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You are here: Home / Open Threads / Excellent Links / Rupert’s Empire: “Hack Work”

Rupert’s Empire: “Hack Work”

by Anne Laurie|  July 30, 20116:06 am| 17 Comments

This post is in: Excellent Links, Assholes, Our Failed Media Experiment

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(h/t commentor R-Jud)
__
In the August 1 issue of the New Yorker, Anthony Lane has a most informative article on “a tabloid culture run amok“:

… Whatever the case, the last laugh has been his. Murdoch knows something that his assailants will seldom concede, and that renders their call for radical change, in the rapport between governance and the media, both tardy and redundant. The change has already happened; culture, media, and sport are not in Murdoch’s pocket, but the British, not least in their yen to watch soccer and cricket on Sky, have reached into their pockets and paid for his feast of wares. The country is in uproar just now, but outrage en masse functions like outrage in private: we reserve our deepest wrath not for the threat from without, which we fail to comprehend, but for forces with which we have been complicit. The British press has long revelled in the raucous and the irresponsible; that was part of its verve, and it was Murdoch’s genius, and also the cause of his current woes, to recognize those tendencies, bring the revelry to a head, and give the people what they asked for. He reminded them of themselves.
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Look at an average copy of the News of the World, from March 27th, well before the latest outcry. There are only scraps of news here, and almost nothing of the world. No woman in the first six pages wears anything warmer than lingerie. An entrant from a televised ice-dancing contest is granted a double-page spread to muse upon his newly transplanted hair. And the column on the op-ed page is by Fraser Nelson, the editor of the Spectator—a respectable weekly journal, loosely tied to the Tories, with a strong showing in arts and books coverage. Over the course of four decades, under Murdoch’s approving gaze, the lowbrow has paid no more attention to the highbrow than it ever did, while the highbrow has paid both heed and obeisance to the low—submission, in the weird wrangling of British class consciousness, being preferable to condescension. The most telling piece in the Guardian, in the wake of the hacking scandal, came from a former editor of the paper, Peter Preston, who analyzed the sales figures and showed that more ABC1 readers (that is, those with better education, employment, and pay, and thus close to advertisers’ hearts) read the News of the World than the Sunday Times—more, indeed, than the Observer, the Sunday Telegraph, and the Independent on Sunday put together. Murdoch must have closed the Screws with a pang…

(If you don’t click the link, you will also miss an excellent Sorel cartoon.)

Over in the Guardian, ‘media critics’ Roy Greenslade and Michael Wolff play Statler & Waldorf:

Roy Greenslade: As bad as things appear to be, Rupert Murdoch could be seen to be a tremendously beneficial owner of media in Britain. He’s poured money into the Times and the Sunday Times, and kept them afloat when few other people would have done so. He launched satellite TV, increasing the range of channels available to everyone. This must surely be something to appreciate about the man.
__
Michael Wolff: If you like the direction, reach and power of “big media”, you can hardly find someone who has been more beneficial than Rupert Murdoch. The downside, however, is to use it to further his own interests, create a power base, an independent state of his own. Murdoch loves newspapers. But one of the reasons he has loved newspapers is they can be very powerful and they give him a power he can use.
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RG: Isn’t it always the case that small media, if it’s successful, is going to become big media? We would say in terms of business, if we believed in capitalism, that branching out is a natural consequence. So Murdoch, as a newspaper owner, gains power, and we know there’s this amazing reciprocal relationship that goes on. He uses his political power to further his business interests, and he uses his business interests to further his political power. The point is, is there any proof that his use of political power has had any effect on the democracies of Australia, Britain, the United States? Especially the US, where it seems he has very little political clout.
__
MW: Let’s take the present presidential election cycle, in which you have a list of candidates in the Republican party. [You look] at these people and think, “how did they get here? These are the strangest group of national candidates ever assembled, how did this happen?” The answer, most obviously, is because of Fox News. It has two million viewers who want to be entertained by politics, who need exaggerated figures to entertain them. You can only be a viable Republican if you speak to the Fox audience. They demand exaggerated figures, therefore we have conservatives who are unelectable in America…

It’s an epic tragedy! It’s a pie-throwing, crowd-pleasing farce! And it’s got real potential to run long enough for syndication. Just yesterday, the NYTimes reported that “a reassuring, one-paragraph letter from a prominent London law firm named Harbottle & Lewis” clearing Murdoch’s News of the World has “come under scrutiny“; it may be that a truly caring legal representative would have felt it wise to point out that bribing the police force was, however business-savvy, probably illegal.

