Rebekah Brooks is back – to make sure Murdoch becomes even more dominant

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/sep/04/rebekah-brooks-rupert-murdoch-media

Version 0 of 1.

Some have suggested that by reinstalling Rebekah Brooks as chief executive of his UK newspaper group, Rupert Murdoch is thumbing his nose at the public. A more accurate representation might be to have him asking incredulously: “Who?” For if there is anything that highlights the gap between the lofty perch occupied by Murdoch and the ordinary people who buy his papers, books, TV shows and films, it is this appointment.

Related: Rebekah Brooks' return confirmed as Tony Gallagher is named Sun editor

Brooks was editor of the News of the World in 2002 when it hacked into the phone of the murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler. Brooks was chief executive when its parent company, News International, misled MPs about hacking and corruption.

Her return to News UK (NI’s more modest new mantle) could be likened to Asil Nadir becoming chairman of a FTSE 100 company or Bernie Madoff being named pensioners’ financial champion. Except in this important respect: a jury found Brooks not guilty of hacking, corruption and conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. She testified that she had no idea that reporters were hacking, blagging and bribing their way to front-page scoops. She was a fool – not a knave. The fact that, at the very least, she wholly failed to spot the criminality that streaked through Murdoch’s papers like grain through wood makes her a laughably inappropriate steward of Britain’s biggest newspaper group.

Her return suggests that Murdoch’s people are – as Charlotte Church so memorably put it – “not truly sorry, only sorry they got caught”.

Murdoch’s choice won in May, as it has done at every general election for decades

Yet it would be wrong to suggest that Brooks’s return means the campaign to expose hacking and its cover-up made no difference. The News of the World closed; the Press Complaints Commission died of humiliation; Downing Street started declaring meetings with media owners. Most significantly of all, Murdoch postponed his takeover of all of Sky TV, which would have handed him the master key to the country’s future mainstream media. The Metropolitan police secured the convictions of Andy Coulson, the prime minister’s former director of communications, and five other former News of the World executives. Corporate charges for hacking may be brought, if the CPS can resist the Sun’s hate campaign.

Yet, despite the howls of outrage at what Murdoch’s staffers got up to, the power structures have remained essentially the same. The Press Complaints Commission changed its name-plate to the Independent Press Standards Organisation. The Sun on Sunday succeeded the News of the World as Murdoch’s Sunday tabloid. Murdoch still controls an unhealthy share of the public’s consumption of news, sport and culture: four national papers, including the best-selling daily; one of the three big book publishers, HarperCollins; a big Hollywood studio; and a controlling stake in Britain’s largest commercial broadcaster, Sky, and its broadband and betting units.

No one suggests these are fundamentally bad businesses – Sky money transformed UK football stadiums; HarperCollins publishes Hilary Mantel, the Times carries quality journalism. But they are subservient to Murdoch’s agenda, political at times, but mostly commercial. Sometimes the cynicism is comical. Four months ago, the Sun urged the people of Scotland to vote for the anti-austerity SNP – and the people of England to vote for the pro-austerity Conservatives.

Perhaps because of the biased campaigns of his still dominant print titles, Murdoch’s choice won in May 2015, as it has done at every general election for decades.

So what can we expect in the Brooks-Cameron regime Mark II? Perhaps more “country suppers” and more mutually beneficial arrangements of the kind Murdoch alluded to at the Leveson inquiry. (“It’s a common thing in life, way beyond journalism, for people to say, ‘I’ll scratch your back if you scratch my back’,” he said, somewhat undermining his insistence he doesn’t do deals with politicians.)

And the Sky takeover? Just imagine the future cash flow from American drama and Premiership football, pornography and gambling. With BSkyB delisted from the London Stock Exchange, Murdoch could bundle up a Sky subscription with free copies of the Sun, or a David Walliams box set, or the latest X-Men blockbuster.

He could become even more dominant than he is now. He has put in charge Rebekah Brooks – an indomitable, genuinely charming character, whatever else she is – to make it happen.