Murdoch Tried to Buy US Presidency—Media Yawn

Carl Bernstein can't quite believe how the US media mostly ignored what he sees as a bombshell story: As his Watergate partner Bob Woodward revealed earlier this month, Rupert Murdoch tried to get David Petreaus to run for president last year, promising to bankroll his campaign and give him the full support of Fox News. Network chief Roger Ailes was even going to run the campaign. It's all on tape, and yet the Post ran the story in its style section, a crazy underplay that set the tone for coverage elsewhere that followed, writes Bernstein in the Guardian.

"The Murdoch story—his corruption of essential democratic institutions on both sides of the Atlantic—is one of the most important and far-reaching political/cultural stories of the past 30 years," he writes. The tape of Petraeus talking to an emissary sent by Ailes "is an amazing document, a testament to the willingness of Murdoch and the wily genius he hired to create Fox News to run roughshod over the American civic and political landscape without regard to even the traditional niceties or pretenses of journalistic independence and honesty." This should be the end of Murdoch, but the media and political establishments don't seem to grasp its importance. Read the full column here. (More Rupert Murdoch stories.)