He Knew He Was Right

I told you so. More importantly, so did all the trades unions when Murdoch started gobbling the world's media. Now the House of Commons Select Committee on Culture agrees.

This is the mug from which I drink my tea at work. Most of those unions are gone, but their cause is even more justified now.

Life without the Murdochs

I've posted this clip before, but I was telling someone (can't remember who) about it recently, so thought I'd stick it up again. It's Fry and Laurie's parody of the Frank Capra film It's a Wonderful Life, in which a small-town banker facing ruin thanks to his own generosity and the machinations of the Big Banks, contemplates suicide.

The film was made during the Depression, and mixes sentiment with populist distrust of Wall Street: it's not exactly socialist, more a kind of moralism. As he stares into the abyss, a trainee angel called Clarence shows him what would happen to the community if he'd never existed, and it's a mean-minded, grasping struggling place.

Unlike life without Murdoch:




(Oh, and have a look at Matt's latest comic triumph in the Daily Telegraph)

Here's an idea…

Lots of senior politicians, celebrities and so on have written articles for the Murdoch press and the other squalid rags infesting Britain. Usually, they're written by the paper's journalists (you knew this, didn't you?) or sometimes by the 'author's' advisors/PR handler/dog.

Like this one, 'by' David Cameron and Boris Johnson, but betraying not a scintilla of their vocabularies and style, and an awful lot of the Sun's trademark lies and stupidity.

So: now that the Murdoch press has been revealed to be a criminal enterprise (with other publications to follow), how about we ask them to donate their fees to a suitable charity? Perhaps Milly Dowler's parents could suggest one.

It just takes enough people to search for the articles, then for everyone to write to/email/Tweet/phone the 'authors' until they're ashamed of taking money from criminals. Although there is one fly in the ointment: 'shame' is quite an alien concept for many of these chaps and chapesses.

Vignettes of democracy

Two tit-bits from the world of politics: 

Cameron spoke to the Conservative backbench 1922 committee for about 20 minutes tonight but not one asked him about hacking scandal, PA reports.

A Conservative source said Cameron was adamant he would not apologise for trying to get the media onside in the run-up to the general election.

Right. So the only Tory Party body dedicated to holding the leader to account didn't bother raising the only news issue of the month, despite Cameron's former press secretary being arrested, and evidence that his aides deliberately kept him in the dark to avoid incriminating him. Mother of Parliaments everyone!

Meanwhile, Cameron has clearly decided that presentation is far more important than the principle that politicians shouldn't be pushed around by the press. Getting the Murdochs onside for political advantage is far more important. What an example to us all. How confident do I feel about his leadership? Er, not very.

Meanwhile, I'm reading the Moomins cartoon strip, volume 6. Here's how I'm feeling:

What Rupert learned from Capone

China Daily, as I pointed out here, thinks that capitalism is the root cause of the Murdoch newspapers' evil.

They're not far wrong - but it's been going on for longer than Rupert's been in charge. Here's an amusing little paragraph about The Times and Al Capone in 1932. Claud is Claud Cockburn, a great campaigning journalist of the mid-twentieth century.

…he interviewed Al Capone at his headquarters… gently frisked by a couple of 'bulging Sicilians', he was escorted into the mobster's presence. Their tête-à-tête was conducted in a civilised manner, even though Claud immediately spotted the barrel of a gun poking through the transom of a door… 

'Listen, don't get the idea I'm one of those goddamn radicals', Capone snapped… 'Don't get the idea I''m knocking the American system. My rackets are run on strictly American lines. Capitalism, call it what you like, gives to each and every one of us a great opportunity if only we seize it with both hands and make the most of it'. 

Despite these profound insights, the interview was never filed. When asked why… Claud remarked that Capone's remarks were in essence identical with the editorials of The Times itself, and he doubted whether the paper would be very pleased to see itself in agreement with the most infamous racketeer in Chicago. 

From Norman Rose, The Cliveden Set (London: Jonathan Cape: 2000): 158.

Hear no evil…

I promise I'll get back to mundane nonsense soon, but the Murdoch story just keeps on giving.

