Yes We Can!

My latest piece for the Daily Banter is now up. The subject: the fact that we've finally reached the point where a news organization just feels like it can come right out and admit that it engaged in illegal activity and -- as if that's not enough -- follow it up with an arrogant, "You're welcome."

Feel free to take a look and comment either here or at Banter.

The Daily Banter/Yes We Can!/4.6.12

Tap Out

Murdoch is so screwed.

NPR: Justice Department To Probe if News Corp Hacked 9/11 Families/8.24.11

Quote of the Day

"This defense is a smoke screen. The real transgressions of the Murdoch empire are not its outré partisanship, its tabloid sleaze, its Washington lobbying, or even what liberals most love to hate, the bogus 'fair and balanced' propaganda masquerading as journalism at Fox News. In fact, these misdemeanors are red herrings—distractions from the real News Corp. corruption that now threatens to bring down its management and radically reconfigure and reduce its international corporate footprint. The bigger story is this: An otherwise archetypal media colossus, with apolitical TV shows (American Idol), movies (Avatar), and cable channels (FX) like any other, is controlled by a family (and its tight coterie of made men and women, exemplified by the recently departed Rebekah Brooks) that countenances the intimidation and silencing of politicians, regulators, competitors, journalists, and even ordinary citizens to maximize its profits and power and to punish perceived corporate, political, and personal enemies. And, as we now know conclusively, some of this behavior has broken the law."

-- Frank Rich in New York Magazine

Take 20 minutes or so out of your day if you can and read Rich's entire piece; it's relentlessly detailed in its excoriation of Murdoch's empire as anything but your average media conglomerate.

Expanding on what both Rich and the previously linked Peter Daou piece have to say, you might also want to take a look at Fox News's latest completely-made-up controversy that's sure to turn into its next very public crusade. And then read a classic and thoroughly brilliant piece by Matt Osborne that dissects the Orwellian origins of the right-wing fear factory.

Yeah, it's a lot to take in -- but it's gotta be better than staring blankly at that little flashing cursor on your computer screen for hours on end.

Wire Trap

Not to be too cliché, but, Jesus, just when you think it couldn't get any more disgusting:

"The News of the World hacked into the phone of Sara Payne, the mother of Sarah Payne, an abducted and murdered 8-year-old girl, the Guardian reported Tuesday.

It was the hacking of 13-year-old Milly Dowler's phone that turned the long-simmering phone hacking scandal into a full-blown crisis. The news of Payne's hacking is, in some ways, even more shocking, because it was her daughter's murder by a pedophile in 2000 that led News of the World editor Rebekah Brooks to launch a crusade for a sex offender's law in Britain known as 'Sarah's Law.'

Payne grew so close to the paper, and to Brooks, that she wrote a column for its final issue, paying tribute...

'The NOTW team supported me through some of the darkest, most difficult times of my life and became my trusted friends,' she wrote. 'One example of their support was to give me a phone to help me stay in touch with my family, friends and support network, which turned out to be an absolute lifeline.'

According to the Guardian, it is that phone -- personally given to Payne by Brooks -- which may have been hacked."

Just a reminder of the kind of illegal and reprehensible behavior Murdoch's people engaged in, in case that little story had fallen off your radar.

Noose Corp: Update

I'd say,"Poor Rupert Murdoch." But not only has he played a pivotal role in perverting modern journalism but he's a colossal asshole to boot, so I just can't feel bad about any of this.

You reap what you sow.

The Huffington Post: U.S. Justice Department Prepares Subpoenas in News Corp Inquiry/7.21.11

Picture of the Day

Are You Not Entertained?

Matt Taibbi nails the bigger implications of not simply the News Corp scandal but of the company's rise to power in the first place:

"Once the media business made the collective decision to always put money above editorial judgment, I think scandals like the News of the World affair became inevitable. Because once media companies abandoned the notion that their business was somehow different from other money-making businesses, that there were no longer places they wouldn’t go to generate product, it became inevitable that the corporate media game would become nothing more than an all-out, relentless quest for sensational, titillating material... When information equals money, and everybody in the business is all about money, pretty soon lines are going to be crossed to get information."

It's nothing short of staggering how often this connection can be brought up in any discussion of the modern media, but the 1976 film Network was so frighteningly dead-on that it can legitimately be wondered whether Paddy Chayefsky was some kind of honest-to-God prophet. Network imagined a world in which news and entertainment were one and the same and where the engine that powered each was the relentless pursuit of cash for the conglomerates that owned the media outlets and controlled the product they disseminated. As Taibbi says, what we're witnessing now is the corporate media-for-money stranglehold taken to its logical, and sickening, conclusion.

