Murdoch’s Watergate?

If you’ve been following the phone-hacking scandal that began in Britain and which seems to be burgeoning like a crop of mushrooms after a hard rain, then you know who Murdoch is. Let’s take a closer look at this guy. There’s a synchro here. I promise.

In 1986, an Australian born, naturalized American citizen named Keith Rupert Murdoch created Fox Broadcasting Company. He became a naturalized citizen to satisfy the legal requirement that only  U.S. citizens could own American T.V. stations.  Before this, he had extensive media holdings in Britain, Australia, and in the U.S. Tabloids like The Star were owned by Murdoch – you know, those cheesy papers in the checkout line at your local supermarket that feature the latest celebrity sex scandal.

In 1996, Murdoch got into the cable news market with  the Fox News Channel, a  24/7 cable news network.  As progressives learned during the Bush years, Fox News became the mouthpiece for the Republicans and Murdoch’s power to influence – i.e. brainwash –  the public’s attitude about politics grew exponentially.

I remember being at the gym in the aftermath of 9-11 and looking around at all the televisions and every single one of them had Fox News on. A friend told me that her husband became so disgusted with seeing Fox News on at his gym that he quit the gym and found some other place to work out. I didn’t quit my gym (which later folded), but I started bringing a book with me for when I was on the treadmill.

After the U.S. invaded Iraq, the patriotic fervor on Fox News became a kind of grotesque and horrifying cheerleading squad for war – the war in Iraq, then on Afghanistan, and always, of course, for the war on terror. Through its mouthpieces like Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Glen Beck, and the chorus line of  blond bimbo Barbies, the network thrived on spewing hatred, racism, and any sort of divisiveness they could cook up.

During this period, when driving Megan to and from school, I would find solace in Air America, where  Stephanie Miller, Al Franken, Rachel Maddow, Ed Schultz, Thomas Hartman and other progressives provided a window of sanity. After Air American declared bankruptcy, Franken went on to become a senator and Maddow and Schultz, thanks to Keith Olbermann,  found a home at MSNBC. There,  they continue to present a more fair – if not exactly balanced – reportsa and opinions of the news, a counter to every major talking point the Fox News people have for a given day. And, let’s face it, if there was no Fox News, MSNBC would still be treading water in the middle-of-road CNN realm.

In 2008, when Obama really started gaining ground in the polls, Fox News pulled out the stops. The dark, reptilian brains in the newsroom were slammed into overdrive, cooking up bogus issues at the speed of light. The birther issue. The pastor issue. The socialist issue. But at the heart of it all was the race issue.

Meanwhile, Glen Beck was pulling in millions a year for spewing hatred and racism, people like Greta van Sustern who ran a respectable show on CNN, jumped ship for a million bucks, had a facelift, and became unrecognizable physically – and politically. She was now a Fox News mouthpiece. When McCain picked Palin as his running mate, Fox News was ecstatic about the cutie from Wasilla – wink, wink – and made valiant attempts to ignore the fact that she was so stupid and ill-informed about the basics that she could barely complete an interview with Katie Couric on September 24, 2008, weeks before the election. If McCain still wonders why he didn’t win, he can start by looking at a re-run of the interview in which Palin was baffled by a simple question about what newspapers she read.

Now here we are in July 2011. Fox News has been on the air for a mere 15 years and Murdoch’s personal fortune is now estimated to be nearly $8 billion. In the 2000s, he expanded his holdings to satellite TV, the Internet and film industry  and bought the Wall Street Journal. In 2010, On the Forbes list of the most powerful people in the world, he was ranked 13^th (how’s that for a number ranking!).

One of Murdoch’s holdings in the UK is (or was) News of the World, a tabloid that had existed for 168 years before folding this week.  The newspaper has been accused of hacking into cell phones of everyone from royalty and the former prime minister to crime victims to get the scoop on stories.

And, because it’s always interesting to see what other countries think, here’s something from Times of India.

Princes Charles and Camilla, even the queen herself, may have been targeted. Then there’s the hacked phones of families of the 7-7 bombing victims in London, attempted bribery of NYC cops to release the phone numbers of families who lost loved ones in the 9-11 attacks, and the hacking of a  kidnapped teenager’s cell phone, which set off this furor.

The synchro, at least for us, seems to lie in the parallels to Watergate. From Wikipedia: “On September 29, 1972 it was revealed that John Mitchell, while serving as Attorney General, controlled a secret Republican fund used to finance intelligence-gathering against the Democrats. On October 10, the FBI reported that the Watergate break-in was part of a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage on behalf of the officials and heads of the Nixon re-election campaign.” Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, reporters for the Washington Post,  suggested “that knowledge of the break-in, and attempts to cover it up, led deep into the Justice Department, the FBI, the CIA, and even the White House.”

On August 9, 1974, Nixon – facing possible impeachment in Congress – resigned, the only resignation of a U.S president.

Back in 1974, cell phones didn’t exist. Neither did any brand of personal computers. So what’s the 21st century equivalent of a break-in? Getting hacked. Hacking is the nefarious shadow that slips into your life through your computer or your phone and steals parts of your personal life – your identity, your money, your soul. A hacker invades, like a virus, like cancer, like some alien life form.

Richard Nixon resigned, Murdoch probably will be forced out of his own company. Well, he’s also 80-years old and a billionaire. Very few will shed tears the day he steps down.

So does Fox News hack phones to get scoops as at least three of its sister newspapers have done? We don’t know yet, but we’ll probably find out a lot more in coming days and weeks as the scandal spreads across the Atlantic.

We’ll let Howard Kurtz, of the Daily Beast and former Washington Post media reporter, have the final word here:

“Mr. Murdoch, whose empire stretches from Fox News to The Wall Stdreet Journal to the Times of London, is engaging in corporate damage control by shuttering Britain’s bestselling newspaper. If media ethics were his prmary concern, he would have fired his top London executive who ran the paper during the phone hacking. Maybe someone should put up a statue of the media mogul outside the News of the World buidling, to remind us of the dangers of corrupt journalism.