How Murdoch’s Empire Suffocates the Craft of Journalism

 With guilty pleasure, the mainstream media have been serving us a virtual buffet of reasons to despise Rupert Murdoch's evil media empire. Amid this fetid mess, however, it shouldn't be forgotten that beneath every media mogul, however rotten, is an enterprise of real people—a culture of workers who represent the embattled and tragic state of journalism today.

The ethical breaches at issue clearly reflect top-to-bottom corruption. Yet more importantly, the underlying criminality lies in a vulgar laissez faire corporate culture in which honesty and critical thought are dismissed as an impediment to commercial success.

The alleged hacking and bribery are just extreme symptoms of an ailment metastasizing throughout the media. Listen to the former employees who talked to Reuters about News Corp's inner sanctum, directly linking the cutthroat newsroom climate with the wholesale abandonment of ethics:

A fifth former News International employee who worked with News Of the World journalists at this time said its reporters were under "unbelievable, phenomenal pressure," treated harshly by bosses who would shout abuse in their faces and keep a running total of their bylines. Journalists were driven by a terror of failing. If they didn't regularly get stories, they feared, they would be fired. That meant they competed ruthlessly with each other....

Reporters say they lived in constant fear of byline counts which weeded out those who had filed the fewest stories. "They were always seeking to get rid of people because it was a burn-out job. Their ideal situation was you work your nuts off for six months and they let you work there another six months," said the general news reporter.

"Every minute you spent there you felt that your employer hated you.”

Even more disturbing is the acknowledgment that “Eavesdropping on voicemail or obtaining call logs was initially a money-saving measure” to get the scoop fast and cheap. That is, pressure to maximize profits contributed directly to the corruption of reporting practices.

Media commentator George Snell takes a wide angle on this do-or-die mentality:

The pressure on journalists these days is tremendous.  The industry is still reeling from the Great Media Collapse in 2008-09 where more than 30,000 journalists were axed.  The industry continues to shrink with more than 2,800 lay-offs last year and more than a thousand job cuts so far this year, according to the newspaper lay-off tracker service Paper Cuts.

This means fewer journalists – with less experience – doing more work.

Technology, especially on the web, has increased deadline pressure to outrageous extremes.  Forget daily deadlines or even hourly ones – news is breaking each and every second of the 86,400 seconds in every day.

Snell concludes with a tough question: “With all of these factors putting additional pressure on traditional journalists is it any wonder that some of them are relying on underhanded and unethical practices? Is the News of the World scandal an anomaly or is it a harbinger of a new era of yellow journalism?”

In the age of copy-paste punditry, despite the rise of citizen journalism and other progressive media movements, professional ethics and quality seem increasingly in short supply, in part because the workforce itself is disintegrating at the hands of a few conglomerates.

This is not a new story at Fortress Murdoch, of course: Back in the 1980s, the tabloid magnate outraged British print unions by shifting operations to a non-union plant in Wapping, East London, setting off a brutal labor dispute. Journalist Ian Griffiths recounted in a 2006 Observer article: