En Passant

Duncan’s contribution on Q&A on Monday night was a lightning rod of class clarity. That is why the ruling class is trying to silence his message and punish him and anyone else who might expose the rotten reality of Australia today. Defend democracy. Defend Duncan.

A variety of opinions? A contest of ideas? Only those writers imbued with the capitalist ethos are published in the mainstream media.

Phone hacking went on at an industrial scale, the court was told. It wasn’t just celebrities, writes Simon Basketter in Socialist Worker UK. Trade unionists and ordinary people had their phones hacked too. But this is not just about bad journalism. The scandal has revealed the unholy alliance between the police, the media and the political establishment. And it goes to the very top. The most prominent of the accused were David Cameron’s close friends.

That Henderson views the exercise by the downtrodden of their right to be heard as some sort of repression of free speech shows how thoroughly imbued he is with the right of the one percent to dominate all public discourse.

Under the present mainstream media duopoly the views of a large number of Australians are silenced.

The News of the World scandal shows the corruption at the heart of the system. Only a thoroughgoing democratisation of the system can create a truly free media and society.

Does it get any better than this – Rupert Murdoch beating the retreat? Well, maybe if he died along with his media empire it would be even better.

Illegal phone hacking, bribing police, perhaps covering up criminal activity, paying what looks suspiciously like hush money to victims….It just goes on and on.

Rupert Murdoch should be in jail, awaiting trail. His News of The World has hacked into the phones of a murdered girl and the relatives of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan and of people killed in the 7/7 terrorist bombings. It has paid bribes to police. It has cosied up to the politicians, as they have with […]

Sack Murdoch. It was on his watch, under his leadership that these disgusting and disgraceful actions occurred.

Better yet charge Murdoch. Treat him like Julian Assange. Or Bradley Manning.

More importantly, rather than having news ‘owned’ by profit driven corporations, isn’t it time we democratised the media?

Let’s see the media unions and members take over and run the big media corporations, not to make a profit but to provide information to and entertain working people.