Tag: Wall Street Journal

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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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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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