Capitalism Kills The Truth - Fox Buys National Geographic

Rupert Murdoch's 21st Century Fox Corporation has bought up the prestigious National Geographic magazine and its associated TV channel. Within 24 hours of the title exchanging hands, 180 staff (about 9% of the total) were "let go" and although Murdoch's spokespeople have insisted that the editorial board and writing staff are largely intact, the Digger's reach is likely to go beyond the frozen staff benefits pot.

National Geographic, first published in 1888, has long been prized as an impartial and highly reliable source of news about the world. Although with a heavy focus (literally) on wildlife and wilderness landscapes, it has also contributed massively to the mainstreaming of the debate on climate change with leading articles on global warming, resource depletion and environmental damage. Its photo-journalism has sometimes been the conclusive proof of corporations' damage of rainforest, pollution of the seas and assault on indigenous communities.

Click through to a few National Geographic pieces:

"Yes, We can take action to fix climate change!" 

The Climate Change Special Issue

Weather versus Climate change

Learning from Indigenous Peoples About Climate Change

It has a website devoted to explaining climate change: HERE


By contrast, take a look at Murdoch's Fox News Channel's output on this major issue of our times:

 Fossil Fuels are no catastrophe: they have made our lives better.

Weather Channel founder blasts climate change (as fake)  

 Climate change is "Superstition"

Many commentators have criticised Fox for its lax standards of verite, not only on global warming but on a wide range of issues. But it's obsessive traducing of the climate crisis is creating serious damage to the fight to save humanity from self-destruction. The widespread scientific consensus on global warming being caused by human activity is denounced as fraud perpetrated by a Protocols of Zion type world-wide conspiracy by universities in search of grants, while every flake of snow is pronounced another nail in the coffin of the "liberal" myth of a warming planet. Although happy to trouser millions from the biblical climate change epic Noah, Murdoch himself crassly pronounced modern, scientifically proven climate change false after he flew over 300 miles of ice - in the Arctic!

With one analysis declaring 93% of its output as "misleading" on climate change,   the enduring tragedy is that more Americans trust Fox News thant President Obama on the issue - not that, with his own addiction to fracking, Barak has not exaclty covered himself in glory on the environment.

But Fox is critical in slowing and blocking the crucial opt-in to global action on greenhouse gas emissions by the USA without which action by other countries will have limited impact (It is worth noting here that Chinese coal use is now falling and China, doubtlessly in thrall to liberals!, is investing more in clean energy than the rest of the world combined).

Murdoch has of course already insisted there will be no loss of editorial independence, but anyone following the British satirical magazine Private Eye's regular tracking of tie-ins and cross-selling between his UK Sky, Times and Sun media brands will know differently.

Like any good global capitalist, for Rupert Murdoch, global warming, even at its now accelerating pace, is of far less concern than his year on year profits. His poisonous legacy - and those of hundreds of similar global magnates - will exact a huge price from his grandchildren's generation. But of course, by then Rupert will have long since gone to the Corporate Boardroom in (the) Sky.

Below - Spoofs abound already: but is the future bleak for National Geographic?

"The Sun" Turns...

It was bemusing, to say the least, to behold the ire of Trevor Kavanagh, the former Political Editor (yes, there is one!) of The Sun tabloid newspaper railing against what he called heavy-handed police tactics in the latest investigation into News International's activities in acquiring stories for its gutter press. With thirty journalists under investigation for a range of possible offences involving bribery of police and other officials, as well as alleged phone hacking, Mr Kavanagh complained of families being upset by early morning police raids, and unwarranted intrusion into people's privacy.
"This witch-hunt has put us behind ex-Soviet states on press freedom!" he writes furiously in today's newspaper, blithely ignoring the significant changes in counties like Estonia in the last twenty years. He is angry that some of the legends of Fleet Street are apparently not immune from being questioned by police and are now on open-ended bail. More than slightly stating the obvious at this stage, complains that the police are investigating even although "Nobody has been charged with any offence, still less tried or convicted."
Now, of course, we have to wait and see the outcome of the investigation, but Kavanagh's complaints are disingenuous - it may have long been The Sun's take on its own targets that the conviction precedes the investigation, but thankfully, even in neoliberal Britain, there is still at least some observation of the need for an investigation before charging someone with an offence. So the absence of charges at present means nothing other than that the police are pursuing their inquiries as justice and good practice demands they should.


As far as Kavanagh's concerns about invasion of people's privacy, physician heal thyself comes to mind. The Sun, like its late and unlamented News International stablemate, The News of the World, has existed on a diet of intrusion and breaches of privacy against a host of people, famous, infamous and unknown. This is the newspaper that announced Charlotte Church's pregnancy to the world before she did - and before the 12 weeks point often crucial to safe pregnancies. This is the paper that intruded into the grief of the family of murdered football fan Mike Dye within hours of his killing with inaccurate and inappropriate insinuations that he was involved with a gang of trouble-seekers. 


