I was reading a newspaper item yesterday about the negotiations between the basketball league and the players and came across this passage:

The union believes the league’s proposals to increase luxury tax penalties, and eliminate or reduce some spending options, essentially would prevent the biggest-spending teams from being free agent options. A “repeater tax” would further punish teams that were taxpayers a fourth time in a five-year span, and players fear the penalty that awaits teams who receive money from the tax pool but suddenly take on salary and go into the tax would discourage spending.

When I read it in our local paper, I thought that maybe the typesetting software had got messed up and inserted some random words but the identical passage was on the website of a different newspaper. Can anyone make any sense of it?

It is not as if the earlier parts of the article set the foundation for understanding it. Apart from the incomprehensible content, it seems to violate rules of grammar.

Reading the Sunday papers was really quick today. I skipped over all the articles that had anything to do with 9/11, which resulted in almost the entire front and the forum sections being eliminated, along with good chunks of the others. Even the comic section, my favorite, took less time because some of them took the occasion to voice some sappy sentiment.

I was interested in seeing how the paper would deal with the first game of the football season for our team but in this one area, they did not let the anniversary get in the way and produced a full sports section and a supplement on the coming season.

The paper may wallow in manufactured grief but it has its priorities. Nothing gets in the way of football.

The inanity of our national media has become impossible to parody.

People will do the weirdest things for reality TV.

The people involved in the Murdoch phone hacking scandal keep falling faster and harder and, as is often the case in such situations, are turning on each other.

• As I expected, the head of Scotland Yard Sir Paul Stephenson has resigned because of charges that he accepted gifts from Murdoch’s cronies and did not aggressively pursue the hacking case. In his resignation letter he aimed a parting shot at prime minister David Cameron’s close association with former News of the World editor Andy Coulson. Cameron has hit back.
• The assistant commissioner of Scotland Yard David Yates, who had effectively shut down the original investigation into the hacking claims, has also resigned.
• Stephenson and Yates and other senior Scotland Yard officers are to be the subjects of yet another inquiry.
• One of the other senior police officers to be investigated is another former assistant commissioner Andy Hayman who led the original phone hacking investigation in 2006 and later became a columnist for Murdoch’s The Times, another example of the incestuous relationship between the police and News Corp.
• Sean Hoare, a former News of the World employee who first blew the whistle about rampant phone hacking at that paper and alleged that Andy Coulson, former editor of News of the World and later a close aide and confidante to David Cameron, knew about it all along, has been found dead at his home.
• News International’s former head Rebekah Brooks has been arrested and is out on bail but will apparently still appear with Rupert and James Murdoch before a parliamentary committee on Tuesday.
• Prime minister David Cameron has cut short a trip to Africa to return home to help plan the judicial inquiry that he was forced to initiate into the phone hacking.
• Cameron also said that parliament, which had been due to go on a six-week recess at the end of Tuesday, will likely now come back on Wednesday to debate the scandal.
• Now in major damage control mode, News Corp has initiated its own internal inquiry into what happened at the News of the World. This is one inquiry we can probably safely ignore.
• Murdoch is ‘lawyering up’ with some heavy hitters in the US, following reports that the FBI has opened an investigation. The hacking of actor Jude Law’s phone in the US could be a key issue but merely the one that gets the ball rolling. As Felix Salmon points out, there are plenty of other odious News Corp practices in the US that will emerge once the spotlight is turned on them.
• What is going to really hurt Murdoch is that the stock price of News Corp is sliding globally. Ultimately this is what he really cares about since a low price makes him vulnerable to shareholder anger and the possible ouster of him and his family members.

Things are moving really fast.

The loyalists surrounding Rupert Murdoch are getting picked off one by one. Rebekah Brooks, head of his British operations News International, has resigned. It was thought that she and Murdoch sacrificed 168-year old The News of the World, the paper at the center of the scandal, to save her own skin, shutting down the profitable paper and throwing all its employees out of work in the hope that it would quell the scandal. That did not work.

