While I often castigate Canada’s Sun and Post Medias, not to mention the editorial board of the Globe, for their conservative bias there are few more yellow-toothed than those hacks from the UK. Like Canada, British news publications are overwhelmingly conservative, 40 percent of news in the UK controlled by right wing propagandist Rupert Murdoch.
Murdoch is known for going too far, stretching the bounds of journalistic integrity to their breaking point. One such point was reached in 2002 when the British ‘linchpin’ of the Murdoch UK empire, News International, hacked the cell phone of a missing teen, deleting messages and “giving her parents and police false hope that the girl was still alive”. Just as egregious are charges that News of the World illegally paid police for information.
Prime Minister David Cameron described the allegation as a shocking intrusion and major advertisers — including Ford UK — pulled their ads from the paper.
Members of Parliament seized on the case to demand a full debate as pressure rose for the chief executive of News International, Rebekah Brooks, to resign, since she was a former editor of News of the World.
U.K. tabloids have a history of harassing royals, sports stars and celebrities, eavesdropping and paying even the most tangential sources for information about stars’ sex lives and drug problems. But the Dowler allegations showed a press that would even stoop to interfering in a police investigation to seek tabloid headlines.
New allegations emerged Wednesday that Glenn Mulcaire, a private detective employed by News of the World, had obtained telephone numbers of relatives of some of the 52 people killed in the 2005 terrorist attack on London’s transit system. It was unclear whether any of those phones had been hacked.
This would be huge news had the news outlet been the Guardian or some less conservative organization. But Murdoch gets away with bending the ethical and moral rules more than anyone in journalism (even Conrad Black got caught). In the US, Murdoch’s Fox News, WSJ and NY Post specialize in a kind of sensationalistic skewering of the facts to present an ideological perfection required by the authoritarian right. In the UK, this proclivity towards manufacturing and distorting news is even more pronounced.
Don’t expect big outrage over this obvious pillaging of the public trust. People have become complacent when it comes to news organizations and governments misleading them, to the point where they don’t mind that they are being spied upon and having personal rights taken away. It’s almost as if we have given permission to have our freedoms restricted and to be so easily misled.
So it’s satisfying once in awhile to see Murdoch being called out for his misdeeds. Maybe someone will begin to pay attention. Just don’t expect any help from our media. The Brits, on the other hand are taking it very seriously (so’s Kady!). Click here for live debate in UK parliament. (Sample, Bryant: “”We politicians, have colluded far too long with the media.”)
UPDATE: It’s interesting to note that UK PM Cameron hired Andy Coulson as his director of communications after Coulson resigned from News of the World because of the phone hacking scandal. Says a lot, that. Coulson has since quit Cameron.
