Reporting the news is so old school

The phone-hacking scandal surrounding Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. has just about everything: charges of political favoritism, allegations of hidden corporate agendas, high-level media wheeling and dealing, would-be conflicts of interest. And that’s just the news organizations covering Murdoch, not the story itself.



If this was the mindset at thein the 1970s, Richard Nixon would have served out his second term:

Yes, today's Post features an article on the burgeoning scandal surrounding Rupert Murdoch's media empire that goes after other media organizations ... for covering it.

The Murdoch saga has, perhaps inevitably, created its own secondary narrative. This one involves Big Media, whose corporate loyalties and entanglements have raised suspicions about news organizations’ independence and objectivity.



It's an article that expresses concern for Murdoch's ability to "get a fair shake," and that notes other outlets have given it more coverage than Fox News, because as everyone knows, Fox does set the standard for both fair and balanced coverage. Which probably explains why Fox and Friends think that the story has run its course and it's time to "move on."

And then there's the New York Times and NPR, who have:

... enthusiastically pursued the story, raising suspicions about their motives.

The reporter seems almost miffed that the Times "helped revive what had been an almost dormant scandal," and, in what is perhaps the most bizarre part of the article, says:

The story got new legs over the past two weeks with a series of scoops by the British Guardian newspaper, including the revelation that News of the World had hacked the phone of a missing 13-year-old girl later found murdered. The Guardian stories caused public outrage, and set in motion the demise of the tabloid paper and resignations and arrests of News Corp. executives. But the paper — a left-leaning rival of Murdoch’s conservative-supporting British papers — has also had its motives questioned.

So, who is questioning the motives of the paper that revealed Murdoch's News of the World hacked into a murdered 13-year-old girl's phone? The director of a conservative watchdog group who trots out—wait for it—George Soros, and complains that:

The non-Murdoch media’s larger goal, Graham said, is “to rid America of the Fox News Channel,” which has provided a prominent platform for conservatives.



Yes, the arrests, the resignations, the mysterious death, and all of the investigations are a (Soros-driven) plot that the British government, the FBI, the Department of Justice and the entire non-Murdoch media are all in on it. The bastards.

To be fair (and balanced), this joke of an article does contain one noteworthy line:

(Fox News representatives didn’t respond to messages requesting comment.)

Why would they? It was already as if they had written it themselves.