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International Journal of Communication 6 (2012), Feature 1169–1200 1932–8036/2012FEA1169 The Murdoch Media Empire and the Spectacle of Scandal 1 DOUGLAS KELLNER University of California, Los Angeles The press, designed for freedom's best defence, And learning, morals, wisdom to dispense, Perverted, poisoned, lost to honor's rules, Is made the sport of knaves, to govern fools. ~ Philadelphia Public Ledger, 1839 In July 2011, dramatic revelations concerning misdeeds by Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World (NOTW), one of the most successful tabloid newspapers in history, erupted, creating a vast media spectacle that was compared to Watergate and that threatened the existence of Murdoch’s global media empire (Bernstein, 2011). Richard Nixon’s Watergate crisis implicated the president in a series of scandals that led to the famous Senate Watergate Hearings, a major media spectacle of 1973, followed by his resignation from office, a first for a U.S. president. The cascading scandals in Rupert Murdoch’s media empire were thus referred to in some circles as “Murdochgate” (see Bernstein, 2011), a series of outrages and crimes that are continuing to undermine his media power and empire in 2012 and the foreseeable future. For years, there had been accusations that employees of Murdoch’s various tabloid newspapers had hacked telephones to gain information and pay police and other informers for news stories. In 2007, a News of the World reporter, Clive Goodman, and a convicted hacker, Glenn Mulcaire, were sent to jail for hacking the cell phones of members of the Royal Family, and reports surfaced in subsequent years that celebrities like Hugh Grant, Sienna Miller, and Jude Law were also hacked, as well as figures connected to sports, always an important domain of the spectacle. At the time, Murdoch and his minions claimed that the hacking was the work of a single rogue reporter and police and government inquiries accepted these claims. 1 This text is extracted and expanded from my forthcoming book, Media Spectacle and Insurrection, 2011: From the Arab Uprisings to Occupy Everywhere! (Kellner, in press), which traces the major media spectacles of 2011 from the North African Arab Uprisings through the Occupy movements. Thanks to Richard Keeble for sending me a PDF of his coedited book, The Phone Hacking scandal. Journalism on Trial, on the Murdoch scandal and making useful comments on an earlier version of the study, and to Larry Gross and Arlene Luck for their constant support of my work over the years. Copyright © 2012 (Douglas Kellner, [email protected]). Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives (by-nc-nd). Available at http://ijoc.org. 1170 Douglas Kellner International Journal of Communication 6 (2012) On July 4, 2011, however, a British Guardian reporter, Nick Davies, who had been pursuing the hacking stories for years, broke the sensational revelations, with colleague Amelia Hill, that Murdoch’s tabloid News of the World had hacked the cell phone messages of Milly Dowler, a 13-year-old missing girl whose disappearance was a media sensation in 2002 (Davies & Hill, 2011). The Guardian reported that a NOTW employee had apparently hacked into Dowler’s voice-message system, deleted messages, which gave her family and police hope that she was still alive, and used hacked material to write stories about this missing girl.2 Dowler was found murdered, and the revelation that NOTW had hacked the murdered girl’s phone and interfered with the police investigation created a British and global media spectacle in summer 2011.3 Furthermore, Guardian investigative reporting revealed that London police had indicated that more than 4,000 allegations of phone hacking of celebrities, politicians, the Royals, and ordinary people had been gleaned from convicted hacker Mulcaire’s notebook, which contained over 11,000 pages of notes. Allegations that NOTW reporters hacked into cell phone voice-mail systems belonging to families of UK soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan and to families of victims of London terrorist attacks were especially explosive. Outrage grew from day to day as additional major figures in the Murdoch media empire were arrested, and Murdochgate became one of the major media spectacles of the moment, with far-reaching consequences.4 In the wildly successful Harry Potter films, the last of which was released just as the Murdochgate scandal was breaking in summer 2011, the Daily Prophet news tabloid provided a satire of a Murdoch tabloid, and one could see Murdoch himself as a figure for Voldemort, the evil villain whom Harry Potter was to vanquish. In any case, Rupert Murdoch’s media empire has long been a major source of right-wing power throughout the English-speaking world. Differently branded as News International (UK) and News 2 Questions were later raised concerning whether it was indeed Mulcaire, the Murdoch-employed private investigator who admittedly hacked Milly Dowler’s e-mail, who had also deleted the e-mails, as evidence suggested that messages had been deleted from Milly’s cell phone before Mulcaire got on the case, leading the British government to call for a specific investigation into this issue (see Leigh, 2011). 3 Davies and Hill’s (2011) article, “Missing Milly Dowler's voicemail was hacked by News of the World,” revealed how the Dowler family lawyer described the Dowlers’ anguish at the revelation, stating: It is distress heaped upon tragedy to learn that the News of the World had no humanity at such a terrible time. The fact that they were prepared to act in such a heinous way that could have jeopardized the police investigation and give them false hope is despicable. 4 The daily unfolding of the Murdoch scandal was registered and archived on a daily blog by the Guardian; see, for example, the “Live blog” coverage at http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/blog/2011/aug/16/phone- hacking-scandal-live. The Guardian has continued its intensive coverage and blogs on the Murdoch scandal through the Winter of 2011 and into 2012. International Journal of Communication 6 (2012) The Murdoch Media Empire 1171 Corp. (United States), Murdoch’s global media empire was said to have a market value of around $46 billion, with properties including some 175 newspapers worldwide, HarperCollins publishing, 20th Century Fox and other movie studios, and television interests in China, Italy, Australia, and elsewhere, including major cable channels and distribution systems.5 Murdoch was alleged to have a personal net worth of more than $7.6 billion dollars, and was rated on the 2011 list of Forbes’ richest Americans as the 38th richest person in the United States and the 117th richest person in the world.6 Rupert Murdoch had thus been at the center of the construction of global media companies using new technologies to create cable-satellite broadcasting empires and global news and information conglomerates. In the UK alone, Murdoch media properties comprise several leading newspapers, including UK establishment papers The Times and The Sunday Times, popular tabloids NOTW and The Sun, and control of Sky TV, along with a major stake in BSkyB, the two largest cable-satellite franchises in the UK. At the time that the hacking scandal broke out, Murdoch had been seeking permission from the British government to purchase majority shares in the UK cable system BSkyB so he could effectively control cable television in the UK. Although it appeared that the Cameron government was going to support Murdoch’s bid to control British cable-satellite systems, on July 13, the Murdoch corporation dropped its $12 billion takeover bid as parliamentary opposition began to intensify after revelations of the hacking scandals. In the United States, Murdoch owns many newspapers, including The New York Post and the Wall Street Journal, which he purchased in 2007 just before the newspaper industry went into economic free fall, losing millions in the exchange. Murdoch also controls 20th Century Fox films in the United States, as well as Fox Television and Fox News, two of the most popular, profitable, and in the case of Fox News, powerful television channels in the world. Murdoch’s media empire contributed massively to the tabloidization of news and information in newspapers and journalism from the 1960s to the present and in broadcasting from the 1990s to the present. His Sky TV and Fox News television channels highlighted sensationalistic stories with glitzy presentations, large graphics that tell people what to think, and the collapse of codes of news and entertainment—all framed from a right-wing conservative position. Murdoch’s newspapers as well featured giant sensational headlines, short stories with gobs of tabloid trash and scandal, and pictures galore, 5 On the scale of Murdoch’s media empire, see Wolff (2010). The first critical account of Murdoch’s growing media and political influence and its nefarious effects on journalism and democracy is found in Thomas Kiernan’s Citizen Murdoch (1986). For a detailed account of the rise of the Murdoch media empire up until 1992, see Shawcross (1992). Chenoweth (2001) provides a much more in-depth and revealing analysis of Murdoch’s questionable financial transactions, the constant crises of his media empire as it relentlessly expanded and how Murdoch responded to various stages of new media changes in media ownership patterns and technological revolutions of the era to increase the size and influence of his media empire. Chenoweth also provides detailed accounts of how Murdoch’s practices have flirted with illegality and criminality for decades. 6 See Rupert Murdoch profile in Forbes at http://www.forbes.com/profile/rupert-murdoch 1172 Douglas Kellner International Journal of Communication 6 (2012) including naked women in his Brit tabs.7 Thus, not only was Murdoch the major purveyor of an aggressively right-wing political slant on the news, but he also degraded journalism and helped create the tabloidization of both news and information.