A British parliamentary select committee has issued a stinging rebuke to Rupert Murdoch personally and to his media empire.
The committee concluded that the culture of the company’s newspapers “permeated from the top” and “speaks volumes about the lack of effective corporate governance at News Corporation and News International”.
That prompted the MPs’ report to say: “We conclude, therefore, that Rupert Murdoch is not a fit person to exercise the stewardship of major international company.”
I would love to see investigations into Murdoch’s US media interests too because the deep-rooted corruption on display in the UK shows that this is how Rupert Murdoch does business and it is highly improbable that he would not encourage the use of the same tactics to gather information and coerce and bribe politicians and the police here as well.
The Daily Show has more.
(This clip appeared on April 26, 2012. To get suggestions on how to view clips of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report outside the US, please see this earlier post.)
Hi Mano, here in Australia, worlds first Murdocrasy, where Murdoch controls 70% of newspapers in the capitals, and most media follow his line in lockstep, there’s been very little reporting of Murdoch’s corruption. The Australian, Murdoch’s nation broadsheet, reported it as ‘partisan committee unfairly attacks Murdoch’. His tabloids have been conspicuously silent, when if it were some other billionaire, they’d be all ‘free speech demands we attack this evil person’… The local broadsheet in Melbourne, which isn’t owned by Murdoch did report what the UK politicians said, but only one article.
I hope he’s investigated here too.
I have one serious criticism of Jon Stewart’s well researched drubbing of Rupert Murdoch. Rupert is no longer an Australian. He sold his sole to the devil and surrendered his citizenship to become an American citizen. This was because he could not buy a major American newspaper unless he was an American citizen. Sadly for the rest of the world, including Australia no such restriction applies. At the moment his media outlets are trashing the current Australian government and promoting the rise to power of an extreme right wing religious fundamentalist who makes the Tea Party look like left wing liberals.
Murdoch is simply living by the golden rule, he who has the gold makes the rules. Nixon said that ‘if the president does it; it isn’t illegal’. He figured he had the right to make the rules. The “Checkers” speech pretty much told him that no infraction was so large or intractable that it couldn’t be massaged and transformed into an advantage through semantic/political alchemy.
It seems to make sense that if you can make and change the rules at will that you are not bound by those rules. You can draw, and redraw, the lines anywhere you want with your magic crayon. It makes sense if you don’t want to get into the sorts of “heavy mystery” problems George Carlin talked about: ‘Can God make a rock so big that he, himself, can’t lift it?’
Too bad the Tories hold power in England. Even a pseudo-socialist like Tony Blair or Gordon Brown might have been willing to nationalize Murdoch’s propaganda mills.