Another foxy speech by Rupert Murdoch.
Only this one delivered by junior – Rupert Murdoch.
”Junior” is the preppie James.
James, the youngest Murdoch spoke eloquently.
A baby demagogue in training.
Modern demagoguery brought to you by Domino’s Pizza…
A baby crocodille, crying crocodellian tears for the supposed abuses of the same Beeb, we all pay for.
Our Beeb is the public broadcaster and it riles the Demagogues du jour and they cry foul…
I beg to differ…
Foul is what the FOX news has been disseminating in the US.
Fox News and TV has been hugely discredited in the US for their political arrivism.
But ”junior” counts on the English insular audience in Scotland’s capital to know nothing about that….
His speech at Edinburgh International TV festival, really put the fox in the hen house. Again.
Again ? yes twenty years after the senior said the same things. A new long term switch on PR’s cardinal rule: Stay on Message.
What message ????? Twenty years is too long to stay on message but who can blame a working stiff ?
But isn’t this the fashion that swept the US in the late 90′s?
The Noughties…and it comes to these shores now? More than twenty years later, it is dusted and aired hoping for a new found hearing from the sympathetic Cameroonians.
Silly me, I thought, a fashion is supposed to be fresh. About a decade or two too late for fresh, but who is counting. Fashions come and go… Repeating idiocies like destroying the PBS in the US, are about as idiotic as they come. If the old FOX can pull this one off; Especially, here in the home of BBC…. well done – my hat is off to him.
James Murdoch swiftly attacked the BBC as an Orwellian institution. Rich joke, that. Yes, that one….
Of course he didn’t mention anything about the corporate PR shop he is running for his father’s barber… Supercuts.
Or his father pizza shop, Domino’s or his father’s car, GM.
Or anyone who buys adverts. Like the oil majors.
Fox news is an oxymoron – it is just opinion advertising and an occasional editorial for the far right.
Any one who can foot the bill of PR driven News is welcome to the house of FOX.
SKY News? Laughable, I’ll take Berlusconi News any day of the week. At least Silvio is entertaining.
Even Putin’s Pravda is a better bet.
Fox in the sky is laughable… But profitable. And I admit, that is one hell of a quality today.
Nobody in the audience corrected him on the FOX News helping to steal an election in the US and nobody deigned to talk about how Orwell fought the bastards in Spain and got a bullet on his neck for his Thanks. He was fighting for Free Speech too. For free Beeb radio too. So don’t use the man’s name in vain, Jamie…
He was too big a man and you are just a preppie midget.
Which is perhaps why Jamie’s attack on the “chilling” hold the corporation has over the media landscape struck a chord with parts of the beleaguered industry. There were a lot of preppies in the room.
Jamie spoke and left in a private jet back to his daddy’s pocket. Although his speech was predictable and somewhat idiotic, it didn’t fall on deaf ears. Despite a controversial last line extolling the primacy of profit, his comments about the size and scope of the BBC and the creeping mission of regulators were received with agreement. Even the TV industry, which, is facing significant challenges exacerbated by the current economic problems, is loath to criticize the old FOX. Nor the new littler, kinder, foxy preppie one. It was all left to the actor Dominic West, picking up an award for the much-feted US drama The Wire, to speak out “in contempt of the Murdoch doctrine”, more than 20 years ago, when Rupert Murdoch delivered his own landmark MacTaggart lecture. But then again he is from the US and he knows the real chilling effect the PR news of FAX broadcasting and FOX-FAX can have on FREE SPEECH.
The old fox, Murdoch, senior’s audience in 1989 greeted his speech with polite applause that could not disguise a deep-seated antipathy towards a man who dismissed public service broadcasting as “no more than the parading of the prejudices and interests of the like-minded people who currently control British television”.
Yet with this NEW FOX speech now seen as a prediction of today’s multichannel world, some in the audience were left wondering whether his son’s desire for a “far, far smaller” corporation could prove similarly prescient – and whether his speech, delivered with evangelical fervour, would mark the moment when the BBC’s power began to wane.
