Murdoch's Last Stand

The bid for BSkyB was withdrawn an hour ago, and while there isn't quite dancing in the streets, there certainly is on the internet. Murdoch has as many defenders as Moamar Ghadaffi.

The announcement came after the formal statement to Parliament by Cameron, and a PM's questions which must have convinced NewsCorp lawyers that to go ahead would have been ridiculous, especially considering the Commons unanimous vote of no-confidence in Murdoch tonight. And naturally, the ordeal of answering questions to next Tuesday's select committee can now be avoided.
What might not be so easy to duck are the possible charges under US law related to allegations that the families of 9/11 victims were hacked. Or the continuing market dive in in NewsCorp shares. And if, as everyone believes Murdoch is not a fit and proper person to own all of BSkyB, then he is not a fit and proper person to own any of it. But exactly how far NewsCorp falls depends on how much effort ordinary people put into pressurising companies not to advertise with any of their outlets, as they did last week when sinking the News of the World.
And if NewsCorp is vulnerable to public outrage, which corporations are safe? Murdoch is being run out of town on a rail. This is what happens when you give people to much power over information in an age when information is power.
Murdochosaurus Rex is just another dinosaur destroyed by a change in the technological climate, and a meteor called Milly, in his case. In Tunisia, the meteor was called Mohamed Bouaziz, but the climate was just as inhospitable to tyrants.
Anyone who thinks nothing has changed is beyond hope. A dinosaur. You simply cannot go about giving vast numbers of people control over information without giving them power. And in an age when information is power, that is lethal, especially to those whose business is the monopolisation of information (and therefore power). Murdoch was destroyed by the shift from the capital intensive push-media world to the mad internet world which gives us all a voice. And it is instructivbe that the branch of the media which resisted all attempts to smother the truth were the least profitable, like the Guardian, or the one which has no shareholders to answer to at all, namely the BBC. Thank god for the BBC. If Murdoch had not been exposed, future of the the BBC was very shaky. It was the main target in his sights after the BSky B acquisition.

The Siege of Wapping

It's an old story. An entrenched vested interest is faced with a new technology which threatens its livelihood. It reacts by attempting to contain the advance, which is flowing around it like a river around a shopping trolley. Eventually, innovation always prevails, mainly because it refuses to fight the battle with the same weapons or on the same field. It fights with the weapons it has created. History records who were the losers.
The printers of Wapping in 1984 are definitely now seen as the losers in the technology war with Rupert Murdoch. And he is seen as the visionary liberator, whose victory over the unions ensured a golden future...to some.
It is surely one of the most historically monumental ironies that this same Murdoch is now frantically erecting barricades in defence of his own brand of corporate Spanish Practices. The Murdoch of the Siege of Wapping now under siege again from the same forces of progress he once posed as the champion of.
Peter Preston, in today's Observer, compares him with Lear, railing against the storm. That is to grant him too much grandeur. He is not even Orwell's Tolstoy, disillusioned by the failure of ideology to deliver happiness and therefore resentful of happiness in others.
He is simply a gigantic hypocrite, another corporate gangster able to deny anything and believe his own lies. Anything to make money and protect and enlarge his power.
Luckily, he is almost as insane as Lear on the heath, in that he cannot accept the inevitable, and is in hysterical denial about his emasculation.
Murdoch Vs The Internet can only see one winner. In 1985 Murdoch backed progress because he saw an empire to be built. Naturally he opposes the same progress which now threatensto demolish it, but that does not make him sane, only more desperate. And so the BBC can expect an even greater campaign against it than ever.
The BBC is embracing internet technology, having invented vital parts of it, and is committed to free access. The scrap between News Incorporated and the BBC is where the deciding punches will be thrown in the battle for free content, and from a British point of view, the battle for a keystone of our cultural identity. We should know the general outcome by the beginning of June next year. When a closely fought general election is over.
But in the meantime, the BBC might take a leaf from the Murdoch book, and win.
There is nothing to stop any Laundromat millionaire from setting up as an internet service provider. The BBC should do this as soon as possible and market the service globally. The package would include access to all the BBCs growing archive of comedies, documentaries, drama, wildlife etc... This income would subsidise the loyal British license payers who would have access to the service by right. Eventually, with even moderate global take-up (Flickr charges £15 a year) The British member of the corporation would be paying a peppercorn sum for a service which would meet all their needs. The scope for innovation is vast.
Naturally the boardrooms will squeal in horror and outrage, but all are going to have to face the facts that the age of the ownership of information is over. That the source of their profits and lifestyles has dried up. So the sooner they choose sides the better. The sensible will decide to use the new approach to encourage the democratisation of creativity. To enable as many users as possible to find and be stimulated by material produced by people, not the brands marketed and distributed by the usual showbiz/media conveyor belt.
The diehards will try to sue the BBC, and try to charge the public money to read about the drunken antics of the D-list. It's almost sad.

Heather McCartney and other Media Victims

The media have to have flesh to feed on. Objects for their hatesheets. Whether it is this obviously unstable woman for being unstable. Or Fergie because she was ginger and a size 14. Or Jade Goody because she wasn't Jane Asher. Or Britney because she was ill. Or Bruno because he was ill. Or Gazza because he was ill...
Heather McCartney peddles the line that as an amputee she is persecuted because she is disabled. She is right but for the wrong reason. The mentally unstable are fair game in the media Hate Game.

CRAZY PERSON IS CRAZY! LOOK AT THEM BEING CRAZY!

Seems to sell enough wood pulp to keep Murdoch in satellites. Sick. The sad sadists by proxy who swallow these buckets of snot should remember that the pillory and stocks were abolished long before the battle of the Somme. They should know that even General Haig was more human than them. At least he had the excuse of patriotism, all they have is the sick superiority of Marie Antoinette.
 The press do like insulting the mentally ill, such as Frank Bruno and Gazza. Meanwhile, the psychological result of being a paid liesmith, of being a contortionist with the truth, is to distort the victim's sense of reality, to make them crazy as Gazza. It is therefore a matter of some urgency for journalists to make up their minds which world they want to live in, the optimistic one which tries to make things better for as as many people as possible (progress) or the one in which they are allowed to spread their chronic depression as widely as is profitable for their bosses.
 Make the right choice and people will start to despise them a bit less. Make the wrong one and they will continue to be reptiles.