No more ‘News of the World’: Problem Solved?
Someone ought to take responsibility. That seems to be the prevailing sentiment in Britain now, as yet another scandal (or yet another wave in a continuing scandal) breaks over unethical journalistic practices at the various outlets of Rupert Murdoch’s company News Corp.
The phone-tapping scandal has been going on for some time now in the UK, after it was revealed that reporters for News Corp. tabloids the News of the World and the Sun had hacked into the voice mail of celebrities (actress Sienna Miller; actor Hugh Grant; aides to and members of the royal family) to gather “news.” But a new and even uglier face of the story broke this week, with allegations that News of the World reporters had listened to, and tampered with, the voice mail of a murdered British schoolgirl back in 2002, before her body was found. Not only did the paper’s reporters listen to messages from the missing girl’s frantic family; when her mailbox filled up, they deleted old messages to make room for new ones. This in turn gave the family false hope that the girl might still be alive, and it potentially hampered a police investigation.
In the last few days, more allegations of wrongdoing have sprung up. More people victimized by the paper: families of soldiers killed in active duty; victims of the 7/7 terror attacks. Police officers paid for information. And on and on. The Guardian, which broke the story, has a page devoted to the latest news. These new revelations provoke outrage in a way that the hacking of celebrities’ phones does not, although I think the latter violation ought to be disturbing enough. Tabloid readers may assume that the personal life of Sienna Miller, or Prince Harry, somehow qualifies as “news,” and that those people are therefore not entitled to the privacy the rest of us take for granted. But they’re wrong. Now, however, it’s easy for readers to see the immorality of violating someone’s privacy for juicy headlines. In a sense, of course, the News of the World was always taking advantage of the victims whose grief it sensationalized. But this is an impossible-to-ignore example of the paper taking direct advantage of the people it claimed to champion—victims of “paedophilia,” soldiers in uniform, and so on. And the excuse Murdoch and News Corp. have been hiding behind all along—the claim that any wrongdoing was the responsibility of a few bad apples, acting without the knowledge of top editors—is no longer working. “I hope that you all realize it is inconceivable that I knew or worse, sanctioned these appalling allegations,” Rebekah Brooks—the editor of News of the World at the time of the Milly Dowler case—wrote to her staff (the grammar’s a mess, but you get the idea). Really, it’s much harder to conceive that she didn’t know what was going on: don’t editors usually express curiosity about where reporters are getting their scoops? So, today, News Corp. announced that it is shutting down News of the World come Sunday.
Does this count as someone taking responsibility? Or is it an attempt to prevent News Corp.’s executives from actually being held accountable? Media Matters – long on News Corp.’s tail, especially when it comes to the errors of its American enterprise Fox News – thinks this is Murdoch’s Watergate. “Like Nixon’s crooked White House,” Eric Boehlert wrote, “the phone-hacking scandal perfectly captures a larger News Corp. culture at play and that it, therefore, cannot be dismissed as some sort of anomaly. These weren’t just rogue elements at work within the Murdoch media empire. Instead these were elements that reflected a dark Murdoch ethos, where serial mendacity isn’t just embraced, but often celebrated.”
At Salon, Alex Pareene connected the misdeeds of the News of the World with some of the recent ethical lapses of our local, comparatively tame Murdoch tabloid, the New York Post. The same day the story about the Milly Dowler voice-mail-hack hit the papers, the NY Post was hit with a libel suit for having claimed, apparently baselessly, that the hotel chambermaid who accused Dominique Strauss-Kahn of sexual assault was a prostitute. In fact, they called her a “hooker,” and as Pareene notes, they did so
In huge, screaming, million-point text, on the front page last Saturday. The paper also repeatedly called the maid a “prostitute” and even accused her of “turning tricks on the taxpayer’s dime,” claiming she continued to act as a hotel prostitute while under the supervision of the District Attorney’s office. While other newspapers have reported on the woman’s “credibility” problems, not one has so definitively and matter-of-factly accused her of being a “hooker,” let alone one whose union assigned her to the Sofitel in order to maximize their prostitution revenue.
The Post’s reporting on this story has been sensationalistic and irresponsible from the beginning — it was the Post that reported on its front page that DSK’s accuser (maybe) had HIV. (News value? None. Sensationalism value? Through the roof.) And for the record, they are not chastised. Today, an internal headline refers to DSK (still officially facing charges of sexual assault) as a “frisky Frenchman,” and a series of photos of him struggling with the key to his front door were accompanied by a headline calling him “Romeo” — right — and snickering that he had been “‘lock’-blocked.” (If you don’t recognize the “joke” there, you’re too classy to read the Post.) Going back a little further, this is the same paper that claimed — wrongly, as it turned out! — that the problems cleaning up after the December 26 snowstorm in New York could be blamed on heartless sanitation workers — union thugs — who intentionally botched the job to send a message to City Hall. Haven’t seen an apology there either. “In other words,” Pareene says, “the practices of News of the World are an outlier, but not an anomaly, for News Corp.”
Will Rupert Murdoch finally be held accountable for some of the unethical practices he has condoned? Will other News Corp. executives and projects be hurt by the latest scandal? We can hope, but if so, it won’t be because of a sudden corporate commitment to decency. I see that advertisers, most notably Ford, reacted to the revelations of wrongdoing at News of the World by pulling their financial support from the paper. That’s good. But what I really want to know is, when do consumers start to take some responsibility? What will motivate people to make the connection between paying for sleaze and condoning it? James Murdoch (who issued the statement about closing the paper down) can make reference to News of the World’s “proud history of fighting crime, exposing wrong-doing and regularly setting the news agenda for the nation.” But we are still talking about a paper that features photos of topless women on page 3 — a practice pioneered by Murdoch in the Sun. (Think of the Beatles lyric “She’s the kind of the girl who makes the News of the World / Yes, you could say she was attractively built” — I finally understood what that meant when I studied abroad in London.) No one could open a copy of the paper and not understand what sort of standards prevailed in its “good newsroom.” The same goes for the New York Post, with its gleefully prurient, openly sexist coverage of the DSK case (just for example). They don’t have a regularly appearing “sexy lady” feature, but they do have a clear editorial policy of taking advantage of any excuse at all to run a photo of a woman in her underwear. People who subscribe ought to be aware of what they’re paying for. (I know, their sports coverage is great — the Post version of “I read Playboy for the articles.”) And how many deliberate distortions does Fox News have to get caught in before watching it is consenting to being lied to?
The outcome of all this I’d really like to see is not the corporate shuttering of News Corp. or even the prosecution of Murdoch et al. It’s the defection of readers, viewers, consumers who have finally had enough of being complicit in such a shady enterprise. I don’t want Murdoch’s outlets to shut down, or clean up their act, to avoid prosecution. I want them to shut down for lack of an audience.
Of course, if the government did such things – and that’s not a bit implausible – we’d never hear of it. Bad apples abound. Good that the press polices itself.
It takes only one to spoil the batch, David, but when “bad apples abound,” you start to think about cutting down the tree they came from. When governments do things like what this tabloid did we do sometimes hear of it, precisely because some newspaper has been doing its job rather than hounding celebrities and crime victims.
The Brit press is largely a mess of pottage; the TLS and BBC excepted. Curious that M15 or M7 or whatever wasn’t onto all of this. Some intelligence service!
Maybe they were – just not talking about it :o)
Or they were part of the operation?
The first story I linked to, from the New York Times Magazine, goes into what Scotland Yard did and did not investigate when all this first came to light. (They focused on the royals.) And the Guardian‘s initial story on the Milly Dowler hacking said that although Surrey police suspected interference at the time (how could they not, when details from the girl’s voice mail messages were showing up in print?), they “took no action against the News of the World, partly because their main focus was to find the missing schoolgirl and partly because this was only one example of tabloid misbehaviour. As one source close to the inquiry put it: ‘There was a hell of a lot of dirty stuff going on.’”
A British historian observed to me, “Now we see how Nazism got its way.”
