Murdoch's Retarded Spunk Monster Attack's BBC Online

[Red Phoenix]

I like the way he gives the BBC some shit because I think they're a government rig, but News Corporation are a complete disgrace aswell, and their craving for power is sickening. We'd probably be better without both if there were enough decent and honest news outlets to replace them.

[Bob]

anyone read Screenwipe in the guargian guide this saturday (my mind has gone blank on the name of the guy who wrties it, but he's ace)

 

Its a really good piece. Normally, he is very funny, but this week its a serious rant and spot on. it really is.

 

EDIT: Its Charlie Brooker (of course) and its actually called Screen Brun, not screen wipe (that was his TV spin off), and here is the article...

 

EDIT again: Read all pages of thread before posting, dickhead. Kudos BatChainPuller. Repped.

 

article

 

Charlie Brooker's screen burnJames Murdoch is the closest thing the media has to Damien from The Omen, thinks Charlie Brooker

Buzz up!

Digg it

Charlie Brooker The Guardian, Saturday 5 September 2009 Article historyAt last weekend's Edinburgh TV festival, the annual MacTaggart Lecture was delivered by Niles Crane from Frasier, played with eerie precision by James Murdoch. His speech attacked the BBC, moaned about Ofcom and likened the British television industry to The Addams Family. It went down like a turd in a casserole.

 

Still, the Addams Family reference will have been well-considered because James knows a thing or two about horror households: he's the son of Rupert Murdoch, which makes him the closest thing the media has to Damien from The Omen.

 

That's a fatuous comparison, obviously. Damien Thorn, offspring of Satan, was educated at Yale before inheriting a global business conglomerate at a shockingly young age and using it to hypnotise millions in a demonic bid to hasten Armageddon. James Murdoch's story is quite different. He went to Harvard.

 

Above all, Murdoch's speech was a call for the BBC's online news service to be curbed, scaled back, deleted, depleted, dragged to the wastebasket, and so on, because according to him, the dispersal of such free "state-sponsored" news on the internet threatens the future of other journalistic outlets. Particularly those provided by News International, which wants to start charging for the online versions of its papers.

 

Yes Thorn - I mean, Murdoch - refers to the BBC as "state-sponsored media", because that makes it sound bad (although not quite as bad as "Satan-sponsored media", admittedly). He evoked the goverment's control of the media in Orwell's 1984, and claimed that only commercial news organisations were truly capable of producing "independent news coverage that challenges the consensus".

 

I guess that's what the News Of The World does when it challenges the consensus view that personal voicemails should remain personal, or that concealing a video camera in a woman's private home bathroom is sick and creepy (it magically becomes acceptable when she's Kerry Katona).

 

Another great example of independent consensus-challenging news coverage is America's Fox News network, home of bellicose human snail Bill O'Reilly and blubbering blubberball Glenn Beck. Beck - who has the sort of rubbery, chucklesome face that should ideally be either a) cast as the goonish sidekick in a bad frat house sex comedy or b) painted on a toilet bowl so you could shit directly on to it - has become famous for crying live on air, indulging in paranoid conspiracy theorising, and labelling Obama a "racist" with "a deep-seated hatred for white people or white culture".

 

As a news source, Fox is about as plausible and useful as an episode of Thundercats. Still, at least by hiring Beck, they've genuinely challenged the stuffy consensus notion that people should only really be given their own show on a major news channel if they're sane.

 

The trouble is, once you've gasped or chuckled over the YouTube clips of his most demented excesses, he's actually incredibly boring: a fat clown with one protracted trick. His show consists of an hour of screechy, hectoring bullshit: a pudgy middle-aged right-winger sobbing into his shirt about how powerless he feels. It's an incredible performance, but it belongs in some kind of zoo, not on a news channel. But that's the Murdoch way.

 

Now there's a lengthy, valid, and boring debate to be had about the scope and suitability of some of the BBC's ambitions but, quite frankly, if their news website (a thing of beauty and a national treasure) helps us stave off the arrival of the likes of Beck - even tangentially, even only for another few years until the Tories take over and begin stealthily dismantling the Beeb while a self-interested press loudly eggs them on - then it deserves to be cherished and applauded.

 

To finish his speech, Murdoch claimed, "The only reliable, durable, and perpetual guarantor of independence is profit." Or to put it another way: greed is good.

 

Then he clopped off stage on his cloven hooves, guffing out a hot cloud of sulphur as he left.

[Section_31]

New Statesman - The Sun sinks to a new low

 

It was in the summer of 1995 when, ominously clutching a kettle full of boiling water, Neil Kinnock erupted in fury at Alastair Campbell. The old friends were holidaying in France and the former Labour leader had just learned of Tony Blair's decision to fly to Australia as part of his extensive campaign to win the support of the Sun and its owner, Rupert Murdoch. In his diaries, The Blair Years, Campbell recalls Kinnock saying: "It won't matter if we win as the bankers and stockbrokers have got us already by the f*****g balls. And that is before you take your 30 pieces of silver."