The biggest casualty so far is Les Hinton, Murdoch’s long time right hand man who has worked for him for 52 years and who has also resigned as Chief Executive Officer of News Corp’s Dow Jones, the parent company of the Wall Street Journal. Hinton and Brooks say they were ignorant of the illegal activities that were going on all around them but that is not credible and both of them are so close to the Murdoch father and son team that it is hard to believe that the latter two did not know too. Murdoch can probably buy the silence of these loyalists until such time as they are staring serious prison time in the face.

Hinton, seen as Murdoch’s consiglieri, seems the most vulnerable since he seems to have lied to a British parliamentary inquiry, claiming that a thorough internal investigation into the hacking scandal that he ran while head of News International showed that the phone hacking was done by a single reporter gone rogue, an assertion now seen as laughably false. The departure of Hinton and Brooks now puts son James Murdoch in the crosshairs. Brooks and the two Murdochs are due to testify on Tuesday where I expect them to make groveling apologies along with stout denials that they were aware of what was going on. This is of course highly implausible, given that they all seem to be control freaks working closely.

Jonathan Freedland describes in detail the power that Murdoch exercised over the British political structure. Its extent shocked even someone as cynical as me who has long been aware of the collusion of government, media, and business. It seemed like Murdoch has almost all of the big players (David Cameron, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown) in his pocket, obsequiously toadying to him even as his papers occasionally revealed unpleasant things about them.

What may be the final straw is that the corruption extended well into the police, which tends to bother people more than political corruption. As Freedland writes:

What has shocked more deeply is the extent to which the police force and News International had become intertwined: the wining and dining, the top brass of both organisations apparently separated by a revolving door: ex-cop Andy Hayman moving to NI, ex-editor Neil Wallis moving to Scotland Yard. No wonder the Met was so lethargic in investigating hacking: why look too deeply into the affairs of people who represent either a meal ticket or a future paycheck?

The bribing of police to get information seems to be well established but now The Guardian newspaper (and its reporter Nick Davies), which has been terrier-like in its dogged coverage of the story and breaking scoop after scoop, has revealed that the Metropolitan police commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson tried to get the paper to back off on the Murdoch story by saying that it had information that its coverage was “exaggerated and incorrect”, while at the same time not informing them that they had hired a senior The News of the World executive Neil Wallis as an advisor. Wallis has also now been arrested. My hope is that the Stephenson also gets fired (and investigated and even arrested) and a new untainted person brought in who will try and repair the image of the police by doing a full investigation.

Now that Murdoch seems weakened, those who formerly were cowed by him are now speaking out more openly, especially in parliament, and The Independent gives a preview of what to expect at the inquiry on Tuesday.

Murdoch has gone into full damage control mode, apologizing to everyone he can get to, including the family of Milly Dowler, and inserting a big apology advertisement in all the British newspapers today, blaming it all on a single newspaper when the corruption seems to have spread to others within the Murdoch empire with actor Jude Law suing The Sun for hacking his phone. But people who condone the tapping of the phone mails of dead schoolchildren are not the kind of people who feel shame and remorse, and this merely seems like the latest attempt to stem the furor.

The pernicious influence of Murdoch on the media and political landscape is captured by Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie in a parody of It’s a Wonderful Life. (Thanks to reader Norm.)

It should be noted that the Fry and Laurie comedy show ran around 1990. Things have got much worse since then.

Rupert Murdoch and his son James have agreed to appear before a British parliamentary committee next Tuesday to answer questions about the phone hacking and bribery scandal, after initially saying they were unavailable. Also appearing will be Rebekah Brooks, the chief executive of News International, the parent company of Murdoch’s operations in England and former editor of the News of the World. Everyone seems to think she is the key to these practices and are calling for her head but Murdoch seems to be willing to protect her at great cost. It will be interesting to see what price he is willing to pay to save her or buy her silence.

Meanwhile Neil Wallis, another former editor of the News of the World, has been arrested, making nine arrests in all so far in this case.

Interestingly the smarmy Pier Morgan, the replacement for Larry King on CNN, was also a former editor of the News of the World. What is it about that paper that such odious people get to be the head of it?

