1 Sky Falling, Murdoch Sacks Hacks. Game Over?
2 This Is How the World Ends

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11111

Sky Falling, Murdoch Sacks Hacks. Game Over?

D.D. Guttenplan
July 8, 2011
The Nation
http://www.thenation.com/blog/161874/sky-falling-murdoch-sacks-hacks-game-over

Rupert Murdoch may have finally gone too far. For
decades the billionaire media baron has relentlessly
amassed power on three continents. But it is worth
recalling that his first move out of his native
Australia-and out from under the shadow of his father,
newspaper magnate Sir Keith Murdoch-came in 1969, when
he snatched a very downmarket British Sunday title, The
News of the World, away from Robert Maxwell. (Maxwell's
fraudulent dealings were still unsuspected, but his
Czech Jewish origins were held against him by the
paper's editor, who remarked that the News of the World
"was-and should remain-as British as roast beef and
Yorkshire pudding.") In considerable decline from its
heyday in the 1950s, when it sold over 8 million copies,
the paper Murdoch acquired relied on a mix of kiss and
tell stories-the News of the World bought Christine
Keeler's account of her involvement in the Profumo
Scandal-and "investigations" of London vice dens, with
the expose typically ending with the line "I made my
excuses and left."

But it was still the biggest-selling English language
paper in the world, and though Murdoch steered it even
deeper into sleaze-earning him the nickname `the Dirty
Digger'-the News of the World and its weekday
stablemate, The Sun, which he acquired a year later,
supplied the steady profits which enabled Murdoch to
build his British empire. (In 2010, a terrible year in
the newspaper business, the two titles reported a profit
of £ 86 million.) So there was something not just
shocking, but brutal, about James Murdoch's announcement
that "this Sunday will be the last issue" of the 168
year old paper.

The immediate cause of the paper's demise was public
revulsion in Britain to the news that News of the World
reporters had hacked into the mobile phone messages of
Milly Dowler, a 13-year-old girl who was abducted on her
way home from school in March 2002, but whose body
wasn't discovered for another six months. Guardian
reporter Nick Davies's disclosure that the News of the
World had not only listened to messages left by Milly's
frantic friends and family, but had deleted messages
from her voice mailbox to keep the supply coming-
creating false hope for the girl's family and possibly
destroying evidence-sparked a boycott of the paper's
advertisers and widespread denunciation. Prime Minister
David Cameron condemned the hacking as "dreadful,"
Labour Party leader Ed Miliband called for Rebekah
Brooks, a Murdoch executive who was editor of the News
of the World when the murdered teenager's phone was
hacked, to resign. The Royal British Legion, the
country's largest veteran's organization, announced it
was cutting its ties with the paper after reports
emerged suggesting that the phones of soldiers killed in
Iraq and Afghanistan had also been hacked. Even Rupert
Murdoch described the mounting scandal as "deplorable
and unacceptable."

Behind the wave of sentiment, though, lie some
significant figures: the profits of all of Murdoch's
papers put together are a tiny fraction of the £ 6
billion in revenues from Sky, his British satellite
broadcaster. Ever since News of the World Reporter Clive
Goodman and private investigator Glenn Mulcaire first
pleaded guilty in 2007 to hacking into the mobile phone
accounts of members of the Royal Family, Murdoch's
actions have had a single aim: to contain the damage so
that he can proceed with his plan buy the 60 per cent
share of British Sky Broadcasting he doesn't already
own. For a while it even looked like he might succeed.
Despite dogged reporting by the Guardian and the New
York Times the rest of the media showed little interest.
But the slow drip of celebrity hacking victims
eventually brought a wave of lawsuits; each lawsuit
prompted the disclosure of new documents; each set of
documents revealed a culture of lawlessness and invasion
of privacy targeting not just the usual boldface names
but the kind of people who read the Sun, watch Sky and
vote Conservative.

