Opinion
How Fox News missed a big opportunity
Rupert Murdoch had an opportunity to build something the country genuinely needed in the mid-1990s: an effective centre-right counterbalance to liberal major news media.
Bret StephensNew York | In the summer of 2011, Rupert Murdoch stopped by my small office at The Wall Street Journal, where I was a columnist and editor. He was just back from London, where he had given testimony to a parliamentary committee investigating the phone-hacking scandal by his British tabloids (and where he was attacked with a shaving-foam pie). The scandal ultimately resulted in the closure of News of the World, at one point one of the world’s biggest-selling English-language newspapers.
I don’t remember many specifics about the conversation – Murdoch loved to talk politics and policy with his journalists, sometimes by taking us to lunch at the Lamb’s Club in midtown Manhattan – but I do remember the gist of what he said about the fiasco: never put anything in an email. His private takeaway, it seemed, was not to require his companies to adhere to high ethical standards. It was to leave no trace that investigators might use for evidence against him, his family or his favourite lieutenants.
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