In Australia, Murdoch’s national broadsheet The Australian (the only national paper we have) combines pernicious cynicism about public and political life with its championing of what I have to call a right-wing ideological Catholicism (help – I need language to escape being locked down). Today a Murdoch tabloid in Melbourne, the Herald Sun, referred gratuitously to an eminent local parish priest as a ‘renegade priest’, taking its editorial line from the boundary patrol within the Church. I’m curious about this partnership between an insidious party mentality within the Church and what seems to be a Murdoch press orientation towards destruction and division.
I have laready said I think Murdoch nand his empire are sleaze and should be treared as such.
I understand there were serious problems with colaboration by some government people, but I reject the easy tear down of government that seems so fashionable in some(right wing) circles today.
The labeling practice is wrong. Today’s New York Daily News, page 10, with photo of Casey Anthony, “Smile of a Monster.”
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Today’s front page of the New York Post, also a photo of Casey Anthony, “Dressed to Kill.”
It looks as though the “sleaze” is hardly limited to Murdoch.
And in Saturday’s Times: “Another executive who could face greater scrutiny if Ms. Brooks were to leave is Les Hinton, who currently runs Dow Jones for the News Corporation in the United States. A powerful player in the Murdoch empire, Mr. Hinton held Ms. Brooks’s current post during the period when journalists at The News of the World were hacking voice mail messages. He told before a parliamentary committee that he knew of no hacking at the newspaper beyond what was done by a single reporter and an investigator, both of whom where jailed in 2007.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/09/world/europe/09newscorp.html?ref=world
The New York Post and the Wall Street Journal are Murdoch enterprises.
Now more than ever, it seems to me that no individual or corporation should be allowed to own more than two news outlets per country. News (including TV) is a lucrative business, and so attracts all sorts of people including the unscruplulous. It cannot be good for the world when someone like Murdoch is allowed to control the images and thoughts poured into the heads of such vast numbers of voters. For example, Fox News has been a disaster for the U.S. And just having Murdoch as the new owner of the WSJ makes it automatically suspect to me (in ways it wasn’t before).
@David Smith (7/7, 5:37 pm) I’m curious. How, in your view, is this case an example of the press policing itself? Also, based on this post (and the linked articles), does this case appear to you to be one of “a few bad apples” or rather a case that points to an institutional failing/conspiracy on the part of New of the World/News Corp.?
I’m told that Murdoch was made a Knight of St. Greggory for his contributions financially to holy Mother.
Where your treasure is….
Looking at the pictures of Rebekah Brooke, one of the heavys in the scandale, I thought she’d make a perfect villaness in the next Harry Potter movie–the one not yet written as a book. The hair alone!
Here’s a video interview/report with Nick Davies, reporter for The Guardian, who broke this story. Note at 8:03 his (even-tempered yet scathing) comments about the Press Complaints Commission and the failure of self-regulation by the press in this case.
Note also his closing comments about how, in his view, this is a story about the “power elite”—the world’s most powerful news organization, the nation’s most powerful police force, the ruling party and the PCC—protecting themselves, not telling the truth to “the rest of us”, and acting as if they are above the law.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/video/2011/jul/07/news-of-the-world-phone-hacking-nick-davies-rupert-murdoch-video
Luke (07/09 1:15 pm):
The press caught out the press. That’s not formal policing, in the sense of commissions and such, but it’s obviously effective, at least it was in this case. Set a thief to catch a thief. Of course, if the malefactor had been another left-leaning paper, the Guardian might not have been eager to expose it. Hopefully, other papers would have taken up the task. One good example of why diversity in the media is so important. Vital.
How does it appear to me? Perhaps rotten apples are a poor metaphor; disease may work better. Disease can sometimes be cured, whereas apple rot can’t be reversed. Pretty clearly, various people, at various levels, are infected. Some just let things ride, rationalizing that there were more important problems to deal with; some conspired only a little, either for personal gain or for fear of personal loss; some were probably seriously culpable. Human beings are fallible creatures, often given to yielding to temptation. Power corrupts. We all rationalize. Life goes on.
