Triumphant Spread Of Democracy In The Former Soviet Union
You’ve probably heard of a guy called Rupert Murdoch. Yeah, you know,
the megalomaniac who’s multinational News Corp media company owns, among
other things, Fox television, the film studios 20th Century Fox and Paramount
Pictures, and which controls a global newspaper empire. He’s also Ted
Turner’s sworn enemy (maybe because they’re so much alike?). Anyway,
the Ruper-pooper’s News Corp subsidiary, News America, has recently
made a new and fairly unusual acquisition. It has agreed to buy a 38% stake
in former Soviet Union tele-communications group PLD Telekom for $US81 million.
The deal is seen as a News Corp bid to gain a foot-hold in that elusive market
- the former Soviet Union and its 60 million tv households.
Of course, in some ways that’s not too unusual for a media corporation
like News Corp and media barons like Rupe. They seem to buy and sell companies
every second day - presumably because it’s very profitable to do so.
They also seem to have an insatiable thirst for the apparent power and influence
these acquisitions give them. And now it’s Russia - or the former Soviet
Union. It’s just another logical step in Ruper’s plans for world
domination. Hey, it’s just business.
But this is only a small example of what’s been going on in the
media/information industry for many years now: fat and hungry pigs at the
trough fighting each other for a share of the media/information prize. And
the issue at the heart of all this is media monopoly versus media diversity.
We’re watching it play out every day, whether it’s between
Rupert’s News Corp and the Primestar satellite pay-TV operation, or
between Bill Gates’ Microsoft and Netscape - or Macintosh, or (in Australia)
Kerry Packer’s Publishing And Broadcasting Ltd and Fairfax Holdings.
Then again some people will read this and say, ‘Oh, that’s all
just a silly conspiracy cooked up by people like Noam Chomsky. We have a
lot of media diversity’. Or maybe they will say, ‘Media
diversity’s not that important anyway. People like Rupert and their
companies provide a valuable service, and by and large let their editors
and producers and journalists alone to do their jobs. They’re just reporting
the news. And we’re free to make of it what we will’.
Well, that’s one point of view. Another one is that provided by Phillip
Knightly in his book ‘A Hack’s Progress’. Knightly is a respected
journalist who served on the British paper The Sunday Times for twenty years
and who also worked under Murdoch, gaining a deep familiarity with his working
methods. He has this to say about them:
When critics accuse Rupert Murdoch of dictating policy to his editors,
they’re wrong. It doesn’t work like that. First, Murdoch chooses
editors who agree with his basic outlook on life, who think like he does.
Next, to keep them up to date on his views, he holds annual
‘conferences’ for those staff, and they sit around in an opulent
resort hotel for several days, and talk. And at the end of it every editor
knows exactly what Murdoch’s opinions are on almost everything.
Following this up, Knightly then gives an example of such a conference where
Murdoch asked of his editors, "What’s the biggest story in the world
today?" After the various editor’s replies of "drugs?", "increasing
feminism?", "the globalisation of industry?", etc, were given the negative,
Murdoch finally answered that, in his view, the biggest story in the world
was the coming collapse of Communism. Knightly then relates how, come lunchtime,
all the editors at that conference had rushed to their phones to order stories
from their sub editors about Communism’s collapse.
I wonder what Rupert tells his editors is the most important story in the
world now at those ‘conferences’? Maybe he mumbles something about
the triumphant spread of ‘democracy’ in the former Soviet Union.
Rupert, Ted, Bill, a few others. It’s a small club. And it’s getting
smaller.