All Kinds Of Transparent

As media moguls go, Murdoch has been an entertaining fellow.  He appears ruthless and canny and has transformed much of our news media as he's taken control of everything from the most ridiculous British gossip rags to the Wall Street Journal--and exercised considerable editorial control every step of the way.

And this week we see his endless expansion program crash headlong into his editorial approach in spectacular fashion.  If you haven't been following this story, one of his UK Sunday papers (cue Joe Jackson, thank you) has been accused for many years of hacking people's cell phones.  But they were celebreties and politicians so, whatever, the public never seemed to get that riled up about it.  Until this week, when the public suddenly realized that News of the World reporters had hacked into--and deleted messages from--a missing girl's cell phone.  The activity on her phone led her parents to hope she was still alive; she was not. 

A torrent of justifiable (if long overdue) outrage began to pour down on Murdoch's empire, sparked by this utterly inhumane behavior.  Meanwhile, however, Murdoch has been trying to get a controlling interest in yet another broadcaster.  Takeover talks get spooked by bad news stories, so Murdoch had a real problem on his hands.

So Murdoch acted with, er, dispatch.  He canned the entire paper.  And before you think wow, way to punish horrendous unethical behavior by your staff and take responsibility for publishing trash, consider:

• the paper seems to have lost all its advertising overnight;
• Murdoch owns approximately 324,234,456,002 papers (in round numbers);
• he'll likely just move all the News of the World reporting over to a weekly paper (and presumably recoup all that lost advertising revenue);
• he really really really wanted to dampen this scandal before it ruined his chance to take over the next broadcaster on his list.

He's like an ongoing lesson in how to be a robber barron.  And he's running some of our most prestigious, notorious, and influential news organizations including Fox News.  (I leave the inferences to you, dear reader.)

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[ckm]

Check your spelling of "barron".