Thursday, July 14, 2011 

A very Murdochian volte-face and the Wolfman.

It obviously hasn't quite sunk into the Murdochs yet just how far they've fallen, nor has it seemingly occurred to them that they could still go even lower. Their original letters to the culture committee, stating how they were sadly unavailable to give evidence next Tuesday were perfect examples of the excuses given by those who formerly felt or rather knew they were above such inconveniences as appearing before a group of jumped-up MPs to be asked daft, impertinent questions.

Their volte-face a few hours later, after being informed that they could be imprisoned (in the tower?) should they continue to have better things to do, an empty, clearly illegal threat if there ever was one, was as grudging as they come. Yes, we have found some space in our diaries, but don't think about asking us any actual questions (PDF), as then we may be forced to incriminate ourselves. As has been pointed out, no one has yet been charged with any actual offence as a result of Operation Weeting, so there's no possibility whatsoever of any eventual prosecutions being prejudiced or any issues being sub judice. Tuesday then threatens to be something of a let down, as reticence already seems to be the strategy the unholy trifecta of Murdoch, Murdoch junior and Brooks will pursue. It will at least make a difference to the previous one decided upon by NI executives and Screws hacks: what we now know to be lies and deliberate obfuscation.

Speaking of which, Murdoch's insistence to the Wall Street Journal that News Corp has only made "minor mistakes" in its handling of the debacle is just ever so slightly rose-tinted. Even assuming that he's not referring to News International's disastrous combination of procrastination and bullshitting when it came to phone hacking, if he'd bothered to take something approaching an interest back in 2009 then he still could have prevented having to abandon the bid for BSkyB by forcing NI to come clean, instead of it having to be forced out of them by a combination of the Guardian and the police.

NI is clearly grasping at any small mercies which come its way: tomorrow's Sun has on its front page the news that the Graun has apologised over claiming Brown's medical records were accessed by the paper directly. Instead it's accepted that a source provided the detail that Fraser had cystic fibrosis, although where he got the information from it's still not clear, nor does it even begin to make it acceptable that the Sun published the news in the first place, having threatened the Browns if they spoiled the "exclusive".

Not that the Metropolitan police are having a much better time of it. The news that the latest former NotW executive to be arrested, Neil "Wolfman" Wallis had been providing "strategic communications" (no, seriously) advice to the commissioner on a part-time basis may have come as a shock to Boris "codswallop" Johnson and Downing Street, yet his relationship with others within the Met has been known for some time. Private Eye reported in No. 1288 at the end of May that John Yates had been forced into admitting he had lunch with Wallis back in February, a meal Yates felt didn't need to be recorded in the Met's hospitality register as it was a "private engagement". The Eye speculated at the time that Wallis might be "quietly assisting" Inspector Knacker with their inquiries; if he was, then it was obviously decided that his help needed to be put on a more official footing. Still, as a "senior Met insider" told the Graun:

"The commissioner thought if the prime minister is happy employing Andy Coulson, and Neil Wallis has bid the lowest price, what reason would we have not to employ him?"

Yes, what possible reason? I don't know about you, but I'm coming up blank.

Labels: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Share |

7/14/2011 11:50:00 pm | | | links to this post

Wednesday, July 13, 2011 

Decline and fall.

Last December, some of you might remember that Vince Cable told a couple of Telegraph hacks posing as constituents that he was picking his fights in government carefully. Not only had he declared war on Mr Murdoch over the proposed News Corporation takeover of BSkyB, he thought "we are going to win".

I thought the opposite, as must have Cable himself as he was quickly defenestrated for his indiscretion. Indeed, I went so far as to write:

That, more than anything, is the real lesson from today's antics. You simply can't be in any variety of government and be against Murdoch, let alone threaten to go to war against him, especially if you favour not having your voicemail messages listened in to. This is exactly why we've had the miserable sight of both Ed Miliband and John Denham rushing out to condemn Cable, even as Labour gets chewed to pieces in the Sun, as they still believe that one day it'll be their turn to bask once again in the warm glow of Murdoch media support.

In fairness to myself, absolutely no one predicted or could have come close to imagining how quickly Murdoch and News International could have gone from being all conquering behemoths, with the power to strike down any politician foolish enough to suggest that what's good for them isn't necessarily good for the rest of the country, to the pariahs they've become over the course of ten staggering days. True, almost all the media barons of the past few decades have been brought low in some way or another, Robert Maxwell and Conrad Black most notoriously, yet Murdoch just seemed too strong, too imposing, too, to paraphrase a cliché, big to fall.

As the reporters have all stated, the withdrawal of the bid to swallow BSkyB whole is almost certainly the biggest setback of his entire business career. It's also come only a month after News Corp quietly sold MySpace for $35m, having paid $580 million for it back in 2005. The deal may have been shrewd then; now it looks as embarrassing as one of the blinged up, abandoned profiles on the site. Last Thursday he shut the Screws, a still profitable if tainted brand in a futile attempt to try and save the BSkyB, as well as the skin of his glamorous surrogate daughter. Previously politicians may have accepted that as a sacrifice enough, even considering the depths of criminality it seems the paper may have went to. Today parliament was unanimous, if after the fact, in demanding that the takeover be dropped in the public interest. The fear that Murdoch, his papers and editors both inspired and played with to their utmost advantage has gone. It will almost certainly return, but for once it's difficult to demure from the much reached for expression that it will never be quite the same again.

Certainly the spectacle of a previous prime minister of this country denouncing News International as a "criminal-media nexus" is something I never imagined that I'd see. Gordon Brown's speech was typical of him: self-serving, intensely party political, infuriating and also, much to the distress of some on the Tory benches desperate to finger Tom Baldwin as somehow being as equally culpable as Andy Coulson could well turn out to be, mostly bang on target. Both David Cameron and Ed Miliband have tried to stress that both sides were too close to the Murdochs, and both have said lessons will be learn, but Brown's setting out of the record of how while he was prime minister his government blocked News International and BSkyB's aggressive ambitions to expand was in contrast to Cameron's turning of all their concerns and grievances into prospective policies. It was certainly something of a coincidence that when setting out his bonfire of the quangos while in opposition the one he expressly chose to make an example of was Ofcom, the regulator at the time being raged against by NI.

It's also apparent that had Brown, against the advice of Gus O'Donnell and others set-up a judicial inquiry so close to the election that he and Labour as a whole would have been torn to pieces by the Tory press and the Conservatives themselves. Again, it's worth remembering how no newspaper other than the Guardian reported on the employment tribunal that found Matt Driscoll had been bullied by Andy Coulson, while the Sun had just denounced the report by the media committee on phone hacking, which had reached only moderately critical conclusions, as representing "a black day for parliament". It may well be right that if Brown had really wanted an inquiry he could have ordered one, as some have argued in response, but it's more than understandable that he decided it wasn't worth a further monstering from the tabloids. As he's said, the record will come out.

All of this somewhat distracted from the actual announcement of the judge-led, two-part inquiry. It does thankfully seem to be broad enough in scope to consider the entirety of Fleet Street's use of the "dark arts", and not just the dependence of the News of the World on them. Held under the Inquiries Act, Lord Justice Leveson will have the power to summon almost anyone he feels appropriate, with evidence potentially being given under oath. Leveson, incidentally, was described earlier in the year by the Sun as a "softie", a description they may well come to regret. Especially promising is that he'll be allowed to make recommendations on cross-media ownership, with the potential that the Communications Act of 2003 could be amended to put in more stringent rules on the percentage of the media one person or company can control, prohibiting Murdoch from being able to resubmit a bid for Sky without offloading his other interests.