Just watched the Nick Davies interview. Very good – thanks for the link, Luke. Davies is an attractive, personable, highly articulate figure. And here, he’s obviously in his element, enjoying himself immensely. What he tells us, though, I think, doesn’t justify his obvious outrage – at least from a point of view distant from his profession and his position in it.
Someone tapped a phone illegally, and while tapping the phone, they deleted voice-mail data that could have been evidence in an investigation of kidnapping and murder. Someone did a very silly thing and will obviously pay a serious penalty. However, going from that to an all-out investigation of an entire organization and an entire political system is, I think, overreacting. In the context of current times, of course, it’s standard procedure – exhaustive investigations of single-point crimes has become awfully common. The media love it, the lawyers love it, the politicians love it, and a great many people, apparently, have come to regard the spectacle as their due. Nevertheless, I think it’s overreacting.
At about 9:05 into the video, Nick Davies says that Parliament need to act to protect people’s right to privacy. From the press. I imagine that he’d have little or nothing to say about a right to privacy from the government. There seems to be little willingness in the media to challenge what looks like government’s increasing intrusion into people’s private lives. If it had been the government that had accessed the voice mailbox, we’d likely have heard nothing from the media, whether or not the data had been deleted. Very much a double standard.
David: I find your framing of the reaction to this illegal and unethical pursuit of spectacle as “spectacle” rather mystifying. Your broader point about double standards also strikes me as very unsound. Have you forgotten about this? It was, and remains, a pretty important and rather controversial beat for the NYT. Just for example.
Molly, good heavens, no, I’ve not forgotten about that. It’s just what I was referring to. Oh, you mean that the Times is still beating the drum? Are they, really? I haven’t been reading them recently (pay wall) but it seems to me very unlikely that it’s a high-priority issue with them. That story was from 2005, when Bush was around to be attacked for every breath he took. Are they pushing Obama in the same way to de-fang his domestic spies?
David S. –
The scandal is not about just one instance of hacking a phone. Apparently the News hired not only reporters but investigators, some of whom did nefarious things like bugging various placesl and there were apparently some police and government ties as well. See today’s Guardian account at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jul/09/phone-hacking-scandal-rupert-murdoch
I read somewhere else that the metropolitan police were sometimes paid for information.
Yes, Ann, I understand that a number of people had their hands in the till. Not unusual in these things, is it? Not new, and it won’t stop now.
It’s just what I was referring to.
David, you offered a hypothetical (“if it had been the government…”) with two flaws: it wasn’t hypothetical, and it wasn’t true. If “Yawn, this isn’t new” is the sum of your reaction, I congratulate you on your jadedness, but I recommend you leave off elaborating on it, because it isn’t going well.
I grew up in the UK during the 40/50′s. In 1953 I learned a number of things.
1) I am against capital punishment
2) The police are corrupt
3)The Judiciary is corrupt
4) The News of the World was known as the Screws of the World for a reason
I learned all of this from the Craig and Bentley case.
The News of the World, and 2 and 3 only got worse since then.
Good riddance to it.
Mollie (7/10 7:58 am):
That’s not the sum of my reaction, Mollie, I’m just counterposing (counterpoising?) it to the mainstream outrage. Bad stuff is bad stuff – not to be yawned away. But it seems to me it ought to be able to be dealt with without making an entertaining spectacle – dragging Important People into the dock, having multiple high-level commissions report to the public on television over long periods of time, etc. Bad stuff is bad stuff, but treating it seriously and turning it into morality plays for the edification of a sadistic public need not be the same thing.
@David Smith (7/10, 11:59 pm) First, I’m relieved to know that “yawn” isn’t the sum of your reaction. My own view is that when dealing with “bad stuff”, in the end it’s most important to deal with it. Whether that involves entertaining spectacle or unentertaining spectacle, high-level commissions or not, televised or not, long periods of time or short—all those considerations seem secondary.
From what I’ve read (admittedly not much), it seems that what’s known currently about the “News of the World” scandal means that there’s “probable cause” to investigate the possibly illegal actions of people in multiple institutions (the NotW, News International and News Corp., the Metropolitan Police at a minimum). Additionally it seems reasonable for someone to investigate the seeming failure of an entity like the Press Complaints Commission to perform its mission properly in this case.
