Warming to Rupert Murdoch

I never read the Sun or the News of the World, I occasionally read the Times and think it's a curate's egg (and mostly bad at that), I do not subscribe to Sky TV and seldom watch any of the Sky channels on Freeview. In sum, the Murdoch media holdings in this country make zero impact on me, intellectually and financially.

By contrast I am compelled to pay £145 per anum (sic) for the Bitchy Boys Club, which I despise and watch only when it is broadcasting films or sporting events that could as easily have been aired by other channels. When I lived in the States, I could subscribe to a basket of very specific channels tailored to my tastes for considerably less than I have to pay the Bitchy Boys to produce and broadcast material that revolts me.

To the best of my knowledge Rupert Murdoch requires only profits from his many media holdings. In the USA it has proved profitable to tack against the cosy leftist consensus of the traditional media, but in Britain it has not. The Times, for example, is a centrist newspaper, editorially indistinguishable from the Telegraph. Nor has the quality of the Wall Street Journal fallen off since he took it over, despite all the prior bleating.

So why the panic in the MSM about Rupert's News Corp offering £8 billion to take full control of BSkyB, when he has effective control already as by far the largest shareholder? Guardian Media group, Telegraph Media Group, Trinity Mirror, Daily Mail and General Trust, the ex state monopolist BT - and tax-payer funded Channel 4 and the BBC have signed a petition demanding that the Secretary of State for Business should prevent the full take-over.

They say it will have "serious and far-reaching consequences for media plurality". What media plurality?

BBC 1, BBC 2, BBC 3, BBC 4, BBC HD, BBC News Channel, BBC Parliament, CBBC, CBeebies, BBC America, BBC Canada, BBC Kids, BBC Knowledge. Then there's BBC Radios 1-7 plus about 45 regional BBC radio stations. As the Times comments in its second leader today:

The man in charge of all these media outlets, their Director-General, has spoke out about his concern that too much media power might reside in one organisation. . . . The crushing weight of Mr Thompson's responsibilities has clearly suffocated his sense of irony.

Furthermore:

Having argued that the BBC should not be regulated in the same way as normal media outlets, he has now acted exactly as an ordinary business would do, seeking to gain commercial advantage in league with News Corps's rivals. They, at least, are openly self-interested . . .  Any pretence that the BBC is not similarly self-interested is at an end. And public money is being used to advance that self-interest.

Can't fault that reasoning. If the News Corps take-over were to be stopped because it poses a threat to media plurality, then the statist near-monopoly should be broken up for the same reason.

It may be a good moment for it. There is cross-party anger at the Bitchy Boys for the enormous salaries they have been paying themselves and even Tessa Jowell, who as Culture Secretary gave them everything they demanded when she renewed the license fee, has said that "the culture of the BBC was out of time then and it is even more out of time now. [They want] all  the benefits of the private sector and none of the risks".