster after disaster followed; former prime minister Brown now accused two more Murdoch enterprises—The Sun and the Sunday Times—of hacking into his financial records, and more repellently, into the medical records of his young son, who suffers from cystic fibrosis. Since it became clear that few in the country—even his political allies—could stomach the idea that Murdoch and his unethical and criminal minions could be trusted with control of Sky, Murdoch withdrew his bid, at least for the time being. And the “news” kept getting worse for the old boy: In the past week, Brooks was forced to resign as head of News International, and arrested a few day later. Les Hinton resigned his positions as head of Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal; since Hinton preceded Brooks as editor of the News, this only makes sense if the police investigation into News revealed that he was involved in illegal activities at the paper.

Scotland Yard’s cozy relationship with the News had to have some repercussions, and police commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson resigned, hot on the heels of allegations that he had hired Neil Wallis, yet another News staffer under arrest, as a “communications consultant.” Stephenson’s assistant commissioner also resigned, following heavy criticism of his refusal to renew investigations into the News’ activities after The Guardian’s report of widespread phone-hacking in 2009. Two days ago, Murdoch and an out-on-bail Brooks both denied everything, the latter perhaps less credibly; although in 2003 Brooks admitted to Parliament that she was aware of police bribery, now she claimed she hadn’t personally sanctioned it. Perhaps not surprisingly, denials (even if lies) are as good as the truth in the marketplace, because after taking a beating in recent weeks, the stock of News Corp. rebounded. With the News Corp board of directors considering replacing Murdoch as CEO, the only other “good” news was the sudden death of Sean Hoare, who was a key witness in the phone-hacking investigation.

Who is ultimately responsible for this debacle? Rupert Murdoch? The politicians who genuflected before him, fearful of his power to destroy them? Law enforcement that essentially bought good press in return for looking the other way? Murdoch certainly has the pompous conceit (sort of like Huffington, except on much greater scale) to believe that the very size and influence of his empire was immune from the consequences of a few” minor” ethics and criminal violations. What is more, his conservative ideology, in which the rights of individuals can be ignored or trampled upon in order to achieve a world ruled by his vision of the world, was manifestly on display in the current scandal. Murdoch—who once was forced to admit to a persistent interviewer who insisted on a straight answer that Fox News, far from being “fair and balanced,” does indeed have a deliberate right-wing political slant—chose to ignore rather than clamp down on illegal activities going on in his “flagship” UK publication. Not only that, he actually promoted people like Brooks and Coulson who he knew to be overseeing a den of illegality, because they “served” his agenda. Following his testimony on the 19th, John Dean commented on Keith Olbermann’s new show on Current TV that Murdoch showed no contrition concerning his employees’ activities, and repeatedly fudged and changed facts whenever it suited him. And this is the man who has given us Fox News—like father, like child.