Murdoch empire rocked as probe widens
More bad news over at newscorp. It looks like the FBI is going to investigate over potential violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. See below;
This week, Rupert Murdoch will again fly to London to confront a crisis, after Saturday’s arrests of five journalists from The Sun newspaper over allegations of payments to the police and other officials widened the UK press corruption investigation.
This time, however, he will walk the floor of a hostile newsroom, where staff are asking whether he can contain a scandal that is spreading and even threatening to reach the centre of his wider empire in New York.
Last summer’s eruption of a five-year-old investigation into how journalists accessed voicemails swept away the News of the World, his bid for full control of BSkyB and his political clout in Britain.
Last July, after he jetted in to be by the side of Rebekah Brooks, then chief executive of his News International UK newspapers, he said she was his priority, but within days she had resigned.
This weekend, executives relayed the “personal assurance” of Mr Murdoch’s “total commitment” to the profitable and influential Sun and its editor, Dominic Mohan. But furious journalists wondered what Mr Murdoch’s assurance was worth as investigations shake old certainties about his control.
Mr Murdoch made no mention of the arrests but told Twitter followers they were wrong to credit him “with non-existent power and money”. Now, the threats to his power and money are mounting as the arrests of a Ministry of Defence official and a member of the armed forces imply that bribery investigations have spread beyond the police.
A police probe into potentially corrupt payments is running alongside investigations into phone-hacking and computer-hacking. News Corp said last week that its phone-hacking settlements and legal bills had already cost it almost $200m, but bribery allegations pose a risk that is harder to quantify.
Mark Lewis, a British solicitor for phone hacking victims, is in the “advanced stages” of bringing at least one case against News Corp in the US, according to people close to the process. It is not clear what the substance of any case would be.
News Corp is subject to the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, a US law against bribing foreign officials, that has wide-ranging powers. Lawyers remain divided on whether payments for stories would classify as corrupt, but News Corp could be liable to big fines if found guilty of such practices.
“Since July, News Corp has faced the potential of an FCPA enforcement, and these developments I think escalate that,” said Mike Koehler, a law professor and FCPA specialist at the US’s Butler University.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission have each opened inquiries into News Corp but these have taken a back seat to the Metropolitan Police probes.
The FBI has found no evidence of phone-hacking in the US, one person familiar with the matter said, and its investigation is focusing on potential FCPA violations.
At The Sun, there was more anger at News Corp’s internal investigators on the independent management and standards committee (MSC).
The MSC, under the chairmanship of Lord Grabiner QC, reports to the News Corp board through Joel Klein, one of Mr Murdoch’s closest executives, and Viet Dinh, a non-executive who has steered the board’s response.
With about 100 lawyers, forensic IT specialists and accountants, the MSC is poring over 300m emails dating back 10 years. Information passed to the police is stripped of details that could reveal legitimate sources, to calm worried reporters.
One focus of the MSC’s work, a person close to the group said, is the system that allowed journalists to make cash payments to sources. The Sun has long told readers it paid for news tips, and one veteran said reporters might have disguised the identity of their sources when seeking cash from their superiors.
The scale of those payments and how they were accounted for remains unclear.
News Corp’s need to be seen to be leaving no stone unturned has brought it into conflict with journalists who expected the company to stand behind them. One said: “You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.”
“When you work for The Sun you accept you don’t have many friends,” The Sun veteran said, noting that this was the source of its camaraderie. Now, he said, some of its best reporters “have been taken by their own people”.
Chris Bryant, a Labour MP and phone-hacked target, raised concerns that journalists were “paying the price” for News Corp’s actions. “I would much rather that The Sun came under new management.” The tabloid’s problems were endemic, he argued. “It wasn’t just one rotten apple, it was a whole orchard.”
Other risks remain. Jeremy Hunt, the culture secretary, on Sunday also highlighted pressure for new press regulation as Tom Watson, a Labour MP and News Corp critic, told the FT the police should take the investigation wherever the evidence led them.
Sun journalists’ anger is also targeted at James Murdoch, who took over News Corp Europe in 2007, and is under pressure over suggestions that he should have known in 2008 that hacking was widespread.
