Murdoch's World

by David Folkenflik

In Williams’s case, people directly questioned the nature of the definitions separating different categories of journalists. “When is somebody giving his or her opinion?” ABC’s Barbara Walters asked on her talk show, The View. “If you are a ‘journalist,’ where you’re supposed to be straight and narrow and not give opinions—you know how careful I am, because I’m wearing two hats—sometimes that’s one thing. But if you are someone who’s giving your opinion, then you’re allowed to give your opinion!”

  The conservative media criticism group NewsBusters revived comments made by NPR’s legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg fifteen years earlier, in which she appeared to wish harm to befall Republican senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina. In arguing against new funding for AIDS research in 1995, Helms had said, “We’ve got to have common sense about a disease transmitted by people deliberately engaging in unnatural acts.” He was talking about sex between gay men.

  Totenberg said on the syndicated political television program Inside Washington: “I think he ought to be worried about the—about what’s going on in the good Lord’s mind, because if there’s retributive justice, he’ll get AIDS from a transfusion or one of his grandchildren will get it.” At the time, others on the show also reacted strongly against Helms, including conservatives; Krauthammer called Helms’s remarks “bigoted and cruel.” But Totenberg’s comments became relevant once more. Jesse Watters, a producer for Fox’s O’Reilly Factor, confronted Schiller on her way to an appointment to challenge her, on tape, about the disparities between the handling of Totenberg and Williams.

  The entire story played out during the home stretch of the 2010 elections, in which Republicans would take back the US House of Representatives. News Corp had become a participant in the 2010 election cycle, with a $1 million contribution to the Republican Governors Association and another $1 million to the US Chamber of Commerce to defeat Congressional Democrats. The timing for Fox was propitious. In the US in 2010, the Tea Party protests strengthened, borne aloft by fear over the imploding economy and anger over the greater role of the government in health care. Much of the mainstream press was nonplussed at how to gauge this phenomenon. Fox News saw the development as a wave to ride. “Roger [Ailes] may not have given the Tea Party life,” said Chris Ruddy, the CEO of NewsMax. “But he gave it oxygen to breathe.”

  Juan Williams’s firing transformed a dormant rallying cry from GOP backbenchers to eviscerate funds for public broadcasting into a central rhetorical element of their appeal to the members of their diehard base. And officials at some NPR member stations were apoplectic. Complaining calls swamped volunteers and staffers answering phones during their seasonal fund-raising drives. (Donations went up at most stations but stayed flat at others. But local station officials wouldn’t know that until later.)

  Some of the complaints to public radio stations came from their own listeners. But many callers were fans of conservative radio shows on commercial stations or viewers of Fox News programs that were also stoking the flames. The Fox reflex was to rally behind a colleague. Chris Wallace told me in a hallway in Fox’s Washington bureau that he “will never forgive NPR for what they did to Juan.” But it was also the execution of a marketing ploy. “Are you kidding me, NPR?” Jon Stewart asked incredulously on his show. “You’re picking a fight with Fox News? They gave Juan Williams a $2 million contract just for you firing him. NPR, you just brought a tote bag full of David Sedaris books to a knife fight.”

  Ailes’s outrage was surely calculated to a degree. Nine months earlier, Ailes condemned Murdoch’s son-in-law, Matthew Freud, for comments in the New York Times critical of Fox News. Freud, the great-grandson of the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, was believed to be speaking for several of the Murdoch children. Roger Ailes shot back that Freud “needs to see a psychiatrist.” Schiller blundered by invoking the same word about Williams. Ailes knew exactly what he was doing.

  A few weeks after NPR terminated Williams’s contract, Ailes attacked once again in an interview with a favorite reporter, Howard Kurtz of the Daily Beast and, somewhat bizarrely, of Fox’s cable news rival CNN. “They are, of course, Nazis. They have a kind of Nazi attitude,” Ailes told Kurtz. “They are the left wing of Nazism. These guys don’t want any other point of view. They don’t even feel guilty using tax dollars to spout their propaganda.”

