The American Debate: Murdoch's media empire has also been doing damage in the U.S.

Don't assume that the scandals engulfing Rupert Murdoch are solely the province of the British. In truth, his media empire has been doing damage on these shores for a long time.

His minions may not have been bribing and intimidating American police officials, or invading Americans' privacy by hacking with alacrity into thousands of voice mails and cellphones (as far as we know), but it has long been obvious that Murdoch has coarsened and politicized civic dialogue and protected his realm by doing financial favors for the powerful. That behavior isn't illegal, just amoral.

I was reminded of this last weekend when Ohio's Republican governor, John Kasich, was asked on Meet the Press to comment on whether the hacking and bribery scandal would adversely affect Murdoch's Fox News. His verbatim reply: "Well, you know, they, they have not been touched by this, they have told me, and I believe them. . . . You know, Murdoch's fired people, he's, you know, he's, he's quoted as, as being told that - his hands in his, his - in his, his head in his hands, crying with the family that was impacted."

Clearly Kasich didn't want to touch the issue, but the governor did manage to spin for Murdoch by saying that the mogul had "fired people" involved in the scandal (a falsehood; he hasn't fired anybody) and that Murdoch is a compassionate soul who cried with the family of the murdered British girl whose voice mails had been hacked.

But was this defense of Murdoch purely spontaneous? Nope. Unbeknownst to the viewers, Gov. Kasich owed the guy, big time. Murdoch had Kasich on the Fox News payroll for nine years, earning as much as $250,000 annually for a weekly show, and in 2010 Murdoch's News Corp. cut a check for $1 million, payable to the Republican Governors Association.

Moves like that have helped Murdoch skew the public dialogue. Perhaps Rudy Giuliani was merely speaking from the heart the other day when he defended Murdoch as "a very honorable, honest man," but let us also note that in 2005 News Corp. showered Giuliani's law firm with $100,000 in lobbying fees and that in 2007 presidential candidate Giuliani logged more time than any of his rivals on friendly Fox News shows.

Murdoch is not all bad. He did give us The Simpsons. But his penchant for co-opting insiders, in the service of his commercial and political interests, has long warranted major scrutiny. Thanks to the hacking scandal, we now know that he had cowed the British political establishment for decades. And we in America got a fleeting taste of this tactic 16 years ago, when Murdoch needed help in high places to fight off charges that he was violating antimonopoly rules.

In December 1994 he met briefly with the incoming House speaker, Newt Gingrich. One month later, his publishing arm, HarperCollins, signed Gingrich to a two-book contract worth $4.5 million. When the deal went public and an outcry ensued, Murdoch denied he knew anything about it, but such a deal is one of his standard maneuvers; at least six times in other countries, when he had commercial interests at stake, he lavished book advances on the key players, binding them to his agenda.

Not surprising, we have heard barely a word about the Murdoch scandal from the likes of Gingrich, Sarah Palin, Rick Santorum, or Mike Huckabee. Perhaps their silence is principled, and has absolutely no connection with their past status as paid commentators on Fox News. Or perhaps they simply know how to return a favor, much the way Fox & Friends host Steve Doocy earned his keep last weekend when he scoffed at the scandal coverage: "You look at some [web]sites and you'd think that Martians landed in New Jersey."

But we expect no less from Fox News. Far worse are the developments at Murdoch's most recent prize, the Wall Street Journal. It's no longer the independent outlet that he had pledged to sustain. He originally agreed not to change the culture by bringing in his own people; an oversight committee was set up to ensure that didn't happen. Yet a year later, the committee was toothless, and he had brought in his own people. All who work there know who butters their bread. In an obsequious story last week, they interviewed Murdoch - and failed to ask him any tough questions. Earlier this week, they ran an editorial that assailed Murdoch's critics as a "political mob."

Sadly, the lesson here is an old one. Dangers inevitably arise when one person is allowed to flex too much muscle in the marketplace - particularly so when the market is media. A healthy democracy requires a multiplicity of independent voices. Oligarchy, and its inevitable abuses, is the enemy.