One thing that shouldn't be forgotten is that as Simon Jenkins wrote this morning, it wasn't ultimately the police, politicians or celebrities bringing civil cases who exposed what had been going on at the News of the World; it was other journalists. The withdrawal of the bid for BSkyB wouldn't have happened without the outrage from the public and the reverse ferret of politicians, it's true, but ultimately this was the Guardian's victory. This is why the reform of press regulation and change in practices while needed, should not go too far. While there should be a record kept of meetings between editors and proprietors and politicians, it doesn't need to be extended beyond that, discouraging contact between senior officials and hacks which often provide the stories that hold governments to account as much as the Commons itself does.

Not many wars are won without a shot being fired. Even fewer are won by individuals that had no direct involvement whatsoever. Vince Cable despite first appearances won his battle. His and our victory ought to remind us that in politics anything is ultimately possible, with even the most intractable and immovable obstacles and individuals being subject to the same forces as everyone else. It might take a long time, but eventually every empire declines and then falls.

Labels: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Share |

7/13/2011 11:59:00 pm | | | links to this post

Thursday, March 03, 2011 

Hoist by the Telegraph's petard.


Say hello to your new overlords, remarkably similar to the old ones.

When it comes to great examples of being hoist by your own petard, we now truly have one to overshadow all the others. The Telegraph couldn't possibly have known when it sent its undercover reporters out masquerading as constituents in an attempt to extract some juicy gossip with which to fill space in the run up to Christmas that Vince Cable would be indiscreet enough to boast that he had "declared war on Rupert Murdoch", yet it was still stupid enough to run parts of the surreptitiously recorded conversation instead of spiking the entire exercise. It was only too easy then for the strangely omitted part to be leaked to Robert Peston, and so with it went crashing down even the outside possibility that Cable might block News Corporation's bid to swallow BSkyB whole.

You do have give credit to Jeremy "Berkeley" Hunt, though. Just as there was never any chance of the deal being blocked by a Conservative government already as cosy with the Murdoch press as New Labour ever was, so it would be a blown raspberry too far to just wave the deal through. No, there had to be a sacrificial offering, even if it was so minute as to not even come close to appeasing the other media gods expressing their wrath at the potential of even more market share being clawed away. Hence Sky News, hardly the most cherished part of the satellite company from a Murdoch perspective, is to be sheared off and guaranteed almost exactly the same level of independence as the Times and Sunday Times were back in 1981 when the condition of their sale was the creation of a board of directors who were meant to have the ultimate say over the hiring and firing of editors. A year later Murdoch sacked Harry Evans without deigning to ask the board of their views on the matter. The one difference is that neither a Murdoch nor a News Corporation employee can sit as chairman, thereby guaranteeing the channel's complete impartiality for perpetuity.

It's nonsense of course, although as Steve Hewlett writes you can't help but admire its elegance. The new Sky News holding company will have the exact same shareholding as News Corp currently has in BSkyB, the same shareholding which ensures that the likes of the Sun treat the broadcaster as all but one of its own. In any event, even the most ardent Murdoch loathers, and that includes myself, would be hard pressed to claim that Sky News has ever been anything but independent from Keith, slightly right-of-centre general view of the country notwithstanding. Its impartiality has long been guaranteed by Ofcom and its predecessors, leaving the possibility of Murdoch turning it into a British version of Fox News moot. Not that there's anything to stop News Corp in 10 years time from dumping this new arrangement and starting from scratch - indeed, they've only agreed to licence the brand for 7 years with an opportunity for another 7 once those are up.

By then the media environment will have been transformed irrevocably, and Murdoch will be in all but dominant control. It's worth remembering that the BBC recently signed a deal which froze the licence fee at its current rate until 2016, ensuring that it will have to stretch itself ever more thinly in order to carry on doing just what it does now. No wonder then that the deal has so terrified the smaller players, who came together in an unprecedented coalition to push for the deal to be rejected. Today's announcement is essentially their worst nightmare come to life: the plurality test supposedly reached, there's nothing to stop News Corp from bundling together more and more of its products. Want the Sun or the Times along with your Sky television, telephone and broadband? Even if you don't, you'll probably end up getting it. Just as much as the newspaper industry has begun to start stripping out the bulk sales that have for so long distorted the figures, the spectre of a new version of the price wars of the 90s hovers back into view, just when they reach the point of not being able to afford to go through it all again. The Barclay brothers probably have deep enough pockets to ensure that the Telegraph can survive, but the Independent and Guardian, different target markets or not, would be put in even more trouble.

The perverse situation that has been reached is that the government has essentially decided that what's good for Rupert Murdoch is good for Britain. This might make more sense if Sky was actively investing in original programming and creative content for its channels, except as Mark Thompson pointed out it only spent a paltry £100m on new productions last year, while splashing the equivalent of the whole of ITV's programming budget on marketing. You can't have failed to notice the launch of Sky Atlantic, advertised absolutely everywhere incessantly, a channel that will show nothing but the best that err, America has to offer. The Sky Arts channels are the only high-brow investment that Murdoch has almost ever made, and they were originally an outside introduction. Everything else has resulted in a race to the bottom, one which has had the effect of coarsening the nation along with it.

Worst of all is that simply isn't a way back once Sky has been gobbled whole. Murdoch might be 80 and destined to meet the reaper before too long, but the power his empire will have over governments will continue regardless of who steps up afterwards. Unlike Silvio Berlusconi, none of the Murdoch clan appear to have political aspirations; they've learned how to get their way without seeking office themselves. By wielding an ever bigger market share, the ability of governments to operate without having first gained their approval will be even further diminished than it currently is. Already we've seen with the Metropolitan police's pitiful initial investigations into phone-hacking at the News of the World just how entrenched the reciprocal relationships between the main powers in the land have become, and with this deal they'll be even fewer places to turn to. Democracy, when it comes down to it, can be sold just as cheaply for short-term gain as everything else.

Labels: , , , , , , , , ,

Share |

3/03/2011 11:59:00 pm | | | links to this post

Tuesday, January 11, 2011 

Richard Desmond and the PCC: still not a fork in the road.

Richard Desmond has then followed through on his threat to cease the funding of the Press Standards Board of Finance, the body that independently (snigger) subsidises the running costs of the Press Complaints Commission. Unlike the last time he did so, the PCC has stated that it will immediately cease to exercise regulatory oversight over the titles Desmond's Northern and Shell company publishes, which as well as the Express and Star also includes OK! and another couple of celebrity focused magazines.

While it's still difficult to know what Desmond's exact motivation is for withholding funding, especially as Northern and Shell have refused to comment on the news, it's clear he was informed of the consequences of his actions this time round. Almost certainly recommended as a result of Desmond's previous non-payment, the PCC adopted a policy of excluding publishers that refused to pay their dues, although only as a last resort. PressBoF plainly made this apparent in response to the initial indication from Northern and Shell that they would no longer be funding the PCC, ostensibly according to Roy Greenslade as it "no longer suited Desmond's business needs", and it's equally clear that despite this PressBoF had next to no expectation that he would change his mind. Quite whether he anticipated that both bodies would make their disapproval so apparent in their press releases, as well as bring further attention to his first period of not funding the body is less certain. Desmond didn't however get where he is without being utterly shameless, even if he has a remarkably thin skin, so the criticism seems unlikely to have much of an effect.

