Murdoch: An emperor meets his Waterloo

At last, Rupert Murdoch is reaping what he sowed, said Carl Bernstein in Newsweek. The global media empire of the man who made billions on “cutthroat tabloid journalism” in Britain, Australia, and the U.S. has been shaken to its foundation by revelations of widespread phone hacking by his tabloid newspapers in Britain. More than 4,000 people had phone messages stolen by Murdoch’s reporters, including a murdered girl, soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and terrorist victims; to feed the scandal machine, his News of the World and other newspapers hired private detectives and bribed cops to dig up dirt. Investigators are targeting current and former Murdoch top aides, and if the 80-year-old Murdoch is finally nearing the end of his reign as the global king of media, it’ll be sweet justice. No one over the past half-century has had a more degrading impact upon our media and political culture. In the U.S., the low journalism and celebrity-fixation of his trashy New York Post infected other media “like a contagion,” while Fox News, a cynical exercise in overt political bias, turned cable TV, and American politics itself, into a realm of unthinking polarization, “sensationalism, and manufactured controversy.”

Rupert Murdoch didn’t invent tabloid culture, said A.C. Grayling in The New York Times, but he did perfect it—and turn it into a tool of political power. In Britain, he’s used his newspapers to influence every general election since 1979, and he shamelessly leveraged that clout to advance his business and political interests. Murdoch “spoke to Prime Minister Tony Blair three times in the 10 days that led up to the Iraq invasion of 2003,” said the London Observer in an editorial. If Fox News helps defeat Barack Obama and elect a Republican president, Murdoch will certainly be on the phone to the Oval Office, calling in favors and shaping policy.

The man is a bit of a brute, said Roger Cohen in The New York Times. But on balance, he’s been “good for the media and a more open world.” With his “evident loathing for elites,” he’s used no-holds-barred journalism to break down social barriers, and he has consistently been ahead of the curve with new technology—from satellites, to cable TV, to the Internet. Murdoch is a “quintessential anti-establishment figure,” said Jonathan Tobin in CommentaryMagazine.com, and only he had the resources and the guts to break the “liberal monopoly of the mainstream media” here in the U.S. That explains the “lynch mob” of pundits and commentators now baying for his blood.

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Still, the end of his reign “is in sight,” said Charles Moore in the London Telegraph. Even those of us who view him as an evil genius should recognize the tragedy here, because the truth is that the man “has, as we used to say, ‘ink in his veins.’” When everyone else gave up on print, Murdoch kept the faith, betting billions that people would still want newspapers. And in the end, it was newspapers that did him in, said David Carr in The New York Times. The phone-hacking scandal was brought to light not by a police investigation or a government inquiry, but by the dogged work of The Guardian in London. With a “steady accretion of fact,” that newspaper proved that phone hacking, wiretapping, and bribery were not the work of “a few bad apples,” as Murdoch and his minions insisted, but products of an amoral and ruthless culture that permeated his newsrooms—right up to the top. Now that “the hunter” has become “the hunted,” how does it feel, Mr. Murdoch?