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News Of The World Scandal: Will News Corp's Amputation Work?

Ryan Faughnder |
July 8, 2011 | 10:44 a.m. PDT

Senior News Editor

News Corporation's decision to close the infamous British tabloid News of the World has rocked the media landscape worldwide. Amid the investigations into the paper's alleged corrupt activities, Rupert Murdoch's media empire decided to amputate the embattled publication, announcing Thursday that Sunday's issue would be its last. The allegations include hacking the phones of sources and bribing police. The controversy has resulted in the arrest of a former aide to British Prime Minister David Cameron. 

Rupert Murdoch (Creative Commons
Rupert Murdoch (Creative Commons

The story recently flew off the rails with accusations that the paper hacked into the cell phone of a murdered 13-year-old girl.

Rupert Murdoch's son James, New Corp's deputy COO, is making a shrewd business calculation by ending publication, writes the Guardian's Emily Bell:

James's Wapping moment sees him making a gesture he hopes will be grand enough to soften the focus of any phone-hacking inquiry, bold enough to allow the company to extricate itself from present trouble and, in the process, allow him to reshape News International around the digital television platforms he feels both more comfortable with and which are undoubtedly more profitable.

Yet, Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism is not so sure that it can work, sensing desperation:

Rupert and his son James, the News Corp. [...], appear determined to save Rebekah Brooks, the head of News International and editor of the paper when the Dowler hacking took place. Almost anyone else would have purged staff, including Brooks, and kept the paper.

One has to wonder whether Rupert Murdoch is not trying just to salvage Brooks’ career, but also that of his son.

What this really boils down to, writes Dean Starkman of the Columbia Journalism Review, is that the people in charge at News Corp are trying to escape accountability. The company had previously claimed that the scandal was the result of a few bad apples, but now that the alleged corruption appears to extend much higher up the food chain, the executives are cutting and running:

Sure, we’ve all seen this before in our own work lives. But leave it to News Corp. to do it on an industrial scale. A 168-year-old paper that they turned into Frankenstein? Gone. As for its 200 journalists, they weren’t important enough to be stabbed in the back discreetly.

The media soul-searching has also begun on the other side of the Atlantic. The BBC asked Ryan Chittum of The Audit at CJR whether the same thing could happen in the U.S., where publications such as TMZ notoriously breach journalistic ethics by paying for stories. Chittum, who refers to the scandal as "the Super Bowl of media criticism, or something," is not sure, given that the scope and power of the U.S. tabloids -- such as TMZ, the National Enquirer and Murdoch's own New York Post -- are not near what they are in the U.K. Also, the level of corruption seems to be different in kind and well as size.

Furthermore, writes Chittum in a blog post following up on the BBC question, the media culture is fundamentally different in the U.S.:

If an NotW-like scandal came out here, even from a company as powerful as News Corp., the culprits wouldn’t have the police, government, and the rest of the media falling all over themselves to cover it up for them. The good thing about our tabloid culture is that it’s mostly separate from our hard news culture. And, relatively speaking, the good thing about our news culture is that it’s more diversified than in Britain, diluting the power of any one press baron over public life.

Meanwhile, the scandal is widening in Britain. Police on Friday raided the offices of The Daily Star.

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