The Murdoch Scandal and the Corporate Media

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The ongoing phone hacking scandal that took down Rupert Murdoch’s long-running tabloid News of the World and has resulted in resignations and criminal charges has been roundly and rightly characterized as a corruption of journalistic ethics and a breach of privacy rights. More importantly, though, the scandal further reveals an insidious, intertwined collaboration – between police, government and media.

Murdoch’s News Corporation, which owns hundreds of newspapers, websites, radio and television stations, has long garnered a reputation for its tabloid-style sensationalism and for promoting an extreme right-wing agenda: See Fox News for an example. Despite perfunctory investigations into repeated media anti-trust violations around the world, Murdoch maintains an increasing clutch on global media and any ideological opinions expressed therein.

The current scandal grew from the 2005-2007 investigation into phone hackings of the British Royal family and a handful of celebrities, resulting in the arrests of News of the World royal editor Clive Goodman and a private investigator. After Goodman and the investigator pled guilty, Scotland Yard investigators closed the phone hacking investigation, despite clear evidence – since corroborated – of further wrongdoing. Subsequent investigation reveals over one thousand phone hacking victims, including the parents of a murdered child, soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and 9/11 victims’ families.

Fallout

The immediate fallout of the scandal, aside from the arrests and resignations and the damage to Murdoch’s already tarnished reputation, was the failed takeover of British Sky Broadcasting Group by Murdoch’s News Corp., which already owned a 39.1% stake in the media group. In the U.S., the Justice Department has launched investigations into the phone hacking of 9/11 victims’ families. In Australia, there are increased calls for an investigation into Murdoch’s Australian holdings.

Perversely, the same police force that touched off this month’s London riots with the murder of an unarmed civilian acted to cover up their involvement in the scandal and the involvement of government officials and media executives. This fact is all the less surprising with the divulgence that no less than 10 of Scotland Yard’s 45 press officers had at one point been employed by Murdoch’s British subsidiary, News International, including Neil Wallis, who advised Scotland Yard at the time they declared no further investigation to be warranted and was later arrested for his involvement in the cover-up.

In January 2007, News of the World editor Andy Coulson was forced into resignation, yet by July of that year he had been appointed communications director of the British Conservative Party and was later promoted by Prime Minister David Cameron to Director of Communications for the Prime Minister. On July 9, 2011, Cameron defended himself and Coulson from intensifying criticism, stating, “As director of communications for the Conservatives he does an excellent job in a proper, upright way at all times,” (www.telegraph.co.uk).

On August 16, 2011, a 2007 letter written by Clive Goodman ran in The Guardian, further implicating Coulson – and, by association, Cameron and Murdoch’s son James – who had all claimed to have no knowledge of any wrongdoing by any News Corp. employees. According to the letter, phone hacking was “widely discussed” at editorial meetings, and Coulson had offered to let Goodman keep his job in return for a guilty plea that did not implicate any high-ranking News Corp. or government officials, (The Guardian, 8/16/11).

History of Collusion

David Cameron was hardly the first British prime minister to cozy up to Murdoch’s right-wing media empire. In 1995, Tony Blair, elected as a New Labour candidate, famously flew to Murdoch’s home in Australia to beg support for his re-election campaign. In the run-up to the Iraq War, Blair appealed to Murdoch for media support for the invasion. Blair’s successor, Gordon Brown, freely admitted that he and Murdoch “were in regular communication” and that “there is nothing unusual in the prime minister talking to Rupert Murdoch,” (The Guardian, 11/12/09).

Politicians here in the U.S. cozy up to Murdoch as well. Despite the apparent anti-Democrat bias of Fox News, Murdoch hosted a 2006 fundraiser for Hillary Clinton’s Senate re-election campaign, a move praised by The New York Times as “strengthening a pragmatic rapprochement.” Clinton responded to the endorsement, referring to Murdoch as “my constituent,” (NY Times, 5/10/06). When asked if he had any hand in the New York Post endorsement of then-presidential candidate Barack Obama, Murdoch did not hesitate: “Yeah. He is a rock star. It’s fantastic. … I love what he is saying about education. … I am anxious to meet him. … I want to see if he will walk the walk,” (The Huffington Post, 5/29/2008).

This collusion keeps left candidates out of the debate and silences potentially popular positions that would benefit the working class. For instance, the media were dominated for months with debate about health care, yet the corporate media kept the need for free, quality health care for all out of the equation. Nobody talked about eliminating insurance companies or put forward the “single-payer” model. With the government, corporations and media conspiring to cover each other’s tracks, how can the ruling elite be held accountable as they conspire to manufacture support for ruinous and unending wars or brutal austerity measures?

In the U.S., five huge corporations – all household names – control the majority of all forms of mass media, as documented in The New Media Monopoly, by Ben Bagdikian. The corporate media can’t be relied upon to provide fair and honest news. We need to build independent media sources for workers and youth from the bottom up, like Justice newspaper, SocialistAlternative.org and SocialistWorld.net. We also need a society in which the media are not controlled by a handful of huge corporations, but instead democratically controlled, with access to all points of view rather than viewpoints manufactured by tycoons and politicians.

The current corporate media produce lies, fear, isolation and division among working-class people. Through mass movements for fundamental socialist change, we can create a media that bases itself on honesty, human creativity and democratic participation through public ownership.

Disturbingly, the practices revealed in the News Corp. scandal are quite standard procedure within the ruling class, who will quite happily tolerate – even encourage and abet – this sort of criminal and unethical behavior if it is in their interests. This is, after all, exactly how they are able to consolidate and maintain power. It is only when such a scandal threatens their careers and reputations that all parties, implicated or not, issue denunciations and pleas of innocence. Such is the case, for example, in the disasters of the Iraq War or the BP oil spill, when government and corporate malfeasance wrought massive human and environmental suffering, followed by hypocritical professions of blamelessness from members of the ruling class. In the wake of these scandals and deceptions, this much is clear: A truly informed citizenry is something that capitalism can simply not afford.

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