Political Scene: Murdoch, Politicians, and the Nuclear Option

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What will happen to News Corporation in the United States? “You could see the company morphing into a less aggressive political force, for essentially business reasons, and that would change the tone of American politics,” Nicholas Lemann says on this week’s Political Scene podcast. Lemann predicts that “either the company would suffer the fate of other publicly held family media empires, like the one at the Wall Street Journal that Murdoch recently took over, or it would become more bland and corporate, like the Walt Disney Company or the Hearst Company, and be less swaggering and less ideological.”

A less ideological Fox News or Weekly Standard? “We will always have conservatives in this country,” Lemann continues, “but this is a particular alignment of the conservative planets that may be something only Murdoch could pull off.”

Hendrik Hertzberg isn’t so sure: “Anybody who’s hoping that somehow the troubles of the Murdoch family are going to result in Fox News becoming less of a right-wing propaganda operation may be deluded, because this is a form of entertainment that is highly profitable.”

In a story of profit, power, and politics, the latter took center stage yesterday, with Prime Minister David Cameron taking heat from members of Parliament for his cozy relationship with the media mogul. Lemann explains why British politicians must make peace with Murdoch:

British tabloids are kind of like the nuclear option. That is, the reason they have the attention of politicians is they can swoop in three days before the election with some huge, huge thing that changes the vote by five per cent, and every politician just lives in utter terror of that.

By comparison, he says, “Fox News is more like a medium-sized standing army, where it keeps a part of the conservative base active and mobilized and ready.”

Lemann, who is the dean of the Columbia Journalism School, also discusses an inconsistency in his profession’s approach to phone hacking. The News of the World’s foray into phone hacking has been widely and understandably criticized, but, Lemann points out, two of the 2009 Pulitzer Prizes* went to stories based on hacked phone records: those of Eliot Spitzer and a madam, for the New York Times, and of Kwame Kilpatrick and his mistress, for the Detroit Free Press. “Journalists have to figure out what their defense is of why it’s O.K. when somebody else phone-hacks and gives it to us, but it’s not O.K. for us to phone-hack.”


  • An earlier version of the podcast incorrectly stated that the Spitzer and Kilpatrick coverage won Pulitzer Prizes in May, 2010, rather than April, 2009.