When big name journalists start to come out from behind their handlers to take on the powerful by name, it is usually a sign that the aforementioned power is going down. Over the weekend, luminaries like Tina Brown started signing their names to articles about why this time it's different for Rupert Murdoch. And in the most cliched signal, former Watergate hero Carl Bernstein has been trotted out to comment on the similarities between the Murdoch phone-hacking scandal and his own 15 minutes in history. Sort of like Rudy Giuliani being summoned every time some politician wants to use a 9/11 analogy: you can tell it's now safe to dip your toe in that hot water.
Such cynicism aside, for those concerned with reputation - corporate or personal - there are lessons here. One, if you play rough on the way up, the mob will reply in corresponding fashion (Momma didnt lie...). Two, in a scandal this bad (hacking dead girls' cell phones is the new immoral True North), nothing but blood sacrifice will do. Murdoch thought closing his pet News of the World tabloid would stanch the appetites of the baying political hounds. Didnt work. Mere tangible assets are simply not juicy enough. Three, politicians are only your friends until it becomes job threatening for them be so.
The issue here is bigger than the scandal: Murdoch fostered a brutal journalistic style and drove hard-nosed political change. Many cowered in the face of his wealth and brazen singlemindedness. However, that creates resentment which blossoms when weakness appears. In Watergate, Nixon's handlers and enablers buckled under the relentless counterpressure and eventually turned on him. That may or may not happen in a more commercial case. But business or government, eventually you reap what you sow.JL
Jessica Epstein reports in Politico:
"The phone hacking scandal now dogging Rupert Murdoch bears “more than a passing resemblance” to Watergate, writes Carl Bernstein, who knows plenty about the events that brought down Richard Nixon.
While it is “perhaps…unlikely” that Murdoch will ever face charges for the alleged hacking of phones belonging to dead soldiers, missing people and celebrities, Bernstein says in this week’s issue of “Newsweek” that the scandal could be a huge blow to Murdoch’s influence in Britain and in the United States. Executives at Murdoch’s News Corporation followed Nixon’s example of “presiding over a criminal conspiracy in which he insulated himself from specific knowledge of numerous individual criminal acts,” writes Bernstein.
They, like Nixon, were “responsible for and authorizing general policies that routinely resulted in lawbreaking and unconstitutional conduct” and played a “role in the cover-up.”
In Britain, Murdoch’s papers – including The Times of London – amount to “a media empire with no serious rivals for political influence in Britain—especially, but not exclusively, among the conservative Tories who currently run the country,” Bernstein writes.
In the United States, Murdoch has tried to do the same, using the New York Post as a “vehicle…for increasing his eminence and working a wholesale change not only in American journalism but in the broader culture as well.” With Fox News Channel and, since 2007, The Wall Street Journal, as part of his American holdings, Bernstein says, “it’s hard to think of any other individual who has had a greater impact on American political and media culture in the past half century.”
“But now the empire is shaking, and there’s no telling when it will stop,” he adds. British politicians and journalists, Bernstein writes, have told him that “the shuttering of News of the World, and the official inquiries announced by the British government, are the beginning, not the end, of the seismic event” hitting Murdoch.
Journalists “do not routinely break the law, bribe policemen, wiretap, and generally conduct themselves like thugs unless it is a matter of recognized and understood policy,” Bernstein writes. But, within Murdoch’s empire, there is “tacit knowledge and approval of the people at the top” about journalists’ misbehavior.
The scandal, said one former executive to Bernstein, “could not have happened anywhere else. Only in Murdoch’s orbit.” The hacking “was done on an industrial scale. More than anyone, Murdoch invented and established this culture in the newsroom, where you do whatever it takes to get the story, take no prisoners, destroy the competition, and the end will justify the means,” Bernstein said in Newsweek.
“In the end, what you sow is what you reap,” the executive added. “Now Murdoch is a victim of the culture that he created. It is a logical conclusion, and it is his people at the top who encouraged lawbreaking and hacking phones and condoned it.”
Though major U.S. papers like The New York Times and The Washington Post – where Bernstein worked with Bob Woodward to expose Watergate – and the established TV networks have had “lapses,” it’s hard to “imagine the kind of tactics regularly employed by the Murdoch press, especially at News of the World,being condoned at the Post or the Times.”
New details will emerge, Bernstein says, which will “reveal exactly where the rot came from at News of the World, and whether Rupert Murdoch enabled, approved, or opposed the obvious corruption that infected his underlings.” And, from there, Murdoch’s influence may be reshaped.
“Murdoch and his global media empire have a lot to answer for. He has not merely encouraged the metastasis of cutthroat tabloid journalism on both sides of the Atlantic,” Bernstein says. “But perhaps just as troubling, authorities in Britain may respond to popular outrage at the scandal by imposing the kind of regulations that cannot help but undermine a truly free press.”
“The events of recent days are a watershed for Britain, for the United States, and for Rupert Murdoch,” he adds. “Tabloid journalism—and our tabloid culture—may never be the same.”
Meanwhile, the fallout elsewhere in his empire is emerging, as the British officials including Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg call on Murdoch to back out of his bid to buy British Sky Broadcasting Group. And a government agency is “asking for further advice in light of the emerging events from the phone hacking scandal” as it weighs whether to approve the buy.
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