Rupert Murdoch’s infamous Newscorp empire with its history of bullying, bribing, lying, and other notorieties can now add “phone hacking” into its list of crimes. [And quite possibly murder now that the man who first blew the whistle on Newscorp’s phone hacking practices has turned up dead.] Its been found that Newscorp has been hacking into the phone conversations and voicemails of celebrities, politicians, and even murder victims for years. Cops have been arrested for taking bribes from Newscorp to allow the spying and new questions have come up about exactly what influence Murdoch has in politics.
The conspiracy of phone hacking and political influence can even be connected to Britain’s current prime minister David Cameron. For decades, everyone from conservatives like Margaret Thatcher to liberals like Tony Blair have had to kiss Rupert Murdoch’s ass so he wouldn’t bury them in a flurry of bad press, and he has spent a lot of money stateside to buy political goodwill. In the 2010 elections alone he donated a million dollars to the US Chamber of Commerce (the preeminent business lobby that’s one of the most powerful lobbying groups in the country) to buy Republican candidates political seats.
So now we’re left with a decade long reign of terror in Europe that involved spying, blackmail, bribery, and political influence (something an unbiased media should never seek out), and the questions are just getting started. Did he pull the same shit in the US? Almost certainly. Will the US go through the motions of an investigation that will deliberately come up with nothing? Almost certainly. Will Rupert Murdoch finally be brought down for systematic abuse of the media? Well if he hasn’t in the decades he’s been doing it, it’s hard to imagine he will be now. Either way, anything that might get Fox News off the air or The Wall Street Journal in its rightful place in the garbage can is enough to give me some hope.