Fox News Owner’s U. K. Publication Accused of Massive Bribery

But Fox News and the Wall Street Journal Doesn’t Report, So You Cannot Decide



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News Corp. has settled dozens of claims

 in recent months, including with Welsh singer

 Charlotte Church, above, on Monday.



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It has been a while since we visited the press scandal in Britain involving Fox New Parent Corporation’s publications there.  One publication, News of the World was found to have extensively hacked the phones and phone messages of various people in the U. K. including  a teen age murder victim.  As a result that newspaper has been shut down and ongoing criminal investigations are taking place.

The controlling interest in the News Corporation is held by Rupert Murdoch, a man who uses his U. S. Fox News Channel to support Republicans and the Conservative movement. Anyone who has viewed that channel on a regular basis knows that the reporting is unfair and biased, reflecting the owner’s interest in influencing public opinion rather than reporting the news.

But in England the newspapers, like The Sun are trying to report news and trying to get scoops.  As a result, this is what happened according to the Wall Street Journal, another of Mr. Murdoch’s publications.

The U.K. police official leading criminal probes into alleged wrongdoing at News Corp.'s U.K. newspaper operations said that the company's tabloid, the Sun, had a "culture…of illegal payments" by journalists to a wide array of public officials.

This is not just a case of a reporter giving a few quid to an official for some inside info, that sort of thing goes on all the time and is pretty much condoned.  No, it is this.

"There appears to have been a culture at the Sun of illegal payments, and systems have been created to facilitate such payments whilst hiding the identity of the officials receiving the money," Ms. Akers said. She said authorization for the payments were made at "a senior level within the newspaper."

So doesn’t the Wall Street Journal get credit for reporting the story.  Well, no.  The story is buried in the second section, along with a single sentence buried in the story that says this

News Corp. also owns The Wall Street Journal.

And Mr. Murdoch does not deny the allegations, but in a statement (left out of the on line story but in the print version) Mr. Murdoch says he vows to get to the bottom of this and the practices are no longer taking place, so presumably everything is ok.  Like the bank robber Willie Sutton who is no longer robbing banks, so everything is ok.

Conservatives are of course the folks who proclaim they support family values.  That’s great, and maybe they will actually get some one day.