Al-Jazeera’s Listening Post on Syria media restrictions
The struggle for democracy in Syria has continued for most of this year. The media has been largely locked out of the country, so independent reporting has been very difficult (though local bloggers have remained essential). Al Jazeera’s Listening Post discusses the crackdown and I was asked to comment (my last appearance on the show…
Israel, you have a PR problem (hint; you can’t give up oppressing Arabs)
And these wonderfully inventive stunts will only increase: Israel is being confronted by what observers call an increasingly formidable form of pro-Palestinian activism – foreign nationals staging non-violent publicity stunts. Israel’s reaction to these international incidents, critics said, have played into the hands of activists, who blitzed news organisations to cover their protests. The latest…
Murdoch’s ethical bypass (and lieutenants who back it)
Bruce Guthrie is a former News Limited editor and author of Man Bites Murdoch. He writes today in Fairfax papers that the challenging of the Murdoch empire reveals a hollow moral core: In 1988, while attending a conference of News Corporation editors in Aspen, Colorado, I made the mistake of raising the thorny issue of…
How Rupert should think about Watergate and worry
One half of the Watergate investigators who hasn’t spent the last decades fawning before power, Carl Bernstein, writes in Newsweek that the current Murdoch controversy has historical reverberations: But now the empire is shaking, and there’s no telling when it will stop. My conversations with British journalists and politicians—all of them insistent on speaking anonymously…
Strong reasons Murdoch should be shunned from decent society
One: Throughout his years in power, Blair had regular secret meetings with Murdoch, many abroad, and was in regular telephone contact. Price has gone as far as to claim that Murdoch “seemed like the 24th member of the cabinet”. Blair insisted no record was ever kept of the meetings or calls, so they were totally…
US (nearly) declares death of terrorism but will only expand wars
So let me get this right. The US spends billions annually to fight countless wars, defend the homeland, launch drone attacks against “enemies” in at least six countries and the threat is only this? Defense Secretary Leon Panetta declared Saturday that the United States is “within reach” of “strategically defeating” Al Qaeda as a terrorist…
Rupert cares about family and power; ideology always comes second
Andreas Whittam Smith in the Independent reminds us what the Murdoch empire is really about: At its heart, News Corporation, for all its immense global interests, is a family company. The Murdochs may not control all the voting rights in the group, but they run it as if they did. It is not a place…