Business

In my biography of Rupert Murdoch, I referred to News Corporation as Mafia-like, provoking the annoyance of my publisher’s libel lawyers. I explained to them that I did not mean to suggest this was an organized crime family, but instead was using mafia as a metaphor to imply that News Corp saw itself as a state within a state, and that the company was built on a basic notion of extended family bonds and loyalty.

But just because it’s a metaphor doesn’t mean it isn’t the real thing, too.

Well-sourced information coming out of the Department of Justice and the FBI suggests a debate is going on that could result in the recently launched investigations of News Corp falling under the RICO statutes.

RICO, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, establishes a way to prosecute the leaders of organisations — and strike at the organisations themselves — for crimes company leaders may not have directly committed, but which were otherwise countenanced by the organisation. Any two of a series of crimes that can be proven to have occurred within a 10-year period by members of the organisation can establish a pattern of racketeering and result in draconian remedies. In 1990, following the indictment of Michael Milken for insider trading, Drexel Burnham Lambert, the firm that employed him, collapsed in the face of a RICO investigation.

Among the areas that the FBI is said to be looking at in its investigation of News Corp are charges that one of its subsidiaries, News America Marketing, illegally hacked the computer system of a competitor, Floorgraphics, and then, using the information it had gleaned, tried to extort it into selling out to News Corp; allegations that relationships the New York Post has maintained with New York City police officers may have involved exchanges of favours and possibly money for information; and accusations that Fox chief Roger Ailes sought to have an executive in the company, the book publisher Judith Regan, lie to investigators about details of her relationship with New York police commissioner Bernie Kerik in order to protect the political interests of Rudy Giuliani, then a presidential prospect — via redwolf.newsvine.com

The former Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) Lord Macdonald was warned by his own employees as far back as 2006 that there were a vast array of News of the World phone-hacking victims.

Lord Macdonald, who has since been hired by the newspaper’s owner, Rupert Murdoch, was sent a memo nearly six months before the reporter Clive Goodman and the private investigator Glenn Mulcaire were convicted, revealing that the charges they were facing related to just a fraction of the potential victims.

However, the hacking investigation was never widened despite pressure on the police and Lord Macdonald, the head of the Crown Prosecution Service at the time, to do so — via redwolf.newsvine.com

The University of Calgary will soon be ending their partnership with Access Copyright.

For the past 15 years the U of C has had a license with Access Copyright — a copyright collective that ensures universities have licenses to use and distribute copyrighted works while giving the authors and publishers fair compensation for their works.

The current agreement between the U of C and the copyright collective has been called intrusive by U of C’s copyright officer Wendy Stephens.

As of 1 September 2011 the U of C will start to manage their own copyright permissions.

This change will affect both students and staff at the university — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Press lord Rupert Murdoch isn’t accused of doing anything some of his notorious forebears wouldn’t have attempted given the technology. You supply the pictures and I’ll supply the war, William Randolph Hearst is said to have instructed his Cuba correspondents as he ginned up circulation on the eve of the Spanish-American War. The hacking and cover-up are bad, but what makes them worse, dangerous for democratic societies, is that Murdoch sits atop an era of media consolidation that results in fewer voices, less real journalism and, as with so much else in the economy, less competition.

Murdoch’s News Corp controls major newspapers in the United States and United Kingdom, such as The Wall Street Journal and The Times of London. It owns the publishing giant HarperCollins. And it owns Fox News. His agenda is far to the right, especially evidenced on Fox with its partisan coverage and disregard for factual reporting. But News Corp has even slanted The Journal, one of the most respected names in journalism — via redwolf.newsvine.com

In response to the phone-hacking scandal that engulfed News Corp’s News of the World, founder Rupert Murdoch said his media empire would have a new code of ethics. It could help — if managers are serious about enforcing the rules, media experts say — via redwolf.newsvine.com

There will be no storybook ending for Borders. The 40-year-old book seller could start shuttering its 399 remaining stores as early as Friday.

The Ann Arbor, Mich.-based chain, which helped pioneer the big-box bookseller concept, is seeking court approval to sell off its assets after it failed to receive any bids that would keep it in business. The move adds Borders to the list of retailers that have failed to adapt to changing consumers’ shopping habits and survive the economic downturn, including Circuit City Stores Inc., Blockbuster and Linens ‘N Things — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation has paid about $655 million ($A617 million) to make embarrassing charges of corporate espionage and anticompetitive behaviour go away.

It spent $500 million just days before a case against News America Marketing, its obscure but profitable in-store and newspaper insert marketing business, went to trial. Valassis Communications, had already won a $300 million verdict in Michigan, but dropped the lawsuit in 2010 in exchange for $500 million and an agreement to cooperate on certain ventures.

That single payout to Valassis represented one-fifth of the company’s net income that year and matched the earnings of the entire newspaper and information division of which News America was a part — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Like, I suspect, many journalists in Australia, I spent last night on the sofa.

(I did briefly retreat to bed but after ABC News Radio took an urgent pontification break and missed the moment when Rupert Murdoch was attacked, I was back out of bed to watch it on TV.)

It’s just the latest in a fortnight when anybody interested in the media has had to check the news just before going to bed, and as soon as they wake up. The more obsessive among us have also been sleeping with the radio on.

There has never been a more dramatic moment in the history of global media — via redwolf.newsvine.com