A Diminished BBC, you say? By Gum, no!

Kudos to Rupert Murdoch for the Sky Box. He went into tv in the late 80s, piping crap from the 70s into our living rooms. The qualitatively dire programming was a risk, a placeholder for better things to come. No doubt he’s taken the odd punt on himself, and put money into the technology. Fared income. 

As I was watching BBC Newsnight yesterday evening, Evan Dragon’s Den was grilling a BBC guy and a Daily Mail guy about why the BBC needs to be so big. Does it need a weather app? They’re talking about reducing the BBC’s size. Hmmm. I don’t think we want a smaller Beeb, but a Beeb that supports local independent media a lot more (as suggested by the BBC guy) might not be a bad thing.

Montgomery talked shit too!

Rupert Murdoch owns Sky and Fox and the Sunday Times and the London Times and a few red tops and the Australian meeejia. These are the words of Rupert’s son, James Murdoch, in 2009:

"Dumping free, state-sponsored news [ie, the BBC] on the market makes it incredibly difficult for journalism to flourish on the internet. We seem to have decided as a society to let independence and plurality wither. To let the BBC throttle the news market and then get bigger to compensate."

He also claimed that independent journalism ought to be able to charge a fair price for its news.

Well: Is it fair that the Beeb can provide news services free of charge, given that it’s funded by the TV licence of the great Great British Public? They pay for it! They don’t have a choice.  

And for decades, Auntie Beeb WERE a bunch of perv enablers! Even worse, one of their journalists could’ve outed the pervs a few years earlier, As. They. Reported. On the. BBC.

But let’s look at independent journalism – and we’re not talking local or regional newspapers. We could, but James Murdoch is a Sky man. A Fox dude. A Sun* boy.

A couple of years after his 2009 speech, in which he also suggested less and self-regulation for the media, James Murdoch resigned from one of his News Corp Megaglobe positions in part because of the phone bugging hijinks that the Murdoch-owned tabloids got up to. Hijinks is three dots in a row. Makes you think…

The Murdochs had to bury one title entirely, well over a century old till the mucky Murdochs got their grubby hands on it. You might’ve heard about it. It was the news of the world. [GETS COAT.]

Rupert was going on the record as far back as the early 70s with his philosophy on the price of fame. Not a direct quote, but it was like “The dirt can be dished on you if you’re famous coz you can afford to take the hit.” “The price of fame is the loss of privacy” sort of stuff. Right?

Three or four decades later, tall and lovely Elle MacPherson reads about herself in the papers, and she calls a security consultant so that the guys can run high tech gadgetry around her home to make sure she doesn’t have a bug in her lampshade or a ghost in her wardrobe. ’Magine! All coz you’re reading in the Sun about what you told your Ma in a phone call the day after you tell her. Or whatevs. 

 

Over forty odd years, there are any number of far more insecure slebs out there who most likely ended friendships coz they thought they couldn’t trust their pals, or they turned into paranoid lumps coz they couldn’t deal with both a monstrous cocaine habit AND wonderfully accurate news reportage, or they ended marriages coz they believed lies. It was often that their phone messages were being hacked, and scumbags were spinning a grain of truth into a loaf of fibs. Countless criminal invasions of privacy or just plain nastiness undertaken over decades.

So this same criminality encouraged a culture from other newspapers to get scoops in a similar way. Meanwhile the Beeb was - most of the time - exposing dodgy cowboy builders at worst, and doing some of the best investigative journalism in the world at best.

A long list of politicians and celebs have privacy invasions on the record. All caused by Murdoch and his nasty philosophy. That’s just the tip, though.

And many’s the time they’ve dug up muck on regular people too. People already devastated by bereavement, or dealing with other issues.

The News of the World, the Sun and Daily Mirror editors* and Murdoch childerreddedden were all on LOLling terms with HRH David Cameron. Nobody at the Beeb was LOLling along with him. The BBC IS independent. 

It doesn’t need to lick anyone’s caviar-shitting arse.

Read more if you want an Irish spin on things as the rant continues here. 

APOLOGIES: The Mirror is NOT owned by the Murdochs. But it WAS edited by Piers Morgan, who subscribed to the notion of privacy entitlement withdrawal from slebs.