News-gate Threatens to Consume Us All In a Fiery Ball of Corruption and Deceit

The arrest, this past weekend, of Rebekah Brooks, the former editor of The News of the World, shook me up pretty good.

As a reporter, I kept expecting to see a firewall of sorts erected at some point. I'm not naive enough to think journalists are above the same bad behavior as everyone else. But this sort of systematic chicanery goes beyond any previous newspaper scandal of which I'm aware. In short, I expect the occasional writer to go all Stephen Glass or Jayson Blair and just start making stuff up. Sad as that might be, those guys were rogue elements, victimizing their own editors and colleagues as well as the reading public. The News of the World scandal is the exact opposite, involving a conspiracy among professional journalists to act as spies and thieves. I mean, I can imagine the CIA hacking into—and deleting—the voice messages of a murdered schoolgirl, and also attempting to hack the phones of 9/11 victims. But a newspaper?

That is some hardcore anti-social behavior right there.

I look forward to seeing this unfold. But it doesn't take a fortune teller to surmise that working for Rupert Murdoch might be harmful to a person's ethics. Or is being ethically challenged an aid to being hired by him? We'll have to wait and see. But the future looks  something less than bright for Rupert. If you see him in shades, in fact, it's probably so we can't see him crying.

David Carr writes in the Times:

"As Mark Lewis, the lawyer for the family of the murdered girl, Milly Dowler, said after Ms. Brooks resigned, 'This is not just about one individual but about the culture of an organization.'

"Well put. That organization has used strategic acumen to assemble a vast and lucrative string of media properties, but there is also a long history of rounded-off corners. It has skated on regulatory issues, treated an editorial oversight committee as if it were a potted plant (at The Wall Street Journal), and made common cause with restrictive governments (China) and suspect businesses — all in the relentless pursuit of More. In the process, Mr. Murdoch has always been frank in his impatience with the rules of others."

Brooks was considered Murdoch's protege. Now she's being held on charges of illegally intercepting communications and organizing improper payments to police officers. If the charges are true, she didn't just get her hands dirty. She climbed all the way into the poison pool, till the toxic waters bubbled right up over her head. The worst scandal in the history of the newspaper business, bar none. And that doesn't even begin to describe how far this might ultimately reach.