The phone hacking scandal that shut down media mogul Rupert Murdoch's tabloid The News of the World gave The Daily Show plenty of material last night—and this rotten fruit is hanging so low that Jon Stewart and John Oliver didn't have to do much more than simply go through the revolting facts of the case, as Stewart pretended to throw up in his mouth. Some jokes just write themselves, and if you haven't been following along with this yet, the segment serves as a pretty thorough primer on the whole sordid mess:
As Stewart put it—after Oliver explained that the former editor of The News of the World, Andy Coulson, was also the former Prime Minister's press secretary: "My balls just crawled back up into my body!" He might not be the only one; today Bloomberg News reports that News Corp. has lost $7 billion dollars in market value in the past four days. The company "lost 7.6 percent in Nasdaq Stock Market trading yesterday, the biggest drop since April 2009. It was the fourth straight decline in the company’s closing price, cutting its market value by 15 percent to $41.2 billion."
A billion here and a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money. Of course, all of this is still just a rounding era to the ungodly rich and powerful Murdoch, but he's no doubt sweating the outwardly spiraling repercussions of the scandal, which has now jeopardized his bid for full control of British Sky Broadcasting. One analyst tells Bloomberg News, "It will be hard for the government to approve the bid, either now or at some point in the future." And today former PM Gordon Brown accused Murdoch's Sunday Times of employing “known criminals” to gather personal information on his bank account, legal files and “other files — documentation, tax and everything else."
But if Murdoch's empire is crumbling a l'il, at least he can take comfort in the fact that he he's saved a bundle on his tax returns! Reuters reports that "over the past four years Murdoch's U.S.-based News Corp. has made money on income taxes. Having earned $10.4 billion in profits, News Corp. would have been expected to pay $3.6 billion at the 35 percent corporate tax rate. Instead, it actually collected $4.8 billion in income tax refunds, all or nearly all from the U.S. government." While former NYC Schools Chancellor Joel Klein is looking into the hacking scandal for his boss Murdoch, maybe he can shed some light on that tax stuff? And maybe Murdoch will learn from this and start committing genuine journalism?
