Phone hacking: show goes on at Fox News, but for how long?

As the audience sits down in an American cinema to watch the latest release from one of the Hollywood studio behemoths, 20th Century Fox, the words "A News Corporation Company" flash by almost unnoticed in the opening credits.

And among the millions of viewers who tune in to television shows ranging from Glee and The Simpsons to American Idol, House and Bones, there is little interest in the owners behind the Fox Broadcasting Company.

But that could all be about to change as a result of the phone hacking and bribery scandal that is spreading across the Atlantic to the US, home to the most lucrative chunk of Rupert Murdoch's global media empire.

The departure of Les Hinton, the mogul's confidante for 52 years, from a top News Corp job in America on Friday is the most dramatic indication that the storm is now buffeting Mr Murdoch's US interests.

Mr Hinton, who had been chief executive at News International in London at the time of the phone hacking, was brought in as publisher of The Wall Street Journal in 2007 after it was acquired by Mr Murdoch, to the consternation of many of its readers and journalists.

So it was notable that in its coverage of Mr Hinton's resignation, the newspaper noted the dangers to its own proprietor's US fiefdom. The departure was "the starkest sign that the tremors at the media company are reaching beyond the United Kingdom," the paper reported.

"It also injects uncertainty at one of News Corp's most important US properties."

After several days of defiance, Mr Murdoch – an Australian by birth and an American citizen by choice – is finally bowing to pressure from the New York crisis management advisers and Washington lawyers drafted in for damage control.

Investors are already telling him to sell his remaining British newspaper interests – The Sun, The Times and The Sunday Times.

For News Corp's primarily American shareholders and top US executives, the loss of the remaining British papers – two of them loss-making – would cause little distress. Indeed, for many of them, it would be welcome.

Their priority now is to quarantine their US interests. In the news media, these include the Journal and Dow Jones news wires, overseen until Friday by Mr Hinton, the New York Post tabloid and the Fox News cable network, a bête noire of American liberals, including Barack Obama's administration, for its relentless promotion of conservative causes.

But of primary significance to News Corp's bottom line are its 27 US broadcast licences and 20th Century Fox, which contributed more than two thirds of the company's profits of $2.5 billion (£1.55 billion) last year.

Several leading Democratic senators and a prominent Republican congressman last week called for Eric Holder, the Attorney General, the FBI and federal communications and security exchange regulators to investigate the company.

The targets of those inquiries, said Senators Barbara Boxer and Jay Rockefeller in a letter to Mr Holder, should be two-fold: allegations that News of the World journalists may have sought access to phone records in the US and that British detectives were paid for information.

Sen Boxer, a tenacious Democrat from California, told The Sunday Telegraph: "The bottom line is American corporations can't break American laws.

"And there will be consequences if those allegations turn out to be true."

As the scandal spreads, News Corp executives are only too well aware that US judicial and congressional inquiries can acquire an inexorable momentum that reaches juggernaut force.

Mr Rockefeller heads the Senate commerce committee and is considering opening his own hearings.

Congressional investigators have powerful rights to subpoena individuals and documents.

If they turned up any evidence of transatlantic collusion with criminal activities in the UK, which could simply be email exchanges, phone records or financial book-keeping, then the fall-out would be explosive. US law requires that holders of broadcast licences issued by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) be of "good character".

It is a proviso rarely invoked by the FCC, but this is a media crisis of unprecedented proportions and, as recent days have demonstrated, unpredictable developments.

For all the focus on legality, lurking close to the surface is politics. The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post both hew to a conservative agenda on their opinion pages.

But it is the uncompromising Right-wing news agenda of Fox News that provokes a visceral loathing among American liberals, both for its politics and its success.

So there was barely concealed glee for many Democrats at Mr Murdoch's travails last week. "This is an empire that was built on a set of journalistic ethics that's beginning to explode and unravel," said John Podesta, a prominent Obama ally in Washington.

Eric Alterman, a leading liberal commentator, summed up the mood. "Murdoch is viewed as both a successful purveyor of sleaze and an influential challenger to the journalistic and political establishment," he said. "He is also the most powerful individual in all media and one of the few people who is willing to invest in it.

"So few journalists want to take him on and most of the opposition comes from people with a clear ideological viewpoint. But now that there is blood in the water, and he is seen to be vulnerable, people are coming down to shoot the wounded."

There have even been murmurings of reviving abandoned plans to require some legal form of political balance when licences are issued – a move that had been aimed at conservative radio "shock-jocks", but could also have encompassed cable networks, particularly Fox.

With the Republicans in control of the House of Representatives – and well-placed to take the Senate from the Democrats next year – the prospects of fresh legislation are limited.

But at News Corp's gleaming corporate headquarters on the Avenue of the Americas in midtown Manhattan, executives are well aware that it will not require new laws for the company to face a commercial meltdown if audience, advertisers and stars turn against it – as they appear to be doing in Britain.