In one sense at least it seems to be an incredibly short-sighted action on the part of Desmond. While it's long been apparent that his publications with the possible exception of the Express regard their own readers with utter contempt, the PCC doubtless acted as a helpful shield when it came to those with some sort of clout behind them. Not all celebrities or those with the resources will instantly resort to m'learned friends when they feel they've had their privacy invaded or been libelled, instead at least giving the PCC a whirl to begin with. With that avenue now denied to them, the number of suits or claims against Desmond's papers is only going to increase. The PCC is also useful when it comes to negotiating the wording and placement of retractions and apologies, so even if lawyers now essentially take up the role PCC staff would have formerly played, the bill for their work is bound to be exponentially larger than the £150,000 to £200,000 a year it's estimated Desmond is refusing to stump up.

One conclusion to be drawn is that while any paper and proprietor is concerned about libelling the rich and famous, it's far more irksome and embarrassing when any pleb can complain about an inaccurate story and essentially force the newspaper to admit just how badly they got it wrong. The likes of the Star and OK! take this to a whole different level: they don't just show a complete lack of care in the composition of their articles, they actively lie and mislead on their front pages with the aim of drawing in readers. The number of times the Star and OK! have run headlines or blurbs on their front pages which bear only the slightest resemblance with the actual articles inside simply can't be counted as it happens on almost a daily (or weekly) basis, on occasion with the celebrities themselves complicit. One such example was Jordan appearing on the front page of OK! in tears at Peter Andre's dalliance with another woman, only for it to be revealed inside that the person involved happened to made out of plastic. On more than five occasions over the past few years this exact practice has been complained about to the PCC, all resolved without adjudication. It was presumably only a matter of time before either a reader took it to the board to make a judgement on or for the PCC independently to make clear that they weren't going to tolerate many more complaints on the same matter.

Just how into disrepute Desmond's decision will bring the PCC and the wider press as a whole is uncertain. No one with any real knowledge of the PCC regards it as either anything approaching independent or an effective regulator, despite its increasing attempts to both make itself more relevant and fight back against those critical of it. It also seems unlikely, for now at least, that any other publisher will follow suit. The obvious candidates would be Trinity Mirror or the Independent (excepting the Guardian making a further protest over the PCC's hopeless investigation into phone-hacking at the News of the World), and that would probably be as a result of pleading poverty rather than any real problem with the PCC's actual role. Key will be the response from politicians, some of whom have long been critical of self-regulation and will see this quite rightly as an opportunity to show how the media policing itself, despite being allowed to do so for so long, has abjectly failed. No one however either has a viable alternative to the PCC, or the stomach to get into a fight with the media over it, especially as everyone regards Desmond as a rogue rather than someone to model; one thing this isn't is a repeat of Wapping. This time round Desmond has chosen his fight carefully: the only real losers will be the poor bastards who continue to buy his papers. It's up to everyone else to try to convince them to stop doing just that.

Labels: , , , , , ,

Share |

1/11/2011 10:54:00 pm | | | links to this post

Tuesday, December 21, 2010 

He fought the war and the war won.


The Vince Cable "going to war with Murdoch" furore is one of those wonderful occasions in politics where absolutely everyone, with the exception of the person at the centre of the storm is in the wrong.

Seeing as the Telegraph kicked the whole thing off, we may as well start with them. There really is something desperately pathetic and certainly unethical about sending round hacks posing as constituents, not to expose any kind of serious wrongdoing but to instead just to secretly record gossip which can then be splashed on the front page for a cheap story in the run up to Christmas. Reading the censored transcript you can even note that Cable asked for what he was saying to not be quoted which the Telegraph completely ignored, something it would have almost certainly followed had he been talking freely to journalists. Rather than this being Cable spouting nonsense, boasting or showing off as the likes of Julian Glover have put it, it was instead him being perhaps indiscreet with two people he thought were Liberal Democrat voters. At worst he's exaggerating his influence and power in claiming he'd be able to bring down the coalition as a nuclear option by resigning, and very few politicians are guilty of humility. It's not even as if Cable said anything as originally reported by the Telegraph which the more enterprising journalist couldn't have found out and written up, even if without direct attribution; there are disagreements in any government, and anyone who isn't completely signed up to the Cameron agenda can see that their numerous reforms are going much too far far too quickly. These are hardly original thoughts, even coming from a minister.

Quite why then the Telegraph decided to omit Cable's one notable and arguably deserving of public knowledge comment, that he was going to war against Rupert Murdoch over the proposed News Corporation takeover of BSkyB, only for a "whistleblower" (read: disgruntled Telegraph hack) to leak the complete transcript to Robert Peston is a mystery, or rather isn't. Unless the Telegraph was holding it back for tomorrow's paper, something no one seems to believe, even though they have more secretly recorded conversations with MPs, then the only reason it decided not to include it is for the reason that they would have rather had someone as business secretary apparently prepared to block the takeover which they themselves oppose than say, Jeremy (C)Hunt, whose views on the constricting nature of our media ownership laws are already on record. It's a wonderful insight into how journalism, even on what used to be known as the broadsheets works: self-interest trumps everything else, including a politician potentially abusing his power.

The problem with that view is that the idea that politicians ever make decisions on their merits rather than either ideology or short-term advantage is fairly laughable. Vince Cable would have been absolutely right to block Murdoch's bid to fully own Sky on the grounds that he already has enough of a stranglehold over our media, regardless of what the European Commission thinks, even if he was against the takeover as a matter of principle. If you want a truly independent decision made, rather than just a "quasi-judicial one", as the business secretary's oversight was until today so deliciously referred to, then give it either to a judge or a quango rather than a politician. All that's been achieved by moving media and telecoms policy from the Department of Business to the Department of Culture, Media and Sport is a passing of the buck, albeit one which will delight both Murdoch and the Conservatives themselves, safe in the knowledge that Hunt rather than Cable can be relied upon to make the right decision.

That, more than anything, is the real lesson from today's antics. You simply can't be in any variety of government and be against Murdoch, let alone threaten to go to war against him, especially if you favour not having your voicemail messages listened in to. This is exactly why we've had the miserable sight of both Ed Miliband and John Denham rushing out to condemn Cable, even as Labour gets chewed to pieces in the Sun, as they still believe that one day it'll be their turn to bask once again in the warm glow of Murdoch media support.

As for the coalition itself, both Cameron and Clegg know only too well that Cable is the only remaining Liberal Democrat fig leaf in the cabinet. Removing him would have exposed Clegg and his main cronies entirely, something he simply couldn't countenance. Cameron will probably be secretly delighted; the decision over BSkyB given to Hunt to wave through, Cable emasculated and the prospect of having a true believer in David Laws ready to step in once he's been given the all clear. The real worries, as from the very beginning, remain with Clegg, knowing full well that should the coalition fall apart it's his party that'll suffer, not the Conservatives. Should Cable return to the backbenches he could well lead the discontent within the party, something that for now at least has been postponed. Whether that possibility becomes an inevitability remains to be seen.

