Sunday, 24 July 2011

End of a nightmare for U.K. media

Rupert Murdoch gives evidence on the News of the World phone-hacking scandal to the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee, in Portcullis House in central London Tuesday, July 19, 2011. (AP Photo)

We have awoken from a nightmare in Britain to discover that it was all true but that it is now over. Rupert Murdoch and his children will never be able to restore their family's profound malign influence over British society and politics.
Murdoch's power in Britain relied upon two media--newspapers and satellite television--that played distinct yet complementary roles in his empire. Murdoch owns four newspapers: two tabloids, the Sun and (until it was shuttered in the most recent phase of the phone-hacking scandal) the News of the World; the Times and the Sunday Times.
These he used to manipulate politicians up to and including the prime minister. The papers would also intimidate and bully his enemies. The Times and the Sunday Times were more nuanced and subtle in tone than the brash populist tabloids (or redtops, as we also call them). But they shared a unified line on Murdoch's pet political issues. His most persistent bugbear was the European Union and its single currency, even though the opinion of a US citizen whose companies pay virtually no taxes in Britain thanks to elaborate tax avoidance schemes should have carried little or no weight.
The Murdoch papers' key purpose, especially that of the daily, the Sun, was to determine the outcome of Britain's parliamentary elections. Whether they truly did so is debatable. But the perception was immortalized with the paper's headline the day after Labour's election defeat in 1992, "It Was The Sun Wot Won It."
Since then Conservative and Labour politicians (including Tony Blair and Gordon Brown) have gone out of their way to cultivate Murdoch and win the support of his papers. When Murdoch was in town or Rebekah Brooks on the phone, prime ministers jumped to attention--their spines permanently fixed in craven stoop. The papers were less successful in making money than in spreading fear and intimidation...