News just in today that News International ordered the deletion of boatloads of emails. Two weeks ago thereabouts I was supposed to go to a half-day long small business session at the Santa Fe Community College, but while talking to my pal David D’Arcy on the telephone from New York, he advised me that the James and Rupert Murdoch hearings were airing live on CNN.
“I missed Watergate,” he said, “but I’m sure this is just as good.”
While the news of our world – politicians posturing for the cameras and threatening to drive the country into credit default; the President having wholesale abandoned the progressives who elected him – has lately put the news of phone hacking and jacking the story by the News of the World slightly on the back burner, let’s really not forget (shall we?) that if James Murdoch did not know what his company was writing a check for 600,000 British pounds for, and if Rupert Murdoch claims rarely to talk to editors (while being avidly interested in politics), somebody is likely lying. And I would venture from the harried and harassed expression of intense anxiety on the face of Rebekah Brooks that it could not have failed to occur to her that if her superiors really were to be believed about what they did not know, she would certainly have had to know, and so on.
What is sorry about this entire situation is that there are actually journalists who still get the story the old-fashioned way, by following the leads, interviewing sources, and not making things up. As TV goes, the hearings in front of the media, sports and culture committee of Parliament reflected that their politicians appear a lot better prepared than ours to ask the tough questions, and to insist on the follow-up. I’m late posting this but just catching up on my own blog as adobeairstream has been absorbing most of my personal oxygen lately.
