It was the End of the World as we Knew It

(Update: Nov. 2012 — ProPublica maps the ongoing scandal.

(Update: May 2015 — Editor Andy Coulson on trial for perjury.)

Breathtaking.

The sheer mad genius of the thing.

Journalists bribing security guards.  Tapping cell  phones. Hacking computers. Spying on emails.

And not just once in a while, like the Cincinnati newspaper’s  Chiquita banana episode in 1997, or the Chicago Mirage Bar sting of 1974.

But permanently, as part of an ongoing operation, with an A-list of  targets including British prime ministers, rock stars, crime victims, even the royal family. Like Watergate in reverse gear.

The unprecedented, unmitigated  gall of News Corp. and its cheesy tabloid:  To run a private spy agency and dress it up as a newsroom.

In February, 2012, investigators announced that it wasn’t just the News of the World, but also the Times of London.   Five journalists from Murdoch’s Sun were also arrested.  And what has now become known as the “Leveson Inquiry”  just keeps getting better.

These hacking operations also took place in the US. In fact, they were standard operating procedure for News Corp.  Former staffers of News Corp. papers say they were insulated from direct lawbreaking when News Corp. routinely employed private investigators.

Dan Cooper, formerly of Fox television, told the Nation magazine:

Deep in the bowels of 1211 Avenue of the Americas, News Corporation’s New York headquarters, was … the Brain Room. Most people thought it was simply the research department of Fox News. But unlike virtually everybody else, because I had to design and build the Brain Room, I knew it also housed a counterintelligence and black ops office. So accessing phone records was easy pie.

This is fairly well unprecedented in media history, but there are a few interesting flashbacks. The Guardian probably did the best job explaining similar behavior of Lords Northcliffe, Rothemere and Beaverbrook, late of Britain’s Fleet Street.

But for my money, the most grandiose vision was William T. Stead’s 1886 idea of “government by journalism.”  Stead once said:

The telegraph and the printing-press have converted Great Britain into a vast agora, or assembly of the whole community, in which the discussion of the affairs of State is carried on from day to day in the hearing of the whole people…

So why not, Stead asked, just go ahead and replace the House of Commons with the press?  Stead’s vision went nowhere, probably because of a lack of  technology. The mercurial editor turned to other projects like world peace.

Rupert Murdoch’s vision  is similar to Stead’s, and like Northcliffe, Rothemere and Beaverbrook, he has tried to rule government with journalism. Using inside information, Murdoch pulled the strings in the world’s second largest news empire, helping the rise and fall of politicians and keeping public discourse tightly inside his own narrow boundaries.

If you’d asked Murdoch and his editors, they might well have compared their operation to Stieg Larssen’s Millenium epic. In that three-part story about investigative journalism in Sweden, first published in 2004 and made into a terrific film trilogy in 2009-2011, a brilliant but abused young woman named Lisbeth Salander has an almost superhuman ability to hack into cell phones, emails and computers files.  The exact details of all private lives, even Sweden’s secret service, are at her fingertips. She shares them with editor Mikael Blomkvist, who uses the power to track down serial killers.

But how did News of the World use its “Brain  Room?”   To spy on the Prime Minister and learn what he was bidding for a townhouse; to find out how many pounds the Dutchess of York had gained;  to spy on 911 victims; to write malicious celebrity sob stories.

It’s an astounding abuse of power gone awry, almost like a science fiction experiment.  Imagine mad scientist TV’s Frank proposing an experiment: Hey, let’s give a few media bimbos a major national publication, along with their own private spy agency,  and see what they do with it while they paste in the Page 3 cheesecake girl.

In one of those weird life -imitates -art -imitating -life coincidences, the big  item is flying around the UK blogosphere recently was that former News of the World editor Rebekah Brooks insisted that a reporter covering a Harry Potter press conference  dress up like a wizard.  The date was Sept. 12, 2001 — the day after the 911 attacks. The reporter, naturally feeling that this buffoonery was unseemly the day after 911,  checked with the boss. When the boss backed Brooks up, he, wisely, called in sick.  But he wasn’t the sick one.

Yes, Britain’s tabloid press is a sick piece of work.  And if you’re under age 21, you grew up knowing it.  J.K. Rowling, author of  the  Harry Potter books, was a major victim. But she had her own response.   As any 12 year old will now tell you, journalism is the professional home of disreputable characters without the slightest sense of personal honor or common decency.

Just as Britain’s News of the World and the US Fox News became famous for playing “gotcha” as a blood sport, Rita Skeeter, reporter for the Daily Prophet in the Harry Potter books, proudly wears the mantle of sensationalistic arrogance.    In one book,  Skeeter is looking for an angle to skewer Potter. She asks him:

Speaking of your parents, were they alive, how do you think they’d feel? Proud? Or concerned that your attitude shows, at best, a pathological need for attention? The worst, a psychotic death wish?

Rita Skeeter has her own personal eavesdropping technology — She can magically transform into a bug in order to overhear private conversations.

But she gets caught. In Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Hermione Granger catches Rita spying on the Quiddich match and threatens to expose her if she doesn’t stop. Later Hermione tells friends:

 Rita Skeeter isn’t going to be writing anything at all for a while. Not unless she wants me to spill the beans on her… I found out how she was listening in on private conversations when she wasn’t supposed to be coming into the grounds…

A 2008 study in American Communication Journal observed with alarm that the Potter series had:

… three main frames in which media is viewed: Government Control of Journalism, Misleading Journalism, and Unethical Means of Gathering Information. Based on these frames, researchers argue the Harry Potter series does not put the media in a positive light.

Unethical information gathering?  Like … the News of the World?

Additional reading: 

Rob Cox and Richard Beales, Murdoch Schadenfreude has worrying downside, too,  Reuters Breakingviews, July 12, 2011.

Watchdog: Congress must probe Murdoch media, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, July 11, 2011

The Trouble with Rupert, Save the News, July 12, 2011

Susan Paterno,  The lying game  American Journalism Review, May, 1997.

Robert Lissit, Gotcha, American Journalism Review, March 1995.  (About good and bad TV undercover work).

Barroom Sting, Time Magazine, Jan. 23, 1978. (About the Mirage Bar)

Amanda Sturgill, Jessica Winney  and Tina Libhart, Harry Potter and Children’s perceptions of the news media, American Communication Journal, Spring 2008.

Rupert Murdoch: Journalism’s Jack the Ripper, Nation Magazine, May 2013.