Rupert Murdoch – Hank Kalet

Journalists behaving badly, British division: Rupert punts before Parliament

http://abcnews.go.com/assets/player/walt2.6/flash/SFP_Walt_2_69.swf
I’ve avoided weighing in on the phone-hacking scandal surrounding the media empire of Rupert Murdoch — mostly because I have little to add. (Disclosure: My wife works in the corporate offices of Dow Jones, publisher of the Wall Street Journal, which was bought by Murdoch nearly four years ago.)

But watching the highlights of Murdoch’s act before Parliament yesterday — and I can only assume it was an act because of his reputation as an engaged and ruthless businessman — made me mourn for what is left of the newspaper business.

Let’s get this out of the way, first: Paying cops for stories and phone hacking — whether done to innocent victims of crimes of hypocritical politicians — is unethical even, in those rare cases, when it is not illegal. It casts all journalists in a bad light and should not be tolerated.

What is troubling about the allegations here is that a) Murdoch has taken no personal responsibility for what happened under his command and b) it appears that the scandals tentacles reach well beyond the New of the World into other areas of the Murdoch empire.

Murdoch has promised to fix this, but given that News Corp. has always played by its own rules and has used language to mask its true agenda (fair and balanced, anyone?), I am dubious that much will change going forward.

Of greater concern, of course, is his unwillingness to take personal responsibility for the failures of company with which, by all accounts, he is engaged with on a micro level. He may have been humbled by his appearance before Parliament, but he also remains defiant — leaving me to wonder exactly what he means when he says he’ll clean this up.

Expect a public-relations effort that, in the end, will attempt to paint a friendlier face on Darth Vader, while leaving the news divisions to play their dirty games.

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So much for independence at the new Journal

Remember the promise made by Rupert Murdoch that the Wall Street Journal’s independence would be protected? Remember that special committee that was supposed to act as a firewall between News Corp. and the Journal’s newsroom?

Read this (thanks to Steve at The Opinion Mill for catching this):

Instead, questions were immediately raised about the Special Committee when Reuters reported that one appointed member was not only a personal friend of Murdoch’s, but he also ran a computer education foundation that had received $2.5 million from Murdoch’s News Corp. That represented a rather obvious conflict of interest for someone who was supposed to be independent from News Corp. (More on that later.)

Worse, the Special Committee is going to be chaired by a far-right GOP yes man who not only faithfully regurgitates Republican talking points in print for a living, but who in early 2003 predicted the fighting in Iraq would be “relatively inconsequential,” and who months later declared that America had won the Iraq war in “a cakewalk.”

That’s who Murdoch has tapped to protect the Journal’s editorial integrity? Good luck. I mean, was Sean Hannity not available?

What’s more:

And sure enough, as currently spelled out, the committee’s duties seem to be mostly toothless. The committee will have only a “say” in the hiring of top editors. And as Editor & Publisher’s Mark Fitzgerald pointed out last week, “it appears that the [committee’s] enforcement amounts to the power to write a report and publish it in the Journal.” Fitzgerald also “didn’t see any mechanism that would permit a lowly reporter to approach this august committee with a complaint — let alone any guarantee that the journalist would not suffer any reprisals for being a whistle blower.”

What this means for the Journal is unclear, but doesn’t appear good. Murdoch may be willing to dump cash into the franchise, but it remains unknown how he actually plans to use his new toy.

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Feeling blue about Rupert

The Audit, the Columbia Journalism Review’s indispensible blog, offers an interview with James Ottaway, that is one of the best pieces on the News Corp. wooing of the Dow Jones board that I’ve come across. (CJR also ran this absolutely terrifying online profile of Murdoch last week that is a must read for anyone interested in the future of The Wall Street Journal and American journalism.)

The Murdoch sale, according to Ottaway, a shreholder who “ran the largely profitable Ottaway unit within Dow Jones, and held various other posts until 2003, and served on the board of directors until last year,” says a News Corp. takeover would result in “more media concentration in the hands the people who use their media power for personal, political, and business interests, as Murdoch does so blatantly with the New York Post, FOX News network, Star TV in China, Phoenix TV in China.”

That, he says, violates the American tradition of journalism.

The American tradition, which I think is a higher standard, produces a higher-quality of journalism. This wasn’t (always the case) from the founding of the country when we had highly partisan press run by political parties and individuals. Jefferson starting a newspaper to attack Adams when they were running for president. We’re a long way from that. But since the Second World War, the principle has been that in your news columns, you report accurately, fairly, as objectively as you can. And on your editorial pages, you can state your personal political—business interests if you want—but generally, American journalism has been to act with a sense of public service in the way you run your newspapers and to consider a newspaper…a public trust, and not just a personal piggybank.

Otherwise, he says, you have “capitalism gone crazy.”

What we’re in danger of losing is fact-based journalism that serves as a basis for public debate. I fear for the country if we do not have unbiased news sources available to every citizen so that they can hear all sides of major public issues and make intelligent decisions when they vote or speak for or against candidates or issues; where the information is based on some agreed-upon factual starting point. Otherwise everything is propaganda and biased information, and nobody knows what the truth is.

And he offers this final thought:

I am saying privately to many of the Bancrofts, and would say publicly: We should not sell Dow Jones and Ottaway Newspapers to Rupert Murdoch. If some of the family members want to sell their Dow Jones shares, let us find a way to buy them out that is not damaging to Dow Jones and its reputation for absolute integrity in reporting and analyzing global business news. Let us find new investors to help us build the company, and not sell it to a company like News Corp, whose core business is entertainment, and whose newspapers are either tabloid fluff or weapons to enhance the business and political interests of Rupert Murdoch.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick
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