Murdoch's World: The Last of the Old Media Empires by Folkenflik David

Author:Folkenflik, David [Folkenflik, David]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781610390903
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2013-10-21T16:00:00+00:00

THE TWO Murdochs jointly attempted to sketch out a defense, in which the company had relied on the police, the Press Complaints Commission, and outside lawyers hired by News International to perform a thorough review, to tell them what had happened inside their own newsrooms. The police had publicly cleared them. So had the PCC. James said he should have pushed harder to challenge those assumptions. But he said he had been told a thorough inquiry had been conducted and found only limited wrongdoing. The oversight was regrettable, he said. But he left the implication hanging that anyone could have fallen through the same trapdoors.

Labour MP Tom Watson refused to allow James Murdoch to answer for his father. Why, Watson asked Rupert Murdoch, didn’t News Corp instantly investigate reports that the paper’s reporters bribed police for information?

“I didn’t know of it. I’m sorry,” the senior Murdoch said. “If I can just say something, and this is not as an excuse, maybe it’s an explanation of my laxity: The News of the World is less than 1 percent of our company. I employ 53,000 people around the world who are proud, and great and ethical and distinguished people.” Yet Murdoch was not known for laxity—he was a notoriously involved CEO, especially when it came to his tabloids.

The younger Murdoch said he had only learned of the seriousness of the problem less than a year before. “As soon as we had that new information at the end of 2010, that indicated to us there was a wider involvement,” James Murdoch told MPs, “We acted upon it immediately.” He was referring to the lawsuit filed by actress Sienna Miller. The twists and turns of her stormy relationship to fellow film star Jude Law were the stuff that tabloid dreams are made of.

But the year before that “new information” surfaced—in 2009—the Guardian exposés indicated that dozens of celebrities and politicians had been targeted illegally by the tabloid and revealed James Murdoch’s approval of the secret payment to Gordon Taylor. There were only two interpretations of what had occurred. If they conceded knowing what was going on, they had condoned or intentionally ignored activities that were clearly criminal. James Murdoch in particular confronted the Hobson’s choice of managerial incompetence or acquiescence to widespread criminality.

The Conservative MP Louise Mensch was someone who tried over the course of hearings to make the case that hacking was endemic to the British tabloid industry, not simply the Murdoch stable. An author of young adult books who had made a fortune before entering Parliament, she had married the manager of the heavy metal band Metallica and found her own behavior as a twenty-something under scrutiny from critical blogs. As Mensch noted, Piers Morgan, who came up in the Murdoch tabloids and was briefly editor of News of the World before he led the rival Daily Mirror, had spoken several times cavalierly about phone hacking as a routine practice, though Mensch misstated some of the details.

Yet when Rupert Murdoch appeared, she did not relent.

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