Fox News Parent NewsCorp May Face Corruption Investigation

rtfa-troll writes "The Guardian reports that News Corporation may face FCPA investigations after an 'official of the British ministry of defence' was charged 'for allegedly receiving £100,000 from Murdoch's tabloid newspapers.' News Corporation, headed by Rupert Murdoch, is loved by most of the readers of Slashdot as the owner of Fox News and as the company which put the overly complicated paywall on the Wall Street Journal. The article states that the charges 'would be hard for the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission to ignore and would warrant investigation under the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act which could lead to risks for 27 TV licences within the Fox network.'"

Comments

Well one thing is certain...

[3seas]

You know who is not going to be covering this story.

Re:Well one thing is certain...

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course Fox News will cover the story!

But they will begin every sentence with, "The lib'rul biased media says that..."

Re:Well one thing is certain...

[guttentag]

You know who is not going to be covering this story.

Oh, Fox will cover it... Via The Simpsons. There is a provision in the contract that specifies the Fox network may not interfere with the show's content. And it results in awkward things being broadcast by Fox, like this (from Wikipedia):

The Simpsons also often includes self-referential humor. The most common form is jokes about Fox Broadcasting. For example, the episode "She Used to Be My Girl" included a scene in which a Fox News Channel van drove down the street while displaying a large "Bush Cheney 2004" banner and playing Queen's "We Are the Champions", in reference to the 2004 presidential election.

I'm sure many slashdotters could cite even more awkward examples of The Simpsons poking the Fox bear.

Re:Rupert will ...

[Frosty Piss]

Mr Murdoch will be able to buy his way out of trouble...

If you mean pay huge fines that are still less than his yearly caviar tab, and then continue on "business as usual", then yes you are correct...

Re:No meat to this article

[MightyMartian]

The fact remains that if a US company is convicted of bribing officials in a foreign country, that company can be prosecuted under domestic law. Whether NewsCorp will be or not is another question, but there have been strong hints dropped since the case really exploded in Britain that US authorities are carefully watching what happens in Britain.

Re:The FCC has no control over fox news on sat / c

[AK Marc]

So an incident in a subsidiary branch 6000 miles away from the US should induce major headaches for a US-based organization at the hands of the US government.

That's what often happens. For one, foriegn bribes are illegal in the US. That is to say, if a fooreign subsidiary uses bribery, it is a crime (under US law) that can be charged against the parent company. That's why one company I worked for with more than 30 foreign subsidiaries had very very liberal expense accounting. You were expected to pay for bribes yourself, then charge them back as "dinner" or such, no receipt needed, and unprosecutable as far as the feds are concerned.

It was a requirement of doing business, as some countries require bribes. One specific example would have a US analog of:

What would you do if the Elbonia TSA made you pay $5 to get your laptop bin back at the security check? They are government employees, so slipping them $5 for your laptop would be a federal crime in the USA.

So yeah, if he gets convicted of bribery in the UK, then his company is on the hook for breaking the foreign corrupt practices act, and should lose all US licenses.

Why do you want to reward people who break the rules, so long as they break them creatively enough to satisfy you?

Re:More moronic anti-Fox ranting

[tbannist]

"Dude", it's every-bit as much of a news outlet as ABC,NBC,CBS,CNN,MSNBC, the NYT

What if it's not?

You just don't like any news story that runs contrary to your beliefs

What if it has nothing to do with beliefs? What if they are just objectively bad, but you don't want to think so because your beliefs agree with those broadcast by Fox News. Personally, I'm mostly politically moderate. I don't agree with the Loony Left or the Rabid Right and Fox News (the channel) appears to be objectively one of the worst News channels out there because they mix propaganda in with real news. In their 24 hour days they have around 7 or 8 hours of real informational (only a little politically slanted) news, but that means they have 16-17 hours of "opinion" programming (political propaganda) each day. It's not just me, Fox news watchers have consistently scored poorly on knowledge tests about current events. In at least one such test they scored lower than people who actively read and watched no news content. That should be a troubling result.

Frankly, if you're going to accuse everyone who disagrees with you of being biased, you'd better be doing a pretty good job of making sure you account for your own biases, which you haven't, because from your comments you appear to be rabidly right wing. You might want to consider whether some of the things you've "learned" from Fox News might be actually be distorted but you aren't seeing it because of your political leanings.