Labels: , , , , , , ,

Share |

12/21/2010 11:19:00 pm | | | links to this post

Tuesday, December 14, 2010 

Richard Desmond and a "fork in the road".

(Hat-tip to Anton.)

The saying goes that you can't keep a good man down. With Richard Desmond, proprietor of the Daily Express and Daily Star, the Television X softcore subscription TV channels and since the summer, Channel 5, it's more that effluent tends to float. Last July, it seemed that Desmond's apparent inexorable rise might finally be checked, and all as a result of his own insecurity and vanity. He had brought what turned out to be a disastrous libel action against Tom Bower, the unauthorised biographer, for claiming in his book on the downfall of Conrad Black that the Canadian media tycoon had "ground him [Desmond] into the dust". Integral to the case was that Desmond had played the role of a newspaper owner of the old school, interfering directly in the editorial process, or dropping the most blatant of hints to his journalists as to what they should write, including on his business rivals and enemies. Bower's win seemed to open the door to the publishing of his own biography on Desmond, titled Rogue Trader.

Almost a year and six months on, Rogue Trader is still without a publisher. Desmond, meanwhile, succeeded in purchasing Channel 5 with barely a squeak of protest, not even from the usual likes of Private Eye, and has started the same process he carried out at the Express and Star: sacking dozens of employees while cutting costs to the bone, with the focus to be on the pumping out of celebrity obsessed content, cheaply produced and piled high. Desmond, who has long cited Rupert Murdoch as the person he would most like to emulate, has gone even further than his idol in wholly owning a terrestrial British television channel. He even supposedly recently offered Murdoch a billion for News International, something the Australian-American regarded as a good price, even if he had no intention off selling.

It's not therefore much of a surprise, flush with cash as he is, that Desmond is once again objecting to paying the annual fee to the Press Standards Board of Finance, the body that funds the Press Complaints Commission, having previously spent nearly two years refusing to pay the bill, supposedly as a protest against the editor of the Daily Express having to leave the board after the payout to the McCanns. Whether this is just the usual prevarication from a businessman who objects to any variety of oversight concerning his dealings, or signals that the end of his patience has been reached with the frequency with which the Daily Star especially has been referred to the commission is not entirely clear, although if it was the latter it certainly wouldn't be a shock.

While it would certainly be a stretch to describe the Star as ever being a newspaper of repute, increasingly over the past few years it's became little more than a daily version of OK!, Desmond's downmarket version of Hello! The front page lead article is invariably more inaccurate than it is accurate; today's cover, speculating on Katie Price being pregnant for the umpteenth time is for instance completely false. When the cover hasn't been dedicated to the entire industry that seems to follow the antics of a couple of permatanned half-wits, it's been given over to even more inflammatory material, such as this story from earlier in the year on "Muslim-only" toilets in a shopping centre in Rochdale, according to the paper funded by the local council. The only problem was that they weren't Muslim-only, as anyone could use them, and they weren't put in place with the use of public money. The Star, without apologising, was ordered to recognise these facts in a clarification on page two, after the Exclarotive blogger complained to the PCC. Numerous other recent examples of the Star and Express either deliberately misleading their readers, displaying a wholesale lack of normal journalistic ethics or just a complete lack of care abound.

Should Desmond carry through his threat to withdraw funding, it's not immediately clear whether or not the PCC would just continue as it did previously: still taking complaints against the papers, simply without the ability to force them to publish adjudications or corrections. Far more serious would be if he actively took the papers out of the PCC's oversight, something which as Roy Greenslade explains has only happened previously once. Even then, it's hard to see this as being the "fork in the road" or the threat to press freedom some have already put it down as; rather, as all the other newspaper groups are dedicated to keeping up the pretence of self-regulation, almost nothing would change. Any blame would be put purely on Desmond continuing to operate as a rogue proprietor, with doubtless the other owners and editors privately trying to persuade him to rejoin. We've already seen recently how terrified government ministers are when they start to even think of taking on the likes of News International; the idea that a form of state regulation would be imposed now in the social networking age, especially when David Cameron is just as hand in glove with the Sun as New Labour ever was, is unthinkable.

More pertinently, the PCC always has been and remains a cartel rather than anything approaching an active and concerned regulator, as even a glance at their piss-poor investigations into the phone-hacking at the News of the World demonstrates. The PCC's code is hardly set in stone, and changes to it are more than possible. Extra allowances could be made for publications that dedicate themselves almost solely to the discussion of celebrities, where the facts are far more difficult to establish and where rumours are actively encouraged by the stars themselves, so often complicit in much of the content printed about them. After all, how can they possibly operate under such onerous restrictions when gossip blogs, often operated from America, only answerable to their courts can put up almost anything they like? We should never underestimate the ability of organisations under apparent terminal pressure to adapt, regardless of how their actions appear to anyone outside the industry. As all the polling undertaken has shown, trust has never been lower in the tabloid press. The readers almost expect to be lied to; why should a regulator prevent that from happening when it's almost what they want?

Labels: , , , , , ,

Share |

12/14/2010 10:18:00 pm | | | links to this post

Wednesday, October 13, 2010 

Why Vince Cable needs to block Murdoch taking full control of Sky.

While it is rare for either the entirety or vast swathes of the British media to work together, it is not unprecedented. What is unprecedented is that the target of the group formed this week is not the government of the day, as has always been the case previously, but another media group. Such it seems is the existential threat posed by News Corporation acquiring BSkyB in full, already owning as it does a 39% share in the company, that political differences, allegiances and much else have been cast aside for the greater cause.

This isn't quite the abandoning of the mentality in Fleet Street which has long held that dog doesn't eat dog, at least when it comes to general journalistic ethics, most recently broken by the Guardian's investigation into the phone-hacking at the News of the World and which has been almost entirely ignored by the nation's tabloids if not the former broadsheets, but it is highly significant. It's not often that either the Daily Mail or Telegraph see eye-to-eye with the Guardian, let alone the BBC which both of the former continue to pillory when the opportunity arises. The list is if anything more marked by those who haven't given their support, which amounts to Northern and Shell, the owner of the Express group, Richard Desmond presumably either not rocking the boat having recently acquired Channel Five with little adverse comment, as well as perhaps harbouring ambitions of one day rivalling Murdoch in the media ownership stakes; the Independent; Virgin, having recently sold Sky its main channels and ended the war sparked by the removal of Sky 1 and other services from their packages back in 2006; and ITV, in which BSkyB has a 7.5% share, having been forced to sell some of the stake it acquired as part of a gambit to block Virgin, then NTL from attempting to take full control four years ago.

Undoubtedly self-interest is purely behind the appearance of BT on the list, having formerly been a monopoly itself, and which has only very recently attempted to begin to attempt to compete with Sky. Indeed, it's difficult to know just how many of those on the list genuinely do believe, as their letter to Vince Cable, the business secretary has it, that the "proposed takeover could have serious and far-reaching consequences for media plurality". The Mail and the Telegraph certainly haven't been quick to let their concerns about Murdoch's previous predatory behaviour come to the fore; if anything they actively cheered some of it on. Only now that it could possibly affect them have they begun to cry foul. Simon Jenkins also has something approaching a point, although some his analysis is dead wrong, such as his suggestion that without Murdoch there may have been only 3 newspapers by now as in most other "unionised" countries (this ignores the fact that as a country we have always bought newspapers in far greater numbers than almost anywhere else on the planet) when he says that other organisations have opposed his "innovations" only then to take advantage of them without the risk he took on.

