Murdoch scandal: How are his big US media outlets covering it?

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Indeed, for about a week now, the head of the scandal-besieged News Corp. has tried to send a more contrite message. But while his response seems to have shifted in Britain, the memo appears to be having a bumpy ride across the Atlantic to his flagship US holdings.

The Wall Street Journal, owned by Mr. Murdoch since 2007, ran a lead editorial on Monday that media analysts have characterized as a mixture of defiance, deflection, and denial. The editorial reads in part: “It is up to British authorities to enforce their laws.”

RECOMMENDED: Key people to watch as News of the World scandal unfolds

Later on it says, “We also trust that readers can see through the commercial and ideological motives of our competitor-critics. The Schadenfreude is so thick you can't cut it with a chainsaw.”

Meanwhile, Fox News, another News Corp. media outlet, has served up more than 90 segments on the Murdoch scandal, which centers on phone hacking at the now-defunct News of the World, a British tabloid also among the News Corp. holdings. Yet some media critics, including James Fallows of The Atlantic magazine, have found fault with Fox News’s coverage.

In an online article Saturday, Mr. Fallows pointed to a July 15 segment on “Fox & Friends” that lumped two computer hackings, targeting the Pentagon and Citibank, together with the phone hacking done by News of the World. Bob Dilenschneider, a guest on the show and public relations expert, said, “Citigroup and Bank of America – are they getting the same kind of attention for hacking that happened less than a year ago that News Corp. is getting today?”

Fallows writes: “I submit that this could not happen at any other news organization. Rather, it could not happen at a news organization. It happened at the agitprop operation known as Fox News.”

The New York Post, another key News Corp. holding in the United States, has offered a half dozen or so short stories on the phone-hacking scandal in the past two weeks. As of Monday morning, The New York Times, which is not affiliated with News Corp., had published about 100 pieces on the scandal. The Wall Street Journal had published 35.

“This is about the future of the fourth estate,” says Richard Levick, president of Levick Strategic Communications in Washington – whether the public has lost faith in the media and whether journalism will take the lead in demanding the highest standards possible. “We have The Wall Street Journal interviewing its own corporate boss [Murdoch], saying that he has handled the crisis well, with no rebuttals,” he says.

“It’s embarrassing,” says Jeff Cohen, a journalism professor at Ithaca College in New York, referring to The Wall Street Journal’s editorial. Mr. Cohen, who was a paid commentator on Fox News for five years, says that just when that newspaper ought to take the lead in full transparency and self-reflection, “all they are doing is full damage control.”

The Wall Street Journal did not return requests for a response. Fox News also declined to comment, in particular on The Atlantic article by Fallows.

Circling the wagons is certainly understandable, says Jeff Rice, who is joining the writing, rhetoric, and digital-media faculty at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. “Markets do matter,” he says in an e-mail. “To pretend otherwise is not to be honest about journalism as a business.”

However, damage control without transparency will ultimately hurt all News Corp. products, says Leonard Steinhorn, director of the Public Communication Division at American University in Washington.

The Wall Street Journal is correct in saying that politicians should tread carefully in asking for investigations that possibly could abridge press freedoms, says Mr. Steinhorn, noting a further comment in the editorial. “But if the business side of a newspaper engages in influence peddling and buying off politicians and other forms of corruption,” he says via e-mail, alluding to what has been alleged in Britain, then it is “equally dangerous” if The Wall Street Journal were “to hide those practices behind a veil of press freedom simply to exonerate its corporate owner.”

However, late on Tuesday, Murdoch sent a letter to News Corp. employees that promises a future of accountability. His team has formed “an independent Management & Standards Committee, to determine new standards that will be clearly communicated,” the letter reads.

“[W]e will emerge a stronger company,” he adds. “It will take time for us to rebuild trust and confidence, but we are determined to live up to the expectations of our stockholders, customers, colleagues and partners. We are determined to put things right.”

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Ellen Gray: Murdoch scandal has all the elements of good drama

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SO MUCH television, so little time:

* Sunday's World Cup match between the U.S. women's team and Japan may have proved to ESPN that we Yanks will watch soccer - because 13.5 million Americans can't be wrong - but are we really ready for scandal, British-style?

The 24-hour news networks seemed to think so yesterday, providing wall-to-wall coverage of the testimony of a craftily clueless and occasionally cranky Rupert Murdoch and his smooth-as-silk son James before a House of Commons committee looking into the phone-hacking scandal that engulfed the now-closed British tabloid News of the World and may threaten Murdoch's media empire.

I'm not saying the Murdochs weren't good television (though I'm still trying to figure out why the best moment, when Wendi Deng sprang into action to defend her 80-year-old husband from a man with a pie, wasn't initially clear - Fox News seemed to have the best view of the attack - but by midafternoon was everywhere).

For the purpose, however, of the seemingly inevitable movie, the subsequent testimony of Rebekah Brooks was probably more useful.

Not so much for what she said, but because of how she said it.

And, let's face it, how she looked saying it.

Brooks, the 43-year-old former News of the World editor and News International chief executive who was arrested Sunday in connection with the phone-hacking scandal, is just the kind of character who'd render a movie about the scandal watchable, with a meteoric rise from humble beginnings followed by a terrible fall.

And the fact that she's an interesting-looking woman with an unruly mane of red hair doesn't actually hurt.

So for "Hacked" (or whatever they eventually call it), I propose Julianne Moore for Brooks and Michael "Dumbledore" Gambon for Rupert. Lucy Liu could probably handle Deng's moves (and vice versa).

But as for James Murdoch, any pretty boy in a suit who can stick to a script would probably do fine.

* I'm not sure who first decided that one of the big incentives - let's just call it a prize - on ABC's "Extreme Makeover: Weight-Loss Edition" (10 p.m. Mondays, 6ABC) should be skin-removal surgery, but it kind of makes me miss the days when people just went on TV to win cars or refrigerators.

OK, so maybe a fridge would send the wrong message, but what's the right message here? That someone who's upended his or her life to lose a tremendous amount of weight shouldn't expect to be physically acceptable until a surgeon's been involved?

Or that although many surgeons reportedly recommend waiting a year or two after reaching a goal weight before going under the knife, "Extreme Makeover," which this week featured a woman who'd lost more than 200 pounds in a single year, simply can't wait that long?

Or - and here's an idea - maybe losing more than a hundred pounds in a single year is too much change for anyone's body to properly absorb and what "Extreme Makeover" is doing is simply too extreme?

* In a move that would probably never fly on a network that depended on advertising dollars - and the 18- to 49-year-old viewers those dollars chase - HBO's decided to put Dick Cavett and Mel Brooks together onstage before a live audience and just let them - talk.

Actually, the pair, who've been discussing this on and off for decades, filmed the hourlong special last December. But I'm guessing that like the men doing the talking, the show's well-preserved.

"Mel Brooks and Dick Cavett Together Again" will premiere on HBO Sept. 9.

* HBO's not the only premium network going retro for a night.

As the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks approaches, Showtime's announced the Sept. 10 premiere of "The Love We Make."

A documentary from Albert Maysles ("Gimme Shelter," "Grey Gardens") and Bradley Kaplan, it follows Paul McCartney's "poignant and cathartic journey through the streets of New York City in the aftermath of the World Trade Center's destruction," according to Showtime, as well as chronicling the planning of the subsequent "Concert for New York City."

(McCartney was on a plane in New York, waiting to leave the U.S., when the World Trade Center was attacked.)

Oh, and if the focus on the former Beatle isn't retro enough, the film itself is in black and white, shot on the same 16 mm film Maysles employed in 1964 for "What's Happening! The Beatles in the U.S.A." *

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