Friends with Benefits

You know something? Piers Morgan should do himself a favor and go back to not talking about the News Corp scandal. Via his Twitter feed:

"'You're shown immense guts, Mr Murdoch.' Hysterical. This has all gone horribly wrong for the anti-Murdoch brigade."

And you thought the biggest hack was the one the News of the World pulled on the voicemail of Milly Dowler.

Picture of the Day

Rupert Murdoch hangs his head as he and his son, James, testify before a British Parliament committee. "This is the most humbling day of my life," he said as the hearing began.

Quote of the Day

"Officers on the scene report a broken glass, a box of vintage wine and what seems to be a family album strewn across the floor, containing images from days gone by; some containing handpainted portraits of Murdoch in his early days, donning a top hat and monocle. Another officer reveals that Murdoch was found slumped over a particularly large garden hedge fashioned into a galloping horse. 'His favourite,' a butler, Davidson, reports."

-- From a fake story claiming that Rupert Murdoch committed suicide, written in the style of Murdoch's The Sun tabloid and linked to by the infamous group Lulzsec after it hacked the newspaper

Karma's such a bitch.

Quote of the Day

"In a Monday Wall Street Journal editorial on 'News and Its Critics' that borders on brilliant satire, the Murdoch-owned paper rails on about how 'our competitors are using the phone-hacking years ago at a British corner of News Corp. to assail the Journal, and perhaps injure press freedom in general.' That's right, haters, when you criticize an organization that breaks into a murdered girl's voicemails, and believes paying off cops and tampering with individual privacy is 'part of the game,' you're messing with the First Amendment itself. Though the editorial is unsigned, one can't help noting its spiritual kinship with the persuasive rhetoric of that legendary debater, Eric 'Otter' Stratton, who once noted, 'The issue here is not whether we broke a few rules or took a few liberties... You can't hold a whole fraternity responsible for the behavior of a few sick, perverted individuals... for isn't this an indictment of our entire American society?'"

-- Mary Elizabeth Williams in Salon

Bad To Worse

A couple of important things to keep in mind as the News Corp scandal continues to unfold in Great Britain, especially when it comes to the arrogant-as-hell declarations by some media outlets that the whole thing is much ado about nothing:

1. In much the same way that the term "global warming" is an innocuous, relatively fuzzy-sounding euphemism that belies the enormity of what it's describing, "phone-hacking scandal," while a convenient, press-ready term, doesn't in any way convey the sinister nature of what News International did and is accused of doing. What we're talking about here is widespread and seemingly endemic criminal behavior, from the hacking of a murdered girl's voicemail account -- an intrusion which, when noticed, gave the girl's family hope that she may still be alive somewhere -- as well as the illegal accessing of the banking and medical records of private citizens and government officials, to police bribery, concealing information from Parliament and the payment of money to victims of its activities in an organized attempt to keep them quiet. What's more, there's a very good chance that the News of the World -- which after almost 170 years of publication was shut down in response to the scandal -- was just the tip of the iceberg and that at least one other News International paper was involved in similar crimes. Ten people have been arrested in connection with the scandal so far, including former News International CEO and hand-picked Rupert Murdoch confidante Rebekah Brooks; Britain's two top cops at the Met have resigned; and Prime Minister David Cameron has cut short a trip to South Africa to return to London and call for a special session of Parliament.

2. Since this whole thing exploded, I've maintained that it's the very corporate culture that Murdoch fosters and allows for that led to this mess. In yesterday's New York Times, media writer David Carr echoes that sentiment:

"The News Corporation may be hoping that it can get back to business now that some of the responsible parties have been held to account -- and that people will see the incident as an aberrant byproduct of the world of British tabloids. But that seems like a stretch. The damage is likely to continue to mount, perhaps because the underlying pathology is hardly restricted to those who have taken the fall."

Carr then goes on to delve into the case of News America -- that's America, as in here on our soil -- a News Corp company that's chosen to surreptitiously pay out hundreds of millions of dollars in the hope of making accusations of grossly unfair business practices go away. Among the claims against News America: that it hacked into the password-protected computer system of a competitor. Once again, what's happening in the U.K. almost certainly isn't an aberration, it's just the way Murdoch's people do business: however the hell they want.