The other main problem with his argument is that even if the end of the union control over Fleet Street resulted in massively increased pagination, it most certainly didn't result in a corresponding increase in quality. As others in the comment thread also point out, it was the creation of the Premier League and Sky's stranglehold over the live football market which continues to this day which was the true making of him in this country. Mark Thompson recently pointed out that despite having fifteen times the turnover of Channel Five, Sky spends about the same as that broadcaster on home-grown original content, just £100m. Its marketing budget, by contrast, is the same size as ITV's programming one. It's that massive turnover of almost £6bn which those who signed the letter fear becoming fully under the control of News Corporation; the kind of money which can outspend all of them put together, consolidating Sky with his newspapers and HarperCollins, creating a behemoth of an organisation which will be the first port of call for those using the new technologies which Murdoch is eager to get into, starting with the iPad.

Increasingly, it's the BBC which stands in the way of this vision, as has been made more than clear by James Murdoch and other Murdoch employees and devotees. As Roy Greenslade says, subscriptions to the Times and Sunday Times have been disappointingly low since they took the plunge, Murdoch led, of charging for access to their websites. One suspects that when the News of the World and Sun eventually follow suit that sign-ups to those high quality sources will be even lower: it's one thing to pick up a tabloid for between 20 and 40 pence to flick through during lunch break or when commuting (yes, I know the Screws costs more than that; Sunday papers have always been different); it's another to subscribe to them online when you can get far superior content for free elsewhere. Blaming the BBC for the failures of the Times and Sunday Times is perverse while the other broadsheets provide their content for free, yet increasingly it's clear they cannot afford to do so in the long-term, with paid for physical sales in almost certainly irreversible decline. Reduced to say, a choice between the Guardian and the BBC for free content, it will be far easier to point the finger at the corporation as to why the private sector can't make money.

It's no wonder then that with so many other potential targets, the Times picked only on Mark Thompson and the BBC in a leader this morning. Taking the moral high ground when you're a Murdoch paper may be difficult, but the Times still attempted it, making clear that it couldn't objectively comment on the proposed full takeover of Sky for obvious reasons. It accused Thompson of acting as any other business organisation would, despite calling for the corporation to be treated differently, and making a serious error in compromising an issue that the corporation would wish to report on without being accused of self-interest. Far less convincing was its claims that this was still about potential BBC expansion, when it ought to be abundantly clear that the only thing the BBC is going to be doing in the short-term and almost certainly in the long-term also is the old impossibility of trying to do more with less. In an almost certainly unrelated development, Sky also complained to Ofcom and the Office of Fair Trading about the BBC's proposed YouView service at the very last minute.

Whether there will be any material difference made by News Corp and Murdoch wholly owning BSkyB, at least in the short-term, is dubious. Murdoch has always controlled the broadcaster regardless of owning only 39% of the shares. What Vince Cable really needs to consider should he have to rule on the matter is two things. Firstly, that Murdoch owning vast swathes of the British media has never resulted in anything other than a race to the bottom. The best that can be said is that he saved the Times and the Sunday Times for the nation, hardly the greatest of achievements. His partnership with the Premier League resulted directly in the pricing out of the game completely those on low incomes, unable to afford either his coverage or to attend matches, while contributing directly to the massive rise in player salaries and short-termism which now rules the day. The best his satellite services can be said to offer on the cultural front is the Sky Arts channels, and they were only relatively recently brought in house from outside control.

Second, is that the power he already has is immense: nothing illustrates it better than than the MPs who were frightened of the potential consequences should they continue pushing the initial phone-hacking investigation. Politicians have to woo him, not the other way around. While his influence in an online world can and is exaggerated, the fear which comes from having the biggest selling newspaper in the country pouring the journalistic equivalent of a bucket of shit over you, deserved or not, is total. When the police could well be curtailing their investigations because of their links with the real power in the land, it ought to be more than apparent that giving those who wield it even more revenue without the corresponding responsibility is a disaster waiting to happen. Stopping Murdoch from taking complete and total control of Sky is the only way to ensure that it doesn't.

Labels: , , , , , , ,

Share |

10/13/2010 11:25:00 pm | | | links to this post

Tuesday, March 02, 2010 

Putting quality last.

There really is no institution quite like the British Broadcasting Corporation. Here is, as polls attest, one of the most trusted and liked large organisations in the country, which you would imagine should exude confidence as a result; instead, it presents itself as troubled and insecure, prone to self-flagellation at the slightest criticism, and unable to defend itself anywhere near adequately when attacked. It should be able to approach its strategy review, which has been effectively forced upon it both by the Conservatives, who have made no secret of their plans should they be elected to cut the corporation, and by the "opposition" as it were, led by the egregious James Murdoch, from a position of strength; instead it seems almost panicked, clutching at what it thinks it can throw to the pack of dogs pursuing it without causing a backlash amongst its supporters.

When I suggested that the recent report by Policy Exchange was a step by step guide on how to emasculate the BBC without mentioning the dreaded M name, I wasn't expecting that the BBC themselves would take a look at it and decide that much of it was worth stealing. In reality, the two reviews have likely ran side by side, but it's still difficult not to think there might have been some last minute changes after the PE report came out, such is the similarity in some of what they propose. While PE didn't recommend the most eye-catching cuts which the BBC's strategy review has outlined, the closure of the 6 Music and Asian Network radio stations, much of the rest is almost a carbon copy. The strategy review intends to cap spending on sport rights, slash it on foreign imports, close Switch and Blast! and cut back extremely heavily on web content, all recommended by Mark Oliver.

All of this is quite clearly, as alluded to above, a pre-emptive attempt at out manoeuvring the BBC's enemies before they have a chance of actually suggesting, let alone implementing their own ideas on how the corporation should be cut. Yet while it's a half-hearted effort, it's also one which suggests the BBC simply doesn't understand why the likes of 6 Music and Asian Network have found their own niche and why their closure is likely to be so vigorously opposed: it's because they offer something so radically different and which no commercial rival has the resources or nous to deliver. On the face of it 6 Music is ostensibly an indie music station, but it goes far beyond that through the relationship it cultivates with its listeners, and through the genuine love of music which the vast majority of the presenters on it have and want to share. Asian Network, even if its audience has been declining, offers a voice to those who otherwise find it difficult to make themselves heard, even if it can be seen as self-defeating through the ghettoising of the content. Plainly, the BBC thinks it can do away with both mainly because middle Britain is interested in neither, and only cares about Radio 2 and Radio 4, a sacrifice which it can justify to itself easily. Some cynics are suggesting that it's chosen 6 Music and Asian Network specifically because it knows that they have such a dedicated following that the uproar at their disappearance will ensure the BBC Trust intervenes, and while it's difficult to dismiss entirely, the other parts of the report are just as apparently ignorant of why it remains popular.