With James Murdoch’s UK team being thinned down and the Wapping headquarters where Rupert Murdoch battled print unions a generation ago up for sale, they worry that London is turning from a source of the Murdochs’ power into a lonelier outpost in the empire.
Deconstructing the Right-Wing Alternate Reality
Below is a video interview with David Frum discussing the "alternate reality" that fox news and right wing outlets have created. If you are not familiar with David Frum he is a conservative republican and was a speech writer for George W Bush. As a matter of fact he created the "axis of evil" speech.
FOX Responsible for Creating Alternate Reality - Conservative David Frum Slams Right Wing Media - YouTube
Announcing Our Newest Hire: A Current Fox News Channel Employee
So there is a mole at fox news.:) Below is the video that he leaked followed by the article he wrote at gawker..
Fox Employee Leaks Behind-The-Scenes Romney Tape - YouTube
What follows is the inaugural column of a person we are calling The Fox Mole—a long-standing, current employee of Fox News Channel who will be providing Gawker with regular dispatches from inside the organization.
I always intended to keep my mouth shut. The plan was simple: get hired, keep my head down and my views to myself, work for a few months, build my resume, then eventually hop to a new job that didn't make me cringe every morning when I looked in the mirror.
That was years ago. My cringe muscles have turned into crow's feet. The ten resumes a month I was sending out dwindled into five, then two, then one, then zero. No one wants me. I'm blacklisted.
I work at Fox News Channel.
The final straw for me came last year. Oddly, it wasn't anything on TV that turned me rogue, though plenty of things on our air had pushed me in that direction over the years. But what finally broke me was a story on The Fox Nation. If you're not a frequenter of Fox Nation (and if you're reading Gawker, it's a pretty safe bet you're not) I can describe it for you — it's like an unholy mashup of the Drudge Report, the Huffington Post and a Klan meeting. Word around the office is that the site was actually the brainchild of Bill O'Reilly's chief stalker (and Gawker pal) Jesse Watters.
The Nation aggregates news stories, gives them provocative headlines, and invites commenters to weigh in. The comments are fascinating actually, if you can detach yourself enough to view them as sort of the id of the conservative movement. Of course, if you can't detach yourself, then you're going to come away with a diminished view of human decency, because HOLY MOLY THESE PEOPLE DO NOT LIKE THE BLACK PRESIDENT. I'm not saying they dislike him BECAUSE he's black, but a lot of the comments, unprompted, mention the fact that he is black, so what would you say, Dr. Freud?
The Fox Nation moderators, realizing that they had a problem on their hands, did the absolute bare minimum, hiring one or two college kids to comb the comments for the most egregiously racist postings, and putting in automatic text filters that blocked various key words. Of course the intrepid commenters quickly found ways around these filters using letter substitutions and spacings, which is why many comments complain about our "n@gger president" and the "M u s l i m in the White House."
So the site has become the seedy underbelly of the Fox News online empire. It's surprising that we even have an online empire, considering that our fan base is mostly septuagenarian technophobes.
The post that broke the camel's back might be familiar to some of you, because it garnered a lot of attention and (well-deserved) ridicule when it hit last August. The item was aggregating several news sources that were reporting innocuously on President Obama's 50th birthday party, which was attended by the usual mix of White House staffers, DC politicos and Dem-friendly celebs. The Fox Nation, naturally, chose to illustrate the story with a photo montage of Obama, Charles Barkley, Chris Rock, and Jay Z, and the headline "Obama's Hip Hop BBQ Didn't Create Jobs."
The post neatly summed up everything that had been troubling me about my employer: Non sequitur, ad hominem attacks on the president; gleeful race baiting; a willful disregard for facts; and so on. It came close on the heels of the Common controversy, which exhibited a lot of the same ugly traits. (See also: terrorist fist jabs; Fox & Friends madrassa accusations; etc.)
The worst thing about the Hip Hop BBQ incident is that we didn't back away from it. Bill Shine, who is a rather important guy—sort of Roger Ailes' main hatchet man, and the go-between for Ailes and most of the top talent—bafflingly doubled down and defended it. The story still exists on the Fox Nation site, headline and photo montage intact, to this very day.
That was it for me. It wasn't that the one incident was so bad, in and of itself. But it was so galvanizing, and on top of so many other little incidents, that I guess it just finally pushed me over the edge.