The Politics of Murdoch

For anyone still clinging to the Doocy-approved delusion that what's going on with News Corp at the moment really isn't all that big a deal and should be immediately consigned to the last news cycle and left there, a few daunting facts should knock you for a loop this morning. As of right now, News International's former CEO is out of jail on bond while another hand-picked Rupert Murdoch flunky is steeling himself for what comes next after stepping down from Dow Jones & Co.; Scotland Yard's commissioner has also resigned and, oh yeah, the Alien-like appendages of this thing are already wrapped securely around the face of British Prime Minister David Cameron, thanks to his inexplicable belief a few years back that it would be a good idea to make Andy Coulson -- an editor at News of the World when it was initially prosecuted for phone hacking -- his communications director.

The bottom line: The entire British government and Metropolitan Police Service are now in play, all thanks to a media company that became so massive, so powerful, so unapologetically in love with its own ruthlessness, and so inextricably integrated with the political authority structure that any crisis for it would almost surely be a seismic event with the ability to crack a country in two. Rupert Murdoch's News Corp is, quite frankly, the media equivalent of a Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, or Bank of America: an entity that's too big to fail.

It's true that while this scandal has lapped at the shores of the United States, it hasn't yet become a tidal wave -- but to think that kind of nightmare scenario for us is impossible or even unlikely is insane. The New York Post and the Wall Street Journal haven't officially been implicated in any wrongdoing, and Fox News -- while constantly engaged in wrongdoing, it can be argued -- is also staying above the fray at the moment, despite most of its prime-time lineup publicly putting its hands over its collective ears and hoping the whole thing goes away. Interestingly, though, while Fox may not be guilty of the same kind of flat-out illegal acts that Murdoch's British outlets apparently feel they have the privilege to engage in with impunity, it stands as the best example stateside of the big-picture problem with News Corp -- that would be the danger of allowing an outlet that ostensibly reports the news to fuse itself almost wholly to those who make the news, and the decisions, in politics. Fox and the framework of Republican power in this country have become such conjoined entities that the former is nearly as powerful as the latter. A GOP political hopeful can't become a GOP political juggernaut until he or she grants an audience to Fox News -- and occasionally only Fox News -- kisses the ring and takes the omerta; only then is he or she a "made man." Fox's immense authority can create or destroy careers and it willfully sets the political narrative for both its audience and the lawmakers whose party purity is regularly tested by their response to the controversies Fox creates out of thin air, seemingly just for the hell of it.

The relentlessness of this model is mostly the product of Fox News's Hutt-like chairman Roger Ailes, but make no mistake -- his Nixonian bag of dirty tricks and willingness to toss the rules of respectable journalism out the window could only flourish under the kind of corporate culture pervasive in Murdoch's organization. Sure, other media entities -- particularly ones owned by corporate leviathans -- engage in questionable practices, but none with the kind of shameless audacity that seems to be written into News Corp's mission statement. Case in point: While he certainly hasn't been accused of any wrongdoing, it's ludicrous that former News of the World editor Piers Morgan hasn't addressed the scandal once on his nightly CNN show, and that CNN hasn't in fact put his feet to the fire in an effort to get him to at least give the network an insider's view of the miasma; it's equally ludicrous that Morgan has been able to get away with not talking about it by arguing that Murdoch's a friend of his and he owes the guy one. But CNN and Morgan's omission isn't the same thing as Fox's deliberate misrepresentation of reality or, in this case, its unwillingness to go full-bore on a story that admittedly has uncomfortable implications and potential repercussions for it as a network. (And going full-bore for Fox always includes a heated debate during its prime-time, the engine that traditionally drives the news department's narrative for the following day.)

Consider for a moment how many Republican presidential contenders and potential contenders have had either paying gigs as political contributors on Fox or are simply unnervingly regular guests. Now imagine a scandal that involved illegal activity and included Fox News either currying favor with or outright exploiting its allies or former paid employees in politics. That's what happens when the media and politics become too intertwined. Yes, there's a long history of the two universes intersecting -- but never with the kind of brazen arrogance exemplified by Fox News, and by News Corp in general.

Tomorrow, Rupert Murdoch will appear before Parliament as a man under siege and in danger of seeing his empire torn out of his hands -- for the first time, more lamb than lion -- and he'll face a group of people no longer quite as afraid of the influence he's wielded so blithely for decades. But while it was fear of retribution on the front page that kept many British politicians securely under Murdoch's thumb, it was Prime Minister Cameron's decision to invite the influence into the top echelon of British government and in the end he may pay dearly for it.

We in America don't need to concern ourselves with whether Murdoch's minions make it into the castle keep -- to a certain extent they're already there.

Noose Corp

Hoo boy.