As for witch-hunts, well this is the newspaper which routinely publishes wildly inaccurate, hate-filled and hate-inducing articles about disabled people, like one in January by its columnist Rod Liddle, who wrote:
"My New Year’s resolution for 2012 was to become disabled. Nothing too serious, maybe just a bit of bad luck or one of those newly invented illnesses which make you a bit peaky for decades – fibromyalgia, or M.E..There’s lots of money to be made from being disabled – your money, taxpayers’ money, as it happens."
This too is the paper that thrives on gossip about the most intimate lives of celebrities, including ones it creates so it can then knock down. It also does a good line on deaths - speculating even today with lurid headlines about singer Whitney Houston's tragic death: was she on "Jacko drugs"? Was her head underwater?


The Sun, whose huge profits subsidise Murdoch's supposedly respectable but loss-making Times newspapers, was defended just last week by its editor, Dominic Mohan at the Leveson enquiry into the Press as a force for good, which must rank as a prime contender for the biggest piss-take of the year so far. The News International stable has in fact been involved in some of the most pernicious press campaigns of recent years.
Both the News of the World and The Sun were prominent in advocating the so-called Sarah's Law, after the murdered child Sarah Payne, which would provide parents with details of convicted paedophiles living in their area. Keen to get in on the act, N.I. undertook its own name and shame campaign which, as well as indirectly encouraging vigilante law, led to the beating up of innocent people mistakenly identified as paedophiles by mobs and in one case the hounding from her home through vandalism and death threats of a paediatrician, her job title confused with the appellation for a child molester.


All this while running lurid front page stories on under-age sex, like this one on the left, one of many.
So Mr Kavanagh can moan all he likes, but, few will shed tears for his colleagues (although distress to their innocent kids and partners is another matter) as the police undertake their enquiries. Whatever the legal outcome, the employees of N.I. currently under scrutiny will do well to consider for a change what it feels like to be on the receiving end of intrusion and suspicion. And may hell mend them.

Lib Dems Last Chance in the Coalition of the Corrupt

"We both want a Britain where our political system is looked at with admiration, not anger. We have a shared ambition to clean up Westminster..."

These words were the ringing declaration by David Cameron and Nick Clegg in May last year, hailing the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition Government as a new start in British politics, jaded by the scandals of MPs expenses and the banking crisis. But tonight, they ring truly hollow.

After revelation upon revelation in the last fortnight of the incestuously close relationships between News International, the Metropolitan Police and the highest echelons of the Conservative Party, including - perhaps especially including - David Cameron himself, the idea that this can ever be a Government capable of reforming and cleaning up its own mess is beyond risible. Again and again, Mr Cameron has been compromised, whether in his hiring of Andy Coulson, his friendship with Rebekah Brooks, or his courting of Rupert Murdoch (even having him round for a "thankyou" cup of tea when the ink was barely dry on the Coalition Agreement). His actions in the Commons today were evasive to the point of being pathetic, like a childish schoolboy caught red-handed in the tuck shop, but denying he ate the chocolate smeared all over his chin.

Shapeshifter: like Star Trek's Odo, Cameron ultimately reverts to type..

It would be laughable were it not so deeply, terribly serious. Serious not only from the perspective of the victims of phone hacking, nor from the alleged payments to corrupt policemen, nor even the jobs offered by the Met and Cameron himself to former hacks and their family members. But even more so from the perspective that News International owned the two biggest circulation newspapers in the UK which, along with the prestigious Times titles, switched from supporting Labour to nakedly partisan advocacy for the Conservatives at the last election. And, given the nature of the reporting in The Sun and News of the World, these papers have substantially added to the atmosphere (or atmosfear) of xenophobia, disablism and paranoia that informs swathes of our society, while unquestioningly pursuing a right-wing agenda that entrenches the power of Murdoch and the Establishment.

Tomorrow's Morning Star...news you can trust!

Cameron should resign. There is no question of that. He is a disgrace to his office and, as we saw with him having to red-faced hurry home from South Africa earlier this week, he is a shame on our country.

Of course, he won't go. Like many power-hungry men in his position, he will cling by his fingernails to the varnished surface of the Cabinet table until his grip is prised off.

But by who?

Many Tories have long been suspicious of Cameron, but for now there can be little doubt that most will close ranks around them - the entire scandal has tainted their party and their class; so they will not relish removing him if he can ride out the storm.