So here I am. And I come bearing gifts. The video above is of Mitt Romney and Sean Hannity bantering before the taping of an interview for the "Hannity Vegas Forum" in February. Of note: Romney professes his and his wife Ann's well-known love of horseriding, praising the qualities of the "Austrian Warmbloods" that his wife rides—the are "dressage" horses, he notes—while maintaining his own preference for the "smoother gait" of his own "Missouri foxtrotter."
Now there's nothing wrong with Mitt and his wife loving horseback riding. But remember this video next time Romney attacks Obama for golfing. The inherent elitism and snootiness of golf is NOTHING compared to competitive horseback riding. And I think Mitt loses points with the GOP base for his correct pronunciation of dressage. To GOP-voter ears it sounds not only gay, but even worse, French.
Elsewhere in the video you will see the two men discussing the possibility that this very footage may one day be leaked, as they warn one another against primping too carefully. "You don't want to have John Edwards moment," Hannity says. "Did you see that?" Romney replies: "Oh, yeah I saw that. It's one thing to do it for a second. It's another thing to do it for an hour." (And it's quite another for Newt Gingrich's wife to groom him like a circus walrus.)
Later, Hannity's producers ask him to change his necktie mid-interview. Here's a little TV trick for you: The show was splitting the Q-and-A over two nights, and they wanted to make the second night look like a fresh, new encounter rather than a rehash from last night. So they made sure to change Hannity's tie lest eagle-eyed viewers spot the repeat. Romney, to his credit, refuses to play along. Offered a pink tie, he says, "I'm not going all Donald Trump today." That day, Trump had announced his endorsement of Romney. In the portion of the interview that was broadcast, Romney said he was grateful for Trump's support, and that "he is a man who'se created a lot of jobs, and he shares my concern about China."
Full size
"So why not just leave Fox News?" you might ask. Good question! I've asked myself that same thing many times. And I am leaving. Sooner rather than later, I'm guessing. But I can't just leave quietly, can I? Where's the fun in that? So I'm John McClane-ing this shit. I'm inside the building, crawling through the air vents, gathering intel, and passing it along to Carl Winslow.
(Note: Please don't misunderstand, and take my Die Hard metaphor as a threat of violence. Like most left-wingers I abhor actual violence, but am still hopelessly enthralled by the Hollywood machine that glorifies it. Also, that was a 20th Century Fox movie. Synergy!)
Watch this space for future dispatches from the Fox Mole.
Announcing Our Newest Hire: A Current Fox News Channel Employee
Newt Gingrich: 'CNN is Less Biased Than Fox News'
Well well well..I think his words are gold nuggets of truth...
In what some might consider an act of GOP political suicide, Newt Gingrich slammed Fox News earlier this week, saying that the cable news channel has favored Mitt Romney throughout the 2012 Republican race--and that CNN has been the more "fair-and-balanced" network this cycle.
"I think Fox has been for Romney all the way through," Gingrich said during a meeting with Tea Party leaders in Delaware on Wednesday, according RealClearPolitics.com, which said it was granted access to the private event. "In our experience, Callista and I both believe CNN is less biased than Fox this year. We are more likely to get neutral coverage out of CNN than we are of Fox, and we're more likely to get distortion out of Fox. That's just a fact."
The former House Speaker blasted the Roger Ailes-led network, blaming Rupert Murdoch, chairman and CEO of Fox News owner News Corp., for the bias.
"I assume it's because Murdoch at some point [who] said, 'I want Romney,' and so 'fair and balanced' became 'Romney,' " Gingrich said. "And there's no question that Fox had a lot to do with stopping my campaign because such a high percentage of our base watches Fox."
A spokeswoman for Fox News did not immediately return a request from Yahoo News seeking comment.
Gingrich, a former Fox News contributor, added that he will attend the White House Correspondents' Association dinner later this month--as a guest of CNN.
"The only press events I go to are interesting dinners when the wife insists on it, so we're going to go to the White House Correspondents' dinner because she wants to. And we're actually going to go to CNN's table, not Fox."
Newt Gingrich: 'CNN is Less Biased Than Fox News' - ABC News
