The Great Debate UK

from The Great Debate:

Murdoch’s tweets can’t save his tottering empire

On the night Queen Elizabeth scampered back from her Scottish castle to address an angry crowd outside Buckingham Palace – the crowd protesting she hadn’t paid enough respect to the memory of Princess Diana, killed in a car crash the week before – Rupert Murdoch was in the newsroom of the London Times. “There’s your headline,” he told the editor in charge. “Queen Saves Neck!” It was a perfect tabloid headline for a perfect tabloid story.

That Diana, named after the goddess of hunting, should die hounded by a pack of snap-happy paparazzi added a vein of irony to the story of her tragic life. A similar irony informs the scandal engulfing Murdoch. The biter has been bit, a fact clearly on display when Rupert and his son James, arm in arm with their flame-maned employee Rebekah Brooks, were shoved and jostled in a London street by the newshounds of Fleet Street. Hauled before a House of Commons committee, the usually unrepentant mogul looked dented when he uttered the phrase that will litter his obituaries: “This is the most humble day of my life.”

His sense of humility didn’t last long. Nothing has gone right for Murdoch since that day of shame, yet he quickly regained his old pugilistic self using a medium that perfectly suits his headline-writer’s gift, the 140 characters of Twitter. Too cocky to hide behind an amanuensis, Murdoch is back on the attack, railing against “enemies many different agendas, but worst old toffs and right wingers” and vowing revenge. “Seems every competitor and enemy piling on with lies and libels,” he tweeted. “Easy to hit back hard, which preparing.”

While Rupert fiddles on his iPad, his empire burns. Scotland Yard – which, according to the police themselves, had become a News Corp. subsidiary, leading to the resignation of the police commissioner, the head of counterterrorism and the communications chief – is conducting three parallel investigations into bribery, corruption, phone hacking, computer hacking and witness intimidation by News Corp. employees. Senior policewoman Sue Akers has uncovered “a culture of illegal payments” to police and other public servants, meaning News Corp. may technically have broken the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act that deems bribing foreign officials a criminal act.

The company is paying out millions to the more than 800 victims its reporters and private detectives hacked, then humiliated, among them Tony Blair’s wife, Cherie, former interior minister David Blunkett, actor Jude Law and singer Charlotte Church. So far News Corp. has paid $15.6 million to settle 54 lawsuits of the 60 filed by last October.

The scandal has enveloped Prime Minister David Cameron, who used to ride and socialize with Brooks before she became too toxic and who hired as his press chief Andy Coulson, former boss of Murdoch's News of the World who had resigned from the paper after turning a blind eye to hacking. Coulson was driven out of his government post.

Murdoch’s hope that his children would succeed him at News Corp. now seems forlorn. His daughter Elisabeth blames Brooks for destroying the company, his son Lachlan hurriedly decamped for Australia after an unexplained incident in New York, and James had to write a groveling letter to his parliamentary inquisitors for failing to do his job. “I acknowledge that wrongdoing should have been uncovered earlier,” he wrote. “I could have asked more questions, requested more documents and taken a more challenging and sceptical view of what I was told.”

from Breakingviews:

James Murdoch shouldn’t be kicked out of BSkyB

By Hugo Dixon The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

James Murdoch shouldn’t be kicked out of BSkyB. Some observers want to use the Murdoch clan’s troubles at News International, their UK newspapers company, to run them out of town completely. But BSkyB, the pay-television group, is a separate business. And Murdoch Jr has done a good job first as its chief executive and now as its chairman.

Admittedly, Murdoch Jr hasn’t covered himself in glory in handling the alleged phone hacking and police bribery scandal. As well as being chairman of BSkyB, he has indirect responsibility at News Corp for the UK newspaper arm. He was slow to grip the problems -- not least by allowing Rebekah Brooks, who ran the papers and reported to him, to stay in her position for too long. There are now multiple probes into the saga which could embroil him further. But nothing has yet come out which should disqualify him from his BSkyB role.

It is also true that Murdoch Jr’s original appointment as BSkyB chief executive was nepotistic. But he then proved himself in the role. The business is now generating piles of cash –- in part because of the strategy he pursued. His track record isn’t perfect. But even the main cloud in his tenure -– his swoop on ITV –- had a silver lining. Although BSkyB wasn’t allowed to buy the TV group and lost a huge amount of money in the process, the raid did stymie a rival plan by Virgin Media to create a stronger anti-BSkyB front.

