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| Murdoch the Merciless: Press Baron's management style ultimately led to paper's downfall |
What is most shocking about the firestorm of criticism now
surrounding Rupert Murdoch’s Sunday tabloid rag, News of the World, is not that its advertisers have all but
abandoned it, or even the old codger’s decision to shutter the 168-year old
paper under the weight of the scandal, but the degree of collusion that was
exposed between police investigators selling scoops to jounalists. This calls
into question not only the character of detectives sworn to protect the public
but of writers and editors ruthless enough to hack into the voicemail of a
British teenager, Milly Dowler, and erase messages which allowed them to gain
an interview with her undoubtedly suffering family in 2002. It’s sickening, if you ask
me, and the inevitable result of the ruthless style of the Murdochs, who run the
paper.
Profiting from the disappearance of a teenager, and the deaths of soldiers
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| Milly Dowler: Missing teen's voicemail hacked by NoW |
How the journalists of the NoW could be so unfeeling as to
delete messages from the mobile phone of Milly Dowling and then conduct an
interview with members of her family knowing full well that their unlawful acts
were responsible for raising the hope that she might be alive is beyond me.
The lack of ethics involved becomes less astonishing once one realizes that the
take no prisoners style of the Murdochs, both father and son, likely motivated
the ‘scoop at any cost mentality’ that drove the staff at NoW. It raises
questions about whether this phone-hacking culture at the Sunday tabloid is
limited to Murdoch’s UK publication or if it is a virus infecting his entire
media empire on both sides of the Atlantic. If so, and knowing how zealously
Americans like to guard their privacy rights, the implications could be
explosive.
Just as bad is the revelation that the voicemails of family
members of British soldiers who have fallen in Afghanistan and Iraq were hacked
for the very same purposes. Call me crazy, but I’m pretty sure that I would
find it difficult to invade the privacy of grieving families while listening in
to their distraught phone messages informing or being informed that a son or
daughter had been lost in combat. I mean, behavior like this rises to the level
of psychopathy, when you’re willing to set aside any empathy for what a mother
or father whose suffered such a permanent loss must be going through.
A culture of corruption starting with House Murdoch
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| Andy Coulson will be arrested Friday |
Rupert Murdoch’s acquisition of News of the World in 1969 heralded
a changing of the guard in news, even the tabloid-style journalism of the 1950s
and 60s had nothing on the kind of rough and ready newsgathering that his
management style introduced. It has led ultimately to this, with the
revelations that payments (as much as $48,000) to detectives for scoops isn’t
even the most outrageous of accusations being lobbed in a story dealing with the
murder of a child and the cruelly-exploited grief of families. If we can’t
trust detectives to keep the secrets of an investigation, to maintain basic
duties like chain of evidence and information confidential in order to avoid
compromising an investigation, then the whole system is at risk and murderers
everywhere can rejoice. But publications like NoW couldn’t be concerned about
that, they were too busy chasing the almighty pound to realize that they were (and are)
putting people in danger by corrupting the system in pursuit of a story. This is
Murdoch’s doing, and clearly his son James, who’s taken the reins in his wake.
It is the inevitable result of chickens coming home to roost IMO, the result of
eggs laid forty-two years ago with his purchase of the paper and his
bare-knuckled style of journalism. The question now is whether he can contain
the damage to his empire’s reputation (such as it is) and that remains to be
seen.
Final Thoughts
The only good that come of this is that political interests
on both sides of the Atlantic begin to wake up to the danger Murdoch’s style of
journalism, both in the UK and in the US, poses to criminal investigations
everywhere. A cop is only as good as his word, and when that word is
compromised, you really don’t have much left. I wonder just how far his ‘journalists’
at the New York Post and elsewhere have penetrated into the ranks of the NYPD and
other departments across the country if it's as widespread as it appears to be in the UK. I have a feeling that it is far worse than we
suspect. At the very least, Rebekah Brooks, who was editor of News of the World at the time of the most egregious offenses of the phone-hacking scandal, should go from News International as its Chief Executive altogether.
