Doesn't The Simpsons Count for Anything?

For everything that News Corp's done wrong (and wow, what a list that is), at least it gave us Springfield.

Rupert and James Murdoch appeared before a parliamentary committee today in a pie-, rage-, and obfuscation-filled afternoon spent trying to determine what the father-and-son duo knew about the phone-hacking at News of the World. Maclean's Jaime Weinman can't help but make the comparison between the Murdochs and “two of News Corp’s most beloved pieces of Intellectual Property, C. Montgomery Burns and Waylon Smithers.” Like the Simpsons characters, there's curmudgeonly old billionaire Rupert quietly seething over having to cavort with politicians on their terms, and then the Smithersian James, “the ultimate trans-national business scion who will patiently explain to us why we have no business questioning him.” It's a terribly astute comparison. Let's just hope Rupert Murdoch doesn't try to block out the sun if his media empire starts falling apart.

John Doyle, The Globe and Mail television critic, enumerates the impact that the elder Murdoch has had on the world of television, from The Simpsons to Fox News to professional soccer to the scummiest of reality TV shows and back again. Ever since launching the Fox network in the U.S. in 1986, Doyle figures Murdoch's been laughing at his competitors who have had to keep up with his often reckless trailblazing. “Every hit and every controversy made Fox seem more ingenious than the competitors, who scrambled to compete and copy,” says Doyle. For all of News Corp.'s alleged misdeeds, it's impossible not to give some credit to Murdoch & Co. for their work in invigorating American television. But even the best episode of The Simpsons (the one where Marge becomes a gambling addict, duh) can't redeem the actions of a distant newspaper cousin across the ocean.

And finally, Postmedia's Christie Blatchford assures us that the phone-hacking and other depraved Fleet Street practices are most certainly not a part of the Canadian media. The closest thing Canada has to a News of the World-style tabloid are the Sun papers, which for all the scorn they get from the marginally more credible broadsheet press, amount to little more than “sports, hard news with an emphasis on crime, pretty girls, columnists, [and] snappy headlines.” The reporting and editing practices at those papers are just as rigourous as they are at The Globe or the Ottawa Citizen, and they certainly don't pay for stories or engage in criminal behaviour to dig them up. Their columnists' crusades against the CBC or arts funding notwithstanding, we should take some solace in knowing the worst we have to worry about on this side of the pond is the occasional Ezra Levant tirade.