Murdoch started his attack on the BBC by admitting he felt like “a crazy relative” calling the British TV industry “the Addams family of world media”. For many of those present, however, the BBC’s dominance has been of huge concern for much of the past yea. Especially in a time of falling equities and especially those of media and News houses, it pays to line your feather bed with praises to the Barbarian potential employers.
Murdoch’s attack on the “twin terrors” of Ofcom and the BBC. as predictable, as it was joyous with the colourful, headline-grabbing language. His accusation of “Orwellian” state control and assertion that the British broadcasting system, with a powerful BBC at its heart, is “authoritarian” in nature, could have come from the mouth of his father. The Murdochs share a belief that private enterprise should be allowed to go about its business unfettered by regulation, although James’s philosophical approach is stripped of the father’s bon homie and self made man vacuousness.
James Murdoch is coming from a very particular place. A place of a very warm hearth and a bunch of silverware up his butt as a baby. Not just the classical silver spoon but more like a complete Victorian service for 64 people. Murdoch’s faith in the power of the market seems to have been transplanted, wholesale, from an upbringing in the upper echelons of wealthy east-coast America and business school orthodoxy. His banker wsanker friends haven’t imparted any wisdom from their recent trials and tribulations to Jammie… Having learned nothing from the recent ongoing market displacement of the shamed bankers and excesses – he wants some more of the same God help him and Cameroon is a good place for him and his ilke. Cameroon in the midst of Africa is a fitting place for him to woo the natives. Maybe they’ll be friendly.
The fact that Murdoch failed to set out a vision for how the industry could be regulated, choosing instead to argue that it should not be regulated at all, showed the potency of his attack. Exploit the natives Jamie. Till you end up in the pot with the other missionaries and some veg and garnish greenery.
While many concurred with his comments about an expanding BBC and regulator, Murdoch had missed the essential characteristics of the British broadcasting mix of public private focus.
If there is something good in this system, we have we don’t need to Americanize it. Follow G W Bush genius in deregulation of big media and you get Clear Channel. This is a losing game for anyone following Jamie’s ideas and even the Torries know it. But then again, they learn governance by watching the West Wing, so don’t you go hope for too much.
On the upside if something aint broke don’t mess with it. No fixin needed here. We have the best of the world market in international News, and the BBC is a voice of reason locally, nationally and even internationally. Something many others aspire to…. Why should we break it – trying to fix it?
What Murdoch described as an “unaccountable institution”, the BBC Trust and Ofcom, saying, “It’s not really about us.” He was talking of his father. Somebody whose news people didn’t believe – his own news editors checked the weather to see if it was raining if Murdoch came in the office with a wet raincoat.. And nobody trusts FOX NEWS with presenting the reality. The name alone says it all.
All children remember Aesops’ tale about the grapes…. and the FOX. Whatever the FOX cannot reach she is badmouthing.
Same as Jamie – preppie Murdoch foxie is doing now about the BBC. Shame on you little foxie for lying….
There were many supporters of the BBC in Edinburgh. Only they remained silent…
Maybe stunned but silent nevertheless.
For the publicly owned BBC to be neutered financially as Murdoh wants is really bad news. It is bad for all of us owners of the corporation. Even the few of the struggling independent producers who make up the majority of the festival audience wouldn’t welcome the prospect of BBC being financially neutered at a time when the commercial sector is cutting budgets. Murdoch’s conviction that the corporation should be placed on rations wasn’t correct. It stank of self foxy interest. In the BBC the system is geared to building fiefdoms and departments, even now when they are apparently being squeezed. It operates completely differently to any commercial company I have known. The aim of the executives is to increase their scope and headcount all the time. But all that can be said of the NHS too and of all ministries and even of the social services as a total.
Should we cut out all of them so preppie Jamie can get another silver tea-set up his arse?
“They are not focused on more tangible and measurable goals, such as profits,” he said. Nothing happened, he added, “when they were found to have overspent by a huge amount a year ago, a sackable offence in a commercial company.”
When bleary-eyed delegates filed in to watch Murdoch being quizzed about his speech on Saturday morning, the atmosphere was one of surprising sympathy rather than hostility. Asked if the industry was over-regulated, a majority raised their hands to indicate they agreed with Murdoch’s view.
