by ALEXANDER COCKBURN
Having spent many weeks amidst the Strauss-Kahn case listening the locals assert that America’s justice is superior to France’s, we’re now pitchforked into the next debate: could US journalism sink to the septic depths of the scandal-ridden News of the World whose immediate closure Murdoch’s News International announced Thursday, and one of whose former editors, Andrew Coulson, later prime minister Cameron’s media advisor, has just been arrested over “allegations of corruption and phone hacking” during his time as News of the World editor.
What would happen if Rupert Murdoch had ever built a press empire over here?
Hold hard! One of Rupert Murdoch’s earliest ventures in America, back in the early 1970s, was to found the Star, as a weekly rival to the best selling supermarket tabloid, The National Enquirer, paddling in the shallow waters of Hollywood gossip, gothic crime.
There was one huge difference with the British tabloids. The Enquirer and the Star were never reckoned to be part of the “national press” as the News of the World has been. They had zero political clout, and inflicted no political endorsements on their readers. They sold in 7/11 stores and supermarkets to an audience that did not lay them aside to pick up the New York Times.
The respectable press ignored the Star and the Enquirer even though they broke big stories. The Star, sold by Murdoch in 1990 to the Enquirer’s parent company, was the first, in January 1992, to expose Clinton’s philandering, during his run for the presidency. He survived precisely because the scoop, about his long affair with Gennifer Flowers, was in the Star and could be deprecated as being in a mere tabloid.
The same thing happened with the Enquirer and John Edwards, encumbered with a mistress as well as a wife with terminal cancer during his run for the presidency in 2008. The Enquirer was reporting accurately on John and Rielle’s “love child” at the same moment as newspapers were giving Edwards a pass on the “tabloid tattle” rationale. Finally the Enquirer was quite properly put up for a Pulitzer, though the jurors, respectable newspaper executives and the like, made sure it didn’t win one.
Both the Star and the Enquirer were mostly run by Fleet Street veterans and there’s no particular reason to assume that these transplants were of innately superior moral caliber to Murdoch’s crew at the News of the World, or would be aghast at the notion of breaking into voicemail boxes, fostering corrupt relationships with cops and so forth.
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