blazinglord said:
What Hunt says is true though. I don't know how old you are, but while I'm too young to have had actually experience at first-hand television before media deregulation, I have covered this extensively in history and had to produce an end of term essay on it in my first year. I think it is clear to anyone who looks at the evidence that Murdoch's outsider status shaking up the British media industry has on the whole been a force for good. I'm ambivalent about his desire to acquire the rest of BSkyB which he already has de facto control over anyway, and the supposed influence Fox news apparently has on American political discourse (in my view, they cater for an already established audience, they don't turn moderately-minded individuals into rabid anti-muslim racists).
It is rather telling that The Telegraph tried to suppress the damaging comments about Murdoch which shows that the 'anti-Murdoch alliance' supposedly being worried about media plurality is all nonsense. The Barclay brothers (let us not forget, rabid far right tax exiles who thinks Cameron is a socialist) had hoped that Murdoch would be forced to sell The Times to succeed in his bid for BSkyB which the brothers would have been able to snap up in a fire sale. Apparently this is what Cable meant by Murdoch's 'whole empire being under attack'.
The sooner people realise that in this life nobody does anything for purely altruistic reasons, the quicker they see things for how they really are. Interests fighting it out with one another. Even Tom Watson's partisan one-man war against News Corps and Couson is motivated by personal animosity towards the newspapers that have given him a hard time and anyone who dares to have an opinion slightly to the right of himself.
Fox in the states has the kind of blatent agenda that simply isn't allowed in today's UK television newsmedia. They're a slanderous, libellous propaganda machine. Thankfully, we seem to have checks and balances in place to prevent that kind of thing... for now at any rate.
I'm inclined to believe that Coulson has essentially been allowed to continue in his job because he's a valuable advisor and his accusers - like Sean Hoare - have refused to testify about the phone hacking scandal despite speaking to others about it. But thats another story altogether.
I would agree with Hunt to the extent that Murdoch helped to modernise the British television industry, but that doesn't mean he should be allowed to bring all his international might to bear in combating competitors like Virgin and BT and lap up the spoils of victory afterwards, with all the political media might that that entails. The whining from James Murdoch about the BBC is utterly pathetic... he essentially doesn't like Public Service broadcasting. Sadly for him, a majority of the British public do.
Uncontrolled Media consolidation will concentrate the power over knowledge and information in the hands of the few. Knowledge is freedom and it is power... and monolithic media organisations should be given no more trust than the slimiest politicians. Politicians would do well in fact to keep it in mind that the media can shape the perception of politicians and therefore hold power over them. Better to have competing interests and voices in the media and political discourse than one overbearing power.
Hopefully OFCOM look at it all very closely and do the right thing, in spite of Cable's stupidity.
