Murdoch empire crumbles

The breaking news on this story is unfolding quicker than the editing cuts in QoS.
Two CEO'S resign in one day, and the Murdoch's to face a trail of sorts on Tuesday.

Ayone else shocked by how this is progressing? Is this the end of News Corp?

I very much doubt it. Don't be surprised if Rebecca Brooks lands herself another high-paying gig as soon as the dust settles.

I am interested in the results of the FBI inquiry, I doubt the News Corp has them on their pay roll.

This potentially could make a great film. The UK equivelant of All The President's Men....

The phone-hacking scandal is absolutely bloody disgusting ... what kind of morally bankrupt piece of garbage even ASKS for the voicemails of murder victims, war dead etc to be hacked into, and what kind thinks nothing of then going and doing it?

Fuck Murdoch, his shitty rags and all the excuses for human beings that work on them.

I'm just amused by the fact that the sheeple who have made his empire possible are the same folks who are now screaming for his head. It would have never gotten this far if not for the decades-long patronage to his rags and TV stations.

Salomé wrote:

I'm just amused by the fact that the sheeple who have made his empire possible are the same folks who are now screaming for his head. It would have never gotten this far if not for the decades-long patronage to his rags and TV stations.

In that case, I think most people have made his empire possible. I for one have Sky at home, have occassionally bought one of his newspapers, regurlarly watch The Simpsosn, etc.

Most people on Planet Earth are sheepies if you look at it that way.....

The Murdochs and Brooks to face a committee of MPs for questioning today, senior Metropolitan Police officers resigning over their involvement, David Cameron's judgement at hiring Andy Coulson as his spin-doctor called into question, the journalist who first suggested that Coulson okayed phone-hacking when he was the NOTW editor found dead at home last night ...

This is all going to make a hell of a movie one day. Presumably not made by Fox, though.

I'm wondering what other news organizations need to be investigated, as well.

Quote :

The BBC Is at Least a Thousand Times More Evil and Dangerous than Rupert Murdoch

Britain has gone completely mad over the Rupert Murdoch/News of the World hacking affair and the contagion is spreading to America fast.

I knew things were bad when I spoke yesterday to a normally reliably conservative US talk radio show. “But they say they may even have hacked into the phones of 9/11 victims,” said the appalled female co-host, as if this were the ne plus ultra of round, unvarnished evil.

Some perspective, please. I too respect and am moved by the plight of the 9/11 dead and their families. And of the murdered English schoolgirl Milly Dowler and of the servicemen who died in the Iraq war. (They too, apparently, may – and let’s stress that word “may” – have been targets of phone hacking by the now-disbanded Murdoch-owned tabloid newspaper the News of the World).

But then, so do you. So does everybody. No one in the world right now is sitting there rubbing his or her hands in glee and going: “Heh heh. 9/11 victims. Murdered schoolgirls. Dead Iraq servicemen. I’m so glad their mobile phones were hacked into by the News of the World.”

Yet you’d never guess this from the nauseating sanctimoniousness and cant of the left-liberal media, right now. You’d think this was a straightforward battle between good and evil: on one side a wicked, bullying, manipulative, right-wing Voldemort and his hordes of darkness; on the other, the forces of justice, truth and light whose only desire is that our newspapers and broadcast outlets should be transparent and caring and fair and kind to blind old ladies crossing the road clutching baskets of kittens with bandaged paws.

Yeah, right. This is not – pace a projectile-emetic New York Times article- “A kind of British Spring” in which “Democracy, aided, by sunlight has broken out in Britain.” It is, in fact, that very opposite of that: a ruthless, concerted and horrifyingly effective attempt by the dominant left-liberal MSM to silence free speech and crush alternative points of view.

Consider, for a moment, how much worse it would be in the US if you didn’t have talk radio and you didn’t have Fox News or the Wall Street Journal. Just imagine: wall to wall Keith Olberman and Chris Matthews splurging their relentlessly PC take on world affairs; Peggy Noonan and Paul Krugman pulling somersaults in their eagerness to find new inventive ways to explain why, despite all the evidence, the Obama administration is at the top of its game. No Rush to run to for consolation; no Fox & Friends blondes to cheer you up at breakfast; no O’Reilly or Krauthammer or Stossel to stick it where it hurts.

And if you have any trouble imagining such a hideous, terrifying world, just come to Britain where precisely this situation exists. Since 1927, our broadcast media has been dominated by a presence so monolithic and all-powerful it makes Pyongyang’s Korean Central TV look like your local Mom and Pop station.

