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![\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/02\/fe-logo-13-feb-09-250-px1.jpg?resize=250%2C133&ssl=1\" "\\"Fe\\"")
<\/dt>\n<\/dl>\n<\/div>\nNews of the World’s staff illegally hacked thousands of private voice mails of ordinary people,\u00a0heads of state and the royal family. It obstructed\u00a0justice by deletion of millions of emails corroborating the hacking. The publication routinely\u00a0bribed police and other officials to\u00a0obtain access to voicemails and private medical information on the UK’s former Labour Party Prime Minister while he was still in office.\u00a0Collusion may have been involved between News of the World and members of the British government —\u00a0particularly British Prime Minister David Cameron —\u00a0to turn the tide in an election solely for the financial gain\u00a0of News Corp.\u00a0How big can this monster get?\u00a0\u00a0Well,\u00a0the story has ‘legs’, a media\u00a0term\u00a0meaning a news\u00a0story that has momentum beyond a 24-hour news cycle. And these legs\u00a0are big — very, very big —\u00a0with implications reaching right into the halls of Parliament and Congress.<\/p>\n
In America, James Murdoch, Rupert Murdoch’s son,\u00a0could also face the possibility of being prosecuted under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act — the law designed to stamp out bad corporate behavior, which carries severe financial penalties for those found guilty. On Monday, after\u00a0this series of revelations appeared over the weekend, the news day\u00a0closed on an item about a group of investors from News Corp’s Board of Directors filing lawsuit in Delaware against Murdoch for running\u00a0his mega-news\u00a0conglomerate like\u00a0“his own private fiefdom with little or no effective oversight from the board.” As of this writing today, News Corp has withdrawn its bid for BSkyB, a satellite television network, once a golden fleece for Murdoch, whose sole ownership he sought for years. He\u00a0now has to deal with international political and legal scrutiny for News Corp’s actions committed over the years on behalf of their years-long\u00a0attempt to purchase BSkyB.<\/p>\n
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If you’re an American and you care about politics, it’s hard to shake off\u00a0a sense of disbelief hearing this news.\u00a0When you’ve watched your country ride to ruin\u00a0on a steady diet of lies from Murdoch’s Fox News, America’s tabloid network,\u00a0news about any fall of a Murdoch operation is like\u00a0hearing\u00a0Dracula is dead. You need to take every\u00a0bit of info\u00a0with a grain of salt, and have a stake ready in your jacket just in case. News Corp news —\u00a0which is really not news but\u00a0opinion about information with an agenda formed around it —\u00a0can make you immune to or confused by actual fact.\u00a0Fox News\u00a0is a corporate-owned disinformation network.<\/p>\n
Since Fox News was launched in 1996, the year Pluto settled into Sagittarius, we’ve had a railroaded impeachment of a sitting president, a\u00a0stolen election, a false flag attack in New York City leading to two wars, the emptying of the Treasury, a faux ‘revolutionary’ anti-government movement funded by millionaires, and now the attempted diminution of labor unions across the country. Fox probably\u00a0had a direct hand in\u00a0much of it, reporting on it in a way that fit the agenda of the neoconservative Republicans who benefited from it, and improving Fox’s bottom line in the end. With the breaking of the News of the World story, calls for accountability for Murdoch\u00a0are beginning among American politicians\u00a0starting with Senator Jay Rockefeller’s Senate inquiry<\/a> into the situation, and they are increasing.<\/a> This is significant. For the last 15 years, Fox’s impact on national politics has been such that Congress\u00a0has often been too cowardly to make noise against Fox’s agenda for fear of threat by Fox News intimidation. Such was and is Mr. Murdoch’s power.<\/p>\n
A\u00a0study done a few years ago\u00a0found that viewers of Fox News tended to be\u00a0much less informed and\u00a0less bright\u00a0than those who watch CNN and PBS.\u00a0This is the power of opinion disguised as news, sensation driven like a tabloid, leading us\u00a0to all manner of crime: prejudice, racism, terrorism, war\u00a0and torture. What Mr. Murdoch does is nothing new: ideology for and mass manipulation of an empire. It’s one of the oldest ideas in the\u00a0history of empires — the creation and control of the mob. A 130-word meme, good enough to Tweet, makes for a\u00a0funny joke at the office water cooler, or\u00a0an entertaining\u00a0elevator ride to the 22nd floor.\u00a0That’s the formula. Because of these seeds of thought we breed the suspicions that degrade us: Black radical, baby killer, illegal immigrant, Muslim terrorist.\u00a0This is how wars begin. As a nation used to being distracted by our news instead informed by it, we’ve allowed our country’s destruction — mostly from ignorance — \u00a0from within.<\/p>\n
