We’ve written at length about the sullied reputations of Tiger Woods, Arnold Schwartzenegger and Charlie Sheen and the path to redemption through proactive public relations. In a USA Today editorial titled “How Good Could Come From Murdoch’s Low Journalism,” columnist DeWayne Wickham suggests that Murdoch’s closing his newspaper and apologizing won’t be enough to salvage his reputation.
Rather, Wickham suggests that Murdoch finance a follow-up to the commission that University of Chicago President Robert Hutchins headed in 1942 to examine the role and duties of the nation’s mass media. (Ironically, Time magazine founder Henry Luce funded the study in an effort to cleanse his own badly stained reputation.)
To make this effort credible, Wickham says that Murdoch should give a distinguished academic leader freedom to empanel a non-partisan (which is to say not rabidly ideological) committee and the funds to carry out its work. Simply stated, its mission should be to ask what sort of self-policing is needed to fulfill what Hutchins said was “the responsibility of the press to raise the level of American culture” and to supply citizens “with correct and full political, economic, and social information.”
Doing this would send a message to the news industry — and the world — that is more useful than the bloodletting Murdoch’s media empire is undergoing.
I’m still not sure it’s enough. What do you think?
