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COMMENTARY
July 16, 2011
Getting Murdoch
Summer is a time of noise: mechanical sound and fury, signifying nothing, beyond the continued ability of Her Majesty's subjects to own and operate loud, heavily powered, and to my peaceful and Catholic mind, extremely irritating machines. Dangerous, too, when these mostly unnecessary devices (many of which move at provocatively high speeds) are piloted by idiots, which is often the case.I am thinking at the moment less of motor boats, and ride-along lawn mowers, than of the tremendous spectacle filling the Englishspeaking airwaves, of politicians out to get Rupert Murdoch, before their window of opportunity closes. On Wednesday, I generously shared with gentle reader my low opinion of the late, sleazy News of the World (and by extension, its readers). But today, let me add, that as a free press radical, it would never have occurred to me to ban anything but its display from environments where children are present. At the level of the state, it should have been ignored - unless for the purpose of enforcing criminal laws which apply to everybody. If hacking into cellphones and e-mail is illegal, and the crime has been credibly alleged, then by all means let us bring prosecutions, with dates, locations, evidence, and the like. Let us sort the innocent from the guilty, to the best of our limited ability, and let us punish only those we find guilty. When something else is happening, the citizen should be alarmed. And something else has been happening on both sides of the Atlantic. Politicians, including Britain's Gordon Brown, until recently often seen prancing about socially with Rupert Murdoch and his kind, suddenly smell blood and are all over the guy. I name Brown because he went out on the longest limb. He implied what the left wing Guardian newspaper actually suggested: that Murdoch's daily tabloid, the Sun, had hacked into family medical records to reveal that Brown's little boy had cystic fibrosis. Foolish move. The Sun was able to show it had this information from an entirely kosher source, and extract an immediate apology, at least from the Guardian. That their original story had been sympathetic to the Browns, and all parents of afflicted children, was lost in the exchange of impassioned accusations. On carefully selected shorter limbs, the rest of Britain's ruling political class are now screeching like howler monkeys, at the Murdoch they once pretended to love. The liberal-Democrat U.S. equivalent now have the FBI trawling for charges, on which America's prosecutors might hope to stitch him up. I mentioned Wednesday the phenomenon of blood in the water, and how sharks are attracted to it. We are now witnessing the full political feeding frenzy. According to a (characteristically ludicrous) editorial in the (ice-block liberal) New York Times, "In truth, a kind of British Spring is under way, now that the News Corporation's tidy system of punishment and reward has crumbled. Members of Parliament, no longer fearful of retribution in Mr. Murdoch's tabloids, are speaking their minds and giving voice to the anger of their constituents." That passage, flagged by Mark Steyn, gives only a foretaste of a rich field of paranoia. The insinuation that Murdoch, himself, keeps files on politicians, and plays them like a puppeteer for his own nefarious causes, would be something worth testing under the laws of defamation. That he is widely believed to do so, by that political class, is an indication of the extraordinary insecurity they must feel, at the prospect of having any of their own operations exposed to public light. In the U.S., the jackals are salivating at what could be a once-ina-lifetime opportunity to take Fox News down, and ideally, the New York Post and Wall Street Journal. For all three are execrated by smugly liberal people, not least for the huge audiences they command. Murdoch's British operations may be mortally wounded (stock price collapse for starters), and not only his Sky News bid has wilted. It is not unimaginable that, by the end of this, the Times, and Sunday Times, could cease publication (because no one will buy them in the present market), and the Sun unloaded on some minor pornographer who promises the politicians not to pursue news any more. What surprises me, or ought to surprise me, is the indifference of my fellow journalists to a massive political attack on news gathering. The attack is from the "liberal" side, and the target is the world's leading purveyor of "conservative" media. That, I suspect, might be the reason for the omission. But if it is, the silence is terribly short-sighted. The same methods are necessary to gather news, whether from the left or right perspective, so that restrictions placed on one side quickly redound upon the other. And by the time this is over, the politicians may have all kinds of new laws in place to restrict reportorial enterprise, on both sides of the Atlantic. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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