Well, Rupert Murdoch has now made FOX “News” appear tame in his dealings in the UK. Employees of his tabloid paper, News of The World, hacked the mobile phones of celebrities, politicians and pretty much anyone else they wanted. A few of them got in trouble with the law back in 2007 when this was revealed, but thanks to The Guardian’s reporting, Murdoch “settled in court” with some of the victims: In other words, paid them a total of about 1 Million Pounds and told them to shut up. Well, so much for that… Absolutely Rupert Murdoch is a son-of-a-bitch and should be banned from holding a license to practice business. It is going to be hard for his evil stepson Papa Bear O’Reilly to deny this one, using such trumped up sludge as free speech. As if he’d know…

Here is a summary of the reporting, but The Guardian has extensive coverage of this issue, so explore its site further if you’re interested.

Frontline’s long-awaited report on international bribery and corruption finally aired last night and did not disappoint. I have been writing about this investigative report for months now in anticipation of the finished product. Lowell Bergman goes into great detail to show how an agreement between the British and Saudi governments for fighter jets became a gift from Allah, so to speak, for the Saudi royal family, among many others. Investigators have tracked money from BAE Systems in the UK to Washington, the British Virgin Islands, Switzerland and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

The allegations are not trivial and were enough for Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan to threaten to end cooperation in terrorism investigations if the original British investigation into the deal continued. The British government complied and Tony Blair ended the investigation. However, we will have to wait and see whether the FBI will be forced to end its investigation as well, due to BAE System’s critical participation in US defense and American jobs. Prince Bandar is a longtime friend of the Bush family, Clinton’s and Carters, so with the new administration perhaps this investigation has wings. As one of the original French prosecutors involved in the creation of the international anti-bribery laws said, we are good at prosecuting low level and mid level corruption but only by accident are we able to successfully investigate and prosecute high level corruption and bribery cases.

Investigations involving major international defense contractors employing 10’s of thousands of jobs (in the US alone), the leading family of the largest oil distributing country in the world (not to mention the good personal friends of every US President since and including Carter) and government officials of some of the largest economies in the world do not play themselves out easily. The political will needed to allow such an investigation to see its way through is more than I can imagine. The US Justice Department didn’t have the political will to be able to fully investigate the 2000 presidential election, so I’m skeptical to say the least that this will see the light of day. However, the FBI must try, even though Prince Bandar is being legally represented by former FBI Director Louis Freeh. I know!! What better way to beat a charge than hire the investigative body’s former head as your attorney! The video is embedded below, however please go to Frontline’s website to continue reading and watching this tremendous job of reporting by journalists from all over the world.

A lot has been written in the blogosphere about David Simon’s recent comments about the future of newspapers. Simon, the creator of the outstanding television shows The Wire and Generation Kill, is not shy about his beliefs and I can’t blame him. If I spent 13 years on the streets of Baltimore as a cops reporter I might be just as cynical and jaded… However, some of what he says holds merit, even if I don’t agree with his vision of how newspapers should charge for content. (Actually, I’m not necessarily against newspapers charging for content, I just don’t believe it will happen in a million years and that it will destroy the industry in the process if the model is attempted.)

Most of what has been written lately (and hence the predominant blog discussion) surrounds of the future of news and newspapers, but I absolutely love what he said in a recent interview with The Guardian about what newspapers have become; more of a look into the recent past and present. Here is my favorite quote from the full interview (which can be found here).

“The way Simon sees it, The Wire and Generation Kill are, above all else, an exercise in reporting: the pulling back of the curtain on the real America that should have been undertaken by newspapers, transposed instead into the multimillion-dollar world of TV drama. “It’s fiction, I’m clear about that. But at its heart it’s journalistic.” Newspapers, he says, launching into a new tirade, “have been obsessed with what they called ‘impact journalism’ – take a bite-sized morsel of a problem, make a big noise, win a Pulitzer. It was bullshit! But it was the only thing they knew. But what America needed in the last two decades was not ‘impact journalism’. What they needed was somebody explaining what the fuck was happening to the country.” The phrase he uses to describe the role newspapers should have been playing is also, you can’t help feeling, one Simon would like to see as his own epitaph: “A counterweight to bullshit.”"

It seems that lately we’ve been bringing up Glenn Greenwald’s name quite a bit, and often in a positive light; today is no exception. Yesterday, Greenwald interviewed Georgetown professor of international studies and expert on former Soviet republics and Eastern Europe, Charles King. In yesterday’s Christian Science Monitor, King wrote an op-ed piece entitled, “Russo-Georgian conflict is not all Russia’s fault” and goes into greater depth than any other media outlets we have yet seen, discussing the real subject and issues behind the recent conflict between Russian and Georgian forces. Greenwald and King bring up a number of good points and the discussion is worthwhile to read or listen to (available both as a podcast and transcript on Salon.com), but one point in particular which has yet to get greater coverage in the mainstream media is the US’ true capability in helping to alleviate this growing crisis. As The Guardian reported Bush as saying this morning,

““Russia has invaded a sovereign neighboring state and threatens a democratic government elected by its people. Such an action is unacceptable in the 21st century,” Bush said.”

Despite Bush’s short-term memory on what is acceptable or unacceptable in his eyes, it is not as if the US military has the capability of doing anything, already being stretched thin in two countries, but King asks that everyone take a deeper breath,

“American and European diplomats, who have rushed to the region to try to stop the conflict, would do well to consider the broader effects of this latest round of Caucasus bloodletting – and to seek perspectives on the conflict beyond the story of embattled democracy and cynical comparisons with the Prague Spring of 1968.”