Skip to main content

Murdoch on himself and his companies

News comes today that Rebekah Brooks, of News Limited has resigned at last - not with any acknowledgement of wrong-doing on her part mind you. All part of the Murdoch camp's way of bluffing its way through things and obfuscating the truth and reality. An example us old man Murdoch's "interview" with his own newspaper, The Wall Street Journal.

"Just when we were beginning to wonder when The Wall Street Journal would actually start to cover the meltdown at its proprietor’s company with all the zest that the world’s best business newspaper ought to muster for the world’s biggest business story, Rupert Murdoch picked up the phone to his own paper and gave it an exclusive interview.

In the interview with the Journal’s London bureau chief, Murdoch made the revelation that he would establish an independent committee, to be led by a “distinguished nonemployee” to “investigate every charge of improper conduct” that has been swirling around News Corp. in recent weeks. These charges include hacking by his reporters into the phones of celebrities, politicians, 9/11 victims, and a murdered English child, as well as bribes to British policemen for scoops and information.

Although Murdoch said that his company had handled the crisis “extremely well in every possible way” (conceding only that “minor mistakes” were made), the setting up of the independent committee makes all previous assertions by Murdoch managers look ludicrous. Both Les Hinton, CEO of Dow Jones & Co., and Rebekah Brooks, chief executive of News International, have insisted that satisfactory (and comprehensive) internal inquiries into reportorial criminality have been conducted at Murdoch’s tabloid titles. In setting up a new committee, Murdoch has made it clear that those previous exercises were b.s.

In any case, those with knowledge of Murdoch methods will react to the latest announcement with a full-throated, cynical guffaw: “Murdoch” and “independent committee” sit together rather oxymoronically in the same sentence. One has only to look at his past promises of independence to know that this latest one is “not worth the paper it is written on.”

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Robert Fisk's predictions for the Middle East in 2013

There is no gain-saying that Robert Fisk, fiercely independent and feisty to boot, is the veteran journalist and author covering the Middle East. Who doesn't he know or hasn't he met over the years in reporting from Beirut - where he lives?  In his latest op-ed piece for The Independent he lays out his predictions for the Middle East for 2013. Read the piece in full, here - well worthwhile - but an extract... "Never make predictions in the Middle East. My crystal ball broke long ago. But predicting the region has an honourable pedigree. “An Arab movement, newly-risen, is looming in the distance,” a French traveller to the Gulf and Baghdad wrote in 1883, “and a race hitherto downtrodden will presently claim its due place in the destinies of Islam.” A year earlier, a British diplomat in Jeddah confided that “it is within my knowledge... that the idea of freedom does at present agitate some minds even in Mecca...” So let’s say this for 2013: the “Arab Awakening” (the t

The NPT (Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty) goes on hold.....because of one non-Treaty member (Israel)

Isn't there something radically wrong here?    Israel, a non-signatory to the NPT has, evidently, been the cause for those countries that are Treaty members, notably Canada, the US and the UK, after 4 weeks of negotiation, effectively blocking off any meaningful progress in ensuring the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons.    IPS reports ..... "After nearly four weeks of negotiations, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference ended in a predictable outcome: a text overwhelmingly reflecting the views and interests of the nuclear-armed states and some of their nuclear-dependent allies. “The process to develop the draft Review Conference outcome document was anti-democratic and nontransparent,” Ray Acheson, director, Reaching Critical Will, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), told IPS. “This Review Conference has demonstrated beyond any doubt that continuing to rely on the nuclear-armed states or their nuclear-dependent allies for l

#1 Prize for a bizarre story.....and lying!

No comment called for in this piece from CommonDreams: Another young black man: The strange sad case of 21-year-old Chavis Carter. Police in Jonesboro, Arkansas  stopped  him and two friends, found some marijuana, searched put Carter, then put him handcuffed  behind his back  into their patrol car, where they say he  shot himself  in the head with a gun they failed to find. The FBI is investigating. Police Chief Michael Yates, who stands behind his officers' story,  says in an interview  that the death is "definitely bizarre and defies logic at first glance." You think?