The UK has been rocked by a scandal involving reporters for several news publications owned by Newscorp CEO Robert Murdoch (who also owns Fox News) engaging in phone hacking and bribery in order to get stories. With the news that former Prime Minister Gordon Brown was among the targets, Newscorp’s takeover of British Sky Broadcasting, the UK’s largest satellite broadcasting company, is in trouble:
The Guardian reported Monday that journalists throughout the News International empire harassed Gordon Brown over more than 10 years, first as chancellor of the exchequer and later as the Labour prime minister. They tried not only to hack into his voice mail, but also resorted to various underhanded methods to gain access to his bank account, legal files and his family’s medical records, the paper reported.
The furor that has rocked the British establishment erupted last week with reports that The News of the World, the top-selling Sunday tabloid in Mr. Murdoch’s British media empire, hacked into the voice mail of Milly Dowler, a 13-year-old girl who was abducted and murdered in 2002, after she disappeared but before her body was found.
Such was the public outcry against the 168-year-old newspaper that Mr. Murdoch’s family ordered it closed after its final edition appeared on Sunday. Many commentators in Britain saw the closing of the paper as a move to cauterize the phone-hacking crisis and save the bid for the much more profitable British Sky Broadcasting.
I think the most heartening thing about all of this is that there was a public backlash at all. Despite the fact that Murdoch’s political influence is arguably greater in the UK than it is here, I have a hard time imagining the reaction being as decisive and immediate if we somehow learned that Fox News reporters were doing similar things. I suspect that instead, the network would react to the ensuing investigations as proof that the Obama administration was seeking dictator-like authority over the press, GOP Senators would be giving speeches on the floor attacking the president for trying to repeal the First Amendment, and the House would promptly begin investigating whether or not the White House exercised inappropriate political influence in forcing the Justice Department to investigate. I’m imagining every conservative radio show leading with the statement: “Obama will go after Fox News but he won’t prosecute the New Black Panthers.”
It’s really not hard to imagine how similar scandal in the U.S., rather than leading to some kind of accountability or consequences for those involved, would degenerate into an argument about whether or not Obama is persecuting his political enemies and seeking to stifle Democratic dissent. Obviously this is all completely speculative, but virtually the only way I can imagine this playing out the way it’s playing out in Britain here is if a Republican president were actually in office–perhaps something similar would be true if Labour were still in charge in Britain, but who knows.