The Murdoch media scandal continues to unfold in Britain. It appears that Murdoch’s attempt to co-opt British new media as much as he has co-opted U.S. media is crumbling. Yes, he owns the Sun, the Times, and the Sunday Times. But he’s going to have a hard time expanding.
Murdoch had been expected to take over British Sky Broadcasting, or BSkyB, a satellite television company that broadcasts in the U.K. and the Republic of Ireland. The Brits would have had their own Faux News! But Parliament is telling him to drop it. Editorialists are saying that Muroch’s media ambitions are detrimental to Great Britain’s national interests.
George Monbiot writes,
Is Murdoch now finished in the UK? As the pursuit of Gordon Brown by the Sunday Times and the Sun blows the hacking scandal into new corners of the old man’s empire, this story begins to feel like the crumbling of the Berlin Wall. The naked attempt to destroy Brown by any means, including hacking the medical files of his sick baby son, means that there is no obvious limit to the story’s ramifications. …
… The cracks are appearing in the most unexpected places. Look at the remarkable admission by the rightwing columnist Janet Daley in this week’s Sunday Telegraph. “British political journalism is basically a club to which politicians and journalists both belong,” she wrote. “It is this familiarity, this intimacy, this set of shared assumptions … which is the real corruptor of political life. The self-limiting spectrum of what can and cannot be said … the self-reinforcing cowardice which takes for granted that certain vested interests are too powerful to be worth confronting. All of these things are constant dangers in the political life of any democracy.”
Indeed, this very confluence of power and assumptions is one of the primary reasons the United States has become dysfunctional. Apparently, the British are taking this seriously. I hope so.