If You Were Murdoch, Whom Would You Kill First?

By Noah

One of the first voices to blow the whistle on the phone hacking, former News Of The World journalist Sean Hoare, was found dead Monday in Watford, about 25 miles northwest of London. Police said the death was being investigated as unexplained but was not suspicious, according to Britain’s Press Association.
                                                         - The Associated Press, July 18th

 
Oh, no, not suspicious at all! How’s that for the ol’ legendary Brit reserve? Nothin’ to see here, folksies. Move along. It’s nice to know that England’s media is as ridiculous as ours. You might as well get your news from Dr. Seuss or Ted Baxter.
 
Imagine if, during Watergate, E. Howard Hunt or H.R. Haldeman had suddenly turned up dead. Not only will Sean Hoare forever be a former journalist, he happens to have turned up a quite dead journalist on the same day that Scotland Yard’s top guy and his deputy cut their careers short and resigned to go in a different direction, pursue other interests, and spend more time with the family. Swell. Imagine if here, the head of the FBI and his second in command decided, in one day, amid tales of rampant hacking, bribery and cover-ups, to do the same on the same day that a witness in the nation’s biggest federal case turned up dead.
 
Anything else happen to go along with the dead witness and the resignations of the England’s top two cops? Yep. The head of the shuttered News Of The World, Rebecca Brooks, was arrested the day before. Her home computer and cell phone were found in the trash on the curb (She claims her maid did it by mistake!), and Conservative Prime Minister, David Cameron, who was openly backed by Rupert Murdoch, cut a trip to South Africa short and sped home in time for Parliamentary hearings. Can Cameron’s own resignation be on the way? Are the office pools set up? Go ahead. Pick the day! Or, will the PM soon die an “unexpected natural death” by falling out of the highest window of the Tower Of London. Most likely, though, he may resign but the rest will be hushed.
 
The bigger question is; will the death of Sean Hoare silence those who might be inclined to blow more whistles, either in Britain, or here, or anywhere else? Will they now clam up, knowing that the last guy that spoke up is on ice in a morgue? This whole thing reeks of an old Avengers episode. Where are John Steed and Emma Peel. Better yet, where’s Bond, James Bond?
 


Now this Murdoch thing; this is what I call a scandal! I never care who’s sleeping with whom or who is or isn’t wearing panties or what drugs they did 40 years ago. But, show me total hypocrisy, and/or unbridled, evil, money wielding power demons getting a taste of the lash: now you’re talkin’! It’s even better when the come-uppance is a result of something the devil of the day created in the first place.
 
Like many have said, this really is like Watergate. I clearly remember reading my Washington Post one sticky June Washington morning back then and seeing the first tiny, buried two paragraph article about some “third rate break-in” at the Watergate Apartments and saying “Ah, Hah!” to myself with great glee! I knew Nixon was involved. I knew it! It just took some time to unravel and get to that particular sicko’s necessary demise. So it is with the burgeoning News Corp. scandal. From day one, I have expected other shoes to drop and, as I write this, it’s beginning to look like a tornado hit Imelda Marcos’s famous closet. 
 
Where will it end? Time will tell. But, if you ran a multi-national, multi-billion dollar media empire that was really much more than just a mere media empire, and, you were a plotting scheming fascist old coot with sociopathic dreams of control of the world, who couldn’t walk down the street without dropping some of his marbles on the sidewalk, what would you do to prevent those twisted dreams of empire from crumbling before you after, you had worked so hard at owning governments and police forces, ruining lives, bribing and buying influence with offers that your prey dare not refuse.
 
This is not just about England.
 
Already, Murdoch’s man in charge of the once credible Wall Street Journal, Les Hinton, has had to go bye-bye. He had worked for Murdoch since he was 15. I bet he got quite a severance package to keep silent. Dare I wonder now what would happen if it ever looked like he was about to spill the beans? I remember the mafia trials in my native New Jersey back in the late '60s and early '70s. It seemed like witnesses were having mysterious fatal auto accidents every damn day.
 
I’ve long felt that many of our biggest corporations act like mobsters. The recent fatal Massey Energy mine cave-ins in West Virginia are as good an example as any. 29 miners died. With all of the safety violations, you might as well politely call it negligent homicide at the very least. It’s just business; the typical way of business.
 