"The MPS has this afternoon, Sunday 17 July, arrested a female in connection with allegations of corruption and phone hacking. At approximately 12.00 hrs a 43-year-old woman was arrested by appointment at a London police station by officers from Operation Weeting together with officers from Operation Elveden and is currently in custody."

That female would be Rebekah Brooks, who just a few days ago resigned as the head of News International.

A couple of thoughts upon reading this:

1. That sound you hear is Rupert Murdoch's ass puckering up.

2. Wow, someone who likely engaged in a white-collar criminal conspiracy actually being arrested instead of, you know, bailed out to the tune of billions and then handed the car keys again like nothing ever happened. Imagine that.

3. Leave it to the Brits make their undercover police operations sound like they're characters from Middle-Earth.

Duck and Cover

It should surprise no one that Fox News isn't devoting a whole lot of time or resources to covering the seismic phone hacking scandal that's threatening to rip its parent company apart and put its owner on the receiving end of criminal charges. True, if Fox were an actual news outlet it'd have a responsibility to report on the mess, and in fact there'd be at least a few journalists within its newsroom chomping at the bit to use their privilege as insiders to get the story that maybe no one outside the four walls of the castle could. But of course, Fox News isn't an actual news outlet. Feel free to argue with that, but you're an idiot if you do.

Still, it's one thing to ignore the story as best as possible -- it's another thing entirely to do what perpetual company cheerleader Doocy the Clown did this morning on Fox and Friends. You really need to see this to believe it. Doocy brought on a guy no one's ever heard of, who has nothing at all to do with anything going on at News Corp, to basically agree with him that the rest of the media is "piling on" poor Rupert Murdoch and that since, well, we already know that this is a hacking scandal, we really should just "get beyond" that obviously trifling little part of it. Nothing to see here, folks. Doocy and guest say that the bigger story here is the ease with which the victims' phones were hacked, and they likened the whole thing to the hacking of Citicorp and Bank of America -- which would be a worthwhile comparison were it not for the fact that News Corp employees are the ones who did the hacking in all of this.

The argument is basically like saying, "Okay, so I shot a guy, and that's terrible -- but what's done is done. The real issue here is how easy it was for me to shoot him. Oh, and by the way, people get shot all the time. Why is the fact that I shot somebody such a big deal?"

It's such a hysterical and nakedly shameless bit of misdirection that it actually kind of surprised me. And I didn't think anything Fox did could surprise me anymore.

You've gotta hand it to them -- they've got chootspa.

Quote of the Day

"(She's) a galaxy-class schmoozer. World-class doesn't quite do it justice."

-- An anonymous News International employee on Rebekah Brooks, who stepped down as the embattled CEO of the Rupert Murdoch-owned company this morning

This thing is just gonna get uglier and uglier.

Quote of the Day, Jr.

"It is revolting to imagine that members of the media would seek to compromise the integrity of a public official for financial gain in the pursuit of yellow journalism."

-- Republican Rep. Peter King, calling on the FBI to investigate whether employees of News Corp hacked into the voicemail accounts of 9/11 victims

And so begins the process of the rats deserting the sinking ship. Man, can you imagine what it takes for somebody like Peter King to turn his back on the man who owns Fox News?

Murdoch is so fucked.

Quote of the Day

"Forgot my Blackberry at home today -- does any News Corp staffer know my schedule for this afternoon?"

-- Arianna Huffington, via Twitter

A while back I threw out one of those endlessly ponderable questions having to do with the modern media. It basically went like this: "What do you do when a media outlet willfully refuses to do the right thing, when it flat-out ignores calls for it to behave in a respectable and scrupulous manner and laughs in the face of those making the demands?" Not surprisingly, the impetus for this debate was some kind of irresponsible horseshit or other that Fox News had pulled. For years Fox has operated above the rules that govern other news outlets; it's operated this way because it's owned by Rupert Murdoch, and Rupert Murdoch operates this way.

What's happening right now with Murdoch has been years in the making. It was always inevitable. The entire corporate culture of News Corp has been one of imperiousness since the very beginning, the belief that it and its people simply aren't required to adhere to the exhaustingly restrictive laws all those other poor suckers inexplicably submit to. They can do whatever they want and the awesome might of Murdoch and News Corp will protect them at all times. This kind of mad hubris, taken to its logical conclusion, will eventually result in your biting off a lot more than you can chew. Which is what Murdoch's people did -- in spades. They did it because the Murdoch ethos gave them tacit permission to.

What do you do when a media outlet refuses to play by the rules? Apparently, you wait for it to inevitably take the privilege it believes it's entitled to one step too far -- and then you bust it like a piñata.