Guardian-free America wakes up to Murdoch tactics
“There was a kind of thuggishness,” says a former Page Six contributor to the Murdoch-owned New York Post. He says Murdoch was on the phone with Post Editors “all the time. He was down in the newsroom. I can’t imagine anything of that [News of the World] scale could go on and him not know about it.”
Senior brute Ian Spiegelman was fired for sending a nasty email with antigay slurs to someone who had crossed him. Another reporter, Jared Stern, left after being caught asking a billionaire businessman for money in exchange for keeping negative information about him out of the paper.
But what emerging US interviews suggest is that they were part of a newsroom environment in which some questionable practices may have been at best tacitly approved, and at worst encouraged.
It is all horribly familiar.
In a 2007, Spiegelman said “accepting freebies, graft and other favors was not only condoned by the company but encouraged as a way to decrease the newspaper’s out-of-pocket expenses…and that News Corp. attorneys had been instructed to ‘look the other way.’” There was a policy of “favor banking,” the affidavit said, “practiced on a much larger scale by Rupert Murdoch.” In 2001, Spiegelman said in the document, “I was ordered to kill a Page Six story about a Chinese diplomat and a strip club that would have angered the Communist regime and endangered Murdoch’s broadcasting privileges” as he was trying to get Beijing’s approval for his satellite-television service. In similar vein, Stern says,“For a long time the Clintons were targets,” he said. “You couldn’t get enough dirt on the Clintons. Then Billmade a rapprochement with Murdoch, sucked up to him in the run-up to Hillary running for the Senate in 2000. Then one day it was, ‘You can’t write anything bad about the Clintons.’ We had to kill stuff all the time. It filtered down from Murdoch. In the meetings we’d be told, ‘No way, mate.’”
No phone-hacking has as yet been discovered in the US. But what these and other revelations splashed last night at The Daily Beast suggest very strongly is that the man at the top of Newscorp, Rupert Murdoch, knows about everything of any scale at ALL of his newspapers. And that he is a prize bastard, manipulating everyone and everything to his own advantage. Newscorp? It’s more like Usecorp.
Spiegelman gets the final word:
“News Corp VPs are nationless. It doesn’t matter where you put them—they are plugged into their own, floating nation…namely News Corp. You don’t always see them, but they are always hovering between the editor-in-chief and Rupert, and their loyalties remain not with any country or system of laws. Imagine the kind of pressure such a misty, loyalty-free menace could put on a reporter who actually lives where he lives and whose life is there. You want to know if this London poison is likely to have spread to New York? Yeah. But don’t blame London.”
Exactly. Blame one man: Keith Rupert Murdoch.
All those insisting on a nasty Guardian/Brown plot, please take note.
The Slog 