Murdoch’s opinion that we now occupy an “all media market”, in which the distinction between television, newspapers and radio is being blurred, gained traction from unlikely figures such as Robert Peston, the BBC’s business editor, who had a table-thumping disagreement with the News Corp boss over the value of public service broadcasting. In this new world, the current regulatory regime may become moribund as newspapers march in to territory once occupied solely by broadcasters.
If Murdoch had any sense, he would be trying to look at Google as the new threat not the BBC. But he has realized the peak is long past for his kind of tabloid journalism behemoth, and now He wants to be charging for useless content. That is his answer to a fast evolving world. merry Christmas to You too. A ghost from years past is his view: So let’s limit the free speech out there, to get Murdoch’s faulty dead vision corrected.
Let’s take hold of ourselves here. Have you people forgotten the web?
The BBC news website, argued Murdoch, is preventing commercial news organisations from investing in news, with potentially dire consequences for society and democracy. “The [BBC] news operation is creating enormous problems for the independent news business and it has to be dealt with,” he said. “The BBC should not be in the business of competing with professional journalists. The consequences [for] independent journalists is probably the most urgent one to deal with.” News International’s papers are struggling to make money from their websites and Murdoch is considering introducing charges. But that’s difficult when the BBC provides online news and other services free.
There was even more widespread agreement with Murdoch’s attack on Ofcom. David Cameron declared recently that a future Conservative government would cut Ofcom down to size by stripping it of its policy-making functions. BskyB is at loggerheads with the unloved regulator over its long-running inquiry into pay-TV, a fact Murdoch failed to acknowledge in his speech. Ofcom said in June that it wants to force the company to sell its “premium content”, including sport and films, to competitors such as BT and Virgin Media, for up to a third less than Sky currently charges. No wonder Murdoch aimed some of his most acerbic rhetorical flourishes at it, describing the burden it places on Sky as “astonishing”.
Senior Ofcom sources recognised that the ferocity of Murdoch’s attack, coupled with a Tory government headed by a man who used to work for Carlton, could amount to a direct challenge to its authority. Yet what sounds like a threat to Ofcom’s continued existence today, they argue, may be viewed as political posturing tomorrow. They point out that a Cameron government could have far more pressing problems to solve before it turns its attention to media regulation.
Industry sources also play down talk of ideological collusion between the Tories and the Murdochs, despite the close links between the party and the News Corp empire. Andy Coulson, the former News of the World editor who is now Cameron’s director of communications, is said to have a low opinion of the BBC, but there are few votes to be won by talking openly about privatising the corporation, despite public disquiet about the amount it pays its stars. Now he is a man better suited to working for KGB news outlets rather than a free enterprise. Spying at an institutional scale is what the News of the World did during his residency there. Apparently it was just a residency cause he claims to know nothing of it as editor. So there must have been an invisible hand of the Editor someplace…. Another Ghost obviously there.
The speech went on for a very long time. It’s a natural wonder how few people booed him…. The ones who were awake at least booed.
But James Murdoch kept his cool at the Q&A session on Saturday morning, although he did offer fleeting glimpses of the temper that lingers beneath his polished preppy PR induced image.
To close things up, he said: ”The suggestion that the BBC is not run by the state, is nonsense”. “It is a public institution owned by the taxpayer.”
”The current system has resulted in unaccountable self-perpetuating growth over generations”.
Surprise – Surprise…. The scion of FOX news and unfettered capitalism derides growth in other peoples barns.
What a crock of lies and smelly emissions.
Preppies should be kept in college forever lest they damage themselves…
FOX news, remember gave us G W Bush before his time. Helped steal an election in America and done PR for years for the failed wars and empire ego building. Now they want to do the same in old Blighty with the Torries moving in to drown the BBC in celebratory champagne… before they even won.
Admittedly the fashions take a long time to cross the pond and get around in the UK.
About a decade late that is. Ten years that saw the FOX news become a PR shop for Pizza Hut, Republicans, SuperCuts and corporate special interests….
Not exactly the Qrwellian counterpart but the closest thing money can buy.
PS: I put all my money where my mouth is and that is the web….
The infinitely mashable web and the fruits it offers. Internet spawned the freemium news and it ain’t going back no matter what the fuzzy old daddies might wet-dream about.
