Fox & Friends vs. The First Amendment

Just the beginning

We’ve been at The Guardian, a newspaper most Americans probably have not heard of, but a newspaper which is now on the cutting edge of the Rupert Murdoch scandal.

If you are a Fox News viewer, you probably are not aware of what has been happening to Rupert Murdoch’s News International Corporation (the same people who own Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post, 20th Century Fox, and a lot of other newspapers and TV networks around the world).

Is this man powerful?

You might say that.

Is he in trouble?

Rebekkah Brooks, one of his top executives in the UK was just arrested this morning.

Les Hinton, who ran The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones for him in NY resigned.

His company has been tapping phones of lots of important and not so important people, paying off bribes to the police, appears to be intertwined with the government and lots more. And we’re just at the beginning.

Before this is over, my guess is that a lot of formerly very rich and powerful people are going to go to jail.

Rupert’s son James may be among them.

Like I said, big news.

And like I said, totally non-existing if you are a Fox News watcher or a reader of the Murdoch family owned Wall Street Journal.

NY Times columnist Joe Nocera made an excellent point of this yesterday in a piece entitled The Journal Becomes Foxified

On Friday, however, the coverage went all the way to craven. The paper published an interview with Murdoch that might as well have been dictated by the News Corporation public relations department. He was going to testify before Parliament next week, he told the Journal reporter, because “it’s important to absolutely establish our integrity.” Some of the accusations made in Parliament were “total lies.” The News Corporation had handled the scandal “extremely well in every way possible.” So had his son James, a top company executive. “When I hear something going wrong, I insist on it being put right,” he said. He was “getting annoyed” by the scandal. And “tired.” And so on.

 

We cannot know where all this will end, but it is increasingly looking like the Watergate Scandal, with The Guardian playing the role of The Washington Post and Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger playing the role of Ben Bradlee.

What then does this have to do with ‘the video revolution’?

Plenty.

Fox News on television is a very very powerful machine, but it is in the hands of one man and one family.

This is not healthy.

In the UK, Murdoch was on the verge of buying and owning 100% of Sky Broadcasting, the biggest television broadcaster in Britain.

People depend up on television journalism to inform them.

But what happens when that information is skewed or biased or just plain wrong?

This weekend, Fox News Watch, Fox News Channel’s media criticism show, covered the following issues: The media’s coverage of the Casey Anthony trial verdict; MSNBC’s suspension of Mark Halperin for making vulgar comments about the president; the media’s role in the Dominique Strauss-Kahn case; the cancellation of In the Arena, Eliot Spitzer’s CNN television show; and Vice President Joe Biden’s new Twitter account.  – Media Matters

 

In this country we are strong believers in a Free Press

The First Amendment of the United States Constitution lays out very clearly that a Free Press is the foundation of our democracy.

Television is part of the press.

And a press that is owned by one family, giving one point of view, is very much not free.

In the 18th Century, independent printers like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine published their own ‘free papers’, giving a point of view very much at odds with those who had a Royal Warrant to publish.

This is the basis of the First Amendment

Today, your laptop and your iPhone are your printing press.

Follow the traditions of Franklin.

Publish.