News Corporation hacking for pay TV business benefit

The story from Neil Chenoworth in the Australian Financial Review and also played on UK television late in March suggested major computer hacking of codes to undermine pay TV competitors of News Corp. Denials all round from News, including an extraordinary front page article in The Weekend Australian's opinion section denying pretty well everything. It brings to mind Shakespeare's Hamlet maxim about "protesting too much methinks" (and too early).

The pertinence of this to things digital is that the case has been made by Chenoworth and others that in the 1990s when hacking was used by News hackers it was not illegal. Here is another instance where digital technology was well ahead of the law. Writing in the AFR Laura Pringle suggested that there was nothing illegal at the time, in the practice of hacking cable and satellite pay TV video. I happen to disagree strongly with that view. From a civil society perspective, there should be some self-regulation, otherwise we start from the level of barbarity. I suspect that News Corporation would prefer not to be measured at that level.

More importantly, Pringle makes the point that there has been no strong response from the Australian Government to the AFR allegations.

"...have you noticed a slight difference in approach to the one the government took last year in the midst of the News of the World phone hacking scandal?
That was enough to prompt an inquiry into the regulation of the media, the Finkelstein inquiry.
Now, allegations that a major media player may have skewed the competitiveness of the pay television industry are something the government will rely on regulators to investigate. In fact, it was hard to see anyone from the government through the large dust cloud on the horizon when this story broke on Wednesday.
One also sensed a certain sluggishness among government lawyers, who seemed to be of the view that it was all probably OK since some of the emails had featured in unsuccessful court cases in the past.
Sluggishness, or a lack of political will to further provoke a media giant from a government in deep political trouble? Take your pick." http://afr.com/p/national/gillard_government_conspicious_in_ac8wuOAU99VDnfGwod9XsM

This is serious. It must be assumed that there's silence about these latest allegations because they are so serious that some things are not talked about and acted upon. Then of course there is the small ocean of News lawyers working at the push back against the allegations. See a letters that the AFR has published from NDS the company that News set up that did the hacking.

NDS letter to  the AFR
http://afr.com/rw/2009-2014/AFR/2012/03/30/Photos/98f25b2e-7a15-11e1-ad2b-f7cbe133cf3e_NDS%20Letter%20to%20the%20Editor%20of%20The%20Australian%20Financial%20Review.pdf

Perhaps "the public" as observed in the Leveson Inquiry in the UK will shine some sunlight on this grubby matter.

Here is The Financial Times
"[Allegations made by The Australian Financial Review, BBC and PBS] come at a sensitive time, when Mr Murdoch’s company faces police investigations and an assessment of whether it is a “fit and proper” media owner in the UK; inquiries by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other US agencies; and an Australian review of a bid for Austar by Foxtel, in which News Corp owns a stake."

Talk about piling on!

Academics and journalism

Having spent 15 years in and around US universities where journalism is taught I have some thoughts on the so-called split between academic training and in-j-house training. (This follows my blog March 12 about News Corporation's opposition to the recommendation of the Australian Media Inquiry, aka Finkelstein Inquiry for a News Media Council and News's arguments that there is a split between media studies academics and working journalists. The writer stifles a yawn, then perks up on realizing that this is serious stuff! After all I am Head of School that includes a successful journalism program.
http://www.bond.edu.au/degrees-and-courses/undergraduate-degrees/list/bachelor-of-journalism/index.htm?&fos=Journalism&cl=Your%20Degree

My experience in the academy from the US perspective is geographically grounded: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's School of Journalism and Mass Communication was across the quadrangle from my office at UNC, the JSchool at Northeastern University in Boston was in the same building I was in in Communication Studies.

1. US journalists are better educated than Australian and UK journalists. This is surprising to me. After 20-30 years of university level education in journalism in Australia, News Corporation journalists still wheel out the old claim that education generates ignorance about how to do journalism. Only journalists educated on the job are to be either trusted or considered capable of real journalism. (How about another beer then?)

As a graduate of the University of Queensland Journalism program (1979 no less) this is a spurious claim by the uneducated intentionally slanted towards an ideological perspective.

