Murdoch and The Bard

LONDON — We stood with all the other tourists this morning with our two youngest kids high on our shoulders to see the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace.

And then we walked along the Thames past the jugglers and the clowns and the mimes and musicians and made our way to Shakespeare’s Globe Theater where we had the cheap standing tickets for the matinee of ‘“Much Ado About Nothing.’” 

Our four boys enjoyed the comedy and didn’t seem to mind the rain trickling down in the open-air theater. A great London day.

But by far the best drama in this town was unfolding all afternoon in Westminster at the parliamentary committee hearings that brought “King” Rupert and “Prince” James Murdoch and their “Lady” Rebekah Brooks all up for questioning.

“Murdoch” the play, with all its plot twists and turns and its characters falling so precipitously from power is certainly worthy of the The Bard himself William Shakespeare. It beats all the royal choreography of the palace and the entertainment value of the street acts. It has all the bawdy dialogue of “Much Ado” and the pathos of “Macbeth.”

But hard to say whether the stage version of “Murdoch” is a tragedy or a comedy.

The hacking of a murdered young girl’s phone messages is so dark and fiendish that it could only be written into a tragedy. The death of the whistleblower, still under investigation, is certainly tragic. The seriousness of its impact in forcing the resignation of the Metropolitan Police commissioner, Sir Paul Stephenson, and the damage the pay-for-information scandal has taken on New Scotland Yard is the stuff of tragedy as well.

But hearing Brooks, chief executive of News International and former editor of The Sun, say with a straight face that “a newsroom is always about trust” was certainly laughable. You just couldn’t help snickering as she flicked her wild mane of red hair and told the committee, “We have a very robust and diverse press in this country and I think that freedom should endure.”

Murdoch’s Sun and News of the World have shredded the standards of journalism that we hold high in America and created a tabloid culture that the British press has over many decades come to tolerate as just part of the British climate, like the rain and the fog.

Having lived in London for nearly five years, I read the British papers closely then and still keep up with them now. I have dear friends who work for the best of these institutions such as the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph, and they would often tease American journalists for taking themselves too seriously. They have patiently — and sometimes impatiently — explained to me that both the high and low approaches of British newspapering were part of a feisty press corps that served the United Kingdom better than America’s stodgy and financially troubled broadsheets.

And some of the time I have agreed with them. The American newspaper culture certainly can be a bit too priestly and there is no question that America’s great newspapers are financially struggling in part because they allowed themselves to become irrelevant. They’ve lost their edge in a lot of ways.

But the enduring truth here is that Murdoch’s tabloid style of journalism — which has made him so much money — changed the culture of news gathering. And that is true on both sides of the pond where Murdoch’s media empire operates. The crassness they bring to the craft have cheapened the process of news gathering. The short cuts they have taken to get the scoop are now alleged to have crossed into criminality.

And now all of that culture — form the floors of Fleet Street to the heights of British power  has come home to roost in a big way.

This scandal is white hot and it shows no sign of letting up. But as to the question of whether it is more tragedy or comedy? Well that was answered in one act of “Murdoch” the play, as it unfolded Tuesday at Westminster.

And that was the moment when a comedian stood up inside the gallery of the hearing room and rushed to the bench and threw a shaving cream pie at the aging media tycoon. As they might say in the splashy headlines of The Sun, “GOTCHA!”