Its name, of course, is the BBC. During the first Gulf War, it was briefly rechristened the Baghdad Broadcasting Corporation – and understandably so, given the relentlessly anti-Coalition bias of its reportage. But then the BBC doesn’t much like the West. Or the capitalist system. Or the US. Or old-fashioned concepts like liberty, freedom of choice, personal responsibility or limited government. It is – and has been for decades – the official broadcast outlet for the values of the progressive left.

On any given subject you know exactly what the BBC’s line will be. If it’s covering the Middle East it will be bigging up the gallant Hezbollah freedom fighters and the plucky Palestinians at the expense of the hateful, damned-near-as-bad-as-the-Nazis Israeli oppressors. If it’s covering the European Union (what you and I might better know as the EUSSR) it will treat every politician who is not in favor of ever-closer-political-integration as a rabid, swivel-eyed crypto-Fascist loon. If its covering any kind of war in which the US or Britain are involved it will be of the view that the enemy are the good guys and that we thoroughly deserve to get our asses whupped. If it’s covering the environment it wil, of course, conclusively demonstrate that the earth is doomed and it’s all the fault of greedy Western capitalists.

None of this would matter – at least not quite so much – if it weren’t for three big problems. The first (a legacy perhaps of its distinguished World War II reporting; or maybe its dignified and majestic royal wedding coverage) is that around the world the initials “BBC” still convey gravitas and authority. The second is that the BBC is committed by its charter to being fair and balanced. It isn’t of course. Not in the slightest. But this does give its defenders (almost all of them on the left) the perfect excuse to defend the BBC’s hegemonic status on the grounds that it represents the whole nation’s diverse viewpoint (and not, as it really does, the achingly PC values of a self-selecting cabal of metropolitan bien-pensant tofu eaters).

The third and worst problem, though, is that there is no counterbalance to the BBC’s relentlessly liberal-left propagandizing. From cradle to grave – starting with the Kim-Jong-Il-Jr-style brainwashing offered by CBBC, moving on to oh-so-hip-Daddy-O pop broadcaster Radio 1, through classical Radio 3 to fuddy-duddily left-liberal Radio 4, not forgetting the achingly worthy and progressive TV channels BBC1, BBC2, BBC3 and BBC4 – the audience for Britain’s dominant national broadcaster is indoctrinated into a very specific Weltanschauung.

That Weltanschauung, you won’t be surprised to hear, does not find much room for concepts like limited government, low taxation, liberty, political sovereignty and accountability. It is extremely unlikely that a Tea Party movement could ever take off in Britain: the main reason being that, unlike in the US, the British simply lack the political vocabulary and intellectual building blocks to demand one.

And of course, the house leftists at the BBC (most of them recruited through the pages of the left-wing Guardian newspaper, which BBC employees tend to believe is also the ONLY newspaper) want to keep it that way. That’s why they have been pushing the “scandalous” Murdoch revelations so hard; that’s why Labour leader Ed Miliband and Tony Blair’s ex-enforcer Alastair Campbell and socialist ex-Prime-Minister Gordon Brown and the pathologically left-wing Twittersphere and, yes, the Guardian newspaper have been so eager to join in the fray. Sure they hate Murdoch, that’s a given. But what they hate far, far more – because they fear it – is the possibility that British audiences should be exposed as US audiences are to dangerously conservative concepts like freedom and small government.

This is what Murdoch has been trying to achieve in his bid to buy a majority shareholding in the broadcaster BSkyB. His plan is – or at least was – to hive off the Sky part of the operation (so as to avoid anti-monopoly regulation) and set up the TV channel Britain so badly needs: a UK answer to Fox.

The British government’s culture secretary Jeremy Hunt was due to make a ruling on the issue this week. That’s why the BBC (and its myriad leftist fellow travellers) waited until now to make these “shock” new revelations (using information, of course, they had been sitting on for months if not years). This had nothing to do with justifiable moral outrage – and everything to do with a viciously cynical attempt by the liberal-left to exploit dead schoolgirls, Prime Ministerial children suffering from cystic fibrosis and 9/11 victims in order to protect its hegemonic domination of the media.

And what’s depressing is, the bastards may have have got away with it. It seems genuinely not to have occurred to most of British people now working themselves into a lather of almost Death-of-Princess-Diana-like hysteria over the evils of the Murdoch press that they are duped as the liberal-left’s useful idiots.

If only they were capable of realizing it, they would understand that over the last decades, the BBC has done infinitely more damage to Britain – economically, socially, politically – than anything the yellow journalism of Rupert Murdoch has ever achieved. By setting the parameters of the political debate, the BBC has been responsible for Britain’s cultural surrender to Islamism and “multiculturalism”; for its submission as a vassal to the creaking, moribund European Socialist Superstate; for the current Coalition’s inability either to lower taxes or rein in government spending; for the proliferation of “rights” and dependency culture and the creation of a feckless underclass trained to believe it is government’s job to take care of its every need; for the removal of empiricism, hard science and skepticism in the debate on “global warming”.

