RR Phantom
Location : Wasted Space
Job/hobbies : Cayman Islands Actuary
 |  Subject: Murdoch back at Inquiry for second day  Thu Apr 26, 2012 3:16 am | |
| News Corporation boss Rupert Murdoch will face questions about how he dealt with allegations of criminal behaviour at his UK newspapers when he returns to the Leveson Inquiry later.
The 81-year-old, giving evidence for a second day, will be asked about the phone-hacking scandal and claims of illegal payments by his journalists.
On Wednesday Mr Murdoch claimed then-PM Gordon Brown once threatened to "make war" on his company.
That was later denied by Mr Brown.
Mr Murdoch told the Leveson Inquiry into press standards that the Labour prime minister had phoned him in 2009 after the Sun newspaper had moved to back the Conservatives.
Mr Murdoch quoted Mr Brown as saying: "Well, your company has declared war on my government and we have no alternative but to make war on your company."
Mr Murdoch said that Mr Brown had not been in a "balanced state of mind" when he made the phone call.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-17850093 |
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CovOps
 Location : Ether-Sphere
Job/hobbies : Irrationality Exterminator
Humor : Über Serious
| | Subject: Re: Murdoch back at Inquiry for second day Thu Apr 26, 2012 4:20 am | |
| LOL
Murdoch: "You must be fucking joking..." |
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RR Phantom
Location : Wasted Space
Job/hobbies : Cayman Islands Actuary
| | Subject: When Rupert went to the circus Thu Apr 26, 2012 6:19 am | |
| When Rupert went to the circus
''I never asked a Prime Minister for anything,'' Rupert Murdoch told the Leveson inquiry in London last night.
Lead counsel for the inquiry Robert Jay had been trying to coax the media mogul into a confession that he had absolutely no intention of making: that the chairman of News Corporation, through his news outlets, exercised undue influence on politics and politicians. That democratically elected Prime Ministers were captive in Mr Murdoch's petting zoo.
Mr Murdoch's statement to the inquiry was intended as complete rebuttal.
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But truth is there could be no more succinct or categorical acknowledgement of Mr Murdoch's power.
Being manifestly powerful means not having to ask. Politics knows what you want and what you need, and what you can do by way of retribution when thwarted.
The relationship between politicians and media barons is always a delicate exercise in counterpoise. Hence the sound of those coat-tails trailing deferentially before you.
Ask? Why ask, when everybody already knows what the transaction is. And when, as Murdoch biographer Michael Wolff put it in The Guardian after Mr Murdoch's appearance last night: ''His business is so large, his resources so vast, his options so many, his minions so efficient, that it would not occur to him that he would need to do this.''
But that acknowledgement notwithstanding — that we are watching one of the most powerful media barons in the world denying his power, thereby subtly confirming it — is a lurking sense of nostalgia.
A sense that the covert power Mr Murdoch references has already peaked; that all this is a reflection on a past world. That a combination of the hacking scandal in the UK, the continuing internal pressure on Mr Murdoch within his own company to move past his old school love of newspapers, and the fragmentation of the media market is eroding everyone's hegemony in increments.
That no one quite directs the play any more: not the politicians, not the media owners — that the monster of their co-creation has bounded somehow, drowned in the cacophony of the internet or rendered valueless by the weary cynicism of the consumers of politics and news.
That things are not as they were, and never can be quite as they were, despite the implacable will of the mogul putting up with the interrogation at Leveson, because a sequence of events largely outside his control has left him with no other tenable option.
To sit at the table and be star of the flea circus.
That too is a statement of shifting power, as emphatic as Mr Murdoch's.
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/political-news/when-rupert-went-to-the-circus-20120426-1xmv3.html#ixzz1t8lllfTO
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| | Subject: Re: Murdoch back at Inquiry for second day | |
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