Media, Morality, and Rupert Murdoch

July 13, 2011 by Greg Garrett

Continued from Page 2

Here in Hawarden, Wales, where I have spent the last five weeks at the Gladstone Library, the proprietors of the small post office that is my village's newsstand tell me that villagers are canceling their subscriptions to the Murdoch-owned Times (once one of the world's most-reputable papers, but smeared by this scandal), often for the progressive Guardian, which broke many of these phone-hacking stories and continued to pester the government to take some sort of action. The Telegraph reports that this trend of buyers abandoning the Times in protest of News International's actions, seems to be happening across the country. It seems that Britons who once delighted in titillating stories now are discovering they don't so much like the methods employed to break them.

So a final thing for us to consider. In a scandal so far reaching, there is plenty of blame to go around. How much belongs to Mr. Murdoch, his executives, and his editors? How much should be attributed to British politicians and celebrities who kowtowed to the Murdoch media?

And to what degree are we, the general populace, to blame for always wanting the inside story, the unknown detail, the hidden secrets?

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7/13/2011 4:00:00 AM

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About Greg Garrett

Greg Garrett is (according to BBC Radio) one of America's leading voices on religion and culture. He is the author or co-author of over twenty books of fiction, theology, cultural criticism, and spiritual autobiography. His most recent books are The Prodigal, written with the legendary Brennan Manning, Entertaining Judgment: The Afterlife in Popular Imagination, and My Church Is Not Dying: Episcopalians in the 21st Century. A contributor to Patheos since 2010, Greg also writes for the Huffington Post, Salon.com, OnFaith, The Tablet, Reform, and other web and print publications in the US and UK.

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