The big story yesterday was confirmation from the two senior policemen giving evidence that Ed Llewellyn,  the Prime Minister's Chief of Staff, explicitly told them not to inform David Cameron what was going on - despite employing the News of the World editor who had to resign because of the phone hacking scandal.

This is a disgrace. This is the Prime Minister of a country deliberately isolating himself from the certain knowledge of criminality as a subterfuge. The Chief of Staff has to resign, and I'm sure that when he does, he'll say he was acting alone to protect the PM. It won't wash. An apparatchik doesn't behave like that unless he's damn sure that it's what the boss wants.

It reminds me of a mafia boss covering his ears while taking the payments from his underlings. It's deniability, but it isn't plausible deniability. It's personal survival taking precedence over political and moral responsibility.

The view from Beijing

The Chinese Communist Party's mouthpiece, China Daily, isn't very impressed with the News of the World, and sees it as symptomatic of capitalist distortion.

Recently, News of the World, a newspaper under News Corporation, was shut down as a result of the phone hacking scandal. Some experts in Beijing and Shanghai believe that this incident directly exposes the inherent money-seeking nature of Western media today, and the false nature of the concepts of “freedom”, “impartiality” and “human rights” that they have long bandied about. As the scandal has continued to develop, it has become a major assault on the model of media supervision and control in the West.

It's hard to disagree with the basic points. Virtually all media academics - of which I'm half a one - would agree that the pursuit of profit has degraded the public sphere and commoditised readers and subjects alike. Furthermore, most leftwing commentators would agree (thanks to Gramsci, Foucault et al.) that 'freedom', 'impartiality' and 'human rights' are discourses used as weapons rather than meaningful terms with a causal connection to what we call democracy. Listening to Norman Lamont on Radio 4 yesterday describe the financial markets as democracy in action was chilling and demonstrative of this idea. Likewise the Murdochs explaining how much access they had to prime ministers.

Of course China is hypercapitalist now and was never communist in the purist sense of sharing resources and power equally amongst the citizens (you'd have to go back to Winstanley for that), so it's a bit cheeky of China Daily to accuse Murdoch of being a greedy tyrant! I certainly wouldn't want a media run along Chinese lines: craven, slavish and demonstrably false, but their analysis of Western media is pretty good.

There's only one solution. Everybody read Vole. I write it for free and say what I want. Though I would like access to the corridors of power.

The Murdoch hearings, digested

So, James and Rupert Murdoch are giving evidence to Parliament.

It's not very enlightening. Murdoch Sr. seems to have been reading a lot of Beckett and Pinter: long pauses followed by monosyllabic replies. Sometimes he appears to be blaming his son. James seems to be suffering too: nobody calls him Mr. Murdoch, and his expressions betray hatred of not being the top dog in the room.

Their defence appears to be - rather implausibly - that they didn't know anything, nobody told them anything. They're completely surprised by the implication that there's anything untoward about press moguls have frequent, complete and secret access to Prime Ministers. Democracy, it seems, is an alien concept of which they've heard without being tempted to try.

In some ways, it's an object lesson in PR tactics. The Murdochs have clearly been coached: stay polite, talk for a long time but don't give anything away, reel off dates and figures to avid the impression of waffling. At times it gets farcical, reminding me of another character: 'that would be an ecumenical matter'. (Sorry about the ad, couldn't find one without).



It's not entirely working though. Murdoch Sr comes across as senile. Perhaps this is his tactic, but I suspect it's an inability to deal with a situation which he can't control. I doubt he's ever been compelled to answer questions or follow someone else's line of thought.

OK, it finished with Murdoch getting a custard pie in the face, the egregious Louise Mensch scraping together enough brain cells for a good question or two, and Murdoch dropping the senility act in favour of reading out a prepared statement that sounds ('my son and I') like he's apologising to the neighbours for James breaking a window with a football. And almost as sincere.

What we didn't learn was much about the command structures, who's paying for what, and what responsibility the Murdochs will take. Murdoch seems to feel that he's the victim ('I was betrayed by people trusted by people I trusted'). Humbug!

Finger on the pulse, Uppal, finger on the pulse

Yesterday in Parliament, the entire Labour Party got to their feet (it's a tradition thing) to demand a debate on the little matter of the News of the World hacking into the phones of murdered little girls, bombing victims and various other citizens.

