Le scandale Murdoch : “a global crisis” ?

Le scandale Murdoch : “a global crisis” ?

Le scandale Murdoch-News of the World (NotW) ne cesse de prendre des proportions de plus en plus gigantesques. Le terme, effectivement, a sa place, avec la menace que le scandale, de londonien, ne s’étende aux USA et n’enflamme toute la sphère anglo-saxonne (“anglosphère”), découvrant de façon publique et sensationnelle les extraordinaires dimensions de la dictature de Rupert Murdoch sur le système de la communication anglo-saxon.

Le 7 juillet 20911, le Guardian a publié une analyse des possibilités que ce scandale s’étende aux USA, où Murdoch possède un impressionnant groupe de presse et d’influyence. La brutalité de son intervention avec la fermeture du NotW ce dimanche marque aussi bien une mesure pour bloquer le scandale à Londres qu’un risque que ce scandale ne déborde aux USA, à cause des effets secondaires autant que des révélations que cette mesure risque d’entraîner dans un effet boule de neige. (Michael Wolff, biographe de Murdoch, observe : «Murdoch's bet is that closing News of the World will contain the scandal, but the sheer extreme measure he has taken just shows how difficult this is going to be.»)

Extraits de l’article du Guardian :

«News Corporation's US holdings – including the Fox cable TV channels, 20th Century Fox, Dow Jones which publishes the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Post – account for a dominant part of its more than $32bn (£20bn) global annual revenue, and its shares are listed in New York. Its UK newspapers by contrast form a relatively tiny fraction of its wealth.

»Until this week, the phone hacking story was largely ignored by the US media and treated as a local British matter. But after the Guardian revealed that NoW had hacked into the phones of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler and those of relatives of soldiers killed in Afghanistan, the scandal has caught the imagination of the public and been intensively covered in US newspapers and TV outlets. “Profiting on the backs of dead children and soldiers has resonated with American readers in a way that previous stories had not,” says Sarah Ellison, a contributing editor of Vanity Fair. “People are starting to see this as a level of corruption that lacks humanity.”

»The phone hacking scandal had already begun to reach high up within the American core of Murdoch's media empire before the Milly Dowler revelations. Last month, Lawrence Jacobs, News Corporation's top lawyer, resigned after more than 15 years with the company. Though he is not known to have had any direct role in the scandal, he was Murdoch's main legal adviser throughout the period in which laws were broken.

»A further indication of the heights to which the scandal is reaching within Murdoch's US headquarters is that he has entrusted two experienced lawyers now sitting on News Corporation's board of directors in New York with key roles in the handling of the crisis. Joel Klein, who until January was in charge of New York city's schools system, the largest in the US, and who now runs News Corp's education programme, has been asked to “provide important oversight and guidance” in the investigation into what happened at NoW. Viet Dinh, like Klein a former assistant attorney general of the US, has been charged with keeping the board informed of any developments.

»US media executives told the Guardian that Klein and Dinh had advised Murdoch that he needed to take drastic action to contain the phone hacking problems within the UK and prevent it spilling into a global crisis.

»One question that is likely to persist beyond the NoW's closure is the extent of the involvement of Les Hinton, the chief executive of Dow Jones. He was the executive chairman of Murdoch's UK newspaper arm, News International, between 1995 and 2007 when he moved to New York. He told the British parliament on two occasions in 2007 and 2009 that the hacking had been limited to just one rogue reporter, a claim now known to be untrue. In his statement explaining the NoW closure, James Murdoch, chairman and chief executive of News Corporation, said: “The paper made statements to Parliament without being in the full possession of the facts. This was wrong.” The comment appears to apply in part to Hinton.»

L’activité de Murdoch aux USA, outre le “journalisme” de sous-sol, avec pressions, corruption, extorsions d’information et chantage, bref tout ce qui sous-tend la puissance et l’influence aujourd’hui, touche évidemment la sphère politique. Murdoch est le “parrain” du mouvement neocon et de tout ce qui soutient cette fameuse“politique de l’idéologie et de l’instinct”. L’article déjà cité du Guardian précise : «The involvement of a News Corporation subsidiary in illegal practices is particularly sensitive within the US given the importance of Murdoch as a political player. Most of the Republican candidates running for the White House in 2012 have until recently been on the payroll of the right-wing Fox News channel, while Murdoch donated $1m of News Corporation money to the Republicans in last November's mid-term elections.»

Polly Toynbee, du même Guardian, le 8 juillet 2011, signale dans le même sens les pistes qui s’ouvrent pour une extension du scandale aux USA, avec la possible mise en œuvre de la redoutable machinerie juridique US :

«Meanwhile, US law may enter the fray. A former Labour cabinet minister has alerted attention to the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which makes an American company (News Corp) liable for colossal fines if any employee bribes a foreign official (the Met police) even if no one at head office knew. What's more, any whistleblower inside the company (sacked News of the World reporters), stands to win a percentage of that fine if they report acts of bribery.»

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