newjerseynewsroom.com

BY ADELE SAMMARCO

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

With a crushing blow to not only his character, but to his entire media empire, a British parliamentary panel found Fox News Corp. chieftain Rupert Murdoch, "not a fit person to exercise the stewardship of a major international company."

The British parliamentary committee issued its findings Tuesday in response to the illegal phone hacking scandal at the Murdoch-run tabloid News of the World, which led to several arrests of his senior employees.

The committee said Murdoch "turned a blind eye and exhibited willful blindness" to the phone hacking that was considered common practice at his news outlets, disavowing the defense’s claims that its senior executives were oblivious to the devious activities of its reporters.

The panel also found Murdoch's son, James, showed “poor leadership” in failing to quickly put an end to the hacking.

In its report, the committee pointed to three senior executives at News Corp. and the now-defunct News of the World, including Les Hinton, one of Murdoch's closest pals, for misleading Parliament about the pervasiveness of the cell phone tapping

"Just think of it as part of a tide, an ever-increasing, unstoppable, inevitable tidal wave," said Murdoch biographer Michael Wolff according to the Los Angeles Times. "It just accrues. Every piece of news is worse than the last piece of news. It's something that they can't get out from under. They can't stop it. And it has their name on it."

The report not only shines a spotlight on Murdoch’s effectiveness to run a corporation, but could jeopardize his almost 40 percent controlling stake in British Sky Broadcasting.

British regulatory authorities are now deciding whether major stakeholders like Murdoch are "fit and proper" owners of mass media in England, which to media analysts say may be a critical turning-point for the way the news is viewed.

The agency that oversees BSkyB said it would take the committee's findings into consideration in its review of Murdoch's ownership.

In addition to his problems across the pond, the report added pressure to Murdoch's holdings in the United States.

A Washington-based ethics group called on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to revoke 27 television licenses owned by Murdoch, citing the British parliamentary report as evidence the media mogul fell short of the, “necessary good character standards to be entrusted with a broadcast license.”

In a message to his employees, Murdoch acknowledged his company's failures.

"I recognize that for all of us, myself in particular, it is difficult to read many of the report's findings," Murdoch said according to the BBC. "But we have done the most difficult part, which has been to take a long, hard and honest look at our past mistakes."

The company cited "hard truths" that emerged from the committee's investigation, admitting it had been "too slow and too defensive; yet deflecting blame to some employees who they say "misled the Select Committee in 2009."

Nonetheless, FOX News Corp. was not pleased with the finding that their boss was deemed "unfit to run a company.”

It called the characterization "unjustified and highly partisan," saying the committee's four conservative members dissented from the six-person majority on the basis they had not been asked to judge Murdoch's fitness to run a company.

Committee members agreed three of Murdoch's senior executives lied about the phone hacking, when the company insisted for years that it was confined to only one "rogue reporter."

The last time someone was found in contempt in England was back in 1957, when a British journalist was brought before the House of Commons and forced to apologize for an article lawmakers felt impugned their honor.

The committee called it "astonishing" Rupert Murdoch and his son took so long to discover the phone hacking went far beyond only one reporter.

That British reporter, Clive Goodman, was briefly jailed in 2007 for hacking into the cell phones of aides to the royal family.

Police say the cell phones of thousands of other people including celebrities, athletes, politicians, and even family members of fallen soldiers, may have been hacked by News of the World reporters in pursuit of sensational, tabloid headlines

The report stated, "Their instinct throughout, until it was too late, was to cover up rather than seek out wrongdoing and discipline the perpetrators."