It was particularly notable that the Conservative Party MPs stayed seated and silent. All the political parties are utterly guilty of outsourcing their policies - especially on immigration and trades unions - to the columnists of the Sun, Daily Mail and Express, but the Tories are on particularly shaky ground.

So you won't be entirely surprised to learn that my mediocre millionaire MP Paul Uppal was one of those Tories who kept schtum.

But he hasn't been wasting time. He knows what the great British public really care about, and it's not perverting the course of a murder investigation. It's this:

Glad to have spoken in popular debate on dangerous dogs, issue of owner responsibility needs addressing urgently.

Talking of guard dogs, I think recent events (especially the News of the World spying on a policeman investigating one of its private investigators in a murder enquiry) have solved the conundrum of quis custodiet ipsos custodes: it's the Murdoch press. And may I say what a fine job they're doing?

I despair of Uppal, I really do

Sometimes I think he crawls up his ministers' bottoms just because it's warm and comfortable. Or perhaps he thinks there's some community of feeling between himself and Rupert Murdoch. They are, after all, both dishonest millionaires. I can't think of any other reason why he would need to say this in Parliament, on the subject of the BSkyB takeover. It's just meaningless words…

For the sake of clarity, will my right hon. Friend confirm that under the new, strengthened undertakings any future chairman of Sky News, and the current chairman, will be truly independent and impartial?

But in the interests of public service, I draw your attention to a previous occasion on which Rupert Murdoch promised full independence to the Times and Sunday Times when he bought them:

Frank Giles, editor Sunday Times 1981-83, commented that the board ‘had very little power or will to protect the independence of the papers they were appointed to safeguard.’ In his autobiography, Sundry Times, he describes how Murdoch ordered him in January 1982 to replace the paper’s magazine editor with an editor from the News of the World.

In March 1982 Murdoch called Fred Emery, a former Times assistant editor, into his office and said he was considering firing Times editor, Harold Evans. Emery reminded Murdoch of his guarantee that editors couldn’t be fired without the approval of the independent directors. Murdoch’s response was, ‘God, you don’t take all that seriously, do you. Why wouldn’t I give instructions to the Times when I give instructions to editors all around the world?’

Harold Evans, when editor of The Times asked Edward Pickering, ‘What protection can I expect from you as a national director against improper pressures?’ ‘You have to remember, said the fifth independent national director, ‘that I worked for Beaverbrook…that’s the way things are.’ (Harold Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, p404) Evans resigned after incessant pressure on 15 March 1982.

I notice that despite the story that News of the World reporters illegally hacked into the phone of a missing (murdered) child to listen to messages left by distraught parents and friends, then deleted them in the hope that new ones would be left, allowing the family and police to believe she might be alive, none of the tabloids are running the story. Why might this be? Because they all did it, and the last thing they want is a circular firing squad. This is why British tabloids are a cancer on a free society.

In case you've forgotten: while the NotW did this, they were also running 'exclusive' heartbreaking interviews with Milly's parents.

Who was the editor? Rebekah Wade Brooks: now chief executive of News International. Who was deputy editor? Andy Coulson: until last year the Prime Minister's right-hand man, despite the Tories' full knowledge that criminal acts were being committed under his control.

14 Cents a day…and your soul

Decisively rejecting its reputation as not evil, Apple has launched its newspaper for the iPad, The Daily (great name, Poindexters).

For 14 cents, you get a stunning piece of electronic design, but there's a pretty major worm in the apple, if you'll excuse the pun: it's a Murdoch publication, so it will be vacuous, banal celebrity nonsense and sport distorting the public sphere at best, and vicious, reactionary propaganda at worst, with all stories depending on the illegal interception of mobile telephones.

Oh yes, they'll also call their rivals Nazis - then deny it: see RIE's blog for evidence.

Move along, nothing to see here

A Fearless Fox News reporter puts the owner of his network on the rack with some detailed, relentless questioning. I refer you also to the Sun's coverage of the phone-hacking scandal. Rather limited, to say the least. Still, at least the News of the World journalists have been cleared - according to its sister paper, that is.

