Needlenose

In recent days, a long-simmering scandal in the United Kingdom over unscrupulous journalism (specifically, the repeated hacking of cell phones owned by celebrities, politicians, and crime victims) by newspapers owned by billionaire Rupert Murdoch has exploded, with leading Murdoch executives being arrested and top British officials forced to resign over apparent complicity with the papers’ schemes.

And now obvious questions are being asked:

… critics muse that Mr. Murdoch’s free-wheeling and politically conservative hand in British reporting may have influenced American journalism as well – particularly in the well-regarded Wall Street Journal, whose parent company Dow Jones was acquired by Murdoch’s News Corp. in 2007.

For its part, the Journal’s editorial page fired back about these charges in an editorial for Monday’s paper:

When News Corp. and CEO Rupert Murdoch secured enough shares to buy Dow Jones & Co. four years ago, these columns welcomed our new owner and promised to stand by the same standards and principles we always had…

… [regarding] Friday’s resignation of our publisher and CEO, Les Hinton, who ran News Corp.’s British newspaper unit during the time of the alleged hacking . . . on ethical questions, his judgment was as sound as that of any editor we’ve had.

To help readers understand what makes this such a galling non-denial denial, we pause here for a concurring opinion from the hereafter:

The WSJ editors lie without consequence

The above is from the suicide note of Vincent Foster, an aide to the Clinton administration who killed himself in 1993 after being savaged in a series of Wall Street Journal editorials during the preceding two months.

In other words, it wasn’t the Journal‘s editorial-page standards that anyone was concerned about when Murdoch took over.  The issue is whether Murdoch pushed the news operation into the op-ed section’s moral cesspool.

Stumble it!

Tags: Fox News, phone hacking scandal, Rupert Murdoch, Wall Street Journal

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 17th, 2011 at 6:11 pm by Swopa and is filed under Media criticisms. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.