Skip to main content

Time for the Sun to set on the Murdoch Empire

The fall of the News of the World was a curious affair. It seemed to me at the time to be something of an over reaction to close the newspaper, even in the face of public outcry over the phone hacking scandal. It only made sense in the context of launching a seven-day version of The Sun, the NoTW's daily stable-mate. Of course that is now what has happened.


However the "sacrifice" of the NoTW begins to make far greater sense now that we understand the seemingly far greater level of corruption that was going on at The Sun itself. In now seems quite clear that the closure of the NoTW was a diversionary tactic by Rupert  Murdoch in order to protect his most popular title and even extend its franchise to seven day publishing.


However it is now not just Vince Cable who is on the warpath against Murdoch.


Every new revelation makes it quite clear that Murdoch has presided over a totally corrupt system. He has relied on corrupt payments to public officials and covert pressure that does not stop short of blackmail. Bribery and Blackmail were not -it seems- occasional exceptions, but the normal way that News International has conducted its business.


Given the extremely tepid support that Rupert Murdoch has offered the current government, and his continuing flirtation with the SNP, demonstrated in his rather ill advised tweet on the subject of Alex Salmond, which seems to have resulted in the leak of the SNP's proposed referendum date to the Scottish Sun, David Cameron and Nick Clegg neither owe Rupurt Murdoch any favours, nor
are they his prisoners.


As these revelations mount, it seems self evident that should the criminal investigations lead to prosecution, then the entire question of whether Rupert Murdoch is a fit and proper person to have such control over any media outlet in Britain needs to be investigated.


James Murdoch already faces the real prospect of serious charges under the foreign corrupt practices act in the United States. A wide range of charges against News International employees is now under investigation in the UK too and several key NI executives are apparently set to face trial.


The scandal of Parliamentary expenses over the past years now looks like pretty small beer against the almost mafia-like racketeering that seems to have been going on at the UK's largest media group.


If these prosecutions result in guilty verdicts, then the reaction of the British regulatory authorities should be swift and total: the complete expulsion of any firm controlled or influenced by the Murdoch family interest in the UK. 


It seems more than time to clean the stables- and the black heart of Murdoch's twisted and corrupt empire would certainly be the best place to start.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Liberal Democrats v Conservatives: the battle in the blogosphere

It is probably fair to say that the advent of Nick Clegg, the new leader of the Liberal Democrats, has not been greeted with unalloyed joy by our Conservative opponents. Indeed, it would hardly be wrong to say that the past few weeks has seen some "pretty robust" debate between Conservative and Liberal Democrat bloggers. Even the Queen Mum of blogging, the generally genial Iain Dale seems to have been featuring as many stories as he can to try to show Liberal Democrats in as poor a light as possible. Neither, to be fair, has the traffic been all one way: I have "fisked' Mr. Cameron's rather half-baked proposals on health, and attacked several of the Conservative positions that have emerged from the fog of their policy making process. Most Liberal Democrats have attacked the Conservatives probably with more vigour even than the distrusted, discredited Labour government. So what lies behind this sharper debate, this emerging war in the blogosphere? Partly- in my ...

Concert and Blues

Tallinn is full tonight... Big concerts on at the Song field The Weeknd and Bonnie Tyler (!). The place is buzzing and some sixty thousand concert goers have booked every bed for thirty miles around Tallinn. It should be a busy high summer, but it isn´t. Tourism is down sharply overall. Only 70 cruise ships calling this season, versus over 300 before Ukraine. Since no one goes to St Pete, demand has fallen, and of course people think that Estonia is not safe. We are tired. The economy is still under big pressure, and the fall of tourism is a significant part of that. The credit rating for Estonia has been downgraded as the government struggles with spending. The summer has been a little gloomy, and soon the long and slow autumn will drift into the dark of the year. Yesterday I met with more refugees: the usual horrible stories, the usual tears. I try to make myself immune, but I can´t. These people are wounded in spirit, carrying their grief in a terrible cradling. I try to project hop...

Are the Liberal Democrats Libertarian?

A few days ago Cicero met with one of the better known figures in the Libertarian Alliance, Brian Mickelthwait . Brian writes for various blogs that I enjoy reading- including Samizdata . Ahead of our meeting Brain expressed "scepticism" about the Libertarian credentials of the Liberal Democrats: "My charge was that when you meet a Liberal Democrat you never know what he will believe. The one who talks to you is likely to say what you want to hear. But the others will simultaneously be telling other people with quite different views what they want to hear. So don't vote for these lying creeps." Political parties- all of them- are coalitions of people who quite often disagree with each other. Apparently we are not supposed to "air our dirty linen in public", but actually one of the reasons that the Liberal Democrats appealed to me was that they were prepared to talk about issues and policies amongst themselves in public. The eclipse of the Liberal Party...