  Ailes’s vitriol fit neatly with the extreme rhetoric being served up at that time by Glenn Beck. On one occasion, he offered listeners to his radio show a mind-set that would help them endure the Obama years: “You have to think like a German Jew [in] 1934.” The month we spoke, Beck used Nazi allusions to assail Al Gore’s environmental activism. “The government and their friends are indoctrinating our children for the control of their minds, your freedom, our choice and our future,” Beck said on his show. “This is what Nazi Joseph Goebbels said about the Hitler Youth.”

  When I pressed Beck to say whether he actually believed Gore sought a dictatorial or fascistic society, the Fox host replied, “I don’t think Al Gore is going to put anybody in gas chambers. I don’t think we’re actually going down that road.”

  “But when I heard him say, ‘Well, you know, your parents don’t understand the things you instinctively know,’ you’ve got to be kidding me, right? Next—why don’t you have them report on me if they’re not recycling as well?”

  Beck spoke of Israel with glowing reverence. But he often pivoted, warning viewers as well about a shadowy government in a way that some of his critics said evoked elements of anti-Semitic slurs. During an extended riff about the liberal billionaire financier George Soros, Beck called him “the puppet master.”

  “He’s known as the man who broke the Bank of England. The prime minister of Malaysia called Soros an unscrupulous profiteer. In Thailand he was branded the economic war criminal,” Beck said on Fox early in November 2010. “They also said he sucks the blood of people.”

  Soros is a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust. Deborah Lipstadt, professor of Holocaust studies at Emory University and perhaps the leading American authority on Nazi rhetoric, noted that the Malaysian prime minister cited by Beck had also ranted that Jews were behind his economy’s instability. Beck shockingly even claimed Soros as a young teen collaborated with the Nazis in his native Hungary. Soros had passed as the young Christian godson of a government official who was acting to save his life; at that time he witnessed the cataloguing of a Jewish family’s belongings for confiscation. Holocaust experts agreed this anecdote did not constitute evidence of any fair notion of collaboration. “I haven’t heard anything like this on television or radio,” Lipstadt told me, “and I’ve been in the sewers of anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial more often than I’ve wanted.”

  Beck also tied Soros to a variety of philanthropies and media groups, including NPR, which received a $1.8 million grant lasting several years from a Soros foundation to help train reporters for local member stations to cover state governments around the country. The age of blogging and tweeting has fomented a culture in which people blithely call one another Nazis online and on cable TV and talk radio. But Fox News stood out amid mainstream media outlets for its ferocity and frequency in doing so. The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank found Beck had referred to Hitler or Nazis on his Fox News program hundreds of times.

  The example was set at the top when Ailes accused NPR leaders of engaging in Nazi-like behavior. Ailes ultimately apologized, but intentionally not to NPR. Instead, in a letter to the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, a Jewish civil rights organization, he said he should have instead called the NPR officials “nasty inflexible bigot[s]”—not Nazis. The ADL’s Abraham Foxman has served as a public exculpator for both Ailes and Rupert Murdoch, who has been a donor to the group. Murdoch received an international leadership award from the ADL the same month Williams was dismissed.

  In a subsequent book, Muzzled, Williams argued that the termination of his contract was part of a larger pattern of the suppression of unwelcome opinions. I
suggested to him that it was a complicated case to make amid the cacophony of the blogosphere and the explosion of new social media sites such as Twitter and Tumblr.

  “There are lots of platforms and lots of points of view out there. It’s like going to a New York City street,” Williams responded. “You hear the cabs honking, the kids screaming, the ice cream truck. You can hear everything out here. But I think to myself . . . the experience that most Americans have is that they bite their tongue on a regular basis.”

  Williams’s termination by NPR took an emotional toll, leading to fears his career would be hurt and that he would be considered a bigot. Williams wrote that his editors at NPR were unhappy with his previous book—Enough—in which he criticized liberal black leaders. Williams said he was told by an NPR executive (whom he would not identify to me) that his thinking and his book were not in sync with the kind of African Americans valued by the network.