It might further be argued that BSkyB should have a chairman who isn’t also an employee of News Corp, which holds a 39 percent stake. But this needs to be weighed against the benefit in having that shareholder fully engaged in driving performance. What’s more, BSkyB’s eight independent directors, who constitute a majority of the board, have been robust in defending shareholders in the one case where there was a conflict of interest: News Corp’s attempt to acquire the remaining 61 percent. That bid has now been pulled. But there’s every reason to suppose that the independent directors would be equally robust if the furor over the hacking scandal dies down and the Murdochs return with a new bid.

Ofcom summons up courage to tackle BSkyB

- Steven Barnett is professor of communications at the University of Westminster, and a writer and commentator on broadcasting issues.  His first book, published in 1990, was on the relationship between television and sport. The opinions expressed are his own.-

Today is a historic day for British television: the first time in its brief six-year history that the supposedly uber powerful Ofcom has been prepared to flex its muscles to tackle the brute force of BSkyB’s overwhelming dominance in pay television.

It is an issue that has blighted the television industry for years, disadvantaged consumers, put companies out of business, and sent competitors, regulators and politicians running for cover.

Finally, after three years of exhaustive analysis, the regulator has had enough: BSkyB has been ordered to lower the prices at which it sells its premium rate channels to other platform operators such as Virgin and BT.

Consumers may even be able to buy sports and movie channels without being forced to pay for a bundle of countless other unwanted channels.

We can now expect a blaze of carefully orchestrated outrage not just from the hugely influential head of BSkyB itself, James Murdoch, but from its formidable number of friends and allies. For the power and influence which this single corporation exerts on British public and political life is quite extraordinary.

We have already heard the first rumblings from powerful sports bodies, threatening legal action and warning of “serious consequences” for sport.

British broadcasting deserves better than Murdoch attack

- Steven Barnett is professor of communications at the University of Westminster, and a writer and commentator on broadcasting issues. He is finishing writing a book “Just Wires and Lights? The Rise and Fall of Television Journalism” that will published by Sage in 2010. The opinions expressed are his own. -

I was in the audience for Murdoch senior’s MacTaggart lecture 20 years ago, and was shocked –- as were many others –- by the ignorance and shallowness of his analysis. It wasn’t just the blatant self-interest of promoting his newly launched Sky channels; it was the sheer incomprehension of British television’s achievements in broadcast journalism compared to its manifest failure in the United States. Murdoch senior pretended it was the other way round, a strange distortion of the empirical evidence.

Son James is clearly a chip off the old block. His MacTaggart lecture was adapted for modern times, but his analysis of what was “wrong” with British broadcasting –- and particularly broadcast journalism –- was as misguided and self-deluded as his father’s.

There was the usual stuff about free enterprise, free choice and freedom in general being undermined by “massive, state-funded intervention”, and the usual claptrap about the TV licence fee penalising the poor (in fact, it provides astonishingly good consumer value and is disproportionately valuable to the poorest who make most use of television).

There was a marked inability –- presumably deliberate –- to understand the difference between state-sponsored broadcasting and the BBC as an institution which has demonstrated over 80 years a greater willingness to take on governments than most of the country’s press. And there was the 50 year old caricature of public service broadcasting as a paternalistic instrument which ignores “the customer” and treats viewers as passive creatures “in need of protection”. British viewers, through millions of freely made switching decisions per week, in fact demonstrate an abiding affinity for the BBC which Murdoch pere and fils would prefer to ignore.

Perhaps the most damaging nonsense was when James talked about the threat to “investment in professional journalism” created by the BBC’s presence. Really? If so, we would expect the broadcast networks of the world’s great engine-room of business and free enterprise, the United States, to be overflowing with investment in ground-breaking, independent journalism. After all the marginalised, desiccated channels of Public Broadcasting Service are certainly no threat to the might of the private sector.

Unfortunately, the truth is exactly the opposite. Investment is dropping, foreign bureaux are closing, and senior network news executives in the U.S. look with envy (and some admiration) at the quality of broadcast news over the Atlantic. One recently told BBC director general Mark Thompson that there will soon only be two sources of foreign news –- the BBC and the news agencies. So much for investment.