By Jim Sleeper – July 18, 2011

Breathtaking accounts like this of the Murdoch meltdown by Don Van Natta Jr., Sarah Lyall, and others are precisely what the New York Times is on earth to do.

And that the Times is doing it is doubly gratifying if you enjoyed the exposes here and in the Washington Monthly in May of how Murdoch fellow traveler William McGowan, author of the Times-bashing book Gray Lady Down, got assistance from many Murdoch minions and from the conservative Earhart Foundation, Bradley Foundation, Revere Advisers, Manhattan Institute, and Social Philosophy and Policy Center in scolding the Times for its lapses, including some that, as I showed, the paper never committed.

To read about the still-unfolding horrors at Murdoch’s News Corporation in the Times now is to taste the purest justice, with just a hint of delightfully naughty revenge. Horrific though the phone-hacking and police corruption are, it’s almost amusing to watch Murdoch and his News Corporation minions scrambling to cover their butts alongside the politicians and police officers they corrupted.

Over at the New Republic, using well-chosen slides and wicked pens, Gabriel Debenedetti, Alex Klein, and Matthew Zeitlin are baring the inside skinny on the butt-covering — and the angry butt-bumping — going on at News Corp.

And it’s even more gratifying still to watch the empire being rocked by the scrappy little British newspaper The Guardian – whose “bulldog reporting,” as Times media critic David Carr put it, broke open this vast scandal. In 2007, when few people cared, I wrote this warning in The Guardian about “Murdoch’s Enablers” thanks to its American editor at the time, Michael Tomasky. The lesson is that we who are sometimes faint of heart should take heart almost despite ourselves even when Power and Indifference seem indomitable.

Now for the hard parts:

First, the scandal has yet to take its proper toll on its perpetrators, some of whom will surely wriggle away. The Times story on the arrest of Murdoch’s powerful former editor Rebekah Brooks is making many wonder whether the police have arrested her partly to give her an excuse not to testify fully to a Parliamentary panel about her dealings with with police officers who were complicit in the phone hacking and who squelched investigation of it.

David hasn’t slain Goliath just yet, and surely Murdoch has more cards (and coins) up his sleeve.

Second, and, to my mind, far more important: Even if no phone had ever been hacked and no police officer ever paid off, Murdoch’s “news” outlets have been mugging every body politic they touch, inducing their readers and viewers to fear, mistrust, and sneer at fellow citizens by scaring, goosing, and titillating them every day. This I think was the point of Joe Nocera’s belated but welcome mea culpa in a Saturday Times column establishing what I long ago warned Murdoch would do to the Wall Street Journal.

He’s still at it, and, as long as he and his minions remain in charge of any news media, they’ll always be at it. Not because they’re evil geniuses, although Murdoch is that, but because they’re banal carriers of a social disease called ressentiment, whose spread through Murdoch journalism I sketched here in May apropos McGowan’s attacks on the Times. .

It’s almost in the nature of the Murdochs of this world to be the carriers of that sickness, as the Columbia Journalism Review made clear when he was charming and elbowing the Bancroft family out of its stewardship of Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal.

I’ve known quite a few people who’ve worked for Murdoch but are wholly innocent of his organization’s crimes and wholly free of ressentiment. But most of them have left his employ, and perhaps the hardest lesson of this mess, in these hardest of times for job-holders, is that those who haven’t yet left the News Corporation and its outlets should find ways to do so.

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