Caught in the flashlights….Joe Nocera
You have to love the fact that when John Yates resigned on Monday as the assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police in London – aka Scotland Yard – he complained about the “huge amount of inaccurate, ill-informed and, on occasion, downright malicious gossip” that had finally forced his hand. My first thought was: He didn’t really say that, did he? My second thought was: Can any human being truly be that unaware?
When the writers and editors of the late, unlamented News of the World were busy bribing Yates’s police officers, what they wanted in return was – gosh! – malicious gossip. When they were hacking the phones of royal family members and murdered teenagers, they were seeking, you know, malicious gossip. When the recently arrested Rebekah Brooks called Gordon Brown, the former prime minister, to tell him that Rupert Murdoch’s Sun, which she then edited, was about to reveal that his infant child had cystic fibrosis – information that Brown is convinced came from a hacked phone message – she was telling him the paper was going to print a piece of gossip that a more humane institution would have let pass. She might not have viewed this as malicious, but the Brown family certainly did.
Let’s be honest here. There is something undeniably rich about seeing the tables turned like this. When I see photographs of Brooks, or Murdoch, or his son James (who until a few weeks ago was his father’s heir apparent at the News Corporation), sitting in their cars, staring blankly ahead, I can just picture the paparazzi horde jostling to get a decent shot of its prey. Murdoch’s papers have always feasted on scandals like this, picking the bones of their victims. Now Murdoch’s the one whose bones are being picked. The whole thing reminds me a little of the ending of Ian McEwan’s wonderful novel Solar, in which the many awful things the central character has done in his long life suddenly come together to bury him in an avalanche of comeuppance. I’m OK with that. Although I generally admire entrepreneurs who build giant companies, Rupert Murdoch, despite giving us Homer Simpson, generally has not been a force for good over the course of his long career. His Bill O’Reilly-ed, Glenn Beck-ed
Fox News has done a great deal to coarsen the political discourse. His tabloids have lowered the standards of journalism on three continents – and routinely broken the law on at least one of them. He had dumbed down his prestige papers, like The Times of London. He has run roughshod over cross-ownership rules meant to prevent one man or company from having too much power – and then used his lobbying might to get those rules diluted. He has put kowtowing to China ahead of freedom of the press, even killing a book set to be published by his HarperCollins unit that the Chinese authorities objected to. He has consistently used his media properties to reward allies and punish enemies. It’s a long list. Throughout his career, Murdoch has never just been satisfied with besting the competition, as most decent businessmen are. He’s not truly happy unless he has his foot on a competitor’s neck and is pressing it downward.
Fox News has done a great deal to coarsen the political discourse. His tabloids have lowered the standards of journalism on three continents – and routinely broken the law on at least one of them. He had dumbed down his prestige papers, like The Times of London. He has run roughshod over cross-ownership rules meant to prevent one man or company from having too much power – and then used his lobbying might to get those rules diluted. He has put kowtowing to China ahead of freedom of the press, even killing a book set to be published by his HarperCollins unit that the Chinese authorities objected to. He has consistently used his media properties to reward allies and punish enemies. It’s a long list. Throughout his career, Murdoch has never just been satisfied with besting the competition, as most decent businessmen are. He’s not truly happy unless he has his foot on a competitor’s neck and is pressing it downward.
One feature of Murdoch’s career is that he’s never played by the rules that apply to other businessmen. That’s one reason I think he seems so shellshocked in those paparazzi photographs: unable in this dire circumstance to make his own rules, he simply doesn’t know how to react or what to do. When he is excoriated in Parliament, it will be the first time he has ever truly been held to account. It undoubtedly won’t be fun for him. But there are many people who are going to take great glee in his misery -not unlike the way his newspapers have always taken such glee in the misery of others.
In the e-mails I trade back and forth with friends, we can’t stop marvelling at the scandal, at the head-spinning twists and turns. “It’s the best kind of story,” one wrote me, “because none of us really knows how it ends.”
All we can do is read the paper every day, searching for more malicious gossip.