Journalism education needs to be taught in the broadest possible terms, not only as technical craft. It needs to incorporate all the nuances, challenges and variety of a top quality liberal arts education so that its practitioners practice the investigation of the range of human experience. This approach will also incorporate the key concerns of critical thinking and creative problem solving.

Furthermore, journalism education needs to be incorporated into progressive institutional contexts, because journalism is probably one of the bastions of progressivism  - the perspective that includes the values of equity, tolerance and fraternity, liberalism by any other name - and involves a forward thinking commitment. The antonym is backwards looking ill-liberalism. 

Both the US institutions I taught at expected their students to embody these kinds of values and approaches. To argue that there is a split between the academy and journalism is to argue for the wrong thing.

2. On the question of journalism education and politics I have some comments.

The sense that education incorporates left or progressive politics should be neither here or there. In liberal democracies, social democracies or their derivations the purpose opf the media is to reflect on and influence the democratic opportunities available to citizens. This should be an open ended commitment, reflected through the lens of journalists educated to make decisions and judgements about what is socially good in civil society. It may be a surprise for some journalists to realize that educated people do not think of money and wealth as an end in itself.   

James Murdoch leaves the UK - News goes for TV and Rupert Tweets

Whoever said the world is a simple place has been disconnected. Following the continuing unravelling of News International / Corporation in the UK, it is a challenge to get one's head around the entire enterprise of this "family business."

Here is a smattering of news from this date: March 1, 2012. All the news embodies aspects of the digital -

• James Murdoch resigns even as the UK Government inquiry continues into digital phone hacking News of the World (NOW, closed); 
• moving from newspapers to TV, which is converged digital video / applications by any other name; 
• Rupert Murdoch tweeting;
• members of the Inquiry tweeting him!

A non-digital aspect to the story stream is the news that Rebecca Brooks, former NOW editor saved a horse from the glue factory.  https://twitter.com/#!/rupertmurdoch/status/174810157082091520  This was Rupert Murdoch tweeting, so back to the digital. (This is, I'd suggest, a perfect communicative strategy for dedicated conservatives like the Murdochs - talk about animals in distress.)

James Murdoch has resigned as executive chairperson of News International, the British newspaper subsidiary of News Corporation.  At least one commentator - Michael Wolff, author of a recent Rupert Murdoch biography - suggested that James may face time in prison for his role in the hacking business. For such a possibility to play out, there will need to be a significant collapse of elite support for News - that may in fact be occuring.  http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/feb/29/james-murdoch-exit-news-international?intcmp=239

Such an outcome would be the result of utilizing the Internet in the newspaper domain.

The standards for Internet behaviour in the un-regulated digital domain are or have been, unknown. You could do anything you wanted on the Internet - including hacking people's phones. The default is to rely on Enlightenment legalities about decency and civility - that is, allow people privacy on their telephones. (Frankly, you cannot blame the so-called journalists employed on English tabloids for doing anything but what their bosses instructed them to do or whatever was necessary to get the story. If I am correct, many of these "journalists" are uneducated well connected young people for whom the terms "critical thinking," "reflection" and "academics" are totally unfamiliar terms.  Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the Banality of  Evil offers a take on this. A reading of Arendt on Eichmann should let the implications of "I was just following orders" explain itself to this generation of the mindless).

In many ways the Leveson Inquiry is an attempt to claw back the idea of civility in the face of the digital. A similar claw back took place in the US after the commercialization of the Internet and the Telecommunication Act of 1996, with the Copyright Millenium Act, the Digital Decency Laws, Children protection laws and a multitude of other post-factum efforts to regulate the otherwise unreglated. (See Uprising for more on this).

 I want to draw attention to what is possible in the uncivilized twittersphere. I want to repeat here the tweet from the Levenson Inquiry Committee Member Tom Watson after Rupert Murdoch tweeted about the horse.  https://twitter.com/#!/tom_watson/status/174811123030298625

"@rupertmurdoch You comment on her horse but not on her insider knowledge of a criminal investigation into your company. Have you no shame?"

