As Rupert Murdoch scrambles to contain the
phone-hacking/
police bribery/
government corruption scandal which threatens his entire British media empire, News Corp's US operations are desperately trying to prevent the crisis from staining their American brands as badly as it has in the UK. So far, the prevailing strategy of Murdoch organizations like Fox News and the Wall Street Journal has been to obfuscate the issue until the average viewer either doesn't understand the extent of the criminal activity in the News Corp empire, or simply decides it's too complicated to care about.
While Fox went the
more ostentatious route of associating News of the World with a group of hacking
victims while discussing the story, the Wall Street Journal simply chose to compare the now-defunct tabloid to another news organization caught up in a hacking-related scandal: Wikileaks. On Tuesday, WSJ foreign affairs editor Bret Stephens
claimed News of the World and Wikileaks are "largely the same story."
