Young guns, havin' some fun.......

It's only just over two years, August 2009, since media gunslinger Wild Jim Murdoch spread fear among the citizens of Media City like a loose gun in a bar-room brawl. Jim rode intotown from his old man's BIG M ranch all tooled up and ready to deliver the annual McTaggart lecture, to fire off some warning shots at the BBC and to warn the Corporation that he and his daddy were gunnin' fer it.

Just you wait until the Tory posse arrives, he snarled, the BarBarCee ranch will be under seige and I'll be raiding and harrying you 'til you give up your plum steers and I rustle them off. We're gonna buy the BSkyB ranch and take over the whole county, so you'd better watch yore step!

The young gun was out of its holster and going after senior BBC henchmen and they quaked at his power.

Well today, the gunslinger was run out of town. The sherrif's posse that he thought he had bought has been blabbing to Judge Leveson and the youngster's power base was revealed as diseased and corrupt.

 Young Gun Jim his Pop Big Rupe Murdoch and a red haired moll.

No shoot out at the old corral for this brave boyo. Slinking off to the good old USOFA to keep his head down and lick his wounds and seek the comfort of his daddy's ranch.

to be continued........

What can it mean?

This has just appeared on the Sky News website.

It reports that Tom Watson MP has asked  for Rupert Murdoch to appear before a Commons Select Committee to be questioned on claims of 'phone hacking by the News Of The World, a Murdoch newspaper.

That's interesting enough, but the tone of the article is revealing: it contains quotes such as...

"(Andy Coulson) was the brains behind the investigations department - how can he say he had no idea about how it works?"

and another source is quoted ..

"Coulson would certainly be well aware that the practice was pretty widespread."

Murdoch controls both Sky News and the NoW, so the question must be: is the Murdoch empire preparing to sacrifice Coulson to save big-boss Murdoch the ignominy of appearing before, and being asked embarassing questions by, the Standards Committee of the House of Commons?

I would not be surprised. Watch this space....

P.S. Friday 10th Sept, 10.15.

This from the Guardian. By Christopher Montgomerie who from his profile seems to be a prominent Conservative.

Christpher Montgomerie was a previous director of Friends of the Union, and ran A Better Choice, the campaign to keep Tory members enfranchised in leadership elections

All in all, pretty scathing of Coulson and the Murdoch empire, and of the supine attitude of Parliament before thr power of the yellow press.

The Dirty Digger Nobbles the Debate (With Help From a Noble Lord)

The blogs are sceaming with advice for the participants in tonight's debate. Do this Gordon, don't mention that. Dave should push on this subject, raise this matter..etc.  etc. etc.

But I'm very much afraid that Cameron's best tactic is probably to do nothing. Given his position and the support he has in terms of a compliant press and cash to spend, he really doesn't have to impress, just make no big mistakes that the press simply cannot ignore, smirk a few lines and go home. The Murdoch Empire will do the rest for the debates (Dave Done Great!) and Ashcroft's cash willl deliver in the marginals.

So Cameron and his supporters can relax. The foreign owned press and the non-dom millionaires are seeing him in with friendly media coverage and Central American cash. The Sun's headline is already written, (Cam 'e Won!), and it will be emailed from Australia before the debate begins so as to be in time for the first editions.

The price we, the people of theUK, will have to pay if DC does "win", and goes on to govern with the backing of foreign interests is worth considering. Murdoch and Ashcroft don't do favours: they do deals, and the deals they have done with the Tories will come home to roost, after (if) a Cameron victory.

The price we will pay is likely to include a damaging "review" of the BBC and the "privatisation" of some of its most profitable arms....guess who will be first in line for the auction? And of course, the nasty things said about non-doms: they'll disappear, as will any mention of fair taxation for foreign based millionaires who like to live in the UK but don't like paying taxes in the UK.

All that remains is for the Conservatve Party's registered offices to be moved to Belize and the official Tory logo changed to a wide brimmed sun hat with blue bottle corks suspended from the rim.

Hoorah! for patriotism and British Democracy.

New Poster Art, continued.....

The Guardian has an article on how dismal the posters in this campaign have been ( I would exempt the "two-horse race" poster in my headline from that accusation..). Anyway, they have commissioned a number of artists to do their best to produce new ideas and better targetted posters.

All the posters are very good and thought provoking.

My favourite is this one....




...which seems to me to do exactly what a poster should do: it gets its message across quickly and with point and humour.

And it embodies an essential truth, i.e. that the Murdoch empire wants to destroy the BBC, and has Tory agreement that it will do so. Murdoch benefits from the weakening of a rival and, whatever the Tories think of the BBC, they consider its destrucyion a price worth paying for Murdoch's support.

Murdoch would also wish to dictate how a Tory government behaves, and impose its own, (the Sun's, Fox News'), social  and political "morality" on the Tories. A nighmare if ever.....

The Future of the BBC Should be a Big Election Issue

The Observer reports that at least 50 prominent actors have signed a letter attacking Conservative plans for the BBC. David Tennant, Eddie Izzard and others claim that the Conservative position "threatens to devalue not just the BBC itself, but our culture as a whole", urging voters to consider the consequences for the corporation on polling day.

I would go further, and I have done so in direct conversations with BBC senior executives. I believe that the Tories have an agreement, formal or not, secret or not, with the Murdoch empire that, if the Tories win the election, the BBC will be attacked, weakened and perhaps made to divest of parts of its organisation, such as the much admired and successful BBC website and some radio or TV stations. The Murdoch empire will benefit by the weakening of a broadcasting rival and in furthering Murdoch's online ambitions by removing the BBC website as an obstacle to those ambitions.

I raised the matter during an interview I had on the weekly Newswatch programme with the BBC but I got no direct response, and that portion of the interview was edited out and never broadcast.