Also, Gawker reports that the New York Post has “instructed its reporters not to destroy any documents ‘pertaining to unauthorized retrieval of phone or personal data, to payments for information to government officials.'”

When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions…

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Reader Interactions

17Comments

  1. 1.

    Linda Featheringill

    July 30, 2011 at 7:43 am

    I don’t know if Murdoch pursued a political agenda in the UK but I really think he has done so in the US. He has built up a very effective propaganda machine that has done a lot of harm. Sure would be nice to shut that down.

    ETA:
    I’m first? Wow. Everybody must be sleeping in this morning!

  2. 2.

    JPL

    July 30, 2011 at 7:52 am

    Fox News gave free advertising to the tea party republicans running in the last election. How many times has Walker and Kasich been allowed to spout their message?

  3. 3.

    Mark S.

    July 30, 2011 at 7:59 am

    Via OTB, TurtleMan says he won’t negotiate with Reid. I don’t see how in the hell this gets 60 votes. We’re fucked.

  4. 4.

    JPL

    July 30, 2011 at 8:04 am

    Mark S .. TurtleMan wants to meet with the Pres. He must feel slighted that the Pres played golf with Orangeman.

  5. 5.

    aimai

    July 30, 2011 at 8:14 am

    I’ve been spending the last few days reading books on brain plasticity and on cognitive science generally. Without getting into the back and forth over the actual plans for the debt ceiling lift I think that its a mistake to think that the game is won, or lost, from the perspective of Obama’s popularity or public perception, until the end of the end game. While negotiations are batting back and forth like this, and there is so much uncertainity in what is on the table,and its implications, no one can easily make up their minds about who is “leading” and who is destroying, who is doing the best they can and who is not.

    But all that changes on Sunday night. I think, at this point, the best thing that could happen to Obama and the Dems is for McConnell and Boehner to force a crisis, refuse to compromise or even to look at Reid’s bill and for Obama to have to step in and “settle things.” I grasp the political and legal issues but psychologically he’s set himself up as the “grownup” and at a certain point the public and the markets actually believe thats true and that is what grownups do. If he steps in and takes charge and “solves” the problem he will be perceived as a savior even by people who are wobbly now. If he continues to seek compromise, even if he gets a better deal than the Reid deal, I’m afraid he loses the psychologically important moment and people will, retrospectively, decide this wasn’t such a big deal after all.

    aimai

  6. 6.

    WereBear

    July 30, 2011 at 8:20 am

    Since the Republicans are going to cause trouble anyway, let’s at least get something out of it.

  7. 7.

    El Cid

    July 30, 2011 at 8:39 am

    I had no idea it was illegal to bribe policemen. How could anyone expect me to know such a subtle legal rule?

  8. 8.

    kay

    July 30, 2011 at 8:55 am

    How many times has Walker and Kasich been allowed to spout their message?

    Fox management and employees promoted Kasich. It was absolutely blatant. So blatant that at one point they put his campaign site up in the crawl, and the state Democratic Party had to sue.
    Kasich won by such a narrow margin in a low-turnout election that it’s fair to ask if Fox News management and employees actually elected the governor of Ohio.
    Which is when it got really personal for me, because state law and governance actually is much closer to people, and affects us immediately and directly.
    Fox as propaganda arm of the GOP and conservative movement was abstract (horrible, granted, but distant) to me until they started directly interfering in the Ohio governor’s race.
    I actually expect management and employees at FOX to start campaigning for state court judges next, if they aren’t already.