When Labour MP Tom Watson, himself a hacking victim,
called for Murdoch's takeover of BSkyB to be blocked
nobody cared. But when Zac Goldsmith, a Tory MP whose
father was a bare-knuckled corporate operator and whose
grandfathers were both Tory MPs, rose in the House of
Commons and said that Murdoch's organization "has grown
too powerful.. It has systematically corrupted the
police and has gelded this parliament, to our shame," it
was a sign that the political weather was changing. By
Thursday David Cameron announced two new investigations,
and by Friday it emerged that government approval of the
BSkyB takeover, once seen as inevitable, has now been
deferred until at least September.

Cameron's moves may have been an attempt to deflect
attention from the arrest on Friday morning of Andy
Coulson, the Prime Minister's former director of
communications, who'd resigned as editor of the News of
the World when Goodman and Mulcaire were convicted, but
who always claimed to have no knowledge of what they'd
been up to. Coulson is accused of approving hundreds of
thousands of pounds in payments to police officers in
exchange for confidential information.

There is no doubt that Murdoch has been seriously
damaged by all of these disclosures. It has often been
said of Murdoch that the only thing he cares about is
his share price. Events over the past week wiped some
$2.5 billion off the value of News Corporation, his
U.S.-based holding company. But there is still every
likelihood he will recoup his losses. Even closing the
News of the World may turn out to be a boon, allowing
him to jettison not only a toxic title but also the
expense of a separate weekly paper if widely rumored
plans for The Sun on Sunday turn out to be true.

For Americans, the real question is whether Murdoch's
political influence is on the wane. Certainly it would
be pretty to think so. A world without Fox News would be
a fairer (if not more balanced) world in every sense.
But as the widening revelations of the phone hacking
scandal show, News Corporation is not an ordinary
commercial enterprise. Through his journalists and
gossip columnists and the network of former and current
police officers and law enforcement officials on his
payroll Rupert Murdoch has been operating what amounts
to a private intelligence service. And the threat of
personal exposure-on the front page of the Sun or Page
Six in thePost-gives News Corporation a kind of leverage
over inquisitive regulators or troublesome politicians
wielded by no other company on earth.

English already has the expression "para-state" to
describe the kind of shadowy forces that operate beneath
and behind legitimate authority. Is it really
unreasonable to suggest that in News Corp, Fox, News
International, Sky and the rest of Murdoch's empire we
are witnessing the emergence of the para-corporation?

D.D. Guttenplan, who writes from The Nation's London
bureau, is the author of American Radical: The Life and
Times of I.F. Stone (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

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22222

This Is How the World Ends

     A cynical and fitting sacrifice for the News of The
     World

By Archie Bland
July 7, 2011 08:45 PM
Colombia Journalism Review
http://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/this_is_how_the_world_ends.php

Finally it died as it has lived: in an explosion of
moral piety designed to disguise actions that, in truth,
were the expression of the most ruthless and inhuman
business judgment. The News of the World, Britain's most
popular newspaper, was closed down today, the victim of
its own reprehensibly-won success, and 200 journalists
were facing up to the reality that they will need to
look for another job.

It was the right thing to do, James Murdoch explained in
a written statement. "Wrongdoers turned a good newsroom
bad and this was not fully understood or adequately
pursued," he explained, describing the culture behind
the stunning series of crimes that have unfolded into
public light this week to put the final cap on the
phone-hacking scandal that has dogged his father
Rupert's empire for years. In order to atone for --
among other sins -- breaking into the voicemails of a
murdered girl and deleting them to make room for more,
in the process giving her family and friends false hope
that she might have yet been alive, Murdoch explained
that the proceeds of the final edition would be given to
good causes.

"These are strong measures," he said. "They are made
humbly and out of respect. I am convinced they are the
right thing to do."

He did not add that in the process he and his father
would be able to carve an opportunity out of a crisis by
making the News's sister paper, the Monday to Saturday
Sun, into a seven day operation, with the hope of
producing the same revenue with a far smaller staff.