The Murdoch empire has been one of the least savoury influences in the degradation of the news media in the UK and in the USA. It's actions have been purely commercial and never taken in the interests of society, the country or any observable moral or ethical goal. The profit and growth of the organisation have been paramount, codes of accuracy or impartiality or morality have been notable by their absence from Murdoch's output.

The BBC, on the other hand, is one of the best, most respected and most impartial news organisations in the world. It produces a wide range of excellent factual and entetainment programmes on television and on radio and it has a world-renowned website. It is one of the best loved institution in Britain and a flagship of British culture and integrity abroad. It is a benchmark organisation in its field.

If the Conservative's win the election it will be the signal to the Murdoch empire that it is open season on the BBC. IMO, the BBC is too good a broadcaster and too precious a national institution to be damaged, diminished or even lost in the interests of privatisation and profit. And the Murdoch empire is too malign an entity to gain such a victory over the BBC.

The actions of the 50 TV actors  would tend to indicate that they have similar concerns.

There are many reasons, economic, social and ethical to reject the Conservatives. In my opinion the danger to the BBC from a Conservative/Murdoch victory is not the least of these.

War Declared: The Sun Invades the Independent...

Cleggmania is responsible for many thing, including panic in the ranks of the Tory Party's election advisers, as evidenced in the concerted attacks by the Tory press on Clegg today.

And Cleggmania also appears to have had an explosive effect on the Murdoch empire. This report  from Michael White in the Guardian reveals that young James Murdoch and Murdoch executive Rebekah Wade, blasted their way into the HQ of the Independent newspaper and bent the ear of editorial executive Simon Kellner. Kellner, the Independent editor-in-chief, has been "guilty" of running adverts in his paper saying that "Murdoch won't decide the election. You will".

The crime in question is that newspapers have a little "tradition" of not directly attacking each other. So rich newspaper magnates just don't attack other rich newspaper magnates. It's just not done, and young James was apoplectic in his defence precedence and politesse.

Behind all of this is the rise of Clegg, the man who was supposed to provide the ballast in the real battle between Brown and Cameron. The Sun in particular, and the Murdoch empire in general, has been plugging Cameron as the only choice for next PM and consistently dissing Brown as yesterday's man. But the rise of Clegg has been muddying the waters and threatening the Sun's favourite with, at worst, a hung Parliament and maybe even a straight defeat.

But there is an even bigger question behind the even that, and it is this: why on Earth should there be an agreement that newspapers don't attack each other? How can that be consistent with a free press? The vast majority of the press in the UK is aligned with the right wing parties, in particular the Tory Party. Murdoch inteferes in UK politics although he is not a UK citizen. The Daily mail is owned by the Rothermere family, the previous Lord Rothermere loved nothing more than to sit in his French Chateau while dictating his "daily dose of fear" to Daily Mail editors and executives: Europe the enemy but also the home to the noble Lord.. Gordon Brown has suffered many times the treatment meted out to Clegg today. Every prominent Labour politician is a potential target for the vitriol spewed by the Tory press, foreign owned or British owned.

Are other papers supposed to stay quiet on these issues?  If the effect of the press is to distort the political and social dicourse, by skewing coverage, misleading emphasis or downright lying, are other news organisations compelled to comply with some "gentleman's agreement" that these matters are somehow subject to newsman's omerta? Not to be mentioned? Not to be revealed to the gaze of the voters?

The most shocking thing about the Sun's invasion of the Independent is not the physical or psychological hurt to the fabric of the Independent newspaper. It's the blithe assumption on Murdoch's behalf that such an act of violence to a fellow newspaper executive was justifiable on any respectable moral or ethical grounds.

Or maybe Mr Murdoch wasn't thinking about ethics or morals? Maybe he was worried about the power and influence of his once dominant news empire......

Time to limit the Power of the Murdoch press...?

The Guardian has a series of stories about Rupert Murdoch's UK newspapers, and their propensity to hack the phones of a wide range of establishment figures. This article outlines MPs findings that 

the News of the World  was guilty of;

Amnesia, obfuscation and hush money

hacking phones 'on industrial scale'

And that Scotland Yard and press body failed properly to investigate

The  report rejects executives' lone 'rogue reporter' defence

 The Guardian also reprts that ....

The MPs reserve their most damning passages for the News of the World and others involved in illegal phone hacking. The paper's royal correspondent and a private investigator were jailed in January 2007, but the committee says many others played their part. For the Guardian, which has doggedly pursued this story, revealing last July that the NoW had paid more than £1m to suppress legal actions, the findings are a vindication.

The MPs say they were "struck by the collective amnesia afflicting ­witnesses" from the NoW. These "claims of ­ignorance … and deliberate ­obfuscation" reinforced the impression "that the press generally regard themselves as unaccountable and that News ­International in particular has sought to conceal the truth about what really occurred," the report concludes.

Comprehensive coverage of the story, with the Guardian producing a full suite of facts and reactions, is to be found here

Add to that the bullying history of the paper under the editorship of Tory PR head Andy Coulson, and you have a truly astonishing story of the arrogance of unlimited media power. And this,also from the Guardian...

David Cameron's communications director, Andy Coulson, will come under fresh pressure to defend his editorship of the News of the World and his knowledge about the illegal activities of his journalists amid new allegations about the paper's involvement with private detectives who broke the law.

The Guardian has learned that while Coulson was still editor of the tabloid, the newspaper employed a freelance private investigator even though he had been accused of corrupting police officers and had just been released from a seven-year prison sentence for blackmail.

I can't help but think that, if Gordon Brown was to announce an inquiry into the ownership of the British Press with a view to restricting foreign ownership and limiting Murdoch's power, he would gain hundreds of thousands of votes overnight.