Murdoch is a ******* but the idea that stopping him from getting his mitts on Sky News preserves plurality in TV media when 70% of it is the BBC compared to 7% Sky is ridiculous.
Government has absolutely no business interfering in his attempts to take over BSkyB either. Regardless of the moral outrage if the deals follow the relevant regulations all is fine. It's all well and good preaching about the free market, it's not right to suddenly get interventionist when it's politically expedient so frankly Labour and the Lib Dems can stop hand wringing and shut up. Hilarious really a party that calls themselves 'Liberal' being so desperate to get interventionist. Planks.
Good to see the mainstream media getting suitable mileage out of all this, to the exclusion of everything else. It also gives the Labour party more time to avoid having to come up with something like coherent policies as they have another angle to do the only thing they seem to know how to do right now and attack the government, which is pretty rich actually.
Both sets of politicians are
squarely in an unpleasant orifice of Murdoch.
Wish the Mother of all Parliaments would grow up a bit. It seems to be fighting over moral outrage, faux moral outrage, some twisting of facts and not a lot of genuine, constructive substance at the moment. No wonder the current government is such a pile of excrement when all they have competing with them is
cynical, directionless opportunists.
Murdoch make Mandelson look like the 'white' lord in comparison. Truly a scary individual. At the same time politicians trying to cash in on this for popularism makes me want to vomit. If they broke the law they should go to prison. If it can be proven it goes all the way to the top then all the way to the top can also go to prison.
---------- Post added at 22:54 ---------- Previous post was at 22:50 ----------
Quote:
Originally Posted by Flyboy
It appears Murdoch has now reneged on a commitment to make Sky News independent.
Phone hacking scandal: Murdoch pulls Sky News plan to force inquiry
This will now undoubtedly be referred to the competition commission, which I suspect was the plan all along. It is not impossible to imagine that he has a few "friends" on that commission. |
Good - it was ridiculous and unnecessary anyway. It's a cynical little move on his part of course, however so long as the commission follow the rules he's in with a fairly good chance of getting it through, because it's not a threat to competition.
Ofcom's own figures during the initial investigation:
So who's the threat to plurality exactly?