Why else would the BBC so bizarrely ignore BBC3 when it was considering what could be cut? Here's a station that costs a staggering £115m a year and which has in its years of broadcast created at best 5 programmes which have been either critical or commercial successes, the latest of which is Being Human. The BBC openly admits that Channel 4 has been better than them at reaching the 16-25 market, hence the closure of Switch and Blast, so why not chuck the execrable BBC3 on the bonfire as well? It does nothing which BBC2 or BBC4 couldn't commission instead, and would be a statement of intent which would reverberate far beyond the shutting of 6 Music and the Asian Network. Extend it further and you could also justify the privatising of Radio 1 or/and the closure of 1Xtra. 1Xtra looks an especially expensive and slow to react indulgence when compared to say, the vibrancy with which the pirate stations in London, Rinse FM especially, have all while under the threat of raids and imminent closure. This would still leave the BBC able to target the 16-35 demographic which the PE report wanted the BBC to leave to others, but with a respectable budget and without patronising them on their "own" stations, as it has done for years with the utterly crass comedies BBC3 has mostly offered.

Along with the emasculation of BBC4, with the removal of "entertainment" and comedy, which presumably means Charlie Brooker is out of a job unless a home is found for him on BBC2, the whole report is the BBC retreating to what it thinks it's good at it and what it thinks others think it's good at. It seems to be a report which falls directly into how the BBC is stereotyped abroad: all those worthy costume dramas and as bias free journalism as it's possible to produce without realising that as admired the corporation is for those things, it's also liked because the licence fee means it can do things that others would never imagine doing or could never justify. As much as we love the HD nature documentaries, we'd like some bite and the unusual along with it. This report is likely to be the first step in a retrenchment strategy which leads to the Kelvin MacKenzie and Murdoch-approved final solution of a BBC consisting of BBC1, BBC2 and Radio 4, all thoroughly non-threatening and all as dull as dishwater. Why else, after all, unless you were seeking Murdoch approval, would you leak a draft of the report to the Times, which then savaged it as not going anywhere near far enough? When the BBC stops caring what rivals think about it and becomes comfortable and confident enough to defend itself on its own terms, then the programmes might also reflect that strength and purpose. Until then it seems that death by a thousands cuts is the way of the future.

Labels: , , , , , , , ,

Share |

3/02/2010 10:42:00 pm | | | links to this post

Thursday, January 14, 2010 

How to destroy the BBC without mentioning Murdoch.

It's been obvious for some time now that the BBC under a Conservative government is going to be facing a vastly different climate to the one that it currently enjoys under a somewhat supportive Labour party. Facing not just the accusations from the usual suspects of an innate liberal bias, but also now the outright fury of the Murdochs for daring to provide a free to use news website, with many certain that the deal between Cameron and Murdoch for his support must involve some kind of emasculation of the BBC once the new Tories gain power, there still hasn't been a set-out policy from how this is going to be achieved. Thankfully, Policy Exchange, the right-wing think-tank with notable links to the few within the Cameron set with an ideological bent has come up with a step-by-step guide on how destroy the BBC by a thousand cuts which doesn't so much as mention Murdoch.

Not that Policy Exchange itself is completely free from Murdoch devotees or those who call him their boss. The trustees of the think-tank include Camilla Cavendish and Alice Thomson, both Times hacks, while Charles Moore, former editor of the Daily Telegraph and who refused to pay the licence fee until Jonathan Ross left the corporation is the chairman of the board. Also a trustee is Rachel Whetstone, whose partner is Steve Hilton, Cameron's director of strategy. Whetstone was also a godparent to the late Ivan Cameron. The report itself is by Mark Oliver, who was director of strategy at the Beeb between 1989 and 1995, during John Birt's much-loved tenure as director-general. Oliver it seems isn't a blue-sky thinker to rival Birt however; his plans are much simpler.

His chief recommendation (PDF) is that the BBC should focus on quality first and reach second. On paper this is a reasonable proposal: the BBC has for too long tried to be all things to all people, although its reason for doing so is that all of the people are of course forced to pay a regressive tax to fund it. Oliver's pointed recommendations on what it shouldn't be doing though give the game away: it shouldn't be spending money on sports rights when the commercial channels do the job just as well when they win the bids. Has Oliver seen ITV's football coverage, one wonders? About the only sport ITV has covered well in recent years was F1, and they decided to not bid for the rights the last time they came up because of the money they'd spent on the FA Cup. The other thing the BBC should stop trying to do is 16-35 coverage, which really drives the point home. The real proposal here is that by stopping catering for the youth audience, the hope is that the young lose the reverence for the BBC which the older demographic continues to have, even if if that has been diluted in recent years. There is a case, as I've argued in the past, for shutting down BBC3 and privatising Radio 1, not to stop catering for the young but because the money spent on both could be better distributed and spent elsewhere. BBC3 in nearly 7 years of broadcasting has produced at most 5 programmes of actual worth, and all of them could have been easily made for and accommodated on BBC2. Radio 1 is just shit, end of story.

Along with Oliver's proposal to end the spending on talent and on overseas programmes which the other channels would bid for, this removes the justification for the keeping of the licence fee right down to the public service credentials - in short, the BBC should do the bare minimum, stay purely highbrow and in doing so, would lose the support which it currently still has across the ages and classes. The first step in this process was clearly the Sachsgate affair, resulting in the stifling layer of compliance which producers now have to go through, and which is discouraging even the slightest amount of risk-taking or programmes which might cause anything approaching offence. If, after Sachsgate, the BBC was allowed to keep its bollocks, just not allowed to use them, then Oliver's proposals would complete the castration.

Oliver's other key recommendations involving the BBC include the abolition of the BBC Trust, which hasn't held the corporation to sufficient account even though it has put its foot down on a number of occasions, while also recommending the "bottom-slicing" of the licence fee, which as the BBC has repeatedly rightly argued, would end the special relationship it has with licence-fee payers, leaving it no longer able to justify itself fully to the public. Finally, a Public Service Content Trust would be set up, another quango to which the BBC would have to justify itself to.

The other two eye-catching proposals which don't involve the BBC are that Channel 4 should be privatised - after all, ITV is a shining example of the benefits of such a move, or the Simon Cowell channel as it is shortly to be renamed. Lastly, ownership and competition constraints should be relaxed in exchange for programme investment commitments, or as it may as well be called, the Murdoch clause. The vision which this report set outs is a media environment in which Murdoch's every wish comes true - allowed to buy ITV and Channel 5, those pesky rules on impartiality dropped, and a BBC reduced to a husk. Whether we should go the whole way and rename the country Murdochland is probably the subject of Policy Exchange's next report.

Labels: , , , , , , , ,

Share |

1/14/2010 09:21:00 pm | | | links to this post

Wednesday, December 02, 2009 

Mandelson vs News International.

If we needed any more evidence that New Labour has decided that they have nothing to lose, Peter Mandelson's astonishingly personal attack on News International in the Lords today during the reading of the Digital Britain bill most certainly fits the bill. According to the Graun:

"There are some in the commercial sector who believe that the future of British media would be served by cutting back the role of the media regulator. They take this view because they want to commandeer more space and income for themselves and because they want to maintain their iron grip on pay-TV, a market in which many viewers feel they are paying more than they should for their music and sport. They also want to erode the commitment to impartiality. In other words, to fill British airwaves with more Fox-style news."

...

"They believe that profit alone should drive the gathering and circulation of news rather than allowing a role for what they call 'state-sponsored journalism'. The government and this bill reject this worldview, and I hope that the whole house, including the Conservatives, will make clear today that they think likewise, and that they will support Ofcom – including its efforts to ensure consumers are getting a fair deal in the pay-tv market."

