Jul
15
2011
The ever-widening black-mark on the Rupert Murdoch-owned News Corp has reached across the pond from Britain into the U.S. The FBI confirmed yesterday that it was “looking into” allegations that U.K. News Corp employees hacked into the cell phones of 9/11 victims here in the U.S. Today the Chief Executive of News Corps UK publishing at the center of the scandal, Rebekah Brooks, resigned, further shaking the international media empire. In an incredible reversal of fortune, the once untouchable Rupert Murdoch is under intense scrutiny. Earlier this month it was revealed that reporters at his UK paper, News of the World, had commandeered the voicemail of a missing British teenage girl back in 2002. They listened to, and deleted, messages in the weeks before her body was found. The 168 year-old UK paper was instantly reviled, and closed within days of the revelation. Since then, a growing list of British power players have been implicated in the paper’s standard practice of mobile phone hacking. Currently, 9 past and present News of the World employees have been arrested, including at least two former aides to Prime Minister David Cameron. The affair has also exposed a cozy relationship between Murdoch, the Prime Minister, and Scotland Yard of the kind that is familiar to U.S. observers. The Fox News Channel, a broadcasting subsidiary of Murdoch’s News Corp, has long been accused of being a biased propaganda machine for the Republican Party. U.S. Fox News is headed by Roger Ailes, a former Nixon operative, with a reputation for spying on his staff and pushing Murdoch’s conservative agenda at Fox. A June Rolling Stone Magazine profile on Ailes quotes former Bush Administration speechwriter David Frum explaining the relationship, saying, “Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us. Now we’re discovering that we work for Fox.”
GUEST: Ellen Broadsky, runs the blog Newshound, worked as a researcher for Robert Greenwald’s documentary films, Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism, Iraq for Sale, and the Fox Attacks Series of short films
Read Ellen’s writings at www.newshounds.us