The Dog Ate My Homework

I'm loving the last week's politics stories: lying Tories on the run, corrupt scum running Ireland falling, and Murdoch's empire under hostile scrutiny.

Part of the fuss about Murdoch taking over the Sky shares he doesn't control is the fear that he'll use the full spectrum of his media holdings to pursue his own agenda. So it was fascinating to see that the Sun's response to Sky commentators' sexist abuse of a young female referee: they published shock-horror pictures of her, revealing that young women sometimes wear short skirts and go dancing. Disgraceful.

The other big story is the ongoing saga of the News of the World's phone hacking. It turns out they've done it very recently, rather than once or twice in the distant past. The best line in the new story is this one:

However, a senior News International executive has claimed that Dan Evans's defence is that he phoned Kelly Hoppen's number for legitimate reasons and accidentally accessed her voicemail when the keys on his phone got stuck.

Seems perfectly plausible to me.

Meanwhile, here's German Stasi film The Lives of Others resubtitled a là Downfall for the News of the World:

Rupert Murdoch and Julian Assange face off: in prison!

See it here in this ever-so-slightly satirical cartoon about the American plan to charge publishers of leaked material with espionage.

Meanwhile, have another of my favourite words: synfyfyriol. It sounds utterly beautiful, doesn't it? Especially if you know that in Welsh, 'f' is a v sound and the y is a slightly flattened vowel. It means 'absent-minded', 'pondering', 'musing' and so on. There's even a song about it, by the wonderful Fflaps (hello Alan) and available on the sublime Triskedekaphilia album (play it here).

Sold! To the Australian Media Mogul at the back!

The Tory Scum/Lib Dumb government's secret little deal to sell the public sphere to Rupert Murdoch - their favourite tax-avoiding billionaire - proceeds apace.

Today's little scam is to strip Ofcom, the media regulator, of much of its oversight duties. In particular, the powers to set media ownership rules and review public service broadcasting have been removed, so that when Murdoch's allowed to take over every media outlet a la Berlusconi, there won't be any objections, nor will there be when news, documentaries and all the other serious unprofitable programming are dumped unceremoniously. All of Ofcom's powers are being given to the minister, instead of a board of experts. Let's not forget that every single one of Murdoch's outlets vocally supported the Conservative Party in the General Election. (If you want to see how Murdoch channels and papers work together to benefit the master, read this)

In a nasty little attack on Welsh-speakers, the virtually completely monoglot, anglophone government is giving the power to set the budget of S4C, the Welsh-language channel, to the minister for culture, a man appropriately surnamed Hunt. What's the betting that will lead to a massive cut in funding? The Tories were forced to set up S4C when Gwynfor Evans went on hunger strike after Thatcher tried to break her promises: he's dead now, and the Tory Scum see the Welsh language as a) expensive and b) an unpleasant reminder that the British Empire didn't have everything its own way.

Government by rich philistines. It's back to feudal times. Now it's their turn to eat

Rupert's Bare

… Or, The Emperor Has No Clothes.

Rupert Murdoch has started putting his newspaper sites behind pay walls. As predicted, this has had a wonderful effect: traffic to the sites has halved. People confronted by the registration page head either to the Telegraph (boo) or the Guardian (qualified yay).

It's early days, but this isn't going to be good for News International. They already make a whacking loss on The Times, and without readers, their advertising rates will drop, with no compensation by subscriptions. Result: a better informed public.

A draw's a win, right?

Here's one US tabloid's take on their team's battling draw with England, via Paul Flynn MP's blog. It's a Murdoch paper, by the way.

Like most English people, Americans find it difficult to distinguish between Britain and England. Bunker Hill was the first engagement of the US War of Independence, in Boston. The British won, but lost half their troops. 

G'day, voters

Though actually he took US citizenship long ago.

BBC - the campaign continues.

I'm a bit concerned that the resistance is focussing on 6Music, and not on the abolition of the Asian Network - are we no longer concerned about racial and cultural inclusion? Last night's Channel 4 news included a sterling defence of the Network by DJ Bobby Friction (I never expected to write a sentence containing those words).

Meanwhile, Jonathan Freedland puts forward a cogent argument that this madness is simply the BBC committing hara-kiri before a Tory government murders it. Here's most of his piece, because it's important.

