"Really, what Rupert Murdoch managed to do was break the civil compact of this country through achieving a degree of control over the essential institutions of a free society: the press, the police and the politicians."
Carl Bernstein, 29 Sept., 2011
ARE Canadian privacy laws keeping pace with the risks posed by intrusion-style technology? If not, what can be done to remedy that and how fast can we do it?
In his foreword to Dial M for Murdoch, Washington Post journalist Carl Bernstein encapsulated what authors Tom Watson and Martin Hickman called the "corruption of Britain" by an Anglo-Australian media baron.
In painful detail, the authors described how a man - loyal to no country - co-opted his son James and other enablers and ended up achieving what two world wars had not.
Together, the pair used the power of Rupert Murdoch's vast News Corporation - the tabloid News of the World, News Corp International, the Sun, News Corp Asia and others - to systematically destroy Britons' trust in the institutions that underpin their democracy.
The Watson-Hickman book is not an easy read. Peppered with British terminology and enough names and quotes to require frequent checks of the opening dramatis personae, the reader imagines the Murdochs had a wall-size white-board to keep track of the wrong-doers in their networks.
They used reporters and editors who had few scruples about hacking into mobile phones, land lines and computers. By their action, inaction or "willful blindness," no institution was immune to infiltration, conscription and/or outright corruption. The list is long: England's famed Scotland Yard;
London's Metropolitan Police and the Police Complaints Commission; lawyers and a series of British prime ministers, up to and including today's David Cameron. One way or another, all were compromised by News Corp fingers. Sickest of all, was the invasion of privacy unleashed on grief-stricken parents of missing children.
If there was a story to be had, News Corp wanted it and wanted it yesterday - literally - even if it had to be manufactured.
If you're asking why this true-crime style story is relevant to Canadians, here's why: We have an oxymoronic relationship with our democratic institutions.
We elect politicians to govern but, spoke out in anger in mid-July when Prime Minister Harper appeared set to compile a list of those his office considered enemies. Who were the enemies? According to National Post editorials that drew "comparisons with the Nixon administration and Watergate," they were "enemy lobbyists, bureaucrats and reporters."
We demand freedom of the press and transparent government, yet expect provincial and federal privacy commissioners to protect our personal information.
Similarly, we defend our right to walk down the street at will, yet go gaga over every move - on or off the stage - made by the Biebers, Lohans and Douglas-Zeta-Joneses of the world.
Strict legal boundaries must be met before police officers can photograph us, or photo-radar evidence is allowed in court. Yet, as Christine Lyon told North Shore News readers Aug. 4, "users can use Google Glass to film people without their knowledge" whenever, wherever and doing whatever. How long will the eagersnooper line-ups be when that technology is released? What then of the rights of hermit-crabs like me who detest having their photograph taken, even by the friendliest of cameras? The Murdochs were able to carry out their ruthless plans because complacency has become the hallmark of Western democracies.
And so it was that those members of the British public not already hooked on knowing every salacious detail about their favourite celebrities, nevertheless found it hard to believe the depths to which some of Murdoch's 52,000 employees would stoop.
Their initial reaction was likely an expectation that the story couldn't be that bad and that it would prove to be yet another conspiracy theory.
But the story didn't die. For the better part of a decade, the tsunami kept landing on the shore until, in 2005, after what Thomas-Hickman referred to as "a trivial report about Prince William's knee," it began to overwhelm the wrong-doers in its path.
Until then, Murdoch's scheming went unchecked because, as the Dial-M authors pointed out, "In Britain [he] had come to control 40 per cent of national circulation.
"In his native Australia, his dominance was greater still: 70 per cent of the newspaper
market.. . ." Politicians like Watson, journalists like Hickman at The Independent and those at the Guardian - all of whom strove to unmask the corruption - were subjected to relentless hacking and published retaliation.
Many years before it was exposed to the light of day, hacking into personal, celebrity and public voicemails and emails had evolved into a News Corp culture - a culture of everyone here is doing it so I must too if I want my job.
Too many people had engaged in the practice so thoroughly and for so long, Murdoch's world of the news had become a world without conscience.
For News Corp, headlines and the stories were the ends that justified any means, including bullying, bribery and pay-offs, right up to what any reasonable person would call blackmail.
A complacent population allowed convergence of media control in Britain. The machine that Murdoch built milked that power for all it was worth.
With cross-pollination growing between telecom, television and radio and the rumoured
merger between the Vancouver Sun and Province, it's up to us to decide whether the same infection will be allowed to ooze across Canada, or whether new laws can be enshrined to vaccinate Canadian society against it.
We are indebted to people like British MP Tom Watson, investigative journalist Martin Hickman, Britain's Guardian newspaper and many other courageous citizens who risked reputations, careers, even their safety, to make sure the story saw the light of day.
