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July 19, 2011
Here we have an editorial in the Wall Street Journal in the US defending Murdoch re the phone hacking scandal in the UK, which News International tried to contain. This crisis, which raises fundamental questions about the culture of collusion between politicians, the police and the press and reveals a deep malaise in British life about those opposed to democracy, is dismissed by the WST editorial as the political mob wanting to regulate how journalists gather the news.
In Australia, News Ltd is also wheeling out a defence of the News of the World's behaviour with Brendan O'Neill's Elite few spearhead the anti-Murdoch campaign over phone-hacking scandal in todays Australian.
It's a pathetic defence as it doesn't address the issue of the unaccountability of the trashy hack journalism practiced by some of the Murdoch tabloid titles or some of their journalists breaking the law:
what we are witnessing in Britain is a media coup led by a tiny gaggle of illiberal liberals...These self-interested crusaders may pose as warriors against alleged criminality in the tabloid press, but their true target is the culture of the tabloid press, the age-old arts of muckraking and sabre-rattling, which they consider vulgar and offensive. Under the guise of ending illegal phone-hacking, they're really pursuing a culture war against what they view as the ugly, mass, populist media.
O'Neil, who is the editor of Spiked, says it's some celebs and politicians getting revenge on Murdoch and this intolerant cultural tide will result in the end of press freedom. There is no mention of the Murdoch's running something close to a protection racket in the UK.
ONeil's defence of Murdoch is a both a de facto defence of News Ltd having 70 per cent Australian newspaper market share and Murdoch's tabloids being above the law. Its a defence of the abuse of press freedom. It is corporate power posing as a defence of press freedom.
This is corporate power whose business as usual practices to make profits includes criminal acts by journalists and editors; interception of communications; payments to policemen; theft of medical data; hacking; illegal copying; maybe lying in court and parliament; theft and intimidation and threat.
Murdoch has too much power in Australia. Thomas Clarke says that Australia’s cross-media ownership regulation simply is not working to achieve the principles of media access, freedom and diversity that it is supposed to protect.
We need media reform in Australia, yet the best that Paul Keating could do on Lateline was call for tougher privacy laws and confirm the blindingly obvious that News Ltd was currently at war with the Gillard Government. Yet there is the News Corp managed Foxtel endeavouring to take over Austar for $2.7 billion thereby creating an Australian pay-TV monopoly---the ACCC is currently looking over the takeover.
What's more News Ltd ought to be broken up. Or the newspapers sold off. It is too dominant. The real battle that Murdoch must win is in the USA and News Corp may sell of the newspapers in the US and Australia to protect the centre of the Murdoch empire in the US.
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OH FFS! Who is going to swallow this tripe about News International being the defenceless vicitim????