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At last! Rupert Murdoch and Newcorp’s combined karmic hangover has finally caught up with them, tanking the beloved News of the World and thrusting his entire corporation’s dubious newsgathering ethics into the spotlight. I posted about this a while ago when Murdoch’s bid for BskyB was on the line – though thankfully now UK Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt isn’t as sure as he once was of his wholesale approval of the venture. Many sources are even claiming that Murdoch’s been forced to drop his bid in light of the recent allegations. Looks like it’s for real – a glimmer of light in the dark tunnel of homogenized media consolidation. More here.
Why does this matter? I hear you thinking. Well, here’s an insight into ol’ Rupert’s business MO, courtesty of a June 2002 FT interview, in which he comments that:
“We start with the written word. Then we get to TV, originally with the idea that it will protect the advertising base and it then progresses into a medium of its own with news, programmes and ideas. You then look at TV and you say: ‘Look, we don’t want to just buy programmes from a Hollywood studio, we’d better have one.’ Then comes the issue of people who are going to deliver your programmes. Cable is consolidating … Instead of having 20 gatekeepers, you are going to have three or four. For content providers, that is very bad news. So, you try to protect yourself in having some distribution power.”
Or else see ol’ Rupe’s comments backing US intervention in Iraq, back in 2003: “I think what’s important is that the world respects us, much more important than they love us … There is going to be collateral damage. And if you really want to be brutal about it, better we get it done now than spread it over months,” he said. Now that the Iraq war has left both UK and US economies in tatters (estimated cost currently totalling $787bn), not to mention the human cost on the ground in Iraqi civilian/US solider casualties and PTSD trauma, can we not start to question the motives of someone with such unchecked access to media control?
As the wheels on the Newscorp bandwagon come increasingly unhinged, more influential figures are willing to put their heads above the parapet, amongst them Eliot Spitzer, former NY Governor. Here’s to hoping the avalanche of criticism appears on the radar of even the most apathetic newsreader.
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