Then again, maybe this is more of the same: is the appeal to "shame" anything more than an appeal to the civility of Enlightened values?

News Corporation is planning to focus on television. This is understandable given that so much quality visual media is around. Given what I have seen in the 3D and games platforms dimensions, it is only going to become more engaging and immersive, perhaps even transformational. The size of the global market for Internet-based communication is vast.
http://www.internetworldstats.com/list2.htm

Rupert Murdoch in his letter about James's resignation said:
"He has demonstrated leadership and continues to create great value at Star TV, Sky Deutschland, Sky Italia, and BSkyB. Now that he has moved to New York, James will continue to assume a variety of essential corporate leadership mandates, with particular focus on important pay-TV businesses and broader international operations."

 It may as well say digital video.  Is it really possible for James Murdoch to end up in prison? If so he will have plenty of TV to watch, much of it very, very good! Complex indeed.

Proletarianization meets News Corporation

The end of journalism as an ethical practice continues. At least this could be the conclusion reached by the unravelling of News Corporation in the face of the UK government's Leveson Inquiry into the media. (I have blogged on this previously.) There is not much room to believe in the future of newspapers as established institutions for information, as the story continues to emerge about the way News Corporation journalists in the UK collected news.

They appeared to take two roads: they used whomever they could to hack into mobile phones to illicitly collect private information and secondly, they paid police and UK Ministry of Defence officials for secret information. Both sources were used to create news and sell papers.

According to old school moralists, this is not acceptable. The clear message from the moral gate keepers is that established standards of journalism should prevail even while the Internet makes that ideology obsolete. It's a case of attempting to reproduce nineteenth century reporting standards in the twenty first century of digital feeds. The two do not fit together. They cannot fit together.

Curiously, The Guardian newspapers persists with the idea that News Corporation is the embodiment of immorality. 

The story in The Guardian on 11 February 2012 - apart from its self-serving claims to holier-than-thou status - was instructive because of the sheer joy The Guardian appears to derive from seeing News Corporation in trouble.  With a headline like this, why bother asking readers to read on?

"Murdoch media empire engulfed in scandal as Scotland Yard net spreads."

The more significant comment was this line in the story:
 Following the first set of arrests, a News International source suggested it was intent on "draining the swamp", a comment that provoked fury among the company's journalists.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/feb/11/rupert-murdoch-media-empire-scrutiny

Draining the swamp of what? It would be correct to assume that the higher ups in News Corporation have determined that they can get back to old fashioned journalism if they can just rid themselves of the crooks in the organization.

More strident critics than me would suggest that the entire ediface of News Corporation is a swamp. A more accurate interpretation could be that the organization may be finished as a global newspaper player because the Murdoch model of newspapers cannot be sustained, not because a few toads got into the pond to mess up an obsolete moral universe.

The fact remains that cell phones and new technology make something of a mockery of print media and its journalistic standards, even though print media continues and in some parts of the world is growing. (Latin America and parts of Asia). Draining the swamp would mean some kind of effort to find lilly-white journalists who rely on ethics as it once was. The internet has made that approach impossible.

Proletarianization means that the dirt circulates without the kinds of controls News Corporation wants to put in place. It can drain the swamp all it likes. The circulation of the vicious, the vindictive and the venemous is already here. Pretending that some kind of swamp draining will work is a fools errand.

Going French with Eric Beecher - Civil Society Journalism

Eric Beecher is probably Melbourne’s most outstanding media entrepreneur. To all intents and purposes he is a self-made media mogul, albeit on a small global scale and thankfully perhaps, one who did not inherit his media products from a parent. In this way he epitomises the spirit of liberal capitalism, which welcomes hard work, innovation and determination to take and make money in the marketplace.

The take and make framework is a well established model for all manner of enterprises – with some exceptions, namely the media. In Australia there are well known models of state funding for industries that cannot survive without Federal and State Government support. The Australian Film Industry, Ballet, Opera, Orchestral Music, Literature, Children’s Television are obvious ones which are all variously supported and defended by keepers of whatever faith is being promulgated therein.

