Murdoch – 21years is a long time apparently.
July 12, 2011 by Doug Kennedy
I have been watching this ‘hacking’ debacle since the highly astute and reputable ‘Yates of the Yard’ first strutted his stuff. At the time, it seemed odd, particularly the arresting of Labour ministers, and the sudden announcement that there was nothing more to act on when people who seemed to know what they were talking about were protesting that there was loads more.
Then we had the horrifying prospect of Murdoch’s empire owning all of BSkyB along with the rest: I seem to remember that when he bought British Satellite Broadcasting in 1990, he agreed to hold onto a minority of BSkyB shares because otherwise the govt thought he’d own too much – so what’s changed in 21 years? Does it now not matter that he could own virtually all of our cable/satellite TV as well as our biggest newspapers.
And now we have the tories (following Labour) gagging to give the man his way until it blew up in their faces. He plays a long game – he did invest hugely in the development of Sky TV.
This is a strange scandal, and I think that manypeople are glorying in the finding of new ‘horrifying’ examples of journalistic misbehaviour.
The important thing is that we need investigative journalism that works within a free and varied press environment.
I get very cyinical about our government these days.