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After an extended hiatus home and away from email and the interweb, I’m now back and straight into classes at Stanford. Not that the holiday hiatus was totally work-free – see above for a cartoon published this month in Jewish Renaissance magazine – it illustrates an anecdote from the article it accompanies, so don’t fret if you don’t get it. The idea is that in uniform, all the army soliders’ religious differences/stereotypes become obscured. So hurrah for uniformity! Not often you hear that on this website. Content aside, it was a nice prod for me to turn my hand to watercolour washes over the festive period, as I grabbed the odd minute or two to sketch out scenes from London, Yorkshire and Paris (the holy trinity of European cultcha) to hone my life drawing skills. I’ll post new art every day.
What better way to start 2010 than by casting off the shackles of last year – famous for that US Supreme Court ruling giving corporations unprecedented power in electoral funding – and giving Rupert Murdoch the keys to the Kingdom? The United Kingdom, that is – or at least any semblance of a diverse media. After an expose published in December destroyed Vince Cable’s cabinet credibility, it now falls to Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt, who has already publicly stated his support for the wannabe Ozymandias of Oz, to decide on whether Murdoch’s proposed £8bn buyout of BSkyB by his News Corporation should be subjected to a Competition Commission inquiry. Why could this be a bad idea? Aside from the obvious media hegemony argument (for the record, I’m no all-hands-t0-the-wheel liberal either), there’s the undisputed history of Fox Managerial influence over its editorial offerings. Click here to read about the memos from Fox News Washington Managing Editor Bill Sammon that told journalists to play down climate change stories, and use the term ” government option” instead of “public option” in their coverage of the health care debate. Surprisingly, the Guardian has come out with some arguments for why the takeover is a good thing, which you can read here.
For more info on Murdoch’s media empire, click here.
