No . It is a little bit more complicated
What happened was that one of his rich bodies owns a news paper which surprise surprise ,always write positive articles about him and his government. Not only that, being stinking rich his friend started handing out this news paper for free making money only from advertisement.
Of course the other news papers could not keep up with such a competition and started to loose money because of that . Why would someone buy a news paper if he just got one for free. And consider all those news papers are already suffering because of the internet.
So " presumably " he met with the owner of the biggest news paper owner and offered him to pass a law to stop handing out free news papers if he would start writing more favourably about him.
The thing is that this idea did not materialize and nothing came out of it.
So it is not even a crime , maybe only conspiracy to commit a crime. But i doubt many people would understand exactly what he did wrong though if we go by the dry law he is at fault.
Hope this is clear , took me a while to understand it myself that is why i think most of the public would not be so impressed with it.