  9. 9.

    currants

    July 30, 2011 at 9:02 am

    Wait–is that a new/current Fry/Laurie bit??

  10. 10.

    kay

    July 30, 2011 at 9:06 am

    El Cid
    I had no idea it was illegal to bribe policemen. How could anyone expect me to know such a subtle legal rule?

    Right. They’re lying. Oddly, they’re also publicly announcing they plan to lie, which is a new low.
    But. One lawyer didn’t lie. He said he saw obvious criminality, and he advised on that. Why didn’t they take his advice?
    While I know it’s terrifying to rely on one decent person (what if he had been out sick?) there is that one person here. What do they do with him?

  11. 11.

    El Cid

    July 30, 2011 at 9:28 am

    More failed media news:

    Prepare yourself for another onslaught (much has already appeared) pimping yet another shoddy scientific study attempting to say global warming is bunk.

    A couple of scientists published some minor data on cloud cover observation and simulation for 2000-2010 and claimed (in a press release) that this study shot down all sorts of global warming models, led by Forbes.

    Best to prepare yourself with brief explanations of (a) why the study itself was shitty and (b) how its results have virtually nothing to say about general global CO2 models. (Hint — models of how much heat energy leaves the upper atmosphere and how much increased CO2 etc rates would slow that are NOT primarily based on theories assuming CO2 amounts far lower in the atmosphere would change water vapor and cloud cover levels. This is the presumption of the study.)

    This review of this shoddy article from one of the known scientists continually claiming global warming is bunk is taken down by the actual climate scientist blog RealClimate.org.

    It has a boring title — it’s the study’s title so it’s worth knowing — but a devastating critique.

    Basically, not only do the two scientists publishing (in Remote Sensing, not a climate publication) use a completely incomparable set of models to claim that existing models are wrong, they get the math wrong.

    “Misdiagnosis of Surface Temperature Feedback”
    __
    The hype surrounding a new paper by Roy Spencer and Danny Braswell is impressive (see for instance Fox News); unfortunately the paper itself is not. News releases and blogs on climate denier web sites have publicized the claim from the paper’s news release that “Climate models get energy balance wrong, make too hot forecasts of global warming”.
    __
    The paper has been published in a journal called Remote sensing which is a fine journal for geographers, but it does not deal with atmospheric and climate science, and it is evident that this paper did not get an adequate peer review. It should not have been published.
    __
    The paper’s title “On the Misdiagnosis of Surface Temperature Feedbacks from Variations in Earth’s Radiant Energy Balance” is provocative and should have raised red flags with the editors.
    __
    The basic material in the paper has very basic shortcomings because no statistical significance of results, error bars or uncertainties are given either in the figures or discussed in the text. Moreover the description of methods of what was done is not sufficient to be able to replicate results. As a first step, some quick checks have been made to see whether results can be replicated and we find some points of contention…
    __
    …For one, [their] observations cover a 10 year period. The [standard] models cover a hundred year period for the 20th century. The latter were detrended by Spencer but for the 20th century that should not be necessary. One could and perhaps should treat the 100 years as 10 sets of 10 years and see whether the observations match any of the ten year periods, but instead what appears to have been done is to use only the one hundred year set by itself…
    __
    …[Their] model has no realistic ocean, no El Niño, and no hydrological cycle, and it was tuned to give the result it gave. Most of what goes on in the real world of significance that causes the relationship in the paper is ENSO [El Niño/La Niña-Southern Oscillation]. We have already rebutted Lindzen’s work on exactly this point. The clouds respond to ENSO, not the other way round…
    __
    …the Spencer interpretation has no merit. The interannual global temperature variations were not radiatively forced, as claimed for the 2000s, and therefore cannot be used to say anything about climate sensitivity. Clouds are not a forcing of the climate system (except for the small portion related to human related aerosol effects, which have a small effect on clouds).
    __
    Clouds mainly occur because of weather systems (e.g., warm air rises and produces convection, and so on); they do not cause the weather systems. Clouds may provide feedbacks on the weather systems. Spencer has made this error of confounding forcing and feedback before and it leads to a misinterpretation of his results.
    __
    The bottom line is that there is NO merit whatsoever in this paper. It turns out that Spencer and Braswell have an almost perfect title for their paper: “the misdiagnosis of surface temperature feedbacks from variations in the Earth’s Radiant Energy Balance” (leaving out the “On”).

