Cameron hired Coulson in 2007 after Coulson left Murdoch's News of the World under a cloud of impropriety from an earlier phone hacking debacle. Coulson nonetheless reportedly secured Murdoch's personal backing for Cameron's successful bid for the PM position -- the British equivalent of the U.S. presidency.
A key player in this epic mangling of Goliath Murdoch is a classic David figure -- British lawyer Mark Lewis -- whose representation of clients victimized by phone hacking and other illegal conduct within Murdoch's English empire contributed to erection of scandal-tracking scaffolding that eventually reached Murdoch's corporate suite.
Lewis' clients included the family of Milly Dowler, a teen murder victim.
Revelations that News of the World's scandal-mongering reporters had hacked into the voicemail of the then missing Dowler -- deleting voicemails so as to continue giving Dowler's distraught parents the false impression that she was still alive -- galvanized public opinion against that newspaper and eventually against Murdoch himself.
"Only twice in the past 70-years have political parties in Britain had a consensus: World War II and Milly Dowler," asserted Lewis during a panel discussion on the Murdoch Scandal last spring at the Logan Investigative Reporting Symposium held at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism.
That Symposium featured a screening of the insightful "Frontline" documentary "Murdoch's Scandal." Lowell Bergman, the lead correspondent for that documentary, is an investigative reporting professor at Berkeley's J-School.
The director/producer of that "Scandal" documentary, Neil Docherty, said, "The thing that surprised me the most in doing this story is the amount of control Murdoch and his News Corporation had over police and politicians."
Docherty added, "One police official who said there was nothing to investigate
regarding phone hacking was later forced to resign. Then he became a columnist
for a Murdoch newspaper."
That collusion between Murdoch employees and top officials of London's Metropolitan Police represents one of the seamier undersides of this serial misconduct, said lawyer Mark Lewis during a TCBH interview.
"Murdoch bought police with wine and football [soccer in England] tickets," said Lewis. "The big issue is that corruption in the Met came from top to bottom not bottom to top. Police corruption is a huge program in England."
The cozy relationship between Murdoch's media empire and the Metropolitan Police dates from a major mid-1980s labor dispute between newspaper unions and Murdoch, where strikers contend police brutalized them.
Collusive behaviors, according to a special union report published in the fall of 2011, included News of the World reporters setting up people to commit crimes and then police "would arrive to nab the culprits, usually on a Saturday afternoon, giving the paper its Sunday scoop and the police their arrest."
John Pilger, a journalist who, like Murdoch, hails from Australia, contends phone hacking and influence peddling are not Murdoch's most atrocious misdeeds. "The most enduring and insidious Murdoch campaign has been against the Aboriginal people," Pilger wrote a few years ago. FOX News in America is often criticized for racist content/commentary against blacks and Hispanics.
Thinking that the British Murdoch scandal in particular or big media ownership in general is no big deal as long as the media provides weather, traffic, some headline news and/or favored shows ignores the reality that what people hear and see in the media all too often becomes what they believe.
The FOX News Channel -- the preeminent purveyors of malicious right-wing partisanship (a/k/a propaganda) and utter misinformation in America -- is a prime example.
A survey released in November 2012 by researchers at New Jersey's Fairleigh Dickinson University documented that people who only watch FOX News are less informed about facts than all other news consumers -- and that's starting from a pretty low bar. The findings of this survey mirror previous findings about ill-informed FOX News viewers.
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