The end of the Iron Fist?

Britain is currently faces a fascinating battle for media plurality today which should have interesting ramifications for the media landscape in other parts of the world. The Stalin of the Media World, Rupert Murdoch is attempting an £8bn full takeover of the satellite broadcaster BSkyB which trades under the name Sky. This would in turn result in an integrated News Corp-Sky operation, which would include the Sun, the News of the World, the Times and book publisher HarperCollins. If British people thought the EU was undemocratic, then surely so is one man owning close to 40% of the country's print media? The Guardian has a pretty strident editorial Here 

 

Murdoch and his empire are no benign dictators. His newspapers (which also include the New York Post, the Wall Street Journal and a sizeable chunk of the Australian press) have pulled no punches in publicising his conservative political bias. In the span of a few months, the Wall Street Journal has gone from being a quality source of business and political news to becoming a tabloid like mouth-piece for the Republican party, replete with churlish editorials that essentially say : Barack Obama + any other vague pieces of progressive legislation = bad and free-market fundamentalism and climate change denial = good. As someone who suffers the ignominy of reading it every day, it epitomises the height of the "dumbing-down" that many titles have taken since they fell into Murdoch's hands. The Times in Britain is another case in point. A moderately conservative newspaper, with a pragmatic editorial line, overnight descended into a tabloid-lite mouthpiece for Murdoch in Britain. Worse still, Britain in particular, and its politicians seems so hamstrung by Murdoch that no political party has since the 1970s won an election without the backing of the Times and the Sun. I just as some of you know finished Tony Blair (Who calls himself a great friend of Murdoch's) autobiography and it describes the lengths at which the Labour Party in the 1990s bent over backwards to capture Murdoch's support, even apologising to them for their moderately pro-EU policies in government. Ed Milliband, already being given the childish "Red Ed" title by that great bastion of intelligence, the Sun, probably understands the challenge facing him in the next election, not just the Conservative party, but the Murdoch press.

In either case , what this battle against a Murdoch merger entails, is the future of media and journalism. For a country that prides itself on media freedom, Britain could do well to block this merger. Interestingly, two right of centre newspapers, the Daily Telegraph and the Mail, have joined the battle against the merger. Proving that Murdoch cannot merely characterize this battle as being one waged by the Left. Instead it is one clearly by the guardians of media freedom on one hand, and monopoly on the other, which will have interesting ramifications for the rest of the world.