The second, much longer clip, of Amy Goodman talking to Guardian journo Nick Davies, was I thought, quite enlightening, certainly interesting.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Media mogul Rupert Murdoch returned to the United States on Wednesday as his media empire is facing a growing number of challenges across the globe. Here in the United States, Democratic Senator Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey urged the Justice Department and the FBI on Wednesday to investigate whether a U.S.-based subsidiary of News Corp. illegally wiretapped U.S. citizens. It’s been alleged that employees of a Murdoch-owned advertising company hacked into the website of a competitor called Floorgraphics 11 times between 2003 and 2004.
Meanwhile, Murdoch faces at least two shareholder lawsuits in the United States. The independent directors on the board of News Corp. have hired former U.S. attorney general Michael Mukasey and former U.S. attorney Mary Jo White. News Corp. has also hired a prominent attorney in the United States specializing in the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Democracy Now
AMY GOODMAN: Our guest, now joining us from the newsroom of The Guardian, is the reporter who has broken the media Murdoch—the Murdoch media scandal wide open. He is Nick Davies, award-winning investigative journalist at The Guardian in London.
Nick Davies, welcome to Democracy Now! Well, did you ever think that the—though you’ve been covering this for quite some time, that your report on the hacking of the murder victim Milly Dowler’s voicemail by the News of the World would shake the Murdoch empire to the extent that it has?
NICK DAVIES: No. So, I’ve been working on this thing for three years, very slowly parceling out the truth. I mean, I think I’ve done 75 stories on it. But the Milly Dowler story was fantastically powerful. I mean, I knew when I filed it that it was the most powerful story we had done so far. But I never foresaw this extraordinary chain reaction of emotion, which just pummeled the entire Murdoch camp. And really very rapidly, within three days, it reached a point where nobody could be seen to be Murdoch’s ally anymore. And that’s a really, really extraordinary thing in this country, because for years the opposite has been the case, that nobody could be seen to be Murdoch’s enemy. It’s kind of like having a bully in the school playground. And once the bully has beaten up a few people, everybody else in the playground recognizes that the bully is there. The bully doesn’t even have to do anything particularly serious. All the other kids tiptoe around. And that means governments and police forces and other newspapers have all been tiptoeing around Murdoch, frightened to say anything against him. And this one story about this 13-year-old girl, at the end of this long sequence of stories, just broke through and changed the whole dynamic. Democracy Now
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