Although a comedy show, The Daily Show is very effective in pushing news items into mainstream discourse. The latest Nielsen report for May shows that its ratings, along with that of The Colbert Report, are soaring while that of Fox News is slumping. What is worse for Fox is that Stewart is beating them handily in the much coveted 18-49 year old demographic, while the average age of a Fox viewer is 65, which is even older than that of the Golf Channel. This is a double whammy for Fox in that not only is its present audience dying off faster than its rivals, but the younger generation is being tutored in how Fox News manipulates the news and are unlikely to become its future audience even when they become old.

Fox News‘s hysterical propaganda shtick makes it an easy target for a comedian and so it should be no surprise that it is a frequent (but not exclusive) target of The Daily Show‘s barbs against the media. While Stewart does not disguise his contempt for the Fox‘s third-raters that use up most of Fox‘s air time (Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Greta Van Susteren, and their incredibly ignorant and vapid morning trio), there used to be a kind of respectful teasing relationship between Bill O’Reilly, Chris Wallace, and Bret Baier of Fox News and Stewart.

Now that the latest rating are out, that is likely to change. Be prepared for Fox to mount an even greater full-court attack on Stewart in an effort to counter his show’s growing influence. What they did recently gives a taste of what to expect, except that I expect it to become even more hysterical, since that is Fox‘s standard operating procedure.

I have said repeatedly that you should be very wary of picking a fight with a stand-up comedian (a breed of people of whom the good ones know how to think on their feet and respond effectively and ruthlessly with hecklers), especially one who has a large staff of writers at his back and his own highly rated TV show. Below is the kind of thing that Fox News can expect if they up the ante.

If Fox does decide to pursue this, it will be a stupid strategy and they will lose because satirical political humor of The Daily Show variety is always more fun to watch than the bluster of a Fox. Even those media commentators moderately sympathetic to Fox News‘s ideology will find themselves laughing along The Daily Show‘s audience.

There is a way for Fox to recover and that is to become a real news network and stop being a propaganda outlet that is almost cartoonish in its style of message delivery that only appeals to the true believers. But that is unlikely to happen unless the Murdoch scandal really blows up in the US and results in the network being sold to a new owner who brings in new management with a new outlook.

The Guardian, which has been relentless in covering the Murdoch story, reports on the first call by a senior US political figure to investigate if Murdoch’s minions have been engaging in similar practices over here.

Senate commerce committee chairman Jay Rockefeller has asked the authorities to investigate if any journalists working for Rupert Murdoch had targeted US citizens, and warned of “serious consequences” for the media group if that were the case.
…
In a written statement, Rockefeller expressed concern that victims of 9/11 and their families could have been targeted by News Corporation journalists, although he did not offer any evidence to suggest that may be the case.

Meanwhile, on The Daily Show, John Oliver comforts Jon Stewart that however messed up the US political system is, it is even worse in England, and he points to all the appalling features of the Murdoch scandal as evidence.

Once the The Daily Show takes on an issue, as it is likely to do with this story, it tends to get into the mainstream.

It looks like the Murdoch scandal is well and truly here.

The Murdoch story now seems to have arrived in the US with NPR giving regular updates and even my local newspaper the Plain Dealer running a long article today.

The Murdoch scandal has taught me a new, and somewhat ugly, word ‘blagging’. It apparently refers to the act of getting information by trickery or deception. In the case of former British prime minister Gordon Brown, people employed by Murdoch’s News International apparently pretended to be him to obtain his financial records.

Les Hinton, one of the key executives of Murdoch’s UK operations during the phone hacking and blagging periods, now heads the US outfit that runs the Wall Street Journal. Hinton may be charged with lying to the British parliament and it will be interesting to see if any investigations get started here, especially since the UK scandal has spread beyond the tabloids News of the World and The Sun and implicated the so-called ‘respectable’ broadsheets The Times and the Sunday Times, indicating that the corruption had spread pretty far and was not due to some rogue operatives at a single low-brow scandal sheet.

Murdoch is so powerful that current UK prime minister David Cameron and former prime minister Tony Blair both toady to him (Tony Blair was an all-round toady so this is not surprising) and may still wriggle out of it. But until he does, I must say that I am enjoying the spectacle of a net tightening around him and his cronies.