The Phone-Hacking Scandal at News of the World and its Impact on Crime and Corruption in Journalism

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

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

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.