Rupert Murdoch's American media outlets weren't close to the Bush White House for nothing, it seems. When it comes to the phone hacking scandal, they're taking the "
slime and defend" page out of Bush's book. It's not just Fox News, either. The
Wall Street Journal is fully in the game.
Let's take a closer look at today's editorial saying, "We're the greatest; libruls and our competitors are the real issue in the phone hacking scandal":
Our readers can decide if we are a better publication than we were four years ago, but there is no denying that News Corp. has invested in the product.
Joe Nocera, who had been a vocal supporter of Murdoch taking over the WSJ, last week detailed the changes he saw in the paper:
Soon came the changes, swift and sure: shorter articles, less depth, an increased emphasis on politics and, weirdly, sometimes surprisingly unsophisticated coverage of business.
Along with the transformation of a great paper into a mediocre one came a change that was both more subtle and more insidious. The political articles grew more and more slanted toward the Republican party line. The Journal sometimes took to using the word “Democrat” as an adjective instead of a noun, a usage favored by the right wing. In her book, “War at The Wall Street Journal,” Sarah Ellison recounts how editors inserted the phrase “assault on business” in an article about corporate taxes under President Obama. The Journal was turned into a propaganda vehicle for its owner’s conservative views. That’s half the definition of Fox-ification.
The other half is that Murdoch’s media outlets must shill for his business interests. With the News of the World scandal, The Journal has now shown itself willing to do that, too.
The WSJ's defensive editorial continues:
The measure that really matters is the market's, and on that score Mr. Hinton was at the helm when we again became America's largest daily.
Some, of course, might argue that law-breaking is as meaningful a point of judgment as the market. This scandal continues to expand and while the Wall Street Journal has yet to be accused of law-breaking, its now-resigned publisher was running Murdoch's British newspapers at the time of the hacking. And of course, the market would have been a key justification for the phone hacking in the first place: get ahead of the competition by any means necessary.
That's the defend part. The editorial isn't short on sliming, either. Where News Corp's role in the scandal created by its own illegal actions is dismissed in two paragraphs, the real culprits, as identified here, are many and varied. On British politicians:
The British politicians now bemoaning media influence over politics are also the same statesmen who have long coveted media support. The idea that the BBC and the Guardian newspaper aren't attempting to influence public affairs, and don't skew their coverage to do so, can't stand a day's scrutiny. The overnight turn toward righteous independence recalls an eternal truth: Never trust a politician.
Yes, the British political establishment Murdoch and his minions worked so hard to get close to, and particularly the conservative politicians they campaigned so assiduously for, are implicated. And any who were complicit in illegal ways should certainly be held to account. But again, they were not the ones hacking into thousands of people's telephones.
On the entire rest of the media:
We also trust that readers can see through the commercial and ideological motives of our competitor-critics. The Schadenfreude is so thick you can't cut it with a chainsaw. Especially redolent are lectures about journalistic standards from publications that give Julian Assange and WikiLeaks their moral imprimatur.
Schadenfreude means "satisfaction or pleasure felt at someone else's misfortune." As such, it implies misfortune as opposed to justice. There's no question that many of us, including perhaps some News Corp competitors, would feel Schadenfreude if the phones of Rupert Murdoch and top News Corp executives were hacked and embarrassing personal secrets publicized. But that's not what happened. This isn't a matter of some passive misfortune; it's justice. And you know what? Let's say that every bit—every single bit—of media coverage has commercial and ideological motives. So what! News Corp still behaved criminally as a means of making profit and influencing world politics. They're going to have to do a lot better than this if they want us to forget that.