News Corp’s\u00a0control of the agenda in Washington\u00a0has made it one of the most powerful media corporations in the world, second only to Disney, the ultimate purveyor of fantasy. In a way, they are competing for shares of the same audience. Drug dealers on a mission to distort reality. Murdoch, like a good capo\u00a0in a film about the Mafia,\u00a0still wants more. Look at what\u00a0News Corp’s\u00a0million dollar contribution to the Republican Governor’s election PAC in 2010 has produced in Wisconsin, Ohio, Florida\u00a0and Michigan this spring. Murdoch has been honest about it: he wants the same power over our government that he has had in the UK.<\/p>\n
Because Fox News is one of the most lucrative news businesses in the country, other news channels have strived to emulate their successful\u00a0news model: low-level info, appeal to the vaunted 18-24 demographic, great for entertainment, devastating for truth and justice, and horrible for the rest of the planet. But our outrage about Fox News and its type\u00a0isn’t enough to kill the beast. We need\u00a0a long cool look at what information we are consuming and why, because our society is addicted to the junk we’ve learned to accept as news and has been paying the price for years in blood and money. Maybe the news on News of the World is a good start, like finally waking up\u00a0to your habit in a trashed-out crack house, realizing you’ve spent all your kid’s college tuition on a fix.<\/p>\n
The First Amendment gives everyone, including\u00a0Mr. Murdoch, the right to free speech, but the consequences must be weighed as to how his information has been retrieved, accessed and disseminated, because the story of what has happened with News of the World in the United Kingdom is the pond scum risen to the surface.\u00a0There’s probably more at the bottom that goes westward across the Atlantic. Cleaning a sewer like News Corp\u00a0and its holdings will never be enough to make it fit to hold\u00a0water safe to drink. There will\u00a0never be enough disinfectant to clean\u00a0up tabloids, or hold news media moguls who run their news businesses like them accountable for what they do, no matter what newspaper they buy —\u00a0like the Wall Street Journal —\u00a0to purchase credibility.\u00a0The contamination will\u00a0still be there as long as there is prurience and voyeurism, people willing to exploit it, and people willing to\u00a0consume it. Have we had enough? News Corp\u00a0news products\u00a0shouldn’t\u00a0be treated as news,\u00a0but entertainment, fit to wrap\u00a0your used chewing gum or fish and chips; not to ruin the lives of good people, demean victims, bankrupt nations,\u00a0or kill hundreds of thousands in illegal wars. Not fit enough to be news, if we can re-establish standards for what ‘news’ is.<\/p>\n
If we are to pursue Mr. Murdoch’s enterprises for\u00a0crimes against our societies here and abroad,\u00a0we have to make the case a good one. The crime of demeaning and misleading nations by lies and extortion for your corporate good has to have consequences. If the story of Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World debacle is to have real legs,\u00a0I want\u00a0those legs to\u00a0grow long, powerful and fully formed,\u00a0because I want Mr. Murdoch to ‘perp walk’ firmly on those legs all the way to the Hague.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It’s hard at the moment to contain my giddiness with the events of the week. I have to literally suppress excitement in order to keep in tow the details of a viral story about\u00a0the Icarus-like fall of\u00a0British tabloid News of the World,\u00a0a tentacle of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp media empire.\u00a0Here we are, days after the … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[1740],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41394"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41394"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41394\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41394"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41394"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41394"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}