Yet of course, this Government is not a Conservative one alone. Cameron holds office thanks to the support of 57 Liberal Democrat MPs and their leader, Nick Clegg. To date, they have been untainted by the scandal - they were not wined and dined by Murdoch and his lackeys - and Clegg claims to have warned Cameron about appointing Coulson as his Press Secretary, although evidently his words fell on deaf ears and he meekly went along with the appointment, the need to clean up politics quietly forgotten.

So, the question now has to be this - how long will the Liberal Democrats continue to sustain this man in office? How long will they permit him to be evasive about his appointment of Coulson? How long will they ignore his meetings with Murdoch's men - 26 in just over a year - at a time when News International were seeking Government approval to buy BSkyB outright? Do they seriously think the public will buy the idea that Cameron's links with NI were unknown to Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt, who was to take the decision?

Before the task fell to Hunt, the duty of ruling on the takeover bid was in the domain of Business Secretary Vince Cable. The Lib Dem big wig was infamously stung by two young female reporters, the "middle aged" Minister effusively showing off by declaring himself to be "at war with Murdoch", thereby disqualifying himself from being allowed to take the decision. In spite of claiming he could nuke the Government because he was so important and powerful, he only just kept his job.

But if Cable's injudicious remarks compromised him, how much more compromised is the Government by the insidious, obsequious relations between the Prime Minister and these people?

So, for Mr Cable and his boss Mr Clegg, already reeling from the hostile reaction to their support for a range of neoliberal policies, the question now surely has to be is it not time to do the decent thing and pull the plug on their Coalition? When you have a Prime Minister as weakened as this one now is, surely it is time to ask the People who they want to govern? And don't they realise that, if they are indeed at war with Murdoch, they are also at war with their Coalition partner, who, more clearly than ever, is nothing but the parroting placeman of the moneymen who are trying to buy up our country and put paid to our democracy?

Time for Vince to push the button...

Murdoch: The Mirth, the Movie and the Music

As more News International executives, including Rebekah Brooks, are arrested - worryingly just ahead of an appearance before an MPs' committee of enquiry on Tuesday, allowing her to possibly refuse to answer many of their questions - the mess that the British Establishment is now in has given rise to an element of grim humour on the web. Whilst we are still some way from seeing a radical transformation of the ownership and regulation of the print media in Britain, satire is providing a valuable tool to point up just how utterly awful the corruption at the heart of our nation really is.


But Murdoch has attracted some good satire for years. Enjoy this selection of just some of the humour on the Dirty Digger...

Steve Bell in "The Guardian"

BILLY BRAGG - NEVER BUY THE SUN from Billy Bragg on Vimeo.

 

 

A BIT OF FRY & LAURIE - WHAT IF MURDOCH HAD NEVER BEEN BORN...?

 

 

 

 

 

 

CITIZEN SMART - "THE RUPERT MURDOCH SONG"

 

 

Perhaps the worst joke of all....

 

COMING SOON - MURDOCH: THE MOVIE

 

 

 ....and good riddance!

 

Rupert Murdoch Simpsons from Kof-i on Vimeo.

 

In Cameron We Trust (not)?

It's that Watergate Moment!

A dramatic week for our politics, press and police. And yet do the travails of the 3-pees amount to anything more enduring than this week's headlines as the Establishment probably prays this morning that the public is heading towards "Murdoch fatigue"?

The chances of this latest crisis to rock our rulers leading to the democratically accountable media we need seem unlikely in the extreme. Even Ed Miliband, who has had a good fortnight, has come out against any compulsory regulation of our errant Press and the "wide ranging" public enquiries announced by David Cameron will take several years to be about as useful as the public enquiries into the Falklands War and the death of Dr Kelly. And now comes the claims in the Independent on Sunday that the Chair of the committee of MPs that will question Murdoch and his acolytes this week has close personal links with News International executives.

At the end of the day, it has been fun to watch them squirm. Rupert Murdoch, Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson (the latter two now both arrested) have been hounded by the cameras all week and even although it is rather a case of their rivals kicking them when they are down, it is still sweet to see the boot finally on the other foot, however temporarily. And as for Cameron himself - the mask has finally slipped as the Independent newspaper revealed his continued friendship and fortnightly meetings with the people whose staff bugged and connived their way into the private life of his predecessor, Gordon Brown. Sadly, as yet, this is not turning into his Watergate - the rest of the Press, chewing on the bloodied legs of News International, have a vested interest in keeping him where he is.

But the parallels are striking - Nixon had links to all manner of unsavoury characters who did him favours, not necessarily with him needing to ask or know. And infamously, he bugged hundreds of conversations in the heart of the White House. Cameron has not done that, but his sponsors (or their surrogates) clearly have committed equivalent acts, even if their newspapers were supposedly so out of control that they didn't know about the hacking, nor ask any questions about where the stories came from.

