Forbes: “The head of a marketing division of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., [Paul] Carlucci once rallied his sales force by showing a film clip from The Untouchables in which Al Capone beats a man to death with a baseball bat.” [Warning: This video is graphic.]
There is a cancer on the U.S. media. That cancer is the disinformation machine aimed at spreading and endlessly repeating the most absurd falsehoods on a host of vital issues to the health and well being of Americans.
As Former NY Times Executive Editor Howell Raines put it last year: “Why has our profession … helped Fox legitimize a style of journalism that is dishonest in its intellectual process, untrustworthy in its conclusions and biased in its gestalt?” That was a WashPost op-ed, “Why don’t honest journalists take on Roger Ailes and Fox News?“
The cancer’s most dangerous symptom — the one that will ultimately prove fatal to human civilization and the American way of life as we know it today — is the relentless lies on climate science (see “Foxgate: Leaked email reveals Fox News boss ordered staff to cast doubt on climate science” and “93% of WSJ‘s Climate Op-Eds Misrepresent Science“).
UPDATE: Joe Nocera, who originally supported the takeover of the WSJ by News Corp, now says “The Journal Becomes Fox-ified“:
Howell Raines’ words from last year resonate today:
http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/07/18/271874/news-corp-scandal-fox-news-wall-street-journal/
There is a cancer on the U.S. media. That cancer is the disinformation machine aimed at spreading and endlessly repeating the most absurd falsehoods on a host of vital issues to the health and well being of Americans.
As Former NY Times Executive Editor Howell Raines put it last year: “Why has our profession … helped Fox legitimize a style of journalism that is dishonest in its intellectual process, untrustworthy in its conclusions and biased in its gestalt?” That was a WashPost op-ed, “Why don’t honest journalists take on Roger Ailes and Fox News?“
The cancer’s most dangerous symptom — the one that will ultimately prove fatal to human civilization and the American way of life as we know it today — is the relentless lies on climate science (see “Foxgate: Leaked email reveals Fox News boss ordered staff to cast doubt on climate science” and “93% of WSJ‘s Climate Op-Eds Misrepresent Science“).
UPDATE: Joe Nocera, who originally supported the takeover of the WSJ by News Corp, now says “The Journal Becomes Fox-ified“:
Along with the transformation of a great paper into a mediocre one came a change that was both more subtle and more insidious. The political articles grew more and more slanted toward the Republican party line…. [E]ditors inserted the phrase “assault on business” in an article about corporate taxes under President Obama. The Journal was turned into a propaganda vehicle for its owner’s conservative views.Today, the NY Times published a scathing piece on the cancer that has eaten away at News Corp, which owns Fox News and the Wall Street Journal, whose falsehood-filled editorial page is another key component of the disinformation campaign:
Time and again in the United States and elsewhere, Mr. Murdoch’s News Corporation has used blunt force spending to skate past judgment, agreeing to payments to settle legal cases and, undoubtedly more important, silence its critics. In the case of News America Marketing, its obscure but profitable in-store and newspaper insert marketing business, the News Corporation has paid out about $655 million to make embarrassing charges of corporate espionage and anticompetitive behavior go away.David Carr, the NYT‘s media critic, diagnoses the spread of the cancer to News Corp operations in America like a board-certified radiologist with shocking news for a patient who apparently thought he was perfectly healthy:
That kind of strategy provides a useful window into the larger corporate culture at a company that is now engulfed by a wildfire burning out of control in London, sparked by the hacking of a murdered young girl’s phone and fed by a steady stream of revelations about seedy, unethical and sometimes criminal behavior at the company’s newspapers.
So far, 10 people have been arrested, including, on Sunday, Rebekah Brooks, the head of News International. Les Hinton, who ran News International before her and most recently was the head of Dow Jones, resigned on Friday. Now we are left to wonder whether Mr. Murdoch will be forced to make an Abraham-like sacrifice and abandon his son James, the former heir apparent.The News Corporation may be hoping that it can get back to business now that some of the responsible parties have been held to account — and that people will see the incident as an aberrant byproduct of the world of British tabloids. But that seems like a stretch. The damage is likely to continue to mount, perhaps because the underlying pathology is hardly restricted to those who have taken the fall.
As Mark Lewis, the lawyer for the family of the murdered girl, Milly Dowler, said after Ms. Brooks resigned, “This is not just about one individual but about the culture of an organization.”The whole piece is a must-read, but these paragraphs jump out:
Well put. That organization has used strategic acumen to assemble a vast and lucrative string of media properties, but there is also a long history of rounded-off corners. It has skated on regulatory issues, treated an editorial oversight committee as if it were a potted plant (at The Wall Street Journal), and made common cause with restrictive governments (China) and suspect businesses — all in the relentless pursuit of More. In the process, Mr. Murdoch has always been frank in his impatience with the rules of others.
News America was led by Paul V. Carlucci, who, according to Forbes, used to show the sales staff the scene in “The Untouchables” in which Al Capone beats a man to death with a baseball bat. Mr. Emmel testified that Mr. Carlucci was clear about the guiding corporate philosophy.“This is not just about one individual but about the culture of an organization.”
According to Mr. Emmel’s testimony, Mr. Carlucci said that if there were employees uncomfortable with the company’s philosophy — “bed-wetting liberals in particular was the description he used” Mr. Emmel testified — then he could arrange to have those employees “outplaced from the company.”
Howell Raines’ words from last year resonate today:
Why haven’t America’s old-school news organizations blown the whistle on Roger Ailes, chief of Fox News, for using the network to conduct a propaganda campaign against the Obama administration — a campaign without precedent in our modern political history?The reason is hardly different than the reason British politicians didn’t seriously investigate News Corp — they were simultaneously too cozy and too intimidated:
For the first time since the yellow journalism of a century ago, the United States has a major news organization devoted to the promotion of one political party…. In a bygone era of fact-based commentary typified, left to right, by my late colleagues Scotty Reston and Bill Safire, these deceptions would have been given their proper label: disinformation….And so the cancer goes untreated. And that most certainly is how the world as we know it ends, not with a bang but a whimper from the once-vaunted U.S. media.
[Ailes] and his video ferrets have intimidated center-right and center-left journalists into suppressing conclusions — whether on health-care reform or other issues — they once would have stated as demonstrably proven by their reporting.
As for Fox News, lots of people who know better are keeping quiet about what to call it. Its news operation can, in fact, be called many things, but reporters of my generation, with memories and keyboards, dare not call it journalism.
http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/07/18/271874/news-corp-scandal-fox-news-wall-street-journal/
