It's Over

(As we get started again, or "restart," if you prefer, I find that Arthur has been sending regular dispatches from Marin County as though I was still alive, and the following is one of those dispatches. My apologies to Arthur for the delay on my part, and thanks. JP.)

Rupert Murdock owned 40% of the news media and television in the UK and was on the cusp of gathering in total control of a broadcasting company that he only owned 39% of. Then some very bad things happened and more things happened and people who knew a lot of secrets started talking publicly for the first time, shaking off the fear of what would happen to them if they spoke up.

Among those who were deeply afraid were the most powerful political figures, of all the political parties. To a great extent the power of the Murdock press monopoly had begun to decide elections and decide policy. That is a more extreme version of the impact Fox News and the News Corporation have had on the United States. Their cute trick of hiring conservative political figures to give them exposure and face-recognition among the electorate (Gingrich, Palin, Huckabee... ) and to buy their loyalty is a twist on what has been done in the UK.

But while these articles on a scandal in England may seem distant from our political world, they are not. This may be the end, or at least the gelding, of the Murdock machine. It can be seen in England to have acted very like mobsters, trading influence and protection for the right to get their way in regard to expanding their media empire, the better to monopolize, control the public debate and reap financial rewards. It looks to the British public rather as though they ran a decades-long criminal enterprise, while wearing nice suits. What remains to be seen is whether any members of the Murdock family will be jailed in the UK, or as it turns out in the United States through a quirk in the law on bribing foreign officials. Which it is clear that News Corp has done. Several million e-mails appear to have been "lost on their way to Mumbai", as has been quaintly suggested. What, they had one too many drinks and fell over the side of the ship? But data has a nasty habit of staying around a great deal longer than people would like it to. And when the company in question has tarnished its reputation by (a) tapping the phones of kidnapped and killed teenage girls (b) tapped the phones of public officials, movie stars and anyone else they thought to be newsworthy (c) and tapped the phones of the bereaved families of soldiers killed in Afghanistan (perhaps to see if they had any newsworthy dirt in their closets?) and (d) ladled out large cash bribes to members of London's Metropolitan Police Force, apparently in return for tip-offs and access to dirt on public figures... when all of that is exposed and when evidence seems to have been destroyed or attempts were clearly made to destroy it, then the public has turned on News Corporation with a fury I can not recall seeing before. The report that in the lead-up to the Iraq War Tony Blair was calling Rupert Murdock several times a day? That is the sort of story that does not do a political figure's legacy any favors.

And the good news is that things in this country had not gone as far down the tubes as all of that. We think. The other good news is that when a career criminal gets arrested in the commission of one crime, they often are quickly identified as the perpetrator of an entire string of other crimes. And that often is the effective end of their useful criminal career, that up until then seemed to be going so well.

I take no pleasure in the fall of others, but it would seem that they made their own beds, not once, but again and again over many decades, and had come to view themselves as untouchable. Too powerful to fail, one might say. And since they interested themselves in politics, apparently for personal gain and no other reason, it is hard to feel too sorry for them. We can be sorry they got greedy, we can be sorry they appear to have been people of not much character, we can be sorry they do not seem to have cared for anything other than their own self-gain. But some people's children just seem to grow up that way.

Arthur