Britain is said to be approaching its Berlusconi Moment. That is to say, if Rupert Murdoch wins control of Sky he will command half the television and newspaper market and threaten what is known as public service broadcasting. Although the alarm is ringing, it is unlikely that any government will stop him while his court is packed with politicians of all parties.

The problem with this and other Murdoch scares is that, while one cannot doubt their gravity, they deflect from an unrecognised and more insidious threat to honest information. For all his power, Murdoch's media is not respectable. Take the current colonial wars. In the United States, Murdoch's Fox Television is almost cartoon-like in its warmongering. It is the august, tombstone New York Times, "the greatest newspaper in the world," and others such as the once-celebrated Washington Post, that have given respectability to the lies and moral contortions of the "war on terror," now recast as "perpetual war."

In Britain, the liberal Observer performed this task in making respectable Tony Blair's deceptions on Iraq. More importantly, so did the BBC, whose reputation is its power. In spite of one maverick reporter's attempt to expose the so-called dodgy dossier, the BBC took Blair's sophistry and lies on Iraq at face value.

This was made clear in studies by Cardiff University and the German-based Media Tenor. The BBC's coverage, said the Cardiff study, was overwhelmingly "sympathetic to the government's case." According to Media Tenor, a mere two per cent of BBC news in the build-up to the invasion permitted antiwar voices to be heard. Compared with the main American networks, only CBS was more pro-war.

So when the BBC director-general Mark Thompson used the recent Edinburgh Television Festival to attack Murdoch, his hypocrisy was like a presence. Thompson is the embodiment of a taxpayer-funded managerial elite, for whom political reaction has long replaced public service. He has even laid into his own corporation, Murdoch-style, as "massively left-wing." He was referring to the era of his 1960s predecessor Hugh Greene, who allowed artistic and journalistic freedom to flower at the BBC. Thompson is the opposite of Greene; and his aspersion on the past is in keeping with the BBC's modern corporate role, reflected in the rewards demanded by those at the top. Thompson was paid £834,000 last year out of public funds and his 50 senior executives earn more than the prime minister, along with enriched journalists like Jeremy Paxman and Fiona Bruce.

Murdoch and the BBC share this corporatism. Blair, for example, was their quintessential politician. Prior to his election in 1997, Blair and his wife were flown first-class by Murdoch to Hayman Island in Australia where he stood at the Newscorp lectern and, in effect, pledged an obedient Labour administration. His coded message on media cross-ownership and deregulation was that a way would be found for Murdoch to achieve the supremacy that now beckons.

Blair was embraced by the new BBC corporate class, which regards itself as meritorious and non-ideological: the natural leaders in a managerial Britain in which class is unspoken. Few did more to enunciate Blair's "vision" than Andrew Marr, then a leading newspaper journalist and today the BBC's ubiquitous voice of middle-class Britain. Just as Murdoch's Sun declared in 1995 it shared the rising Blair's "high moral values" so Marr, writing the Observer in 1999, lauded the new prime minister's "substantial moral courage" and the "clear distinction in his mind between prudently protecting his power base and rashly using his power for high moral purpose." What impressed Marr was Blair's "utter lack of cynicism" along with his bombing of Yugoslavia which would "save lives."

By March 2003, Marr was the BBC's political editor. Standing in Downing Street on the night of the "shock and awe" assault on Iraq, he rejoiced at the vindication of Blair who, he said, had promised "to take Baghdad without a bloodbath, and that in end the Iraqis would be celebrating. And on both of those points he has been proved conclusively right" and as a result "tonight he stands as a larger man." In fact, the criminal conquest of Iraq smashed a society, killing up to a million people, driving four million from their homes, contaminating cities like Fallujah with cancer-causing poisons and leaving a majority of young children malnourished in a country once described by Unicef as a "model."

So it was entirely appropriate that Blair, in hawking his self-serving book, should select Marr for his "exclusive TV interview" on the BBC. The headline across the Observer's review of the interview read, "Look who's having the last laugh." Beneath this was a picture of a beaming Blair sharing a laugh with Marr.

The interview produced not a single challenge that stopped Blair in his precocious, mendacious tracks. He was allowed to say that "absolutely clearly and unequivocally, the reason for toppling [Saddam Hussein] was his breach of resolutions over WMD, right?" No, wrong. A wealth of evidence, not least the infamous Downing Street Memo, makes clear that Blair secretly colluded with George W. Bush to attack Iraq. This was not mentioned. At no point did Marr say to him, "You failed to persuade the UN Security Council to go along with the invasion. You and Bush went alone. Most of the world was outraged. Weren't you aware that you were about to commit a monumental war crime?"

Instead, Blair used the convivial encounter to deceive, yet again, even to promote an attack on Iran, an outrage. Murdoch's Fox would have differed in style only. The British public deserves better.