Whether Murdoch senior and/or junior will directly return fire or not remains to be seen, and if there is one person who might just manage to win in a full-scale war between the two, Mandelson might just be that man, but it is a staggering act of cynicism which causes trouble for all sides. After all, if the Sun had delayed its changing of support to the Tories until next year, there wouldn't be a snowball's chance in hell of Mandelson making any such statement, regardless of its accuracy and regardless also of how NI would still be attacking Ofcom for daring to suggest that it shouldn't have a monopoly on how much it charges for its exclusive content.

The problem this poses though for those of us think Mandelson is exactly right, just for exactly the wrong reasons, is obvious. The Murdochs have, as they usually do, played it perfectly: they identify when something or someone is weak, then move in for the kill, on this occasion on both the BBC and Ofcom at the same time. The power which NI wields was ably illustrated by just how quickly Google decided to roll over and play dead once attacked by Rupert. For Mandelson to now be making the exact same arguments which we should be against increased NI media market dominance runs the risk that we end up looking like New Labour stooges, or that we ourselves have an interest in keeping the status quo. Mandelson's attack also potentially puts the BBC in a difficult position, as it could perpetuate the view that NL has an interest in ensuring it can keep churning out its "state-sponsored journalism", when the nation as a whole has an interest in impartial, free at the point of use news, which is what the BBC provides both online and off to a generally excellent standard, and which the public themselves overwhelmingly choose over the online offerings of a certain News International.

Mandelson does have a point though, when it comes to the Conservatives actually putting forward an intellectual argument for why they have decided to so favour NI over the opposition. So far all they've done is stated what their intentions are without explaining why - which doesn't exactly inspire confidence that they're doing it for any reason other than currying favour with the Murdochs. We certainly haven't heard the last of this, that's for sure.

Labels: , , , , , , ,

Share |

12/02/2009 09:38:00 pm | | | links to this post

Saturday, August 29, 2009 

That James Murdoch speech.

The only thing he didn't accuse others of doing which his Daddy also indulges in was nepotism.

Labels: , , , , ,

Share |

8/29/2009 12:14:00 am | | | links to this post

Thursday, July 23, 2009 

The rise and fall of Richard Desmond.

In the world of catastrophic legal cases, Richard Desmond's humiliation in the High Court must rank up there amongst the very top. Last year's disaster for the News of the World at the hands of Max Mosley seems to be the only really apposite comparison, but the key difference is that was a case brought by Mosley; here Desmond has brought the entire thing upon himself.

Quite why Desmond brought what was such a trivial claim for libel against Tom Bower remains unclear. Bower's QC, Ronald Thwaites, who has somewhat acquitted himself after his disgraceful performance representing the Met at the Jean Charles de Menezes health and safety prosecution, said in court that the real reason was because Desmond's ego couldn't allow him to described as a wimp, "ground into the dust" by Black, even if it was in a book that was unlikely to be read by many in a passage that was hardly remarkable. Others however believe the real reason was to ensure that Bower never had a chance of publishing a supposedly finished manuscript on Desmond himself, provisionally titled Rogue Trader. If it's as damning as Bower's other works, and when you have such a target it's hardly likely not to be, Desmond has far more to fear from that than from claims that Conrad Black had "ground him into the dust".

Surely the only thing that ensured Desmond had anything approaching a chance of victory was our ridiculous and damaging libel laws, where the defendant has to prove their case rather than the accuser theirs. Everyone in the media world knows how Desmond operates: he is a bully, a born liar and someone who surrounds himself only with sycophants and those he has total trust in. Only someone with a personality like Desmond, where the slightest insult can result in a feud lasting for years, could be thin-skinned enough to take offence at being described as a pornographer. Desmond made his money in softcore pornographic magazines, having obtained the licence to publish Penthouse in the UK in 1983. From there he built an empire thanks to his diversifying into most of the more acceptable fetishes, with among his more famous titles the likes of Asian Babes and Skin and Wriggly. This led inevitably to satellite and cable channels broadcasting much the same content, although his channels show the softcore variants of the produced smut; whether he actually owns the companies which produce the hardcore versions is unclear.

For a man who yearns for respectability and to take his rightful place amongst the establishment, owning wank rags and jazz channels is usually a no-no. While decidedly last century, one way to acquire that sort of status is to purchase a newspaper, and while the Daily Star is hardly what most would describe as an educational read, and the Daily Express has been in decline for half a century, his purchase of both ensured that he had finally entered the world of not just business but also political power. Some of course at the time questioned whether such a man should own a newspaper which used to be the biggest seller in the world; happily, a donation by Desmond of £100,000 to the Labour party ensured that no obstacles were placed in his way.

Desmond has since behaved exactly as you would expect a man of his stature to: he has made hundreds of journalists redundant from both papers, turned them even more than they already were into celebrity rags with a side-serving of news, the majority of which is inflammatory and bordering on the openly racist, and paid himself vast sums of money in the process, anything up to £50m a year.

Most modern proprietors of newspapers, like Desmond, deny that they would ever influence anything which their employees write, let alone tell them what to. In court, Desmond's QC Ian Winter said that it was "difficult to think of a more defamatory allegation to make". Most proprietors of course don't have to tell their journalists what to write, for the simple fact that they already know how they think, what their interests are and how to defend them, as Rupert Murdoch's editors do, although Murdoch at least admits that the Sun and News of the World's editorial line is directly influenced by him. Desmond, while also using that kind of influence in the newsroom, is both more brutal and direct. David Hellier, a former media editor on the Sunday Express, described how Desmond was seen in the newsroom "virtually every day between five and seven o'clock" and would regularly demand editorial changes. Any casual reader of Private Eye will have noted down the years Desmond's regular appearances in the Street of Shame, often ordering journalists around and insulting them on their appearance. One more memorable episode was when Desmond apparently told Express editor Peter Hill that his current front page was "fucking shit". Hill, fed up with Desmond's constant interference, finally lost his temper and left, leaving the deputy to redo the paper. Most notoriously, Desmond punched the Express's then night editor, Ted Young, in the stomach after his failure to run an article on the death of an obscure 60's musician. Desmond settled with Young the day before the case was due to go to an industrial tribunal for a six figure sum. Young was prevented from giving evidence in the High Court by Justice Eady, but thankfully his testimony was not needed.

Perhaps the most damning evidence however was given by the person who wrote the offending article which led Black to sue Desmond and consequently "ground him into the dust". Anil Bhoyrul, one of the former Mirror journalists involved in the Viglen shares debacle which was another stain on Piers Morgan's character, wrote the "Media Uncovered" column in the Sunday Express between 2001 and 2003 under the pseudonym Frank Daly. Despite supposedly being a witness for Desmond, Bhoyrul made clear that he was directly influenced in what he wrote by what Desmond "liked and disliked", which was made clear to him by the editor Martin Townsend in phone calls on a Tuesday. Bhoyrul boasted of how he "got a pretty good feel for who, you know, to be positive about and who to be negative about. The impression I got over time was that Conrad Black and Richard Desmond were not the best of friends." Bhoyrul was hardly exaggerating: he wrote around 27 hostile pieces about Black, and attacked the owner of the Independent, Tony O'Reilly, in much the same fashion when Desmond was in dispute with him.

