Hacking, Blagging, and Why the Murdoch Hacking Scandal is Nothing New
There’s an unofficial rule among British journalists: dog doesn’t bite dog. In other words, reporters working at one Fleet Street tabloid should not expose the wrong doings of reporters at other Fleet Street tabloids, as there are plenty of wrong doings to go around.
That rule is just one of the many casualties of the burgeoning phone hacking scandal involving media mogul Rupert Murdoch and his now shuttered News of the World tabloid.
Murdoch may become another.
As CEO and founder of News Corporation, Rupert Murdoch spent decades building the world’s second largest media conglomerate, measured by revenue, behind only the Walt Disney Company. He is not a man known for his modesty, nor are the newsrooms of his nearly 200 newspapers, radio stations and global TV networks.
For decades, politicians in Australia, Britain, the United States and other nations have sought the endorsements of Murdoch’s newspapers, and scorned the wrath of his broadcasters. As the New York Times‘ David Carr recently wrote: “The News Corporation has historically used its four newspapers — it also owns The Sun, the Times of London, and the Sunday Times — to shape and quash public debate, routinely helping to elect prime ministers with timely endorsements while punishing enemies at every turn.”
It’s also been an open secret for years that some of his English papers – notably The Sun and News of the World – along with other British tabloids, have engaged in a variety of questionable activities collectively known among journalists as the “Dark Arts.” Those arts allegedly include, but aren’t limited to, bribing civil servants and police, wiretapping the phones of public officials, using private investigators to obtain personal information, hacking mobile phones and something the Brits call “blagging” – the art of obtaining powerful information. At times those actions have lead to prosecutions, more rarely convictions, but nothing in the past has hit News Corp – or journalism more generally – than this summer’s hacking scandal. [...]
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