Is Fox News ignoring Rupert Murdoch's hacking scandal?

Murdoch's U.K. papers have been plagued by phone-hacking allegations, and most U.S. news outlets are all over the story — with a few notable exceptions

The phone-hacking scandal roiling Rupert Murdoch's media empire is making headlines all over the world... but not at Murdoch's Fox News.
(Image credit: Scott Olson/Getty Images)

Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. media empire is in the midst of its biggest scandal ever, involving illegal phone-hacking in the U.K., alleged police bribery, potentially endangering the royal family, and other morsels irresistible to most media organizations. News Corp.'s stock has tanked, and Murdoch has given up his bid to take over British cash-cow broadcaster BSkyB. And yet, the scandal is not headline news at some of News Corp.'s prominent media outlets, including the New York Post and Fox News. (Watch a CNN story below.) Is Fox intentionally downplaying the bad news about its boss?

Yes. And Fox News is embarrassing itself: The network's almost non-existent coverage of this "Watergate-scale" scandal is a real challenge for "anyone who denies that Fox is a propaganda operation rather than news," says James Fallows at The Atlantic. It's not that Fox News and its website are entirely ignoring the bad news, they're just treating it "the way the Soviet press covered Chernobyl: 'Small problem in the Ukraine.'"

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