Murdoch - Wounded

Rupert Murdoch owns or controls 20th Century Fox, FOX Broadcasting, BSkyB , FOXTEL, Sky Deutschland, SKY Italia, The New York Post, the Wall Street Journal. In the UK he owns the Times, the Sunday Times, the Sun, the News of the World. In Britain, Murdoch owns 37% of the newspaper market whilst in the USA, content of his media organisation reaches 40% of the domestic audience.

Murdoch has not invented such unhealthy and democracy threatening control. Germany’s late Axel Springer and the still alive and kicking, hair dying Silvio Berlusconi are but two famous examples.

Ownership structures of the media do not excite the general public. But the same people who buy sleazy newspapers because of their sleazy content are the first to get worked up by the techniques employed by these papers to acquire such sleaze. The rich and famous, whose phones were hacked by a private detective who had been hired by Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World, were offered compensation. Now it turns out that they also hacked the phones of a disappeared and murdered 13 year-old-girl as well as those of bereaved families of British soldiers and the proverbial shit has hit the fan.

To appease the public, Murdoch has just closed down the News of the World. The 200 staff of the paper will be made redundant, whilst the woman who was the editor of the News of the World when all the phone hacking took place and who is now Murdoch’s CEO is glued to her chair. Doubtlessly, if the closure of the News of the World will not suffice, Rebekah Brooks will also have to go.

Finally there is blood. But this is not enough. Murdoch should now at long last be gotten rid of. People like him should not own any media. We should definitely not allow such concentration of media ownership and not allow a Murdoch to decide who will be the next prime minister.