In addition to possible (likely?) violations of British law, if subsidiaries of News Corp (a US corporation) paid money to the Metropolitan Police then it seems reasonable that there be at least an investigation by the US Justice Department into whether US law (specifically the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act) has been violated as well.
Finally, if there is any value—and I think there is—in demonstrating that “no man is above the law” (or woman in the case of Ms. Brooks), then it seems worthwhile to pursue these investigations on those grounds as well.
Dean Starkman of Columbia Journalism Review has a good rundown today of the Wall Street Journal‘s (light!) coverage of this “five-alarm business story.” Also very good at CJR: this piece by Archie Bland (and his earlier feature article for the magazine).
Luke (7/11 9:49 am):
These are spectacles, Luke. Stuff like this happens continually throughout the world. If every instance of bribery, journalistic malfeasance, police corruption, and political string pulling of dubious legality were to be given such treatment the public coffers would be bankrupt within a year. These things catch fire only once every so often, and politicians and the media milk them for all they’re worth until they burn out or are replaced with a bigger fire.
Of course, it’s of some teaching value to publicly disgrace an Important Person every now and then. The Chinese even execute them.
David S. –
The details that are emerging indicate that this is not a garden variety scandal about a handful of phone calls. Now it turns out that there have been at least 4,000 hacked phone calls of all sorts of people, and it seems it involves some high ranking people at Scotland Yard.
@Ann Olivier (7/13, 12:34 am) Point of information—According to Sue Akers, the police official now in charge of the investigation, there are over 4,000 individuals (and an indeterminate number of phone calls) whose phones were likely hacked by the News of the World and its contractors.
Thanks, Luke. And now some reports say that it isn’t just the Murdoch papers that are guilty of these violations of privacy.
I’m just curious to know if it will affect Murdoch’s American holdings, especially the WSJ and Fox News. The latter has pretty much been ignoring the whole scandal. No surprise there.
By the way, PIers Morgan, who replaced Larry King in the celebrity interview program at CNN, is a former editor of News of the World. (Really smarmy guy, so I checked him out at Wikipedia.) He is famous for saying that celebrities don’t deserve privacy because they beg for media space, or words to that effect. I had thought CNN would resist such creeps. The center cannot hold. Sigh.
I wonder how much of the strength in the legs this thing seems to have is due to the paper in question’s belonging to the evil Murdoch. A colorful bad guy adds that je ne sais quoi that can turn a pedestrian story of lawbreaking into a gripping tale of good versus evil.
@David Smith (7/14, 2:25 am) Well, it certainly doesn’t hurt that Murdoch is who he is—especially considering that some of the same practices seem to have been in use (at least to some degree) by Britain’s other national tabloids.
Having said that, it seems that the “je ne sais quoi” that turned this story into “a gripping tale of good versus evil” is the fact that the News of the World hacked missing 13 year old Milly Dowler’s cellphone to get information to write stories during her disappearance. After her voicemail filled up, NotW staff deleted old messages so that new ones could be left (so that NotW would have material to write new stories each day that would allow it to sell more newspapers).
This led Dowler’s family and the police to conclude (quite reasonably) that she was still alive, thus giving false hope to the family (Dowler had already been killed) and interfering with the police investigation.
That—combined with the evidence that at least 4,000 other people similarly had their privacy invaded by NotW, and that NotW top executives apparently lied about and covered up their practices repeatedly over the years, and that the “power elite” (political, press, police) protected each other all these years—is what has “broken” this story. If Murdoch’s name were, say, Martin Morgan (CEO of the parent company of the “Daily Mail”), then the story would likely still be as big as it is right now. YMMV.
Just thought I’d add the Tablet had a large piece on Murdoch as a papal knight and (good question) about the order of St. Gregory.
David may be anxious to soften the ugliness of the affair Murdoch, but it is an evil empire and his (I guess ideological) supporters have little credence/