Indeed, saying so would have been out of character;
that's not how things work at the News of the World. At
the News of the World, vicious commercial decisions
taken with no regard for the fates of the ordinary
people who have done no wrong -- a murdered girl's
parents, a new and less corrupt generation of News
reporters -- are routinely dressed up as acts of the
greatest nobility.

News International chief executive Rebekah Brooks was
once the newspaper's editor, and arguably the person who
bears the most responsibility for its cutthroat culture
of utter disregard for the law, or for any kind of
ethical code. It was she who was tasked with delivering
the official explanation to stunned staffers. She did so
in a brief speech that must have been unlike any
delivered to a British newsroom in recent history.
According to reports in various rival papers -- there
are no shortage of talkative sources in that newsroom
now -- she'd given senior editors just a few minutes
notice of the bombshell plan; the mood later, when she
finished telling the hoi polloi why they would all lose
their jobs because of her (she may have phrased it
differently) was, by all accounts, febrile, and Brooks
must have been glad of the minders who had accompanied
her into the newsroom.

Editor Colin Myler, as unsighted and stunned as anyone
else, told her that he wanted to speak to his staff
without her present. And then the most powerful woman in
British newspapers left the newsroom of her most beloved
title, the one she had killed, for the very last time.
Inevitably, these being journalists, and this being
London, everyone decamped to the pub. "They're closing
down a whole newspaper just to protect one woman's job,"
one unnamed reporter told Reuters afterwards. "There is
a feeling of seething anger and pure hatred toward her.
People are just in a complete state of shock."

I work at The Independent, and there too the news was
met with total disbelief-a genuinely jawdropping moment,
the kind you're unlikely to experience very often in
your working life. The first garbled reports were
dismissed (by me, at least) as misunderstandings or
typos. And then the sources got more authoritative, and
the details more convincing. And we realized it was
true. The office dissolved into the kind of frenetic,
concentrated activity that must be unique to newsrooms,
and must have been found at the News of the World more
often than anywhere else.

Every British newspaper, and presumably many American
ones, will be plastered with this tomorrow. A story that
was once, with a couple of honorable exceptions,
dismissed across our press for reasons primarily rooted
in self-preservation -- a phenomenon I wrote about for
CJR's May/June issue -- has by common consent become the
most fascinating and dramatic on the British domestic
landscape this year.

When the dust has settled, attention will turn to the
cold logic that must lie at the heart of the Murdoch
plan. It isn't that hard to figure out, really. Already
there have been moves toward integrating the
conglomerate's Sunday and daily titles, and while the
loss of the News of the World brand is a body blow, it
also made room for what the National Union of
Journalists called "an act of utter cynical opportunism"
in the sudden cull of so many staff members at once. The
assumption is that a Sunday Sun, produced as part of a
rolling seven day operation that absorbs a few of those
beleaguered hacks, will pick up most of the News of the
World's floating readers, and serve advertisers at a
much smaller cost.

Will this work? I guess I hope so, because I don't want
to see even more journalists out of a job. Still, there
would be a certain moral satisfaction in seeing the
scheme flounder, and I suspect that this is what will
ultimately happen.

The great irony of the News of The World's fate is that
the shortcut of phone hacking was so attractive
precisely because the paper thrived on the most
expensive kind of journalism: the getting of significant
scoops, often involving the cultivation of sources over
many months, high-tech equipment, wild goose chases to
the other side of the world, and of course (and rather
less impressively) the payment of considerable sums of
money to helpful people. That kind of work requires a
dedicated staff, not one seventh of a wider operation
more interested in the overall bottom line.

Since the News of the World never had a real heart,
people only really bought it for its exclusives, stories
that made people feel like they had to know what was
going on. Without these scoops, its successor will
surely fail. If it does, and if she is still at News
International, perhaps Rebekah Brooks will finally get
her comeuppance.

In a way, it would be fitting if her fall were to come
for base commercial reasons, and not for the outrageous
ethical breaches that occurred on her watch. That way,
at least the News of the World would have a legacy
befitting its life.

About the Author

Archie Bland is the foreign editor of The Independent.

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