    Please someone consider this a front page item, since the anti-global warming (i.e., increased Earth heat budget imbalance) crowd will be yelling about this crap “study” and e-mailing it around non-stop.

  12. 12.

    R-Jud

    July 30, 2011 at 9:56 am

    currants: about 1991, I think.

    ETA: Oh, there’s a hat-tip to me up there. Thanks, AL.

  13. 13.

    cathyx

    July 30, 2011 at 10:13 am

    There’s a fictitious copywrite on it for a future date.

    I had never heard of Hugh Laurie before “House”. And one day I saw an interview of him and I was floored that he was actually British and speaking with a British accent. His American one is quite good.

  14. 14.

    jwb

    July 30, 2011 at 10:55 am

    aimai: While I quite agree with your analysis, it only works if Obama is in fact willing to step in and solve the crisis. But he keeps taking tools off the table to do that, as if he is going to make Congress solve the problem. From the perspective of teaching the kids Congress that they need to solve their problems, this is a decent strategy, but it does not allow Obama to appear to be taking charge of the situation.

  15. 15.

    Chad N Freude

    July 30, 2011 at 11:06 am

    @El Cid: Indeed, a perfectly reasonable question. From the 2nd page of the NYT link:

    The former official noted that neither Mr. Chapman nor the firm’s lawyer who reviewed the e-mails are criminal attorneys. Mr. Chapman is expected to testify that while he noticed the e-mails in question, he did not realize that paying the police was a criminal offense, the former official said. He is expected to testify that Mr. Goodman’s e-mail mentioning prison seemed to him to be in jest.

  16. 16.

    scav

    July 30, 2011 at 12:53 pm

    I swear I read a copy of the news with excerpts from both missives they apparently received. sigh. It was mildly amusing. No matter, the part where someone apologized for the inconvenience of an effort (not throwing away stuff is an effort?) stuff that they’re saying at the same time doesn’t exist — which leaves me juggling with the construct of not throwing away stuff that doesn’t exist is an inconvenience to be apologized for and then my mental synapses collapsed. Wish I could find the original news feed and have another go at that mess of legalize meets corporate speak meets boilerplate social inanities.

    To the important (cough) stuff: I’m thinking there are two bits of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act that might prove relevant here (insert the usual IANAL and may not in fact live within blocks of one stuff). Not or improperly accounting for payments to foreign officials is itself an offence under it so you can be in a pickle if dodgy payments show up listed under Office Supplies, Misc., not that a clean accounting category of Bribes is going to do you much good either. (Here’s a site/post where that is discussed). I also think that under FCPA, ignorance isn’t exactly a get out of liability free card and there’s a distinction to be made between the corporation as a whole and the individual executives (seem to be differing views on this, see also here). Gotta be a lot of dancing between SEC and other violations going on here, rather like the tension between the “I’m Simply Clueless about What Goes On under me” legal defense running up against the “I’m a Very Model of Strong Management Practices” corporate defense that JM is balancing on.

    Thanks AL

  17. 17.

    Chup

    July 30, 2011 at 6:21 pm

    I bow to no one in my admiration and affection for Fry and Laurie, but if I were ever able to ask either of them one question, it would be, “Why do you make millions of dollars for a reptilian waste of human DNA like Rupert Murdoch?”

    They’ve know for two decades about how horrible he is, but they’ve both, through “House”, “Bones”, and other works have worked for Murdoch a lot. They’ve got power — they could avoid Murdoch properties, but like most, the $$ got them.

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