The Murdoch media scandal continues to unfold in Britain. It appears that Murdoch’s attempt to co-opt British new media as much as he has co-opted U.S. media is crumbling. Yes, he owns the Sun, the Times, and the Sunday Times. But he’s going to have a hard time expanding.
Murdoch had been expected to take over British Sky Broadcasting, or BSkyB, a satellite television company that broadcasts in the U.K. and the Republic of Ireland. The Brits would have had their own Faux News! But Parliament is telling him to drop it. Editorialists are saying that Muroch’s media ambitions are detrimental to Great Britain’s national interests.
George Monbiot writes,
Is Murdoch now finished in the UK? As the pursuit of Gordon Brown by the Sunday Times and the Sun blows the hacking scandal into new corners of the old man’s empire, this story begins to feel like the crumbling of the Berlin Wall. The naked attempt to destroy Brown by any means, including hacking the medical files of his sick baby son, means that there is no obvious limit to the story’s ramifications. …
… The cracks are appearing in the most unexpected places. Look at the remarkable admission by the rightwing columnist Janet Daley in this week’s Sunday Telegraph. “British political journalism is basically a club to which politicians and journalists both belong,” she wrote. “It is this familiarity, this intimacy, this set of shared assumptions … which is the real corruptor of political life. The self-limiting spectrum of what can and cannot be said … the self-reinforcing cowardice which takes for granted that certain vested interests are too powerful to be worth confronting. All of these things are constant dangers in the political life of any democracy.”
Indeed, this very confluence of power and assumptions is one of the primary reasons the United States has become dysfunctional. Apparently, the British are taking this seriously. I hope so.
Janet Daley did a nice job of getting her point across..She’s a good writer.
Now why couldn’t we have decided Murdoch’s influence was against national interests? I know; Business is God here.
Consider the insidious nature of J, Edgar Hoover’s .FBI. Secret information gathered by the government was used to force cooperation from politicians and silence criticism from celebrities. I have to wonder if Murdoch was using a juicy tidbit here and there in Hooters fashion.
Here was my take-away from Ms. Daley’s piece:
“There is a degree of cosy camaraderie between the press and the governing class in this country which my American journalist friends find startling. As one of my counterparts from Washington said to me on a visit to London (in tones that were both shocked and mildly envious), “Everybody here knows everybody else.â€
I didn’t think anything could be clubbier that The Village in DC.
And this story is getting very little play here. None at all on any of Murdochs mediums.
What happened is insidious. Information is the coin of the realm. Never more so than now with instant and wide spread ways to shape, control, and dissemintate it.
This wasn’t Woodward and Bernstein looking into executive branch miscarriages of justice, and coverups. This was casting a wide net to get information for use by an Oligarch who controls many of the mediums of public information. It was gathered for his benefit to help him get, maintain, and increase control and power.
And I’m not naive enough to think it hasn’t happened here. Apparently, this was done to the families of 9/11 victims. Does anyone think that it wasn’t also done here to politicians who are not in Murdochs favor?
I’m hoping that this becomes a big story here and begins to put a dent in ‘Muderochs” empire.
I know it won’t happen, but let us dream for a second about how this nation might yet be saved.
Murdoch is force to shut down FOX News for financial reasons. The WSJ goes back to being the great newspaper that it was, and the NY Post, the NY Post… Well, there’s not much you can do with the NY Post exept start fires – it’s too toxic to wrap fish in, and constipates parrots if you line their cages with it. So stick with fires.
Then Rush invites Roger Ailes to lunch to see what he can do to help out in continuing to propel the propaganda. They order triple-extra-bacon-and-cheese burgers, supersized gravy and fries, and gallons of Jolt Cola, and either die from coronaries, or explode like Mr. Creosote in Monty Pythons “The Meaning of Life.”
Ahhh…
Now back to reality. If, as McLuhan said, ‘The medium is the message,” then ‘Murderoch’s’ still in good shape, because when you control numerous mediums, you also control the message. And Murdoch controls plenty over here in the US. FOX News is treated by the MSM here as a legitimate news organization, and not a propaganda device to spread lies and to misinform and misdirect those too stupid or ignorant to know that they’re being played. Until other Cable TV news channels, and magazines, and newspapers stop treating FOX News with deference and expose what they’re about, I don’t see things changing.
