Murdoch Makes No Retreat From Scandals With Attack on Australia Government

The phone hacking scandal in the U.K. hasn't muzzled Rupert Murdoch in his native Australia, where his newspaper empire is doing more than any other to undermine Prime Minister Julia Gillard.

Less than two months ago, Murdoch told the U.K. Parliament that the theft of voicemails by his News of the World made his appearance “the most humble day of my life.” That’s not the way it feels to members of Gillard’s Labor party, who say a drumbeat of criticism by his papers has created a “climate of fear,” according to Australian lawmaker John Murphy. Murdoch’s Daily Telegraph, the best-selling daily newspaper in Australia’s largest city of Sydney, is “running a campaign on regime change,” according to Communications Minister Stephen Conroy. Gillard herself demanded and got a retraction and apology from the Australian, another daily owned by the billionaire’s News Corp, after it printed a falsehood. She said the Daily Telegraph should enter another report “for one of our fiction prizes.”