News Corp Is a Criminal Enterprise. Why Is Anyone Surprised?

Paul Krugman says what is plainly true:

At this point it’s starting to look as if News Corp is better viewed as a criminal enterprise than as a media organization.

Just to recap: A British News Corp paper, News of the World, shut down after 168 years because it got caught hacking into the phone messages of a missing 13 year old girl who turned up dead. Because her messages got erased, the family had renewed hope that she was alive. The same newspaper apparently hacked the phones of 9/11 victims. The Sun, also News Corp owned, hacked into former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown's son's medical records and the family legal files. Turns out, this has been going on a while:

Brown joins a long list of Labour politicians who are known to have been targeted by private investigators working for News International, including the former prime minister Tony Blair and his media adviser Alastair Campbell, the former deputy prime minister John Prescott and his political adviser Joan Hammell, Peter Mandelson as trade secretary, Jack Straw and David Blunkett as home secretaries, Tessa Jowell as media secretary and her special adviser Bill Bush, and Chris Bryant as minister for Europe.

They've also paid off police and secretly settled with former victims that found them out.

The News Corp Empire (click for larger image)

According to the news flying around the internet, Murdoch's empire is about to be seriously threatened.  People are saying that there might be U.S. investigations. Some in the media are explicitly pushing for it (mostly across the pond).

I'm not at all surprised that the company best represented by Fox News is doing this. They lie constantly, obviously have no journalistic integrity and deliberately attempt to destroy our reliance on science, on reason, and on facts themselves. Personally, I think some of those actions should be criminal. The intentional destruction of society shouldn't be protected by the First Amendment. (And I don't mean how an ideology can "destroy society." Go advocate Communism or fascism for all I care. Just don't make the world believe there's no such thing as the truth. That's democratic arson. But I digress.) The next step to something we actually criminalize is not that far-reaching.

Because I'm not surprised, I'm just past the point of calling for blood about this scandal. For a long time, it's been baffling to watch other news media outlets defend Fox News as if it were actually a news outlet, if just a bit conservative. Now, they're finally attacking News Corp in droves. This is at least partially because it's a scandal and the entire mainstream media functions at the level of tabloids. But hey, whatever it takes. Murdoch is destroying the fabric of society and has been for a while. I'm just glad someone's noticing.

Now, on a sort of separate note, what kind of political steam will have to build up for anything to happen in America? In England, where the BBC is state-run, they don't have this same reflexive cultural need for a wall of separation between government and press. (See? The First Amendment does have a "wall of separation". We just misplaced it.) British people don't freak out at the phrase "press regulation" and call it censorship no matter what, like we do. So they'll have a much easier time investigating the criminal actions of a news organization.

But on our side of the Atlantic, the Department of Justice would be investigating the crimes. The DOJ, specifically, Obama's DOJ, would be investigating News Corp, parent company to Fox News. Remember when Obama pointed out that Fox News is just an arm of the opposition party, and the entire media leapt hurdling to Fox's defense? How do you think it plays out if Obama investigated Fox News? We have no room for nuance in discussion of press criminality or press regulation. People here are stupidly absolutist about the First Amendment, and there will be a huge outcry about any sort of criminal investigation, which will be termed "censorship" no matter how warranted the investigation is. If Obama isn't willing to prosecute the war criminals from the Bush administration's torture regime in order to satisfy our treaty obligations, what on Earth makes anyone think he'll have the political courage to face this down? No, Obama's DOJ will not investigate News Corp unless there is just overwhelming political will. We'll see.