Guardian columnist Robert Greenwald comes out swinging against the Murdoch family after yesterday’s hearing, calling it a promotion of the “spin of willful ignorance.”
If this scandal makes one thing abundantly clear, it is the importance of honest information being presented to the public truthfully – a trend far too rare in the storyline of this corruption. We have no need for a further parade of public relations spinning, meant only to distract the public from facts and the truth. What we need right now is a thorough, just, legal and strong investigation into wrongdoings. The type of honest reporting NewsCorp has shown themselves incapable of doing. …
It is time for the truth to come out. And it is time for the Murdochs and NewsCorp to stop their habitual addiction to spin and lies. The Murdochs bear responsibility for what occurred in their company, and the public deserves accountability around their failed and corrupt leadership. As increased revelations of corruption endlessly emerge within this scandal, the only way for justice and journalistic integrity to win out is for both Murdochs to resign. At that point, their public relations firm can spin all they want, without causing further harm to the public interest.
Others deplored the amount of attention that the scandal has wrung from the British press. Columnist Simon Jenkins wrote a piece titled “The Murdoch story is not a Berlin Wall moment – just daft hysteria.”
Britain has gone mad, or at least the tiny patch of Britain round Westminster. The Pentagon would call it an … all-embracing, uncontrollable chain reaction that appears unable to cease. The new ecstasy theorists call it "whooshing", when reason loses out to passion, and thought to imagination. As after the death of Princess Diana, every politician and commentator cries: "The world will never be the same again." The world usually is. …
Has anyone been murdered? Has anyone been ruined? Is the nation gripped by financial crash or pandemic, earthquake or famine? Are thousands homeless or millions impoverished? …
That everyone knew journalists and the police were engaged in petty barter does not make it acceptable, let alone legal. Nor is it edifying to know how far politicians and editors are in and out of each other's houses. But it is not the fall of the Berlin Wall or the Nuremberg trials. The downtrodden are not marching against their great satan, Rupert Murdoch, "the most evil man in the world" as reported by the BBC Today programme. They are more likely mad at losing their favourite paper. There is a limit to how much significance any event can carry without imploding into daft hysteria.
Columnist Marina Hyde expresses dismay that the scandal has been such a disruption to the British government, calling it Britain’s “official resignation from international life.”
Yet it says something about the banquet of horrors on offer that Tuesday's most exquisite irony did not even occur in a Westminster committee room. That honour surely belonged to David Cameron, literally sweating in Lagos as he was forced to address the growing perception of Britain as a banana republic. The prime minister wasn't accompanied by the Nigerian president - presumably the latter declined to share the podium with him on the basis that doing so could appear to tacitly legitimise the corruption that appears to be systemic in his opposite number's country. "This is a big problem," conceded Cameron of Britain's rapidly unravelling establishment. "But we are a big country."
Are we? To both trained and untrained eyes on Tuesday, we seemed a very small country indeed.
