Hacking Scandal Leads to British Tabloid’s Demise

This is a very good sign that finally Rupert Murdoch is paying a heavy price for his policies.

"Pick your Watergate reference at will, but one thing is certain: The long-simmering phone-hacking story that has been hounding Murdoch for years took a dire turn this week for News Corp. and it suddenly has the possible makings of a career-defining debacle for the partisan media mogul. It's a debacle that features Murdoch starring in the eerily similar role as the one Dick Nixon played.

Like Nixon during his Watergate demise, the hacking story appears to have thrown Murdoch into a free fall with no safe landing spot in sight. There doesn't seem to be any maneuver or strategy available to him at this crucial juncture that will make the blockbuster story go away, even for a price. And like Nixon, whose aides couldn't stop the Watergate bleeding, Murdoch is being hounded by a dogged newspaper determined (and perhaps able) to take him down, as well as by aggressive prosecutors.

And like Nixon's team, Murdoch's News Corp. has recently been unable to make stick the claim that the wrongdoing, and the knowledge of the wrongdoing, does not reach up to the very most senior levels of the company."

There are other similarities like there is also a tape involved in this like the famous Nixon Tapes.

"Now, court documents filed in a lawsuit make clear whom Ms. Regan was accusing of urging her to lie: Roger E. Ailes, the powerful chairman of Fox News and a longtime friend of Mr. Giuliani. What is more, the documents say that Ms. Regan taped the telephone call from Mr. Ailes in which Mr. Ailes discussed her relationship with Mr. Kerik.

It was an incendiary allegation — and a mystery of great intrigue in the media world: After the publishing powerhouse Judith Regan was fired by HarperCollins in 2006, she claimed that a senior executive at its parent company, News Corporation, had encouraged her to lie two years earlier to federal investigators who were vetting Bernard B. Kerik for the job of homeland security secretary."

"Follow the money," as always is still good advice for investigating this scandal as well, no doubt there will also be a "deep throat" to reveal the details of the crimes.

"Meanwhile, I'd suggest that like Nixon's crooked White House, the phone-hacking scandal perfectly captures a larger News Corp. culture at play and that it, therefore, cannot be dismissed as some sort of anomaly. These weren't just rogue elements at work within the Murdoch media empire. Instead these were elements that reflected a dark Murdoch ethos, where serial mendacity isn't just embraced, but often celebrated.

Just ask Glenn Beck, who for more than two years was welcomed onto Fox News to tell every conceivable falsehood, and launch every possible personal smear, that his fervent imagination could conjure up. It was only after his ratings fell and advertisers abandoned him that Beck was shown the door.

Or just ask Fox News boss Roger Ailes who, according to a New York Times report earlier this year, was once caught on tape urging an employee to lie to federal investigators.

Meaning, it makes perfect sense that it's News Corp. that finds itself at the center of this galloping controversy because, quite frankly, it's inconceivable that any other global media company would ever allow its employees to consistently misbehave the way Murdoch allows his lieutenants to skirt common sense rules."

And the similarities just keep on happening since a man with a very close name was arrested first in the Watergate Scandal. Are they going to start naming them after Murdoch now too? It would be hard to come up with something as catchy as the "gate" suffix, though

"Charles Colson was a former Special Counsel for President Richard Nixon from 1969 to 1973.

He was commonly named as one of the Watergate Seven, and pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice for attempting to defame Pentagon Papers defendant Daniel Ellsberg and the following year served seven months in the federal Maxwell Prison in Alabama as the first member of the Nixon administration to be incarcerated for Watergate-related charges."

Hopefully when the dust settles and Murdoch has lost most of his media empire, some reforms will be put into place to assure accuracy in reporting. Maybe the other media outlets will be discouraged to follow the extremes in sensationalism and put the more of the fact before the ratings

Another hopeful sign is that a court just made a ruling against media consolidation.

"The decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit threw out a 2007 FCC rule change that would have allowed a single company to own a daily newspaper and several broadcast stations in one local market.

The court also upheld the FCC's decision to retain its other local broadcast ownership restrictions, and instructed the agency to better consider how its rules affect broadcast ownership by people of color.

The decision is a sweeping victory for the public interest. The court rejected arguments made by broadcast and newspaper giants while exposing the FCC's repeated failures to rein in runaway consolidation.."