  The record tends to belie his perception. NPR’s Morning Edition, one of the network’s most highly rated programs and one of the most listened-to radio shows in the country, devoted nearly eight minutes to an interview with Williams about Enough, a notably lengthy duration for the program. The conversation was used to kick off a week of stories about leadership among African Americans.

  The muzzled Williams was allowed to make his case in print interviews, on Fox News, on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, on NPR’s Diane Rehm Show, and on other public radio programs as well.

  In early January 2011, NPR’s board of directors released a report from a law firm that found Williams’s contract had been terminated lawfully but that there were managerial failings in how it was carried out. Weiss resigned after it was clear she was no longer welcome at the network for which she had worked a quarter century. Schiller was ousted a few months later. Her top fund-raising executive was taped in a stunt by young conservative activists posing as Muslim donors eager to trash Jews in the media. He had been captured making remarks deeply dismissive of conservatives and Tea Party members. That the thirteen-minute version of the tape initially posted online badly distorted what occurred at the lunch didn’t matter. Nor did the fact that Vivian Schiller was not present.

  It was April 2011. Ailes was riding high. But across the Atlantic, at another vital outpost of Murdoch’s World, carefully constructed defenses were starting to fall.

  11

  “AS BAD AS WE FEARED”

  BACK IN NOVEMBER 2005, THE News of the World had published a brief item about a royal limb out of joint. Prince William had to put off a mountain rescue course after pulling a tendon in a soccer practice with schoolchildren. He had been “crocked by a ten-year-old,” the paper’s royals editor, Clive Goodman, reported.

  “He has to wear a knee brace if he wants to do anything other than walk, to stop it getting any worse,” one friend of the prince had “confided.” The economical, 156-word article detailed the injury, the circumstances, the location, the hospital, the course of treatment, and the inside joke from a friend about Prince Harry’s nickname (“Sicknote”).

  Aides to the princes complained to police that someone was accessing their phones. Many of these remarks—such as Harry’s nickname—had been uttered in voice mails, not conversation.

  Goodman’s reporting drew on the help of an athletic man with an eager-to-please affect named Glenn Mulcaire. In his early twenties, Mulcaire had sought to work for military intelligence. Those who interviewed him said Mulcaire wasn’t military intelligence material—but encouraged him to set up his own business one day. He dabbled in private investigation, scouring through records on behalf of insurance companies and doing some work protecting clients from unwanted media attention. That helped him pick up work around the margins for News of the World.

  Mulcaire had been a soccer player too, known as “Trigger” for his quick-whip left foot. When opportunity presented itself, he joined the roster of a new lower-rank professional team, AFC Wimbledon, and scored its very first goal in 2002, a shot taken from beyond the penalty box that whistled past the diving goalie. “You don’t get better than that in this sport,” Mulcaire told a sideline reporter after the game. “It’s still hard to take in, really.” But he added, “to be honest, we should have scored a lot earlier.” AFC Wimbledon lost to Bromley, 2–1. “Trigger had his moment of glory,” his coach said later. “Talk about his five minutes of fame. He had his five minutes of fame, and he loved it.”

  Mulcaire could never beat that opening shot. He did not possess the talent, drive, or luck to make it to elite levels of the game in the UK or even star in the lower ranks. He left AFC Wimbledon the following year after an injury. He was thirty-three. With a dead end, the time was right to return to a private investigator’s life. Soon he had steady work from News of the World. By 2006, Mulcaire had a signed annual contract with the tabloid that exceeded £100,000. The tabloid’s editors had adopted a bit of cloak and dagger to hide payments to Mulcaire—itemizing his bills with receipts for “Alexander” and “Paul Williams.”

  Hacking someone’s cell phone messages turned out to be a surprisingly easy task. It required two people, or at least two phones. On the first, a hacker called someone on his or her mobile phone. On the second, he dialed again, but because the line was tied up, the call would be sent straight to voice mail. Callers were given the option of leaving a message or retrieving voice mail messages. In almost all cases, mobile phone service providers had left the default setting for the code to gain access to voice mail messages as “0000” or “1234,” trusting cell phone users to set up their own. Most did not. Of those who did, most users selected their birthdays. Private detectives like Mulcaire could readily acquire those, too.