How tenable can it be then that we have a Prime Minister who socialises with the people who used pretty underhand methods to undermine his predecessor and twist the democratic process? Or who allowed Parliament to be misled about his continued contact with Andy Coulson after he left his post at Downing Street? Or who was silent about the fact that, since becoming Prime Minister, he has met with News International executives on average once every two weeks?

Cameron's dark side, for the diminishing number who still thought he didn't have one, is becoming strikingly clear - his taste for Power seems to be as endlessly thirsty as the unquenchable palate of the Dirty Digger, whom he clearly admires so much. And to whom, in the end, he owes so much.


Update - 17 July; Metropolitant Police chief resigns and attacks Cameron over the affair. More here.

Symbiotic Sun - who depends on who?  "The Sun" front page on election day 2010)

Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown Addresses Parliament last week:

The News of our World

Barely an hour goes by without another revelation in the phone hacking scandal that has engulfed the British media, police and political classes over the last week or so. Triggered initially by the unlikely scenario of actor Hugh Grant turning the tables on a former tabloid journalist who had bugged his calls, a rolling stone of gargantuan proportions seems to have crushed the vested interests that control huge swathes of our media. Tonight, headlines proclaiming the end of News International and the destruction of Rupert Murdoch's empire are emblazoned across several media sites.

And yet is it so? Or is the media simply playing its own game, for once at home rather than away?

While the scandal is certainly a tour de force of the incestuous relationship between our Masters, it is yet to reach any game changing watershed where the system is so broken that we finally break it down and replace it with something transparent and genuinely democratic.

It was perplexing today to listen to ex-Metropolitan Police Commissioner Andy Hayman giving his testimony to a Parliamentary Select Committee. As well as accepting a job with News International after investigating it for hacking, this was his response to Chairman Keith Vaz's suggestion that accepting dinner invitations from people under investigation might be seen as inappropriate:

"Not having dinner [with NI chiefs] would have been more suspicious than having it", says Hayman. The committee laughs. "We're astonished at how you're answering these questions", says Vaz, when Hayman asks why they're laughing. 

From the voicemail of murder victim Millie Dowler, through the grieving families of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan to today's revelations that even Prime Minister Gordon Brown's family medical information and bank accounts were being hacked into by the gutter press - the media's dark soul has been exposed in a huge cloud of sulphur. Suddenly, after all manner of hesitation, the politicians who previously courted Murdoch are out baying for blood. Tomorrow, the three main parties will combine to demand that Murdoch withdraws his proposed takeover of BSkyB television, prompting the hyperbolic headlines of his media rivals.

And yet...do we honestly believe that only News International have hacked people's telephones? That only the NI stable have intruded inappropriately on people's privacy, peddling papers on stories of misfortune and grief? Do we really think for a moment that, once two or three hacks have been sent to jail, a cop or two has resigned on grounds of ill health and Murdoch has contented himself with his current position as largest stakeholder of BSkyB, anything of any substance will change?

Of course not. Because this is the media's expenses-scandal moment. Just as MPs are now back to claiming more than they did before their supposed damascene conversion to paragons of thrift, so we would be deluding ourselves if we think for a second that somehow we will emerge from this cesspool with a responsible press governed by effective privacy laws and respect for the individual.

The media is the glue that holds the nation in thrall to the ruling class and its kleptocracy. That any of this has leaked out at all is simply testimony to how utterly rotten and corrupt the whole system has become. With their diet of scandal, prejudice and pap, the media is vital to establishing and reinforcing the conformity that, while permitting occasional spurts of defiance to let off pressure, ultimately ensures continuing consensus around our current parliamentary system and socio-economic set up. In the end, the Establishment might wipe away the seeping pus when it inevitably oozes through the cracks, but it will not lance the boil it depends on so very much. The politicians who will vote tomorrow are the same people who last week courted Murdoch and will do so again next week, or month. A few, like Clegg, will claim to have warned about Murdoch, yet effectively did nothing to challenge him, still willingly serving in Government alongside his placemen.

While the papers fill up with the shlock horrors of the phone hack scandal that everyone has suspected for years, the Government has quietly proposed a major act of destruction on our public services with contracting out to private companies to become the virtual default in a whole range of areas. Hospitals, schools, cleansing services and more - everything is up for auctioning off under a veneer of increased choice and community control.

It is not that the hacking scandal should be a non-story. But somehow it is more than ironic that the very exposure of the Establishment's corrupt heart has yet again ensured the obscuring of the sort of issue that should be the lead on every front page. Plus ca change...