Another Black Eye for Rupert

Rupert Murdoch's NewsCorp is at it again. A story published in The Guardian reveals that The Wall Street Journal in Europe has been selling papers for pennies apiece to companies in order to boost circulation figures. The papers are supposed to be distributed free to university students, but it's not clear that anyone really reads them. The papers constituted 41% of the Jouranal's circulation in Europe.

In essence, the Journal has been defrauding advertisers by claiming much higher circulation than they actually have. One would also assume that advertisers expect that business executives who make purchasing and business decisions are reading the Journal, not college freshmen using it to line their pet iguana's cage.

But it gets worse.

When one of the companies, ELP, complained that they weren't getting enough return for the money they were paying for the papers the Journal would also:

give ELP free advertising and, in exchange, the ELP would produce "leadership videos" for them; they would jointly organise more seminars and workshops on themes connected to ELP's work; but, crucially, [Andrew] Langhoff [the publisher of WSJ Europe] agreed that the Journal would publish "a minimum of three special reports" that would be based on surveys of the European market which ELP would run with the Journal's help.

But ELP still wasn't satisfied, so the Journal made a deal to funnel money back to ELP through third parties:

An email from Andrew Langhoff on 26 November 2010 includes a diagram that indicates money was channelled to ELP through two other middlemen. This suggests that Langhoff wanted €15,000 sent to ELP via a Belgian company called Think Media, which sells space on billboards. An invoice dated 2 December 2010, shows that ELP invoiced Think Media for €15,000. An email from 20 December shows that Think Media had paid the €15,000 to ELP. In a series of phone calls and emails to Think Media, the Guardian put it to the company that ELP had provided no goods or services in exchange for this payment, and that the payment was made at the request of the Journal. Think Media declined to respond.

A whistleblower reported the scam last year to Les Hinton at NewsCorp's headquarters in New York, but no action was taken and the whistleblower was dismissed ("made redundant" in The Guardian's quaint British parlance).

Nothing happened until the Journal got wind of the Guardian's investigation of the deals, which "caused a panic" and resulted in the resignation of Andrew Langhoff on Tuesday.

Rupert Murdoch's NewsCorp is a corrupt organization. Its News of the World subsidiary hacked the voice mails of celebrities, terrorist victims and murdered girls. They bought the silence of former employees. They bribed cops. They bribed employees of other newspapers to steal their scoops. NewsCorp News America subsidiary is under investigation for computer hacking and predatory and anticompetitive practices. Fox News execs routinely require reporters to slant their stories to toe the Republican Party line, especially on politics and climate science. Fox is also fighting the FCC over its indecent programming standards. But what can you expect from a company run by a man who became an American just so he could own US TV stations?

When Rupert Murdoch went after the Wall Street Journal I was expecting this kind of thing. He's brought the British tabloid mentality to the Fox TV network, the Wall Street Journal and Fox News. NewsCorp is a giant multinational corporation that thinks it's above the law, ethics, and morality.