  In an August 2006 raid on Mulcaire’s home, police turned up more than 11,000 pages of documents with several thousand names of potential targets. The documents showed the tabloid’s reporting relied heavily on Mulcaire’s investigations, as well as other private investigators, and that many reporters commissioned his work, not just Goodman.

  In January 2007 Mulcaire pleaded guilty to hacking the phones of aides to the princes, as well as five other prominent people, and was sent to jail. Goodman was headed to jail too. Andrew Coulson, News of the World editor, resigned, saying he had no knowledge of their activity but accepted responsibility for what occurred on his watch. The case seemed to write a new but brief chapter in the eternal chase of the royals by the tabloid press. News International brought in Colin Myler, a British editor who was Col Allan’s deputy at the New York Post, to run News of the World and to set new newsroom policies to assure such things would not happen again.

  Goodman pleaded guilty to conspiracy to intercept the private mobile phone messages of three members of the princes’ inner circle. A month later, in February 2007, Goodman was fired for gross misconduct by Les Hinton, then the executive chairman of News International. But privately Goodman wrote a letter to Hinton; Stuart Kuttner, the managing editor of the paper; and the company’s chief human resources executive saying he had done nothing wrong.

  “The decision is perverse in that the actions leading to this criminal charge were carried out with the full knowledge and support” of several executives at the paper, Goodman wrote. He added that others had approved his payments to the private investigator, Mulcaire, for the precise purpose of hacking into the phones of the princes’ aides. The firing was “inconsistent,” Goodman contended, because “other members of the staff were carrying out the same illegal procedures.”

  His next sentence gathered up the combustible material at hand and lit it: “This practice was widely discussed in the daily editorial conference, until explicit reference to it was banned by the Editor. As far as I am aware, no other member of staff has faced disciplinary action, much less dismissal.” Throughout the trial, he had been suspended but remained employed, though the paper’s top lawyer, Tom Crone, had attended his defense preparations and knew he would plead guilty. Crone and editor Coulson “promised on many occasions that I could
come back to a job if I did not implicate the paper or any of its staff in my mitigation plea.”

  Within a month, Hinton had authorized the first in a pair of payments to Goodman that totaled more than £253,000 ($382,000). Only £13,000 of the payment went toward legal fees. Hinton wrote in a letter that the money was only being paid out of respect for his past service to the company.

  In May 2007, News International announced that respected outside lawyers had done an extensive review and found no executives who had any knowledge or involvement in the conspiracy to break the law. The company would stick with that formulation for more than four years. Andy Coulson found new life as the chief communications director of the head of the Tory Party, David Cameron.

  NEWS CORP’S executives have always defined themselves by its enemies—unions, liberal elites, the New York Times, the BBC, the Guardian, and the Australian Broadcasting Corp; self-satisfied politicians, red tape–happy government regulators, the leftist university professoriate.

  Leaders throughout the corporate empire embrace the conflict. “We like being pirates,” said New York Post editor in chief Col Allan. “We’re like a pirate ship,” a senior news executive at the Wall Street Journal told me, oblivious to the echo of Allan—or how remarkable it sounded coming from the mouth of someone leading one of the most prestigious newspapers in the world.

  Murdoch’s men (and women) insisted they didn’t get the invites to high society parties, which is hard to credit, given their social calendars in New York, Hollywood, London, and Sydney. In the UK, Rupert Murdoch had not been knighted by the Queen—as had his father and many of his rivals. Once Murdoch took American citizenship in order to consummate a major television deal in 1985, of course, he could not actually accept a knightship anyhow. But Conrad Black, the former owner of the Telegraph, gave up his Canadian citizenship to accept a peerage. Murdoch still could have been offered it. (Then again, he may console himself with his papal knighthood.)