(World Economic Forum/Wikimedia)
We do not generally bother these days to respond forcefully to corruption or institutional crimes in either politics or press unless one hits us square in the face—and even then, it has to be something spectacularly egregious. Something so rancid that it churns the public stomach even to hear about it.
At the Guardian, Henry Porter writes of the Murdoch News International scandal:
It doesn't get much worse than this, but think of the eye-watering hypocrisy that occurred in September 2009. Just as James Murdoch was signing huge cheques to silence people whose phones had been hacked, he attacked the BBC at the Edinburgh TV festival with a speech entitled "The Absence of Trust" in which he claimed: "The only reliable, durable and perpetual guarantor of independence is profit."
Nothing better describes the lowering, simple-minded greed of News Corp's heir – values which he has taken from his father. [...]
The revelations are deeply troubling – more so than the MPs' expenses scandal – because the corruptibility of journalists and senior police officers, as well politicians, is laid bare. In the last three years, nearly every part of the establishment has been exposed in one way or another. We are arguably a more transparent society than we were, but it is now much more difficult to believe in our democracy.
News Corp. managed quite the feat: it managed to kill off a media institution that had existed for nearly 170 years, and to do it through systematic corruption that, as we have now seen, was not confined to the leadership of just one paper, but had become endemic. It appears that disembowling an historic institution via rampant criminality might mean that Murdoch's goose is cooked in Britain for the time being (at least, we can hope), but so far it is an open question whether we in America will glean much wisdom from it.
Which is a shame, because here is a story of corporate corruption, journalism devolved into a raw profit center, celebrations of greed, confidence that the wealthy are above the law—there seems no end to the possible teaching moments:
This story is about the failure of the entire political class. Journalists and politicians, advisers, PR people, writers and lawyers drank Murdoch's champagne, swooned in his company, took his calls and allowed Rebekah Brooks to irradiate them with her crooked little smile. Over more than three decades, the perversion of politics by and for Murdoch became institutionalised, a part of the landscape that no one dared question.
Serious crimes were committed and the police covered them up. Corrupt, or at least badly compromised, relationships became the norm and all but a very few politicians looked the other way, telling themselves this was how things were and always would be.
Other media players had influence, but with the Murdoch group, the relationship with politicians carried over into Gloucestershire weekends, where David and Samantha and Rebekah and Charlie (Brooks, her husband) and Matthew (Freud) and Elisabeth (Murdoch) – and sometimes Andy, Rupert and James (with or without wives) – wined and dined and rode and walked in each other's company.
Media leaders and political leaders wining and dining each other? Cozy relationships between government and the press, weekend retreats and the like? It sounds pretty damn familiar on this side of the Atlantic as well. I don't find it surprising that a company would undertake unethical and criminal acts in order to turn a profit, but I do think we should be alarmed at the scope of what a single bad company can do, if that company is large enough to influence the government itself.
Reflections on the coziness of the relationship between press and those they cover are not our strong suit in the best of times. Our own government seems of late to be entirely uninterested in preventing ever-expanding media conglomeration from acquiring excessive power in the marketplace or in politics: after all, the Aspen getaway or casual golf-n-lobby weekend with the movers and shakers for one corporation or another have been staples in the American political diet. In short, the corporation rules all, and government has been regulated to being whatever grease will most effectively lubricate corporate gears.
Remember, we just had our own scandal of sorts here. A mere few months after fighting to approve Comcast's takeover of NBC Universal (because really, have we ever seen a media conglomeration that we weren't willing to inflate into something larger?), FCC Commissioner Meredith Attwell Baker left to take a senior job with that selfsame Comcast. The job? "Senior Vice President for Governmental Affairs."
You know: lobbying the government she had just left, on behalf of the company she was ostensibly just regulating.
I say it was a scandal "of sorts" because it wasn't all that scandalous. When the same thing happens between governments and corporations on a regular basis, "scandal" gets demoted to "unseemly," and there's not a politician or partisan hack out there who's not willing to stoop to "unseemly" when it comes to collecting corporate checks for lobbying their former partners in government.
There is one good thing we can take from all this, aside from general satisfaction that a Murdoch-governed company might actually receive a good comeuppance for rancid acts: by God, there is still crooked behavior a gargantuan media company can engage in that would actually get politicians riled up. It takes committing crimes—preferably against politicians themselves—but it is at least still possible.
As long as someone else exposes it first, of course.