Real estate developer and media mogul Mort Zuckerman has picked Colin Myler to be the new top editor for his New York tabloid, the Daily News. That's a surprising choice on at least a couple of accounts.

One is that Myler's last job was at Rupert Murdoch's News of the World, which was shut down while he was boss due to the scandal over News reporters hacking into people's voicemail for scoops. True, the phone hacking seems to have happened before Myler got there--but he seems to have been brought in by Murdoch not so much to clean up as to cover up, to judge by his acknowledged deception (Guardian, 12/15/11):

Giving evidence to the Leveson inquiry into press standards, Myler was challenged over a letter he wrote to the PCC in August 2009--a month after the Guardian first wrote that phone hacking was widespread at the News of the World (NoW).

Jay, counsel for the inquiry, told Myler his reply to the PCC was "disingenuous" given that he had seen the so-called "for Neville" email a year earlier, which revealed that hacking at the NoW went wider than a single "rogue reporter" and prompted a £700,000 payment to football boss Gordon Taylor.

Responding to Robert Jay QC, Myler said: "I had no reason not to give them a full and frank answer. For that I apologize."

But Myler's involvement in scandals hasn't all been after the fact. Before being sent to the News, he worked at Murdoch's New York Post when that paper's scabrous ethics came under scrutiny. Here's Rolling Stones' summary (8/3/11):

The newspaper was rocked by a scandal in which a star Page Six reporter allegedly attempted to shake down billionaire Ron Burkle for "protection" from the gossip sheet, telling him, "It's a little like the Mafia."

Burkle secretly recorded Page Six reporter Jared Stern offering to go easy on him in the gossip sheet in exchange for a hefty payoff. "We know how to destroy people," Stern reportedly threatened. "It's what we do." To shield himself from character assassination, Stern allegedly suggested, Burkle could make a one-time payment of $100,000, followed by monthly installments of $10,000.

News Corp. axed Stern, dismissing him as a rogue reporter and calling his behavior "highly aberrational." But according to a 2007 affidavit by a fellow Post veteran, the alleged shakedown was an integral part of the company's culture. "The spineless hypocrites in senior management at the New York Post and News Corp. have always used 'expendable' employees as scapegoats for the misdeeds of its senior executives," Post reporter Ian Spiegelman testified. Spiegelman revealed that Page Six's top editor Richard Johnson and two others had accepted cash from a restaurateur whose business had received a positive mention the day before. Johnson also allegedly accepted a $50,000 all-expenses-paid bachelor party to Mexico from Joe Francis, the founder of Girls Gone Wild, whom the Post subsequently hyped as "the next Hugh Hefner." Spiegelman further charged that Col Allan, the Post's top editor, received free lap dances at the strip club Scores in return for favorable coverage by the paper.

Myler, as the Post's managing editor, was Johnson's superior when all this going on; it was Myler who handled Burkle's complaints when the billionaire wrote to the paper to complain about the shakedown (New York Times, 4/7/06).

Tom McGeveran of Capital (7/8/11) last year wrote up some more Myler-related scandals, including his resignation as editor of the Daily Mail in 2001 after his paper's interview in a soccer-related assault case led to a mistrial,  another mistrial that stemmed from the Post' s singling out a juror in a corporate corruption prosecution, and his defense of News of the World "investigations" that involved prostitutes tape-recording  orgies and the like.

It's been suggested that part of the appeal of hiring Myler for Zuckerman is that neither of them like Rupert Murdoch. That's true of plenty of people; it's not a good enough reason to put someone in charge of your newspaper.

Hmmm... can I get two votes?

For the record, the results are currently 94 percent for liberal control, 1 percent for conservative-pandering and 5 percent for control by the rich.

I've commented before on the corporate media's tendency to cherry-pick election results to illustrate their favorite political moral: that Democrats need to move to the right.

Still, I was surprised, after a day of voting in which there was one major race pitting a Democrat against a Republican--the special election in Rep. Jack Murtha's old district in Pennsylvania, which the Democrat won quite handily--the New York Daily News provided this analysis (5/19/10):

Tuesday's balloting is a fresh reminder of what all the combatants have understood for months: It's a lousy year to be a Democrat, an incumbent or Barack Obama.

Based on what, exactly? The only election result that's even mentioned is Sen. Arlen Specter's Democratic primary loss to Rep. Joe Sestak. That just showed that last year was a lousy year to become a Democrat.

For the New York Post (3/27/09), it's "Free Dumb Tower." For the same day's New York Daily News, it means "No More Freedom." They're talking about 1 World Trade Center, which is what the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey announced it was calling the skyscraper it's building on the site of the old World Trade Center destroyed on September 11--rather than Freedom Tower, as it had been previously referred to.

And the tabloids, naturally, are outraged. "Freedom is out of fashion at Ground Zero," declared the Post. "Once hailed as a beacon of rebirth in the aftermath of Sept. 11, the Freedom Tower has been stripped of its patriotic name -- which has been swapped out for the more marketable 'One World Trade Center.'"

It's worth recalling that despite the popular media line at the time, there's little evidence that Al-Qaeda targeted the towers because they hated our freedom. The main association between "freedom" and the past or future buildings on the site is "free enterprise." Not only is that more clearly conveyed by the old World Trade Center name, but it's exemplified by the fact that the developers of the building are changing its name in apparent reaction to the preferences of the kinds of businesses that are likely to rent there.

But even commercial freedom looks too free for the Post and the Daily News--they seem to prefer the kind of "freedom" that can be used to shame people who are insufficiently patriotic.