Corporations often even like to think of themselves as mobsters. Take the example of News Corp.’s News America operation. News America's honcho dude, Paul Carlucci, once motivated his sales team by playing them the famous clip from the movie The Untouchables where Al Capone repeatedly bashes a competitor’s skull into a bloody puddle of blood, bone, and pulp with a baseball bat right in the conference room. Nice folks there at News Corp. The mob analogy is all too perfect. If it walks like a… well, what’s the difference?
 
Not long ago, News America got itself sued by a small New Jersey company named FLOORgraphics. FLOORraphics was the company that put clever eye catching ads on the floors of places like supermarkets and large drugstores. They took News America to court when they felt compelled to charge News America with hacking their password protected computers and stealing their plans, strategies, proprietary info, and customers. There’s that hacking thing again! It couldn’t happen here? It already has. FLOORgraphics had a very good case. Murdoch’s company quickly settled for $29 million after about 2 days of adverse testimony. Then, News America just bought FLOORgraphics. Maybe they should have just taken that approach to begin with, but, alas, it doesn’t look like that’s News Corp.’s style. Betta ta be a gangsta.
 
So, you see, only a very naïve or unfathomably stupid person could ever seriously believe that News Corp. behaves any differently here than they do in Britain. I eagerly look forward to hearing more shoes dropping. 

“We reject the notion that the issues at News International are somehow indicative of our culture.”

So says News Corp.’s press bozo Jack Horner (if that’s his real name). He presumably even said it with a straight face; put it in writing too, on News Corp letterhead and everything! But, the truth is that News Corp. has paid out close to $655 million to make charges of corporate espionage, including hacking, disappear. One has to ask, how would such a company pay to make any of us go away, including real permanent like.
 
Paul Carlucci, the baseball bat enthusiast, was recently promoted to head up the New York Post. There’s a pattern here. Obviously, Murdoch likes a certain kind of lieutenant. Do I even have to bring up Roger Ailes of FOX News? I won’t. Enough has been written about him, but, with any luck, we’ll hear a lot more very soon. I would so love to see him doing the perp walk. More likely, though, Murdoch’s money will talk.
 
Still, there’s plenty of potential in the Murdoch scandal. David Cameron’s press flak, Andy Coulson was a Murdoch installation. He’s resigned and been arrested. Kinda makes you wonder about so-called President Bush’s press flak Tony Snow, another “ex”-Murdoch guy doesn’t it? Murdoch’s filthy tentacles are seemingly everywhere. He even stockpiles potential candidates for President on his network. And, what about Rudy Giuliani’s close personal friend, Bernie Kerik, the guy who nearly became Bush’s Secretary of Homeland Security but ended up in jail instead?
 
Murdoch reportedly paid Kerik’s galpal, Judith Regan at least $10 million for her silence when it looked like she might have so much to reveal about Kerik that it could adversely affect Giuliani’s Presidential bid. Murdoch also backed her Regan Books publishing company and she once had her own show on FOX “News.”
 
Before her big $10 million payday, it was reported that Regan was going to say in court that she had been ordered to lie to federal prosecutors about one of Kerik’s controversies. And, I can’t resist just one little thing about Roger Ailes: In February of this very year, a lawsuit revealed that it was Ailes who told her to lie.  
   
The FBI probes have begun. Will they be real, in depth ones? Probably not, but we may find out something about the phones of 9/11 victims and their families being hacked here just like after the subway terror attacks in England.
 
It’s obvious that Murdoch has always hired people like himself and fish does always rot from the head on down all the way to vermin in suits like Sean Hannity and racist goofballs like Eric Bolling or Bill-O who found it surprising that African-Americans can eat in a restaurant without using the M-F word. FOX “News” never pays the price, though. If having Bush’s own cousin, John Ellis call the election for Bush from his position at the head of the FOX News desk on election night 2000, thus influencing all of the other networks to do the same, even though the evidence simply wasn’t there, didn’t set off bells and everything that has followed on FOX hasn’t, what would? It’ll never happen but, to me, Murdoch should have been tried and hung for treason long ago. The last decade would have been a whole lot better and we’d have more optimism about the next one. One man can make a difference.  



[Noah's update will be posted here at 8am, PT]