The 9/11 phone hacking investigation: it's Murdoch and Fox News who could be destroyed, not the Republicans

The News Corp phone-hacking scandal has gone global. The FBI has announced that it is launching an investigation into allegations that Rupert Murdoch’s corporation hacked into the mobile phones of 9/11 victims. If it’s true, it’s a moral outrage of huge proportions – a terrible insult to American honour. It would seriously damage Murdoch’s reputation in the US and reduce his very profitable share of the media market. But the
political context is subtly different to the UK scandal, and that will shape the way it plays out. The comparison some are already making to Watergate is instructive in its inaccuracy. This hurts Murdoch, but not necessarily the Republican Party or conservative media in general.

Hacking into Milly Dowler’s phone was an attack on a single family. Hacking into the phones of the 9/11 victims is an assault on an entire nation. In America, the memory of the people who died on 9/11 is sacred.
The invasion of their privacy not only violates wire-tapping laws but offends a much bigger, popular ethical sensibility. If it is proven true then the Murdoch brand will be irreparably harmed, and that means the collapse of an empire that reaches well beyond a seedy UK newspaper obsessed with sex and celebrity face lifts.....

....For starters, Democratic Senators Frank Lautenberg and Barbara Boxer
have called for Murdoch to be personally investigated under the terms of
the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act for the crime of bribing English
police. If found guilty, the old man could face up to $30 million in
fines and 20 years in prison....

.....In contrast, no Democrat would bother to court the support of Fox News or the New York Post. They are conservative niche media, which has excluded them from half of the US political establishment and kept them philosophically pure. And just because it fills a Right-wing niche doesn’t mean News Corp has determined the ebb and flow of conservative politics either. The Sun’s claim that it “won it” in 1992 is a sentiment that no US news outlet would understand or echo. They regard themselves as either strictly non-partisan or, in the case of Fox, something that reflects rather than sets the popular mood.

In short, there is a distance between News Corp and the Republican Party that will keep the scandal from becoming the partisan frenzy that it was in the UK. Whatever Obama's claims to the contrary, Fox does not
speak for the GOP and would never claim that kind of influence. It is a case of a private institution committing crimes against the general public; the UK's added dimension of political culpability is missing. This is not a conservative scandal, or even a political scandal. It is simply criminal.