 

A victim of the Sun throughout his leadership of Labour, Kinnock spoke from the heart. "You imagine what it's like having your

head stuck inside a f*****g light bulb then you tell me how I'm supposed to feel when I see you set off halfway round the world to grease him up," he said, referring to the tabloid's front page on polling day in 1992, which declared that, if Kinnock were to win, the last voter to leave the country should "turn the lights off".

 

When Campbell protested that he and Blair had given nothing to Murdoch, Kinnock countered prophetically: "You will. And he will take it. You will get his support and then you will get the support of a few racist b*******, and then you'll lose it again the minute that we are in trouble."

An own goal

And so it came to pass. After an awkward 14-year interlude, the Sun has now returned to doing what it does best: bashing Labour. And, it seems, at any price. In giving over the front page to some spelling mistakes made by Gordon Brown in his letter to Jacqui Janes, whose son, Jamie, died after a bomb explosion in Afghanistan on 5 October, the Sun showed no hesitation in exploiting a mother's grief. Even George Pascoe-Watson, until recently the Sun's loyal political editor, has said that the Prime Minister "cares passionately about the care of our troops".

 

And this much is obvious to anybody who reads the full (mysteriously obtained) transcript of Brown's 13-minute phone conversation with Janes on 8 November. Indeed, Pascoe-Watson implied that the Sun may have misjudged the public mood in its reporting of the events, warning of the "danger that public opinion could go against" the paper.

 

Certainly, the consensus among the political and media figures who convened for David Cameron's Hugo Young memorial lecture on 10 November was that the Sun had scored an own goal, and even encouraged sympathy towards the vilified leader. Brown, who in 2002 suffered the loss of his ten-day-old baby daughter, Jennifer Jane, was convincing when he explained earlier in the day: "I'm a parent who understands the feelings when something goes terribly, terribly wrong, and I understand how long it takes to handle the grief that we have all experienced."

 

As for the letter, Alastair Campbell says now: "I have a few of those. I just dug out the one he wrote when my father died. He didn't have to, but he did. It is in the now familiar black felt pen. Some of the words are a bit difficult to read. 'Alastair' with three As looks suspiciously like 'Alistair' with two Is. But it talks about his feelings for his father, and his feelings when he died, and it was a nice gesture at a difficult time for me and my family. Given all the other pressures on a prime minister's time, that meant something. He will be mortified that anyone, least of all the grieving mother of a dead young soldier, might think he would be callous or disregarding of his sacrifice or their suffering. Until a few weeks ago, the Sun would never have thought so either."

 

Which brings us to the bigger political picture behind the sordid headlines - namely, Murdoch's influence on British politics. Campbell was just doing his job when he forged good relations with the Sun. As shown by the paper's vicious campaign against Brown - which echoes the campaign against Kinnock before him, and which will only get worse over the next six months - it does no harm to have the populist paper onside.

 

However, as I have argued here before, Blair and Brown went too far in their attempts to ingratiate themselves with Murdoch. Repeatedly, they betrayed their party's agenda and damaged their own political legacies. Blair, who had a supportive phone conversation with Murdoch on the eve of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, even performed a U-turn on his refusal to back a referendum for the then EU constitution, after being threatened with opposition from the Sun and the Times. Even Cameron has learned - after himself promising in the Sun, in 2007, a Europe referendum - that devising policy to please Murdoch is neither practical nor a sign of good judgement.

 

Lessons learned

To get the full story of Murdoch's influence, I have for years sought to uncover details of his contacts with Labour leaders through the Freedom of Information Act. The reality is that New Labour never needed Murdoch's support: the proprietor is a businessman above all else, and backs who he thinks will win - as he did when the Sun came out for the Tories at the end of the Labour party conference in September. For decades, politicians of all sides have ceded influence to Murdoch unnecessarily because they have failed to see that they could afford to remain true to their instincts, as he'd be forced to back them if they were electorally successful.

 

In the end, Kinnock was right: Murdoch has abandoned Labour now that it has hit "trouble". The lesson for the party between now and polling day is that it must trust its instincts and be itself. After all, it can be sure the Sun will.

 

 

Quality

[Dougie Do'ins]

Wrong thread.

[Dougie Do'ins]

Murdoch's Fox cleared for Sky takeover bid

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-44805046

[Aventus]

Murdoch's Fox cleared for Sky takeover bid

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-44805046

What's happening with Disney buying Fox?

[skend04]

Government have cleared him but the equally repulsive, according to some, Comcast are currently outbidding the scrotum.

[General Dryness]

The cunt already has too much power. Bit late to be "concerned" about it now.