rigorousintuition.ca

We deceive ourselves in thinking that the Beeb has a left-wing bias. The corporation is in thrall to the same interests as Rupert Murdoch’s New Corp and the saviour of Iraq, Tony Blair.

Britain is said to be approaching its Berlusconi moment. That is to say, if Rupert Murdoch wins control of Sky, he will command half the television and newspaper market and threaten what is known as public service broadcasting. Although the alarm is ringing, it is unlikely that any government will stop him while his court is packed with politicians of all parties.

The problem with this and other Murdoch scares is that, while one cannot doubt their gravity, they deflect from an unrecognised and more insidious threat. For all his power, Murdoch's media are not respectable. Take the current colonial wars. In the United States, Murdoch's Fox Television is almost cartoon-like in its warmongering. It is the august New York Times, "the greatest newspaper in the world", and others such as the once-celebrated Washington Post, that have given respectability to the lies and moral contortions of the "war on terror", now recast as "perpetual war".

In Britain, the Observer performed this task in making respectable Tony Blair's deceptions over Iraq. More importantly, so did the BBC, whose reputation is its power. In spite of one maverick reporter's attempt to expose the so-called dodgy dossier, the BBC took Blair's sophistry at face value. This was made clear in studies by Cardiff University and the German-based Media Tenor. The BBC's coverage, said the Cardiff study, was overwhelmingly "sympathetic to the government's case". According to Media Tenor, a mere 2 per cent of BBC news in the build-up to the invasion permitted anti-war voices to be heard.
Coded message

So when the BBC director general, Mark Thompson, used the recent Edinburgh International Television Festival to attack Murdoch, his hypocrisy was like a presence. Thompson is the embodiment of a taxpayer-funded managerial elite, for whom political reaction has come to dominate public service. He has even laid into his own corporation, Murdoch-style, as "massively left-wing". He was referring to the era of his 1960s predecessor Hugh Greene, who allowed artistic and journalistic freedom to flower at the BBC.

Thompson is the opposite of Greene; and his aspersion on the past is in keeping with the BBC's modern corporate role, reflected in the rewards demanded by those at the top. Thompson was paid £834,000 last year out of public funds and his 50 senior executives earn more than the prime minister, along with enriched journalists such as Jeremy Paxman and Fiona Bruce.

Murdoch and the BBC share this corporatism. Tony Blair, for example, was their quintessential politician. Before his election in 1997, he and his wife were flown first-class by Murdoch to Hayman Island in Queensland, where he stood at the News Corp lectern and, in effect, pledged an obedient Labour administration. His coded message on media cross-ownership and deregulation was that a way would be found for Murdoch to achieve the supremacy that now beckons.

Blair was embraced by the new BBC corporate class, which regards itself as meritorious and non-ideological - the natural leaders in a managerial Britain in which class is unspoken. Few did more to enunciate Blair's "vision" than Andrew Marr, then a leading newspaper journalist and today the BBC's ubiquitous voice of middle-class Britain. Just as Murdoch's Sun declared in 1995 that it shared the rising Blair's "high moral values", so Marr, writing in the Observer in 1999, lauded the new prime minister's "substantial moral courage" and the "clear distinction in his mind between prudently protecting his power base and rashly using his power for high moral purposes". What impressed Marr was Blair's "utter lack of cynicism" - along with his bombing of Yugoslavia, which would "save lives".

Stephen Morgan wrote:Murdoch has controlled Sky for many years, I'm afraid. Recently the Competition Commission ordered that he sell his 17-ish per cent stake in ITV, the main commercial channel.

Joe: the BBC has an internal watchdog, a board of governors, a board of trustees, at least two programmes dedicated to broadcasting the views of dissentients (Points of View and Feedback) and is regulated by Ofcom and the Department for Cultcha Media 'n Sport. And the class of superlatively over paid managers and executives, of course. And the Foreign Office in the case of the World Service.

Feel free to write letters of complaint to any of the above, as I hear recent government cuts have resulted in a shortage of bog roll at Broadcasting House.

BOB GARFIELD: So this story seems to begin with one reporter and a private dick he was working with hacking the cell phones of some royals. Who did they hack, how did they do it?

STEVE HEWLETT: They hacked into the mobile voice mailboxes of some close royal aides; that’s aides to Prince William and Harry. Because most people don't change the factory default settings on their voice mailboxes –

[BOB LAUGHS]

– you know, it’s 0-0-0-0 or four 3s or four 9s, or whatever it is, in one sense this was not very hard. And there is reason to think that lots of people, private detectives, journalists and others, were doing it. Now, it was made illegal by the Regulation of Investigative Powers Act in 2000, and it was subsequent to that act that Glenn Mulcaire, the private detective, and Clive Goodman, The News of the World’s royal editor, were caught doing it.

BOB GARFIELD: And convicted, and did they go to jail?

STEVE HEWLETT: Yes, convicted, went to jail. And then when they emerged from jail signed deals with News International for money, sort of severance deals, which had silence clauses in them.

The New York Times comes along and restarts the whole thing with a number of people, 91 I think it was, where the police had found both their mobile number and their PIN number in the possession of Mulcaire. Many of these people, of course, had not been told by the police –

[BOB LAUGHS]

- that they might have been hacked.

So two questions arise following The New York Times, first of all, new questions about whether Coulson could possibly not have known and questions about what the police had done.

BOB GARFIELD: If the police had taken half measures, why they did so.

STEVE HEWLETT: That’s right, why they hadn't pushed it further. There are two ways to look at this. One way says, look, it was SO-13, I think it was, a Special Operations unit, a part of the Metropolitan Police that does anti-terrorism and diplomatic and royal protection.

Now, the reason they were involved in the case in the first place is because, remember, it started with hacking into the voice mailboxes of senior royal aides. Now, these people have to deal with, you know, terrorism, tube trains being blown up, you name it.

So they could justifiably argue, I think, that they had rather more important things to do.

On the other hand, there is the lurking suspicion that what really bothered them was what happened if you kept pulling at this piece of string, because the police and newspapers have relationships which, for good or ill, are frequently not disclosed, involve the panning of information, sometimes money. So the conspiracy theory has it that if you keep pulling at this piece of string, something very nasty turns up...

http://audio.wnyc.org/otm/otm100110f.mp3

Joe Hillshoist wrote:Ha. Nice one.

Just wondering how many former (or wannabe) Murdoch employees are on that board of governors, or members of the overpaid managerial class? Thats what happened here under Howard - the ABC Board was stacked with News Ltd scum and the National Broadcaster hasn't really recovered. Its certainly gone to shit in the last 12 months wrt intelligent analysis and reporting.

BTW Someone else who says bog roll ... thats great. Not as great as the flogging the Poms are getting in a certain pool in Delhi but still - great enough.

Joe Hillshoist wrote:Just wondering how many former (or wannabe) Murdoch employees are on that board of governors, or members of the overpaid managerial class? Thats what happened here under Howard - the ABC Board was stacked with News Ltd scum and the National Broadcaster hasn't really recovered. Its certainly gone to shit in the last 12 months wrt intelligent analysis and reporting.

BTW Someone else who says bog roll ... thats great. Not as great as the flogging the Poms are getting in a certain pool in Delhi but still - great enough.