2 Excellent Articles on Murdoch from the Guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jul/10/rupert-murdoch-downing-street-wapping

What I remember most clearly about the meetings about these heated debates, however, was not so much the debates of rights and wrongs about Murdoch's objectives: many – even among this liberal group – knew modernisation had to come. What shocked people was the audacious brutality of Murdoch's methods. Nobody had predicted Wapping because nobody had ever imagined such a radical plan. The extraordinary secrecy and lies that had masked the construction of his wired-off camp had now been stripped away to show a readiness to cleanse an entire workforce. If they didn't go along with this, journalists were to be thrown on the heap, too. Today, at the News of the World, another band of journalists are in shock at Murdoch's methods.

In 1986 some saw immediately that collaboration with Murdoch had to stop then and there. Claire Tomalin, then literary editor, saw it perhaps clearest of all. The ultimatum, she said, was "the most appalling thing she had ever heard" and she resigned. Others, including me, didn't yet believe what he was capable of and decided to give Wapping a try. I had only been on the paper for 18 months and it was the job I had dreamt of all my life.


and

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jul/10/rupert-murdoch-phone-hacking-cameron?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+theguardian/commentisfree/rss+%28Comment+is+free%29

The door has shut on Murdoch. Party leaders and backbenchers, from Nicholas Soames to Alan Johnson, won't have him back.

Things do revert in politics but there will never be a return to normal service for the Murdoch family, which has lectured us over the years about standards and trust but whose employees may be guilty of thousands of criminal acts, now accused of suborning and bribing the police and suspected of a serious obstruction of justice with the alleged deletion of email archives.

It doesn't get much worse than this, but think of the eye-watering hypocrisy that occurred in September 2009. Just as James Murdoch was signing huge cheques to silence people whose phones had been hacked, he attacked the BBC at the Edinburgh TV festival with a speech entitled "The Absence of Trust" in which he claimed: "The only reliable, durable and perpetual guarantor of independence is profit."

Nothing better describes the lowering, simple-minded greed of News Corp's heir – values which he has taken from his father. That whole ethic seems suddenly unendurable because we see that they are only in it for themselves and they don't mind who they crush on their way to dominance, whether it is an actress who has had the courage to fight for privacy or the greatest public service broadcaster in the world.

"The only reliable, durable and perpetual guarantor of independence is profit."

A good summary (Brooker is a satirist and cynical observer of the media, not an analyst) of the Edinburgh speech from 2009:

:scared:

From the first piece:



And what does Murdoch say today?



Not the people he sacked, not cooperation with the police or inquiries, not the people whose voicemail he hacked; it's his executive and editor at the time of a lot of the hacking.

Murdoch is doing his best to stop the first domino from falling...

is what I wonder about. It would not hurt to do some close examination of them as well.