Fox News announced this morning that President Obama had been assassinated. At least that is what appeared on the Fox News political Twitter feed, @Foxnewspolitics.
These particular tweets, reported by the BBC, are of course hoaxes perpetrated by hackers. But it took eight hours for Fox News to remove the tweets and issue an explanation.
As I wrote yesterday in a comment on a different topic, “I don’t trust Fox News”. In fact I don’t trust any news outlet, although the BBC is generally better than most. But one reason why I am especially wary of Fox News is that, as confirmed by Wikipedia, it is owned by News Corporation.
It is not just that News Corporation is pushing a particular conservative agenda worldwide – indeed they would probably be pleased to have Obama if not dead at least out of the way. But this corporation, or at least its subsidiaries, seem to have scant regard for ordinary morality or decency, or for the law, in the way that it pursues its goals.
This has been seen most clearly in the News of the World telephone tapping scandal here in the UK. Journalists at this News Corporation newspaper have been found guilty of illegal tapping, and investigations into wider scandals are continuing.
In the latest development reported today by the BBC (but not linked by them to the Obama tweet hacking), it has been alleged that the News of the World hacked into the mobile phone of a missing 13-year-old girl, who was later found murdered. They even deleted some voicemail messages, it is said, giving her family false hope that she was alive. Not only would this be a gross intrusion into a family’s grief, it would also seem to have interfered with the police investigation.
The editor of the News of the World at the time, Rebekah Brooks, is now chief executive of News International, “the main UK subsidiary of News Corporation” which owns the News of the World and three other newspapers, and is bidding for full control of the TV news channel Sky News.
The corporation which hacks other people’s telephone records can hardly complain when it falls victim to hackers itself.
Since I know that there is a war against Fox news by the rest of the media in this country, I am wary of accepting these reports at face value. Here, Fox news is blowing the doors off the other outlets, and that is because the public has learned that the so-called main-stream media is not to be trusted. Too many examples of tilt and distortion so obvious that even John Doe can see it.
Galveston, I too am wary of anything in the news media, as all have some kind of agenda. Certainly The Guardian is campaigning against its News International rivals like The Times. But I do trust the BBC to get basic facts right, not least because they are under government regulation and would soon get into trouble for deliberate lying. And, even if these latest allegations are baseless, those basic facts, taken from the latest BBC report, seem to include that:
1. Two News of the World journalists were jailed for phone hacking in 2007;
2. Five journalists have been arrested during the current investigation;
3. Five public figures are taking the newspaper to court for hacking, and five others have reached out of court settlements.
The BBC now reports that
I guess they still will try to blame low level journalists, but one of the journalists who was jailed is talking, very likely about what his bosses knew about and expected of him.