Murdoch-owned Times attacks BBC for ‘media empire’ monopoly

'Cut down to size' means small enough not to threaten private media interests

 

Today the Times newspaper, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News UK, and an arm of his global media empire that includes Fox News, a chunk of Sky TV and newspapers in the UK, the US and Australia, has called for an end to media monopoly… by the BBC.

First, some background.

The general election campaign saw media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers sound the alarm for a free press.

An editorial in his Sun newspaper on April 24 warned the Labour party was planning to censor newspapers if it won the election. 

It cited Labour’s pledge to enact the Leveson inquiry’s recommendations and to cap media ownership to prevent monopolies as proof of a partisan agenda. It said that unlike the Tories, ‘Labour actively seeks to silence critics’:

“During all the years the Sun backed them from 1997, Labour said nothing about the size of our company.

Now, as a direct result of the Sun’s opposition, it has sworn to use the law to dismantle News UK if it wins power.

Dozens of innocent Sun journalists, later cleared, were prosecuted on the say-so of a man now standing for Labour.

Meanwhile, the party vows to enforce the Leveson inquiry’s conclusions. It is all aimed at papers such as the Sun.

This is what sinister state censorship REALLY looks like.”

Murdoch is said to have berated staff at the Sun for not trashing Ed Miliband enough, telling journos the future of the company was at stake.

Now that the election is over and media ownership caps are likely off the table, Murdoch’s papers have changed their tune.

On May 12, the same editorial space in the Sun sounded like this:

“After decades of BBC bias against the Tories, subtle and blatant, it’s payback time.

The new culture secretary will, we hope, pull the plug on the bloated corporation’s smug Left-wing agenda […]

The fee should be shrunk so it focuses on first class original TV and radio.

It must be regularly scrutinised for quality, value for money and neutrality.

If it fails, the licence fee is axed. (emphasis original)

And so with the Murdoch-owned Times. Columnist and historian Michael Burleigh writes in its opinion pages today that the BBC ‘resembles an expansionary empire’. He writes:

“The problem is with the default BBC stance on immigration, Israel, nationalism, the EU, the ‘Red’ heartlands of the US, bankers, hedge funds and the City […]”

The piece is part of a right-wing drive to cut the broadcaster ‘down to size’, which probably means ‘a size small enough not to threaten the business interests of private media corporations’.

The Sun more or less spelled this out, complaining the Beeb uses public money to ‘intrude into markets where private firms – local newspapers, for example – should thrive instead’.

Or national ones. As Burleigh writes: “The BBC is not an online newspaper. We have a diverse and vibrant national press that does the job very well […]”

In the end, you either oppose ‘media empires’ and monopolies or you do not. Any attempt to create a genuinely freer market must address both public and privately-owned media to be taken seriously.

Meanwhile, there is something ludicrous in complaining about ‘sinister state censorship’ of a partisan kind when your own interests are threatened and then cheer on ‘payback time’ for the BBC along equally partisan lines.

Especially if you own one of the largest media empires in the world.

Adam Barnett is a staff writer at Left Foot Forward. Follow MediaWatch on Twitter

 

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50 Responses to “Murdoch-owned Times attacks BBC for ‘media empire’ monopoly”

  1. Dark_Heart_of_Toryland

    Do ever actually listen to the radio? We are talking about the same BBC which routinely pushes a right-wing neoliberal agenda?

  2. Selohesra

    I do and I hear a steady bias of:
    – anti austerity (they had phone-ins on the pain of the cuts within days of the coalition being elected)
    – anti Tory & UKIP
    -pro Labour – even adopting their terminology ‘bedroom tax’
    – pro EU
    – pro Euro (until it imploded)
    – pro warmest agenda that man is responsible for all climate change
    – anti Israel pro Hamas/Fatah
    – pro Obama/anti Republican

  3. stevep

    We all have our perceptions of the BBC, but it is worth remembering that since it`s creation, large parts of the world have come to rely on it`s impartiality and in times of conflict, listened to it clandestinely, often in fear of arrest and death if caught, in preference to their own media.

  4. Cole

    Bit paranoid aren’t we? And do you really expect them to be even handed on climate change? It’s pretty much a settled issue except amongst loonies. I don’t want my licence fee giving ‘balance’ to a bunch of flat earthers whose views have been discredited by science.

  5. Dark_Heart_of_Toryland

    What biases????
    Having one phone-in on the pain of austerity hardly counters the constant message put across by the BBC that austerity is necessary (in the face of all the evidence to the contrary).
    Far from being anti-UKIP, the BBC has given Farage endless platforms and opportunities to put forward his viewpoint – the fact that he used those opportunities to shoot himself in the foot is hardly the fault of the BBC. And as for the Tories, they’ve been given a far easier ride than Labour, and their agenda has been accepted without question. When have ever heard any serious questioning of Tory policies such as the creeping privatisation of the NHS?
    As for the alleged ‘warmest’ agenda, presumably you expect the BBC to give even more prominence to the vested-interests who back climate-change denialism, and to ignore the entire scientific community? And just consider the abysmal lack of coverage given to the Greens.
    The idea that the BBC is anti-Israel and pro-Hamas is just laughable. Hamas are routinely described as terrorists, while the war crimes routinely committed by the Israeli armies are never reported as such.

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