Rupert Murdoch's American media immunity

The paradox is how little interest, until now, the US press has taken in the scandals engulfing the tycoon's News Corp empire

Michael Wolff
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 4 April 2012 10.03 EDT

Last week, PBS aired a Frontline documentary, more then six months in the making, about Rupert Murdoch's phone-hacking scandal. The big budget film, hosted and reported by Lowell Bergman, one of the pre-eminent US investigative journalists, broke no news nor offered new perspectives about the affair. Rather, the show – the first US documentary to delve into the Murdoch scandals – gave a diligent, if somewhat flat-footed account of events that came to a head last summer, for an audience that, the producers seemed to assume, had missed most of the story.

In the same week, the BBC and the Australian Financial Review, opened up an entirely new chapter in the ever-expanding chronicles of News Corporation's scandals: NDS, a News Corp subsidiary company that developed encryption technology for pay TV outlets, had allegedly mounted a long-term effort of piracy and hacking in an effort to undermine its competitors. News Corp's Australian arm has denied the allegations.