Film buffs will defend to the death Australian cinema and government support. Ask an opera buff to give up that boondoggle and all hell will break loose. This narrative is played out over and over again and with good reason. Civil society in Australia and around the world is enriched by public support for otherwise unsustainable artistic activity. It is a long and worthy list.

So it was both a surprise yet nothing new to read the submission from Eric Beecher to the Australian Government’s Media Inquiry. Mr Beecher is advocating for an Australia Council-like institution to fund what he considers ‘quality journalism’.  

He also refers in the document to ‘public trust journalism’ and ‘meaningful journalism enterprises,’ suggesting that the categorization of what he considers worthy of promoting is mercurial at best. Unfortunately, he complicates the matter and his argument by talking about ‘commercial journalism,’ when what he seems to really mean is a type of journalism that makes civil society in Australia worthy of the name.    

 ‘Australian governments should engage in serious discussion and analysis of the potential collateral damage that could be inflicted on our civic society if expensive commercial-sector quality journalism is no longer viable,’ Beecher said in his submission.

‘This could be done – as it is France, on a large scale – by the creation of independently administered government incentives that foster media start-ups and innovative commercial journalism ventures. This approach, possibly using an independent funding mechanism like the Australia Council, could allocate grants on a project basis (to independent publishers as well as ventures such as The Australian Literary Review), would expand the diversity of ownership of independent journalism.’

Mr Beecher makes it clear that he is not in favour of questions about government funding of quality journalism.

‘The relevant question is not: “Is government funding of public trust journalism a bad idea?” The relevant question is: “What kind of country would we have if the commercial funding of quality journalism was devalued to the point where it no longer fulfilled its historic watchdog role?”’

Do we need a new category of journalism? How about civil society journalism? This is journalism that meets the old standards of social responsibility journalism by meeting the obligation to inform and educate and entertain. It would go beyond the claims that social responsibility journalism does little more than reflect the limited imagination that drives ‘responsibility’: the kind of ‘to whom much is given much is expected’ kind of cant, which every dubious evangelist mouths with cherubic solicitude.

Civil society journalism will not be directed to the good and the great, the educated and the excellent – in other words, the elites of society. It will be a much more complicated beast, a multi-headed hydra that represents the diverse interests pulling and pushing at society.

Curiously, civil society journalism already exists and has a name: it is the internet.

The bottom line here is that what Mr Beecher wants is journalism that is not News Corporation. In making this case for diversity of ownership he is absolutely correct – various cities in Australia are dominated by News Corporation publications. Brisbane and Adelaide, Hobart and Darwin citizens have few print media options but a News Corporation perspective.

News Corporation journalists and editors wave their hands in protest at suggestions that there is a News Corporation line and rightly so. Every paper has a line. Why Australian news organizations persist with the myth that there is an objective style of journalism, or that there is no bias is a waste of time.

The fact remains that all information is determined by its source and the forces that impinge of that source. This fact is well known from the history of The New Journalism which emerged in the 1960s, as a means of placing the messenger in first person form in the story. And yet we persist with the idea that journalists are capable of reporting some objective truth.

What we need are clear rules about enhancing the flow of information to citizens so that there is some confidence that as much as possible is available for scrutiny.

Mr. Beecher’s proposal for a funding organization to support quality journalism has value. However, it is not in the self-serving call for a public organization to offset News Corporation’s hegemony. It is revealing that Mr. Beecher believes that the refined tastes of traditional values and history should be embodied in quality journalism. In the era of the internet, such an appeal is conservative, and Mr Beecher is what I would consider a good Melbourne liberal.

These days, journalism is open to all sorts of abuses, mostly through the internet. Furthermore, most citizens under 35 gather their news from social media cites, not from newspapers.

Certainly the French have a grand idea for publicly funding full coverage of French society. That should go with their interest in the values of equality liberty and fraternity. The question for Mr Beecher and for anyone who cares about civil society, is how Australia can create an institution that promotes those values within the take and make framework.

Please see the link below for Eric Beecher's submission

http://www.dbcde.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0020/142724/Eric-Beecher.pdf