LONDON (The Guardian/Pacific Media Watch): Rupert Murdoch capitulated to the British Parliament and abandoned News Corporation's £8bn bid for BSkyB, as he faced the prospect of appearing in front of a judicial public inquiry to salvage his personal reputation and the right for his company to continue to broadcast in the UK.
After 10 days of sustained public outcry over phone hacking, and facing the prospect of a unanimous call by MPs to withdraw his bid for total ownership of the satellite broadcaster, Murdoch succumbed at a morning board meeting at his London HQ in Wapping.
Backgrounders on the Murdoch empire and the Kock brothers (source: MediaMatters):
The billionaires bankrolling the Tea Party
By Frank Rich
Published: August 28, 2010
New York Times
There is just one element missing from these snapshots of Americas ostensibly spontaneous and leaderless populist uprising: the sugar daddies who are bankrolling it, and have been doing so since well before the death panel warm-up acts of last summer. Three heavy hitters rule. You have heard of one of them, Rupert Murdoch. The other two, the brothers David and Charles Koch, are even richer, with a combined wealth exceeded only by that of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett among Americans. But even those carrying the Kochs banner may not know who these brothers are.
Their self-interested and at times radical agendas, like Murdoch's, go well beyond, and sometimes counter to, the interests of those who serve as spear carriers in the political pageants hawked on Fox News. The country will be in for quite a ride should these potentates gain power, and given the recession-battered electorates unchecked anger and the Obama White Houses unfocused political strategy, they might.
SHEP SMITH: The Koch brothers are behind gov. attempt to bust unions
By Glynnis MacNicol
Business Insider
Glenn Beck, Rupert Murdoch and the Koch brothers - are these the guys who have the answers?
Published: Tuesday, September 07, 2010
Updated: Saturday, March 26, 2011
By Joyce Pines
Kalamazoo Gazette
It's been an interesting past couple of weeks for the media. Keyboards sizzled as everyone tried to figure out just exactly what Glenn Beck was doing at the Lincoln Memorial. More interesting, but receiving less attention, was information revealing the power behind the Tea Party and trouble in Rupert Murdoch's empire.
For those of you who don't spend all day reading about this stuff, the following is a synopsis.
Let's start with the latest news. In its most recent Sunday magazine, the New York Times reports that Murdoch's British tabloid, News of the World, has a nasty habit of condoning its reporters hacking into the cell phones of the rich and famous in Great Britain for juicy news.
<snip>
However, evidence suggests that this kind of behavior was pretty routine for many reporters at News of the World.
What's that got to do with us? The New York Times cares because it is in a battle for its life against Murdoch, who owns the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post. Murdoch also owns Fox. Showing that journalistic standards are not practised in Murdoch's empire is to the benefit of The New York Times.
<snip>
Leaving out important names brings us to the third piece of news to emerge in the last few weeks, Jane Mayer's story, "Covert Operations," in The New Yorker. Mayer has stitched together the story of the Koch brothers, the billionaires behind a vast empire that brings in revenues of $100 billion a year, through oil refineries, pipelines, Georgia-Pacific lumber and Dixie cups among other things.
But David and Charles Koch are not content just to get rich. No, they appear to have decided to work behind the scenes to remake America in such a way as to allow them to continue to get richer without having to worry about things like paying much in taxes or dealing with pesky environmental regulations.
Quietly, they are spending millions on lobbyists to insure that nothing gets passed into law that will get in their way.
Their politics, according to Mayer, is not just right-wing Republican, they are actually Libertarian. David ran for vice-president on the Libertarian ticket in 1980. The platform called for the abolition of the FBI, CIA, federal regulatory agencies, the end of Social Security, minimum wage laws, gun control and all personal and corporate income taxes. It proposed the legalisation of prostitution, recreational drugs and suicide, Mayer reported. It advocated that government should be reduced to one function: the protection of individual rights.
The Cato Institute, the Koch Brothers & Rupert Murdoch
February 26, 2011
Progressive American Liberal
A very informative article by Adele M. Stan from Alternet has just come to my attention. I like that she brought out several ways in which Rupert Murdoch was similar to the Koch brothers.
Rupert Murdoch and David Koch Collude Against Wisconsin Workers Ginning up the right-wing rabble is a Fox News specialty. Glenn Beck is more than a talk-show host; he's Rupert Murdoch's community organiser. Like Koch, Murdoch embraces a completely deregulatory agenda: one that would leave giant corporations such as News Corp., the second largest entertainment company in the world, according to Fortune magazine, with nary a single regulation to stand in the way of profit-taking. Like Koch, Murdoch has no use for unions, having famously broken the unions of the newspapers he runs in the U.K. Like Koch, Murdoch gave $1 million to the Republican Governors Association least year, the only difference being that Koch wrote a personal check for his contribution, while Murdoch's check was written on a News Corp. account.
Rupert Murdoch and David Koch collude against Wisconsin workers
While Fox News feeds its rabble the anti-union line, Murdoch's Wall Street Journal columnists front for Koch's Americans for Prosperity and coddle elite investors.
February 25, 2011
AlterNet
In the week-long battle taking place in Wisconsin over Gov. Scott Walker's attempt to strip state workers of their collective bargaining rights, you'd expect Fox News to be doing what it's done: misreporting the story, mistakenly characterising a poll supporting public workers to mean its opposite, featuring Glenn Beck painting the protests of union workers as something cooked up by Stalinists. And you might be tempted to think, well, that's just Fox playing to its base of frightened Tea Partiers who prefer a fact-free zone to the more challenging territory of actual news, where the answers are never pat, and the world is a bit more complicated than it seems in the realm of Fox Nation.
You might think it's all about what brings in the advertising dollars for Rupert Murdoch, CEO of Fox's parent company, News Corporation. But it runs much deeper than that, involving key players at the Wall Street Journal, News Corp.'s crown jewel. The informal partnership between billionaire David Koch, whose campaign dollars and astroturf group, Americans for Prosperity, have fomented the Wisconsin crisis, and billionaire Rupert Murdoch, is profoundly ideological -- the ideology being the exponential enrichment of the two men's heirs, all dressed up in the language of libertarianism and free enterprise. Together with his brother, Charles -- also a big donor to right-wing causes --David Koch runs Koch Industries, the conglomerate that sprang from the oil and gas company founded by his father.
Ginning up the right-wing rabble is a Fox News specialty. Glenn Beck is more than a talk-show host; he's Rupert Murdoch's community organiser. Like Koch, Murdoch embraces a completely deregulatory agenda: one that would leave giant corporations such as News Corp., the second largest entertainment company in the world, according to Fortune magazine, with nary a single regulation to stand in the way of profit-taking. Like Koch, Murdoch has no use for unions, having famously broken the unions of the
newspapers he runs in the U.K. Like Koch, Murdoch gave $1 million to the Republican Governors Association least year, the only difference being that Koch wrote a personal check for his contribution, while Murdoch's check was written on a News Corp. account.
Go to the links for the complete articles.
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