But the axing of 6 Music and the Asian Network looks so dumb, you almost suspect it's a ruse. What better way to demonstrate the depth of public affection for the BBC than to trigger a Twitterwave of protest? If it's not a stunt, it's hard to explain why the BBC would cut two networks that all but embody the corporation's mission. 6 Music exists partly because if it wasn't there, the market would never invent it: a specialist channel offering not the hamster's wheel of a repetitive playlist but curated, eclectic music. "Like friends playing each other bits from their record collections," Jarvis Cocker said yesterday.

As for the Asian Network, the BBC director-general says British Asians will now be served across the rest of the BBC's output. Sounds nice, but something tells me Radio 2 is not about to clear its schedule for an hour of Bollywood and bhangra, or current affairs in Bengali. So those programmes – a perfect example of the BBC serving the entire nation – would be lost.

With luck, the BBC Trust will see sense and veto those two proposals, deciding that since 6 Music only costs £9m and the Asian Network £12.1m – sums that would barely cover Alan Yentob's taxi bill – axing them is not worth the aggravation.

The move is a concession to the whiskery rightwing argument that the BBC should meet only those needs that are not provided for elsewhere. If the BBC has no need to address teens because C4 already does that, why does it bother with sport, given that Sky does that; or news, since there's always ITN? Follow that logic, and the corporation would end up exactly where its commercial rivals want it to be: as a subscriber service for a handful of tiny audiences whose niche tastes are so unprofitable no one else will cater to them. The strategy review should have held firm on the principle that underpins the universal licence: that everybody in Britain should get something from the BBC.

So why has Mark Thompson done it? Because he feared that if he didn't jump from the second storey window, an incoming Conservative government would push him off the roof. He is right to be anxious. The Tories have indeed signalled a hostility to the BBC that is rare, if not unprecedented, in an opposition. Why might that be? Two words: Rupert Murdoch.

People often speak of the unique influence of the media magnate, with his combination of economic and political muscle, but "influence" doesn't quite capture it. Instead David Cameron has simply allowed News Corp to write the Conservative party's media policy.

Start with the BBC. Murdoch, with son James, can't stand it – regarding it, a senior figure in broadcasting tells me, as "like the Ebola virus: they can't destroy it, so they try to contain it". They dress up their opposition in pseudo-intellectual free market blather, but the reality is much earthier than that: the BBC is a rival, and therefore an obstacle to their commercial ambitions. The smaller and weaker the BBC becomes, the more money News Corp can make.

So the Murdochs constantly demand a cut in the licence fee. Last year Cameron nodded dutifully, and called for an immediate freeze in the licence fee. That would have marked an unprecedented break in the multi-year financial settlement that is so integral to the BBC's independence – preventing it from constantly having to make nice to the politicians to keep the money coming in.

Second only to their loathing of the BBC is the Murdochs' hatred of Ofcom, the regulator that stands between them and monopolistic domination of the entire UK media landscape. They particularly dislike Ofcom snooping into pay-TV, an area that makes billions for Sky. How odd, then, that a matter of days after the regulator published a proposalthat would have forced Sky to charge less for its sport and movie channels, Cameron, in a speech on quangos, suddenly singled out Ofcom, suggesting it would be cut "by a huge amount", possibly even replaced altogether.

That's the pattern in one area after another. James Murdoch laments the success of BBC radio in outstripping the commercial alternatives. Ed Vaizey, the Tories' would-be broadcasting minister, suggests selling BBC Radio 1 and letting commercial stations use the frequency.

Sky wants to keep exclusive access to the Ashes, rather than seeing them return, free to air, to the BBC or C4, and the Conservatives agree. Not at first, it's true: initially they quite liked the idea of "listed" sports events, of such national significance they would be available for everyone to see. But someone must have had a word with the shadow culture secretary, because the position was soon straightened out – in perfect alignment with Sky's.

Any doubters should play a game of spot the difference. Hold a copy of James Murdoch's 2009 MacTaggart lecture in one hand, and a clutch of Tory policy positions on the media in the other. Then see if you can tell them apart.