John Pilger

BBC and Murdoch, on the Same Side

What a breath of fresh air and unadulterated truths from a person whose name is synonymous with facts as they really are.  Welcome to John Pilger.

That article lays bare the "inconvenient truths" that this world of ours has "lost its way".  I suggest that the major culprit in this steady but consistent degradation of our planet is the staggering financial and political incompetence of the United States of America.   It seems to me to be directly due to the Jewish Congress and their carefully orchestrated funding of American Politicians so that the “chosen one” may achieve and maintain their grip on power.

I do not believe that any individual Federal politician in the US can safely survive without the permission and direction of the Jewish Congress.  Why else would the land of “Truth, Justice and the American way” pay bounty and supply military technology to a Zionist fascist regime of no rules in occupied Palestine?

To achieve those purposes the Jewish Congress must ensure that they control the information media, in one way or another.  That disease spread rapidly in Australia with the Howard "New Order" and its unregulated "honour" system that was simply another euphemism for a “blank cheque”.

And so IMHO, the international cancer of the Murdoch unlimited propaganda began to eat away at our so-called “democracy” even to the extent of using our Nation’s title as his own personal "national" lies.

With all of this and more, the US Jewish controlled film industry has been able to blend propaganda with entertainment and, at the same time protect and excuse the cruelest style of Imperialism the world has ever known.

Because of the continuation of the US Military/Corporate - which President Eisenhower warned against - it has become a war based economy that one would hope will eventually be realized by the American people and they will call out “that’s enough”.

In the meantime here, right in our own backyard, the Murdoch unlimited power, now being transferred to the SS remnants of the Howard fascists, has been clearly and unquestionably shown by his decision to destroy Kevin Rudd because (to quote a Murdoch Journalist) Kevin “fell out with the Murdoch news media.

And so, after almost toppling the very organized Labor government of Julia Gillard by demonstrating to all that he could do it – so he warns the Mad Monk – beware and get your act together the way I want it.

I never thought that the colour of our Federal Government would be dependant on the plans of a media mogul of fascist inclination.

The only hopeful sign to come out of the last Murdoch election was the fact that at least about half of our citizens are not being herded into false beliefs, diversions and the dictates of a corrupt Murdoch media.

As time passes by, even just recently in “visits to Afghanistan” it will become very clear who is the pawn of the Media Monopoly.  NE OUBLIE.

Fleet Street's highly factionalised newspaper industry today set aside historic differences to join forces in an unprecedented assault against the power of Rupert Murdoch's media empire.

The companies behind the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail – both supporters of the Conservatives – united with the owners of the Guardian and the Labour-backing Daily Mirror to petition Vince Cable, the business secretary, to consider blocking News Corporation's proposed £8bn full takeover of the satellite broadcaster BSkyB, which trades under the name Sky .

Fearful of the combined might of an integrated News Corp-Sky operation, which would include the Sun, the News of the World, the Times and book publisher HarperCollins, the complainants said the "proposed takeover could have serious and far-reaching consequences for media plurality".

The letter, signed by Murdoch MacLennan, chief executive of Telegraph Media Group, Sly Bailey, chief executive of Trinity Mirror, owner of the Daily Mirror, and Andrew Miller, chief executive of Guardian Media Group, was sent to Cable today. The signatories argue against a combined Murdoch multimedia empire that would have a turnover of £7.5bn compared with the BBC's £4.8bn.

They are joined by Mark Thompson, director general of the BBC; Ian Livingston, chief executive of BT; and David Abraham, chief executive of Channel 4. Thompson was the first to publicly call for Cable to review the deal "given the scale of the potential ownership in UK media", in an interview last week with Charlie Rose on the PBS channel in the US.

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At one point the PM was asked:

JOURNALIST: “Andrew Fraser from the Australian newspaper.  Just to pick up one of the themes of your speech, the main ones seemed to be the case for reform and reform is a good thing... In front of an audience like this, I don't think this is a particularly hard sell. However, with the general population you're always up against it...

“How do you propose, if you're talking about a reform agenda, to take people with you?”

First, notice the journalist reflexively disconnects himself (and by extension, the media) from responsibility for how the general public will receive information from the Government.

By saying “you’re always up against it” he tacitly assumes that the media is somehow neutral in its reporting; in other words, he buys into the myth that journalists are “just the messengers”.

The PM, quite rightly, picks him up on this point (my emphasis):

“...We are going to have to have some very tough reform conversations with the Australian community and persuade people about the benefits of reform. Now, that puts an onus on us and I don't shy away from that onus - that's what leadership's about.

“It also puts an onus on the media and the way in which we disseminate information...”

She knows that journalists do not report neutrally. In fact, she was rather more pointed about this at the start of her answer.

http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/40082.html