Reddit reviews The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch

Well, I don't know very many things, but I read a book about Rupert Murdoch once, and from what descriptions there were in it I gather that it's basically as simple as any other corporate structure. The White House press correspondent person sends an email/holds a conference call with the editors' bosses, they relay the message down the pipe to the editors themselves.

With something like this, I imagine there would have been a literal memo and the memo would essentially say "do not use hot-button phrase 'false flag' in article re: turkey/syria phone leak" except with way more shorthand.

From my perspective as a low-level employee of a large corporation, it makes perfect sense. The writer is essentially the checkout boy, and the boss tells him 'Say "Thank you for shopping as BigStore, come again soon!" instead of any other phrase. There will be the occasional upstart who says "No! I will not bend to your corporate will! I will use my own words to convey the same message, but more effectively because I will be genuine!" but then that boss gets his boss, and that gets sorted out quite quickly one way or the other, as they say.

But most of the time, the low-level workers have already been in an environment like this, and they understand that keeping their head down and obeying all the rules is really the only alternative to being shunned out of the building, so they don't take it there. As mentioned above, there are really only a handful of actual separate companies that own the major media outlets, so you just tap into each of them from the top and let each sub-boss along the way enforce his links of the chain.

Again, disclaimer, I am not a smart man.

The thing that's going on at News Corp right now is total, total desperation over this digital stuff

Michael Wolff, author of The Man Who Owns the News, an authorised biography of Rupert Murdoch.