Murdoch-owned papers are working overtime to defend Murdoch from blowback from the phone hacking scandal. And in a recent editorial addressing the business of news and those who are criticizing members of the News Corp family, the Wall Street Journal delivers a dig against papers like The Guardian that have done business with WikiLeaks.

(update below) As the News Corp phone hacking scandal continues to grow and envelop US newspapers and media organizations, which are owned by Rupert Murdoch and part of the News Corp family, the management of each of these papers and organizations are working overtime to defend Murdoch from the criticism.

For the past months, I have hosted a show called “This Week in WikiLeaks,” where I bring a guest on to talk about a WikiLeaks-related story or to talk about the latest news and updates on WikiLeaks, an organization that provides a lens for understanding so much about how the press, policy and politics, the national security state, etc.

This week, Trevor Timm, the person behind the Twitter account @WLLegal, joined the program to talk about the latest news on WikiLeaks. Timm has been a regular legal correspondent on the show.

Julian Assange had his extradition appeal hearing last week. POLITICO published a story on Pfc. Bradley Manning’s treatment at Quantico Marine Brig. Sen. John McCain renewed his push for a Senate select committee that could address what he considers a growing threat to American national security, hacking and electronic leaks.

Organizers now say supporters have a challenge to “match the courage of the hunger strikers” and “effectively pressure the CDCR to immediately negotiate on the standards any negotiation should follow: with the prisoners in good faith, addressing all of the demands, and with the prisoner-approved outside mediation team.”

While many articles on the hunger strike protest of Supermax prisoners at California’s Pelican Bay prison have rightly emphasized the conditions of torture that arise from a regime of long-term solitary confinement, another object of the strikers is to end the hated “debriefing” system, by which prisoners cannot escape their conditions unless they “snitch, parole, or die.” The “debriefing” regime is eerily similar to that experienced by so-called unlawful detainees at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay.

We now have yet another state diverting a large portion of the hard dollar funds they received from the foreclosure fraud settlement, and instead of using them to help homeowners, moving them to cover a budget hole. The latest example concerns Arizona, one of the major states suffering from the

Yesterday the Senate wanted to take up and quickly pass a reauthorization of the Export-Import Bank. After some maneuvering, the bill passed the House with over 330 votes, a rare sight these days. So you would think that nothing would go wrong over in the Senate. You would be wrong.

President Obama’s star-studded fundraiser at George Clooney’s house went off without a hitch. But before the event, about 50 activists with the Campaign for a Fair Settlement, mostly low-income victims of foreclosure or predatory activity by the financial sector, made their appeal to the President in a protest on the

Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, facing a recall election in a little over three weeks, was caught on tape telling a top donor that he has a strategy to turn Wisconsin into a right to work state: A filmmaker released a video Thursday that shows Gov. Scott Walker saying he would

I spent most of yesterday afternoon laughing my ass off about Jamie Dimon’s London Whale loss, but it’s actually not all that funny. JPMorgan Chase revealed a $2 billion loss on a bad bet they made on a credit default swap index trade. They described it as an egregious, self-inflicted

I want to revisit David’s earlier post on the punitive measures the GOP House proposed to replace the automatic defense cuts required by the deficit reduction debacle of last year. That law, passed by both parties after the GOP threatened to force the government into default and signed by President