By Kevin McCauley
The Wall Street Journal today ripped the British parliamentary panel deeming News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch “not a fit person” to run a multinational company as a partisan political attack that threatens the existence of a vigorous free press.
“Even a fair-minded, nonpartisan political inquiry into who can or cannot own a printing press or broadcast license is bound to have a chilling effect on media coverage of government. The potential for political intimidation is great,” noted the lead editorial of the WSJ, which is owned by News Corp.
The Journal imagined the media uproar if the U.S. Congress “decided to opine on the fitness of Carlos Slim, the controversial Mexican billionaire-monopolist to invest in the New York Times. The media denunciations of the politicians would be loud and deserved.”
The paper concedes the hacking scandal that resulted in the News of the World shutdown is a serious matter that requires a thorough criminal investigation, “especially for a media company that can’t succeed without the daily trust of its readers and viewers.”
News Corp. “has paid a fearsome price in damage to its reputation” and anyone who works there “must clean up our mistakes and messes as rapidly and as transparently as possible,” said the editorial.
The Journal doesn’t know how the hacking scandal will play out, “but the last outcome anyone should want is that it becomes a pretext for the political class in the U.K., or the U.S. to decide who is fit or unfit to cover the political class.”
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