The News Corp phone-hacking scandal has gone global. The FBI has announced that it is launching an investigation into allegations that Rupert Murdoch’s corporation hacked into the mobile phones of 9/11 victims. If it’s true, it’s a moral outrage of huge proportions – a terrible insult to American honour. It would seriously damage Murdoch’s reputation in the US and reduce his very profitable share of the media market. But the political context is subtly different to the UK scandal, and that will shape the way it plays out. The comparison some are already making to Watergate is instructive in its inaccuracy. This hurts Murdoch, but not necessarily the Republican Party or conservative media in general.
Hacking into Milly Dowler’s phone was an attack on a single family. Hacking into the phones of the 9/11 victims is an assault on an entire nation. In America, the memory of the people who died on 9/11 is sacred. The invasion of their privacy not only violates wire-tapping laws but offends a much bigger, popular ethical sensibility. If it is proven true then the Murdoch brand will be irreparably harmed, and that means the collapse of an empire that reaches well beyond a seedy UK newspaper obsessed with sex and celebrity face lifts.Part of the US empire is the irrepressible, valuable Fox News: the “fair and balanced” channel that has been sticking it to the American Left since 1996. In 2010 the network took the top 10 spots in the age 25–54 demographic and the top 12 spots among total viewers, and cable TV provides 60 per cent of News Corp’s overall profits. It’s big business, and politicians already sound determined to bring it down. For starters, Democratic Senators Frank Lautenberg and Barbara Boxer have called for Murdoch to be personally investigated under the terms of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act for the crime of bribing English police. If found guilty, the old man could face up to $30 million in fines and 20 years in prison.
It’s tempting to presume that this is payback time for liberals sick of being called everything from Muslims to Communists by Fox News contributors for the past 15 years. Certainly, a guilty verdict would invert the Right-wing franchise’s patriotic image and probably boost the reputation and ratings of the rival MSNBC channel. News Corp gave a generation of young conservatives a platform, and that platform stands to be discredited. Obama will be pleased. His White House communications director once opinioned that, “Fox News often operates as either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party”.
But it is significant that the man leading the calls for an investigation is congressman Pete King: a conservative Republican who has enjoyed positive coverage by Fox in the past. Although some liberals and Europeans will try to paint this as a GOP scandal – hence the reference to Watergate, which brought down Republican Richard Nixon – the outrage at what News Corp did is bipartisan. American news outlets have a far greater sense of separation from the political elite of their country than there is in Britain. In the UK, both parties chased the endorsement of the News of the World. Prime Ministers of left and right invited its editors to cocktail parties and sleep-overs. Its power and importance was reflected in its disturbingly close relationship with the entire political establishment, including Brown and Cameron. That is what made it the British Watergate.
In contrast, no Democrat would bother to court the support of Fox News or the New York Post. They are conservative niche media, which has excluded them from half of the US political establishment and kept them philosophically pure. And just because it fills a Right-wing niche doesn’t mean News Corp has determined the ebb and flow of conservative politics either. The Sun’s claim that it “won it” in 1992 is a sentiment that no US news outlet would understand or echo. They regard themselves as either strictly non-partisan or, in the case of Fox, something that reflects rather than sets the popular mood.
In short, there is a distance between News Corp and the Republican Party that will keep the scandal from becoming the partisan frenzy that it was in the UK. Whatever Obama’s claims to the contrary, Fox does not speak for the GOP and would never claim that kind of influence. It is a case of a private institution committing crimes against the general public; the UK’s added dimension of political culpability is missing. This is not a conservative scandal, or even a political scandal. It is simply criminal.