The unsophisticated will imagine this works crudely, with Cameron pulling out his notepad and taking dictation from Uncle Rupe. And maybe it does. News Corp's latest preoccupation is gaining access for Sky to the wiring that delivers broadband, the "ducts" currently wholly controlled by BT. Interesting to note, then, that Cameron, George Osborne and the rest of the party high command dined with the News International top brass in Davos in January – only for Osborne to announce that very week that he wanted to break up BT's monopoly on those "ducts".

Perhaps this is merely a happy alliance of like-minded folk who share what culture secretary Ben Bradshaw calls a "free market fetishism". Maybe the Tories coolly weigh up the policy alternatives, with no thought to the endorsement Murdoch's Sun has given them and withdrawn from Labour, and just happen to reach a conclusion that matches News Corp's business interests perfectly.

Rather more likely is that a Conservative government would repeat one of the ugliest chapters of the Bush-Cheney era, when the White House allowed the oil and gas industry to write its energy policy. When it comes to media, the Tories are already doing that – handing the pen over to Rupert Murdoch. Don't say we weren't warned.

Steve Bell sums it up…

Save the BBC

Like the Open University, the NHS, the Royal Mail and other British public services, the BBC is an absolute star, proof that government works. Like these other institutions, it has problems, and like them, it's under attack by the forces of capitalism which say that only profit should inform our thinking (despite the global demonstration of capitalism's rapacity and appetite for destruction we're currently enduring).

The BBC is terrified of the incoming Conservative Party government.

If there's a single reason to vote Labour, it's that the Tories are going to cut everything that impedes the power of their friends. Usually, parties stand on a ticket of what they think is good for the citizens: with the Tories, they stand for whatever is good for their friends, and screw the voter (whom they construct as a bundle of greed, fear and selfishness anyway). They need to remember this: the market is a tool, not an end in itself. If we don't want it, it should go. The people like the BBC. Only tawdry commercial rivals, driven by greed and an outdated ideology, want to destroy it. Unfortunately, our political leaders listen only to such people.

In particular, this means that the BBC is going to be stripped bare because Murdoch's News International wants advert-funded, biased, hysterical and profitable TV to replace publicly-funded provision.

If you're a pop music fan, imagine a world in which you only ever hear top-ten, major label, reality-TV derived stuff. No Lady Gaga, no weird novelty hits, no Joy Divisions or bedroom tinkerers or odd commentators on life as it's lived now. Just an endless succession of manufactured, demographically calculated mimers or fake rebels advertising hair wax. If you like classical music, prepare yourself for a world in which the only tracks played have been sanitised by appearing on adverts (ClassicFMworld).

If you like news, imagine a world in which corporate activity is always presented as saintly. One in which newscasters tell you that the Prime Minister is a communist, or a reverse racist or a Nazi (i.e. watch Fox News now). Investigative journalism - dead. Speaking truth to power - gone. Boring but important investigations - abolished.

If you like comedy, imagine a world without Chris Morris, Alan Partridge, The League of Gentlemen and a host of others. Nothing weird, innovative or worthy - just programs tailored by the demands of advertisers. I doubt that the Tories will tolerate The Thick of It.

There are programs made by and for Tories which will go to the wall too. Songs of Praise: brought to you by some televangelist. Antiques Roadshow, sponsored by Cash4Gold. Last of the Summer Wine, full of Sanatogen product placement. Points of View? Not any more: f**k you. Kids' TV sponsored by McDonald's and a host of tatty toy manufacturers. Soaps advertising soap once more… Normal Tories like the BBC as much as anyone else: it's only the corporate shills at the top of the party who hate the idea that the public sphere should give any space to noncorporate voices.

And imagine this schlock punctuated (indeed, suffused with) adverts, product placements and hectoring. A shrunken public sphere in which only consumption has value.

Who wrote this BBC proposal?

It was drawn up by the corporation’s director of policy and strategy, John Tate, a former head of the Conservative policy unit, who co-wrote the party’s 2005 manifesto with David Cameron.

All becomes clear. The Tories have captured the BBC already. It's a hostage: bound, gagged, whimpering and developing Stockholm Syndrome. Why else would you employ someone who is ideologically opposed to your very existence. John Tate should be sacked, then tarred and feathered by the viewers.

This is hell. And it's coming to your living room in 2 months' time.