Then there was just the sort of in the public domain knowledge which made Desmond look like an idiot. Three days after Desmond had threatened a business contact down the phone, telling him "[he'd] be the worst fucking enemy you'll ever have", the Sunday Express ran a defamatory article about the contact and his hedge fund, Pentagon Capital Management. When Desmond had to settle the libel claim from Pentagon, a statement was read out in open court that "Mr Desmond accepts that it was his comments in the presence of Sunday Express journalists that prompted the Sunday Express to publish the article." Yet Desmond denied when questioned by Thwaites that he had complained to the editor about his predicament, or in front of the journalists. Unless Desmond was committing perjury, he presumably only agreed to that statement in the libel settlement to get it over with.

Whether in the long run much will come of Desmond's humiliation, apart from the possible publication of Bower's biography, is difficult to tell. Undoubtedly his enemies at the Mail will tomorrow have a field day, as will the others that despise Desmond, but readers of his own papers would never know that he had even lost his claim. The article in the Express doesn't so much as mention it, merely setting out that Desmond "set the record straight", while even more mindboggling is his claim to that it was "worth it to stand up in court". Certainly, the estimated costs of the action, £1.25m, is only about a week's wages to Desmond, but to someone with his sensitivity to criticism and determination to be seen as a honest, generous, philanthropic businessman, he must be secretly devastated. Most damaging to Desmond though is certainly Roy Greenslade's conclusion that he is an even worse newspaper owner than Robert Maxwell was. Greenslade should know: he was Mirror editor under Maxwell (His book, Press Gang, is also a fine post-war history of the British press). Although Desmond has clearly not defrauded the Express in the way which Maxwell did Mirror group, he has stripped it of assets in a similar fashion. The Guardian describes how while Greenslade was giving his evidence, Desmond gripped the table in front of him tightly, while his wife asked whether he was OK. That might yet be nothing on what he does tomorrow when the papers quote Greenslade in an approving fashion.

(Other sources for this apart from the links include the latest Private Eye, 1241, and its report on the trial on page 9.)

Labels: , , , , , , , ,

Share |

7/23/2009 11:59:00 pm | | | links to this post

Saturday, November 24, 2007 

Murdoch in his own words.

On occasion, stories which prove much of what you argue about just sail straight out into the open:

The media mogul Rupert Murdoch has said he wants Sky News to become more like his rightwing US network Fox News, and revealed the extent of his editorial grip on his British newspapers to a House of Lords committee.

The communications committee, chaired by Lord Fowler, toured the US in September to meet media executives, regulators and consumer groups as part of an inquiry into media ownership. Their conversations were made public yesterday in detailed minutes.


The minutes, available in this .doc file, are mostly full of the usual self-aggrandising bullshit from Murdoch about how wonderful his companies are and how, despite all the evidence to the contrary, he doesn't interfere with editorial independence, except when it comes to the Scum and News of the Screws.

Most amusing are the following claims:

They [the regulatory authorities] kept investigating his purchases on the grounds of plurality but he had invested in plurality by keeping the Times alive and putting 200 extra channels on the air through Sky.

Ah yes, keeping the Times afloat, meaning that his own politics are given the necessary veneer of "centrist" broadsheet gloss, is a sure sign of plurality. Thank the Lord for Rupert: he's given us 200 more channels of pure unadulterated shit.

He stated that “the BBC has a unique place in British life”. People were very hostile to any challenge to the BBC.

Which certainly hasn't stopped him from bashing the corporation at every opportunity in both the Sun and the Times. The reporting from both during the Hutton inquiry was a case in point: the government had done very little to nothing wrong while the BBC were the true villains of the piece, guilty before they had even stepped inside the court. The leaking of the final report to the Scum the night before it was published only highlighted how deep inside Number 10's rectum the paper was. The reporting from the Sun over the BBC fakery "scandals" was gleeful, gloating and delirious at being able to shoot into an open goal; when ITV's far more serious defrauding through its phone lines was exposed the coverage was cut to the bone and nowhere near as condemnatory.

News Corp was the first organisation to bring proper football coverage to the UK. Their investment led to better football grounds and other benefits. However it had been a real struggle.

Or you could of course argue that Murdoch's money and its effects have never been more apparent than following Wednesday's catastrophe. Murdoch created the "golden generation", the "bling generation" or whatever you want to call it, and has poured money in while the real football fans themselves have never been so priced out of the game.

He believed that Sky News would be more popular if it were more like the Fox News Channel. Then it would be “a proper alternative to the BBC”.

How true. You could watch the BBC's best efforts to be impartial, or you could watch open propaganda for Murdoch's politics on Sky News.

Mr Murdoch stated that Sky News could become more like Fox without a change to the impartiality rules in the UK. For example Sky had not yet made the presentational progress that Fox News had. He stated that the only reason that Sky News was not more like Fox news was that “nobody at Sky listens to me”.

This is also completely untrue. Sky News gave Richard Littlejohn two chances to make the "presentational progress" that Fox News had, one before Fox News had even been set-up in 1994 and then again in 2003. Both were miserable failures, with Littlejohn the first time complaining that the impartiality regulations were the reason.

Mr Murdoch believed that the role of the media is “to inform”. Reporters are there to find out what is going on and editors are there to invest in those investigations if they uncover something.

You can more than make up your own mind on what Murdoch's real view of journalism is by the example set by Fox News and by our own Sun.

He distinguishes between The Times and The Sunday Times and The Sun and the News of the World (and makes the same distinction between the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal). For The Sun and News of the World he explained that he is a “traditional proprietor”. He exercises editorial control on major issues – like which Party to back in a general election or policy on Europe.

It is of course then just a coincidence that the Sun and Times share the exact same view on both Europe and which party they backed at the last election. The reality of Murdoch's editorial control over the Times and Sunday Times is far more complicated. As what happened when Murdoch first gained control of the Times showed, he made the same platitudes he does now at the Wall Street Journal over editorial independence, only for Harold Evans to resign within a year because of Murdoch's constant meddling and disagreements with him. Andrew Neil, most certainly not a left-winger, and a former Murdoch editor has for instance also said:

Rupert Murdoch was an enormous presence in my life. Even when he wasn't there he was this sort of looming presence....I think that's how he does control things. He leaves you in no doubt that if he's not there in person he's there in spirit and he's watching what you are up to and you've got to stick to the parameters. The idea that he doesn't interfere is nonsense.

Neil hits the nail right on the head. Murdoch editors know full well what is expected of them. If they deviate from his well-known line, they get sacked. As a result, they don't, and so there's no need for him to leave huge calling cards which would make clear his gross editorial interference. Why else would every single Murdoch owned major newspaper around the world have supported the Iraq war?

Mr Murdoch insisted that there was no cross promotion between his different businesses. He stated that The Times was slow to publish listings for Sky programmes. He also stated that his own papers often give poor reviews of his programmes.

Any reader of Private Eye will be more than aware of the numerous puffs and cross-promotions that frequently feature in both the Times and Sun for his other media interests.

Of course, if you were looking for a report of Murdoch's evidence in his own papers, you'd be searching for a long time. Neither the Sun (which has only mentioned its owner 10 times this year) or the Times have published any article on the Communications Committee's release of the notes of the meeting. Then again, how could he possibly tell Sun readers that what they're consuming every day is exactly what he wants them to?

Labels: , , , , , ,

Share |

11/24/2007 08:57:00 pm | | | links to this post

About

  • This is septicisle
profile

Links

Last posts

Archives

Email me
Syndicate this site (XML)
Powered by Blogger
and Blogger Templates