Murdoch arriving at News International’s London offices on July 10 Frank Doran/Rex
On July 19, Rupert Murdoch is scheduled to sit before a U.K. parliamentary committee investigating the phone hacking and corruption scandal engulfing his media empire. For Americans the setting may be exotic, but the structure of the drama will feel familiar. An executive stares down grandstanding legislators and makes a choice: a tight-lipped defense of conduct or an apology for prior sins.
Murdoch—the Oxford-educated son of an Australian newspaper man—did not forge himself into the chief executive officer of the 21st century’s dominant global media empire by issuing apologies. This time he might want to make an exception.
If even a handful of the accusations being leveled against some of News Corp.’s journalists turn out to be true—hacking a murdered girl’s voice-mail messages; tampering with evidence; bribing police; procuring the medical records of a Prime Minister’s ill son—News Corp. will have been guilty of, at the very least, abysmal management. Given the level of scrutiny the company has brought upon itself, it’s almost certain those accusations will now, finally, be fully investigated.
But by letting the damage get so severe before conceding there might be something rotten at News Corp., Murdoch and his management team have allowed the tiny print newspaper division—just 3 percent of overall profit in the most recent quarter—to imperil the broader company. His decision, really a capitulation, to pull its $12.5 billion bid to gain full control of British Sky Broadcasting, the U.K.’s largest pay-television broadcaster, has effectively cratered the strategy of bolstering News Corp.’s digital operations and tapping into BSkyB’s rising cash flow. Members of the House of Commons are now questioning whether News Corp. is fit to hold on to the 39 percent of the company it already owns. In Washington, two senators are calling for probes into whether Murdoch’s reporters tried to hack into the phones of Sept. 11 victims and their families.
The revealing thing about the News Corp. scandal is not that journalists can be ruthless in pursuit of a scoop. It’s that News Corp.’s influence on Western media—and British culture specifically—is so pervasive. Aside from the countless celebrities, public figures, and victims of tragedy whose privacy News Corp. journalists are reported to have violated, the trickling revelations have shown that British media and power are inextricable.
Prior to the scandal, Prime Minister David Cameron was focused on implementing the U.K.’s most austere budget in generations. Now he’s scrambling to explain why he hired Andy Coulson, a former News of the World editor, and cultivated friendships with a circle of senior Murdoch executives and family members, including Murdoch’s son James and Rebekah Brooks, the CEO of News International and another former editor of News of the World. “British politicians had gotten the idea, rightly or wrongly, that they couldn’t win a general election without the endorsement of Murdoch and his newspapers,” says Tim Bale, a professor of politics at the U.K.’s University of Sussex. “[Cameron’s] judgment looks questionable, and it makes him look like he’s part of this elite group who felt they were bulletproof and could do anything, including possibly misleading Parliament and the police.” It is safe to say that no one in British public life has been ennobled by the scandal.
When allegations first surfaced about sleazy tactics at the 2.8 million circulation News of the World, Murdoch blamed them on a solitary rogue reporter at the newspaper who had been fired. In 2007 the episode appeared to be subsiding; the reporter, Clive Goodman, and an outside private investigator, Glenn Mulcaire, were put behind bars for tapping the phones of members of the royal family. The British police then closed their investigation, citing a lack of evidence.
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