Thanks to the BBC, the people of Britain are poorer, more highly taxed and regulated, less able to control their own political destiny and considerably less free. But of course they are not aware of this. How could they when the political outlook they imbibe from birth comes straight from the wrinkled dugs of Big Government’s Nanny In Chief – the BBC?

http://biggovernment.com/jdelingpole/2011/07/12/the-bbc-is-at-least-a-thousand-times-more-evil-and-dangerous-than-rupert-murdoch/

By James Delingpole, Jul 12th 2011.

So this whole scandal is not NewsCorp's fault for actually bugging the people, but for the BBC and co for waiting to use it when it was most advantageous to them?

colly wrote:

So this whole scandal is not NewsCorp's fault for actually bugging the people, but for the BBC and co for waiting to use it when it was most advantageous to them?

It's both, not one or the either. Just most tend to excuse the BBC and Guardian, because they're seen as a moral crusaders.

Sharky wrote:

http://biggovernment.com/jdelingpole/2011/07/12/the-bbc-is-at-least-a-thousand-times-more-evil-and-dangerous-than-rupert-murdoch/

I couldn't honestly find a single valid point made in that entire article. The idea that a broadcasting corporation which employs the likes of Andrew Neil and Nick Robinson, as senior political correspondents and editors, is pushing some radical progressive agenda simply leaves me speechless.

HJackson wrote:

The idea that a broadcasting corporation which employs the likes of Andrew Neil and Nick Robinson, as senior political correspondents and editors, is pushing some radical progressive agenda simply leaves me speechless.

I'd consider Andrew Neil and Nick Robinson to be as "right wing" as the current Tory party. In other words, only by name. You're talking about them as if they're Claire Fox, who although calls herself a Marxist Libertarian, embodies echt conservative values far more than anyone in the current coalition, or in the BBC apparatchik.

Sharky wrote:

HJackson wrote:

The idea that a broadcasting corporation which employs the likes of Andrew Neil and Nick Robinson, as senior political correspondents and editors, is pushing some radical progressive agenda simply leaves me speechless.

I'd consider Andrew Neil and Nick Robinson to be as "right wing" as the current Tory party. In other words, only by name. You're talking about them as if they're Claire Fox, who although calls herself a Marxist Libertarian, embodies echt conservative values far more than anyone in the current coalition, or in the BBC apparatchik.

Well I don't really think it's the responsibility of the BBC to be a megaphone for voices beyond the mainstream political spectrum. They go as far to the right as the Conservatives and as far to the left as Labour, as far as political commentary goes, and they go about it pretty even handedly. I don't really think that counts as agenda-setting - it's the three (or is that two now?) main Westminster parties that set the agenda, and the BBC covers it. They shouldn't be a shill for far-right libertarianism or conservatism any more than they should set up a week of readings from Das Kapital on Newsnight.

I call dibs on Murdock's stealth boat.

I think it's ridiculous to solely target Murdoch in this case. He owns a multi-billion dollar corporation, and News of the World was a minuscule part of that. The left-wing media reports this as if Murdoch was doing the phone hacking himself. Or, they spin it as if he was supposed to be on the phone twenty times a day with every writer and contributor at News of the World; therefore, making it seem as if he had a major part in this scandal and he should sell his entire company and abandon everything that he's ever worked for in his entire life.

Get real. :roll:

Murdoch did nothing to defend those who broke laws and committed these heinous acts. He pulled the plug entirely on the newspaper, gave advertising space in the final issue to charity, and donated a portion of the profits from the final issue to charity. He sat in front of a panel and explained his case, and didn't weasel his way out of the hearings after being attacked by a barbaric protester. Team Murdoch assessed the situation and handled it appropriately. They're working with police in the UK, and Murdoch himself stated that he'd work with the FBI in their investigation. Murdoch wouldn't have condoned the phone hacking, either, simply because it's bad for business. He'd know that the risks would be enormous and the consequences would be disastrous.

This whole "evil, right-wing media mogul" concept is being overplayed. And it's funny that nobody in the media has made a big deal of Ted Turner's past debacles (especially when he referred to the 9/11 hijackers as "brave men").

None of these guys are saints. They're simply businessmen. Every company has some bad eggs. Murdoch disposed of these bad eggs in his company. Instead of targeting only News Corp., the FBI might want to investigate all of the major US media companies. Might as well clean the whole house, instead of only the living room.