Ohio Democratic Party Chairman Chris Redfern sent a letter to Governor John Kasich on Wednesday asking him to give to charity the contributions he received from News Corporation.
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Redfern noted that Kasich earned $265,000 in 2008 for a program he hosted on Fox News. The CEO of News Corp., Rupert Murdoch, also donated $10,000 to Kasich's campaign and said the two have a close friendship. Kasich appeared as a guest on Fox nearly thirty times to promote his candidacy for governor, even allowing him to solicit donations on air.
"Perhaps no public official in America has benefited more, both personally and politically, from News Corporation than you," Redfern wrote in his letter to the governor.
"The tactics of your former employer and major campaign donor were despicable, unacceptable and even inhumane. For that reason, we are calling on you to donate all of your earnings from News Corporation, as well as all of your campaign contributions from News Corporation, to charities of your choosing."
Dan Cooper, who helped launch Fox News as managing editor in 1996, said that a “brain room” carried out “counter intelligence” on the channel’s enemies from its New York headquarters.
He was threatened after it found out he spoke to a reporter, he claimed.
Another former senior executive said the channel ran a spying network on staff, reading their emails and making them “feel they were being watched”.
And:
“Most people thought it was simply the research department of Fox News,” he wrote. “I knew it also housed a counter intelligence and black ops office. So accessing phone records was easy pie.”
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Mr Cooper said yesterday that he helped to design the high-security unit. “It was staffed by 15 researchers and had a guard at the door. No one working there would engage in conversation.”
And:
Another former Fox News senior executive, who did not wish to be named, said staff were forced to operate under conditions reminiscent of “Russia at the height of the Soviet era”.
“There is a paranoid atmosphere and they feel they are being watched,” said the former executive. “I have no doubt they are spying on emails to ensure no one is leaking to outside media. (Sounds like Rupert Murdoch is the freedom hater..)
“There is a unit of spies that reports up to the boss about who was talking to whom. A lot of people are scared that they’re going to get sidelined or even that they’re going to get killed.”
Long before it was possible to hack phones, Murdoch was waging a war on journalism, truth, humanity, and succeeded because he knew how to exploit a system that welcomed his devotion to the "free market". He may be more extreme in his methods, but he is no different in kind from many of those now lining up to condemn him who have been his beneficiaries, mimics, collaborators, apologists.
As Gordon Brown turns on his former master, accusing him of running a "criminal-media nexus", watch the palpable discomfort in the new parliamentary-media consensus. "We must not be backward-looking," said a Labour MP. Those parliamentarians caught two years ago with both hands in the Westminster till, who did nothing to stop the killing of hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq, and stood and cheered the war criminal responsible, are now "united" behind the "calm" figure of Ed Miliband. There is an acrid smell of business as usual.
The Tory operation to bury the phone-hacking scandal in spin and official inquiries is now in full flow. On his way back from Africa, David Cameron declared it was essential to get the whole business into perspective, echoing Rupert Murdoch's insistence that his competitors had got up "this hysteria". Today, the prime minister chided Ed Miliband for "chasing conspiracy theories" and claimed it was really Gordon Brown who had been in the pocket of the global media billionaire.
Meanwhile, News International pundits and others with their own reasons to stem the flood of revelations have been loudly insisting that the political clout of Murdoch's corporate colossus has been exaggerated. The hyper-regulated BBC is the real media monopoly, they say, and in any case the current fixation with phone hacking has meant no one is discussing bankers' bonuses and the threat of another financial meltdown. This is a "frenzy that has grown out of control", the Daily Mail complained.
But the real frenzy isn't the exposure of the scandal – it's the scale of corruption, collusion and cover-up between News International, politicians and police that the scandal has revealed. As the cast of hacking victims, blaggers and blackmailers has lengthened, and the details of the incestuous payments and job-swapping between News International, government and Scotland Yard become more complex, it's easy to lose sight of the bigger picture that is now emerging.
If it were not for the uncovering of this cesspit, the Cameron government would be preparing to nod through the outright takeover of BSkyB by News International, taking its dominance of Britain's media and political world into Silvio Berlusconi territory. But what has been exposed now goes well beyond the hacking of murder victims and dead soldiers' families – or even the media itself. The scandal has lifted the lid on how power is really exercised in 21st-century Britain – in which the unreformed City and its bankers play a central part.
Judge Michael Mukasey, who served under George W Bush, will work alongside Mary Jo White, a former director of the Nasdaq stock exchange and US Attorney for the highly regarded Southern District of New York.
Both are partners at law firm Debevoise & Plimpton and are regarded as two of the country’s most formidable legal minds.
The independent directors, who are said to have had concerns about the way Rupert Murdoch has handled the phone hacking scandal, have also hired Mark Mendelsohn, a partner at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, who previously worked at the Department of Justice, where he specialised in bringing prosecutions under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA).
“The board want to protect themselves and doing that may come at the expense of Mr Murdoch,” said Roland Riopelle of Sercarz and Riopelle in Manhattan, a former federal prosecutor.
The US government confirmed this week that it has begun an investigation of News Corp under the FCPA act, which allows a criminal case to be brought against individual directors if there is evidence of a company bribing foreign officials such as police. It also allows a civil case to be brought if there is evidence of legitimate payments to officials being wrongly accounted for.
James Murdoch gave "mistaken" testimony to a British parliamentary committee, two senior ex-News of the World executives said on Thursday, the most direct accusation made so far against News Corp's heir apparent in a phone-hacking scandal.
Murdoch said he stood behind his testimony to the committee, which had asked what he knew of a scandal that has forced senior News Corp executives and two senior police chiefs to quit and raised questions over press barons' influence on politicians.
The statement by Tom Crone, the British news group's top legal officer until last week, and Colin Myler, editor of the News of the World tabloid until it was shut down earlier this month, was the first open challenge by former senior executives of Rupert Murdoch's global media empire.
And it won't, rest assured, be the last.
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