I’d love to see that change. I just don’t see it happening here. Do you?
“Surprisingly perhaps, considering how generally open and friendly American society is, relations between journalists and politicians in Washington are far more formal and officially distant than they are in Westminster. There is certainly a well-developed school of spin there, which Bill Clinton’s administration perfected (and then exported to Blairite New Labour), and the Obama people clearly have close and mutually adoring relations with the New York Times. But the blurring of distinctions between commentator and player, or between political correspondent and party adviser, which is a regular feature of Westminster life would be seen in the US as a breach of probity on both sides.”
I am not saying that this isn’t a well written, worthwhile article. One might hope that it is the first confession in a revelatory series. We need a similar phenomenon to occur here. This last paragraph carries her point, but does not seem particularly insightful about the state of American politics and journalism, which seems to me also destructive to our democracy. In fairness to Janet Daley, her focus is dealing with events in her own country.
I haven’t been to Britain since 1968, so I have virtually no idea of the state of journalism there. If American journalism seems virtuous by comparison, it must be an absolute horror.
NPR, (TOTN?) hosted a fellow who had written an article, “In Defense of Murdoch”. It seemed intent on portraying Murdoch as a great businessman, “fair and balanced”, and a stand up guy. I heard only about half of the program, but one caller offered the standard opinion that “Fox was the only source for the conservative point of view” amid a sea of liberal bias. It’s an old saw and she was just pushing an shopworn button in the “conservative” mythos. (She might even have been a paid shill, — paranoid much?) There was the full of range of ‘the left does it too.” Admittedly, one reason I ditched my TV ten years ago, was that the news media had become insufferable. My opinion would be a near exact mirror image of the caller’s. Clearly one, or both of us has taken a long hike out of the land of reality.
But, in my defense, union representatives, environmentalists and other “progressives” seemed practically nonexistent when I had satellite service. Businessmen, pitchmen from right wing think tanks tiresome hacks like Tucker Carlson were thick on the ground. Has anything changed?
I heard the “Noam Chomsky Show”, HBO’s “Great Figures in Labor History” and “FDR, Savior of America” were all cancelled after their first season.
I was there in 2005, and British news media didn’t seem nearly as grotesque as in the U.S. I think Janet Daley is seeing obsequiousness, not formality. I also didn’t notice that the British have grown a “punitocracy” that is quite as influential as ours, and Beltway pundits and politicians are thick as thieves. Well, pretty literally.
This has been the one bright bit of news lately… although Lynne is right, it probably won’t affect News Corpse’s method of operations here.
“British political journalism is basically a club to which politicians and journalists both belong,â€
Not sure things are much different here. The citizen’s united decision is a perfect example. Why would the media report on the corrupting nature of big money in politics when they stand to gain so much from the barrage of “interest group” advertising? From what I’ve read Murdoch basically controlled who got where in British politics. I would say he definitely has the power to be a king maker in the republican party here. It’s only a matter of time that Democrats will start making deals with him for favorable coverage as well, just like Labour started doing in the UK. Hopefully this scandal will take him down a few notches.
Of course they aren’t, and in fact the U.S. is way further down that road than is Britain. But the Brits have an opportunity to turn things around; it may be too late for us.
Apparently Murdoch has dropped his bid for BSkyB ahh too bad!
As usual, Jon Stewart has an amusing and insightful take on this.
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-july-11-2011/have-no-fear–england-s-here
Check out this epic confrontation between embattled PM David Cameron and Labour Leader Ed Miliband today:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2011/07/rocking_the_house.php?ref=fpblg
Why can’t we have a system like this, where there is direct questioning?
I know why, because it didn’t work out so well for the Republicans with Obama when they did talk to him, and Little Boots couldn’t have handled anything lie this without his puppet-master Cheney’s hand up his ass.
I also love how the PM is on the same level as the person questioning him.