# taz.de -- Murdoch, News Corp. and the United States: The nice smile might come off
       
       > As the blood-spattered UK side of the scandal unfolds, some troubles may
       > be looming for Team Murdoch in den United States. There are two potential
       > lines of inquiry.
       
 (IMG) Bild: Protesters in front of Fox News headquarters in New York, 2004.
       
       Some in the United States view the phone-hacking scandal in the UK with a
       wary enjoyment, like mice watching a feared tomcat treed by a Pinscher. Fox
       News, Rupert Murdoch's most important U.S. redoubt, is widely understood to
       be a propaganda wing of the Republican Party, but little is made of this in
       day-to-day coverage of the network, even by the nation's most powerful TV
       critics. The plain but unspoken hope of many here is that the wound will
       incapacitate Murdoch in the UK and perhaps – be still their beating
       hearts!—eventually bleed state sward.
       
       Murdoch's peculiar genius is finding the people who can help him assess a
       market and then devise the best way to debauch it. In the UK, he and
       executives like Rebekah Brooks and Les Hinton took advantage of the
       country's little-enforced privacy laws and an apparent culture of
       complicity in the police force to create a feared and unapologetically
       power-wielding phalanx of journalistic thuggery. Oversteps in this area
       have pleasantly brought this ugly empire to its knees.
       
       In the U.S., the approach is slightly different. Here Fox News practices
       thuggery with a smile; a broad and bland mien of innocence — and the comic
       slogan "fair and balanced" — are its trademarks. The network does not, as
       is often suggested, campaign for conservative causes. It's a specifically
       Republican operation, working efficiently with GOP power brokers to deliver
       the day's message, no matter how contradictory or inconsistent it is with
       previous ones.
       
       One of its very smart practices is to promote the idea that the "mainstream
       media" – of which Fox, the most watched news channel, is somehow not a part
       — is liberal and biased. In this worldview, Fox and conservative (not
       Republican) views are under attack. Those who say the obvious — that Fox as
       a matter of course each day repackages the news through a partisan filter —
       just prove the network's contention.
       
       ## The move may turn out to have had a down side
       
       As the blood-spattered UK side of the scandal unfolds — with developments
       on a Grand Googol scale happening daily, almost hourly — News Corp. could
       be excused for not focusing on its transatlantic flank. But some troubles
       here may be looming.
       
       When Murdoch began buying up TV stations in the United States, he ran up
       against a law prohibiting foreign ownership of broadcast outlets. So with
       impressive alacrity he became a U.S. citizen, and News Corp, previously
       Australian, became a U.S. business, technically incorporated in the tiny
       state of Delaware. (Because of some quirky biz-friendly state incorporation
       rules, many well-known companies keep post-office boxes there.)
       
       The move, so beneficial to him up till now, may turn out to have had a down
       side.
       
       With scandal looming, a number of powerful organizations — regulatory
       bodies like the Securities and Exchange Commission; investigative
       operations like the Federal Bureau of Investigation, or FBI; not to mention
       the U.S. Congress itself— can make life difficult for it.
       
       The question is whether the organization broke any U.S. laws. There are
       several strands opponents are looking at.
       
       While the widespread hacking of phones and suborning of police officers
       seem to have been a UK phenomenon, some legislators have seized on a stray
       phrase in a report in the UK's Daily Mirror — to the effect that employees
       at the now-defunct New of the World tabloid had talked to a private
       investigator about hacking into the phones of 9/11 victims in the New York
       area.
       
       ## Jude Law is suing another Murdoch paper
       
       That is the sum total of the allegation, and while liberal commentators and
       some elected officials here have made hay with it, there is as yet no real
       evidence of such activities. Additionally, the British actor Jude Law, it
       was reported last Friday, is suing another UK Murdoch paper, the Sun, for
       what the actor says was hacking into his phones. The suit is interesting in
       that it pointedly alleges that the hacking occurred when he was in New York
       City. That conceivably could be the basis for a US. prosecution.
       
       As yet, there are no allegations that News Corp. operations here engaged in
       such behavior. In the U.S., even the most Murdochian dailies have standards
       of behavior far higher than most UK papers. (They're much lazier
       reportorially, too, and as a rule much less aggressive.) The British
       tabloid niche of the market is filled by what are called "supermarket
       tabloids," including the National Enquirer and the Globe. (These are
       commonly purveyed on racks at supermarket checkout lines.) These weekly
       papers are aggressive in the UK mode—routinely, for example, paying for
       stories, a practice still fairly unusual at most broadcast outlets and
       daily newspapers. While the tabloids have a dubious reputation for
       accuracy, it's also true that they rarely lose libel suits and have broken
       many important stories, most prominently among them the John Edwards sex
       scandal of 2007 and 2008.
       
       The second potential U.S. line of inquiry is more promising, if you're
       rooting against Team Murdoch. A federal law called the Foreign Corrupt
       Practices Act prohibits bribery by U.S. corporations. This ban is mostly
       thought of in terms of payments to corrupt foreign governments, but bribing
       police officers in Britain is said to qualify. The act gives the government
       extraordinary powers to dig through corporate documents; while there is of
       course enormous political and legal hurdles to overcome before the
       Department of Justice would begin such an investigation, since even Brooks
       herself has formally testified to Parliament that her paper had undertaken
       such payments (a remark she subsequently tried to backpedal from), it would
       seem to be a legitimate area of inquiry.
       
       ## Where the fun begins
       
       That's where the fun would really begin. The prospect of holding the
       proprietor of the hated Fox News accountable might bring out some bravery
       in Congress, and hearings would follow, with Murdoch and other corporate
       figures trotted out for public humiliation.
       
       Such a spectacle would create a wonderful moment for Fox News watchers; how
       would the cable news network respond?
       
       We’ve seen a sample of what might happen this week, as the august Wall
       Street Journal, now owned by Murdoch's News Corp. as well and his most
       presentable face to the American establishment, delivered a thundering,
       curious editorial on the UK scandal.
       
       The piece has generated a great deal of comment, most of it negative. The
       WSJ editorial page is a ferocious but fairly rational beast. (This writer
       has contributed to it.) The editorial a) came to a ringing defense of most
       News Corp. doings; b) half-acknowledged that hacking had occurred but
       blamed Scotland Yard (!) for not putting an end to it; and c) curiously did
       not substantively address the suborning of police officials, which would of
       course explain contention b).
       
       Since Les Hinton, after his time running the Murdoch UK papers, had come to
       America to oversee the Journal and other properties, the editorial could
       speak of him with some familiarity. While the editorial writer was happy to
       testify to the probity of Hinton, it took him at his word that he had not
       been aware of hacking when he was in London, though he didn't seem to have
       been pressed too hard in the matter either. (Among many dubious News Corp.
       contentions, the idea that a top editor routinely did not know the sources
       for the paper's biggest stories is simply not credible. I don't recall the
       scene in "All the President's Men" where Jason Robards says, "My, I can't
       imagine where you two come up with all of this stuff!") The paper also took
       time to go on the attack against its perceived enemies, among them the New
       York Times and a nonprofit investigative journalism group, ProPublica.
       
       It was not, in other words, American journalism at its finest. But it was
       perhaps portentous in its defiance and belligerence. If its master comes
       under serious attack on these shores, the façade of the nice smile at Fox
       News might come off once and for all.
       
       20 Jul 2011
       
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 (DIR) Bill Wyman
       
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