In case you missed it, Gabriel Sherman recently wrote a very detailed account of the downfall of Roger Ailes. However, there’s one anecdote that has nothing to do with the festering sexual harassment scandal surrounding the man who turned the fair and balanced network into a Republican agitprop machine. It turns out that in its quest to dig up dirt on those who dared call out Fox News, Ailes stooped to the same level as his counterparts across the pond—phone hacking.
It turns out that back in 2010—right around the time the phone hacking scandal at News of the World broke in full—Fox News hired a private eye to obtain the landline and cell records of Media Matters reporter Joe Strupp.
In the fall of that year, Strupp had written several articles quoting anonymous Fox sources, and the network wanted to determine who was talking to him. “This was the culture. Getting phone records doesn’t make anybody blink,” one Fox executive told me.
Although the hiring was nominally done by general counsel Dianne Brandi, there’s little doubt this has Ailes’ fingerprints on it. The Daily Beast and Newshounds were the first to notice this potentially new scandal.
Media Matters has been one of Fox News’ main tormentors for over a decade, so it should come as no surprise that it was a target of the dirty tricks operation run by Ailes on the 14th floor of 1212 Avenue of the Americas. But this was a new low, even for Fox News. Indeed, Media Matters president Bradley Beychock is convinced Fox News tried to hack others’ phones as well—and also tried to hack email.
I had hoped that there was some chance Fox News could be reformed after Ailes got the gate. But if it turns out that Fox News brass condoned both sexual harassment AND phone hacking, then this network isn’t just a propaganda machine. It’s a criminal organization. And it should get the same treatment that News of the World got. That is, it must die by a thousand cuts.
Media Matters has already all but announced it will sue. Hopefully this will be the first step in suing Fox News out of existence.