Media is a word that has come to mean bad journalism. Graham Greene
A monopoly on the means of communication may define a ruling elite more precisely than the celebrated Marxian formula of ‘monopoly in the means of production’. Robert Anton Wilson
The state dare not forget that all media have a duty to serve – a duty which flunkies of a so-called press freedom dare not be allowed to confuse. Adolf Hitler
Rupert Murdoch and his son engulfed in scandal. How did the owner of the Fox Network, the Fox News Channel, the Movie Studio, The New York Journal, and a worldwide media empire come to be hounded by the press and haunted by the death of a teenager? Frontline s30e6: Murdoch’s Scandal, PBS 2012
Newspapers turned to professionals in the darker arts – private detectives were hired. ibid.
The police ... surprisingly decided to close the investigation ... Why were the police not informing more victims and taking further action? ibid.
The police contradicted the Guardian’s story. ibid.
For 30 years Rupert Murdoch had been visiting Number 10 to be thanked for his support by British prime ministers. ibid.
In a secret operation he built a new printing plant. He then fired his union print workers and moved his four papers to the new plant. ibid.
News International had been paying off victims and settling cases. ibid.
Murdoch withdrew his bid for BSkyB: his past had caught up with him. ibid.
James Murdoch wants to ... create the world’s first multi-platform media operator ... If we block it, our media sector will suffer for years. Jeremy Hunt, memo to David Cameron
There was not, there never has been, any grand bargain between the Conservative Party and Rupert or James Murdoch. David Cameron, parliament
4Rupert Murdoch – the most powerful media mogul in the world. He is accused of dragging Britain’s press into the gutter, of having contempt for the law, and contaminating our politics and public life. Rupert Murdoch – Battle with Britain, BBC 2013
The News of the World: within a few months Carr was shunted upstairs to become life president, and Rupert Murdoch took control of the biggest selling English language newspaper in the world. He was just thirty-eight years old. ibid.
In 1974 Rupert, Anna and the family – now three children – moved to New York. This was Rupert Murdoch’s land of greatest opportunity. ibid.
1979: from this point on Murdoch and Thatcher are inextricably linked. ibid.
The Times/Times on Sunday: rightly regarded as a stitch-up. ibid.
Wapping reignited the powerful suspicion that Murdoch had again conspired with Mrs Thatcher – this time to smash another of Britain’s powerful trade unions. ibid.
Murdoch had planned the move to Wapping like a military operation. ibid.
Sky went on air on 5th February 1989. ibid.
He had no choice but to agree to a merger with his establishment rival BSB. ibid.
Then a monumental scandal broke. Journalists at the News of the World had hacked the mobile phone message box of murdered teenager Millie Dowler. ibid.
People value honest, fearless and above all independent news coverage that challenges the consensus. James Murdoch, McTaggart Lecture, Sky 2009
The only reliable, durable, and perpetual guarantor of independence is profit. ibid.
Horrified by disclosures in the newspapers about David Mellor and an actress, not to mention pictures of a near-naked Duchess of York, the government has resolved to ‘do something’ about the excesses of the press. The job itself has been farmed out to the Ministry of Heritage where the Secretary of State (and the man who masterminded John Major’s campaign for the Tory leadership) was the aforesaid David Mellor.
This has caused some embarrassment so the new ‘Privacy Bill’ (or whatever else it is called) has been passed over to Mellor’s junior, an apparently ‘safe’ gentleman from the shires called Robert Key. As Key drafts his bill, he gets plenty of helpful advice from the Labour Party, whose front-bencher on these matters, Clive Soley, is writing his own bill to protect the general public from the ravages of the gutter press. Soley makes it clear that his aim is not the same as that of the government. Their bill will protect only the rich and famous; his bill will concentrate on protecting ordinary folk who are treated by the media like dirt.
All these efforts are widely supported almost everywhere. Everyone hates the tabloid newspapers, especially the 12 million people who buy them every day. The capitalist press is rotten and corrupt. It breeds a specially nasty type of human rottweiler whose peculiar quality is to be as offensive as possible to anyone at all who might in some way assist towards ‘a good story’.
It is this offensive behaviour – bursting into peoples’ houses to seize photographs of dead relatives; making up quotations; tapping phones, half-kidnapping children and generally trampling over people, that earns for editors and journalists such universal contempt. It seems obvious that the media do have too much power and that the more preposterous manifestations of that power need to be cut down by law.
But what law? As soon as detailed proposals start to be spelt out, the doubts arise. Consider a law to protect privacy. Would it ban any photograph which had not been taken by permission? How would that apply to some of the great pictures – action pictures such as the man defying the tank in Tiananmen Square, or (from the sublime to the ridiculous) pictures of Fergie prancing with her financial adviser in a rich man’s garden? If no photographs are to be published unless they are taken with permission, the whole world would be a duller place. Certainly, the high and mighty (especially royalty) would much easier be able to maintain the consistency of their family values. If such a law is accompanied by a rider insisting that any without permission pictures be ‘in the public interest’, the question arises at once ‘what is in the public interest?’ ...
But a law to curb the press will not work just one way, just against the moguls and the proprietors. It will work far more savagely against openly challenging and revolutionary papers like this one, and will even further restrict the few independent journalists who attempt to rip the veil away from the secret state and its paymasters.
Can anything, therefore, be done about the vile standards and offensive behaviour of the media? Of course. These matters should be the permanent concern of the workers who work in the media and of those who read and watch the media. They should be discussed and acted on where discussion and action can have some effect.
The trade unions in the media have always given far too low a priority to the content of what they produce. The ridiculously named Ethics Committee of the National Union of Journalists makes itself a permanent laughing stock by sitting in moral judgement over individual journalists, and castigating them for their transgressions. The unions in the media should combine to set up their own standards committee. They should appoint to it people whose judgements would have a wide measure of respect. Where they find against the media they should direct their fire on the people responsible – the proprietors – and punish them where they hurt most, in the pocket. Paul Foot, article October 1992, ‘Press Private Parts’
You’ve got someone sitting in New York who is a foreigner who has enormous influence over parliament, enormous influence over the government, enormous influence over the police force ... That really is a subversion of democracy. Max Mosley
Open discussion of many major public questions has for some now been taboo. We can’t open our mouths without being denounced as racists, misogynists, supremacists, imperialists or fascists. As for the media, they stand ready to trash anyone so designated. Saul Bellow
If people in the media cannot decide whether they are in the business of reporting news or manufacturing propaganda, it is all the more important that the public understand that difference, and choose their news sources accordingly. Thomas Sowell
When I started my public life, twelve years ago, I understood the media might be interested in what I did. I realized then their attention would inevitably focus on both our private and public lives. But I was not aware of how overwhelming that attention would become. Nor the extent to which it would affect both my public duties and my personal life, in a manner, that’s been hard to bear. At the end of this year, when I’ve completed my diary of official engagements, I will be reducing the extent of the public life I’ve lead so far. Diana, speech Headway lunch 3rd December 1993
From 1980 onwards a more aggressive media had a fresh target to hunt: Diana. Andrew Marr, Diamond Queen III, BBC 2012
The Queen was soon becoming uneasy about the pressure journalists were piling on her daughter-in-law. ibid.
Both Princess Diana and Prince Charles turned to journalists to tell their side of the story. ibid.
But it was the absence of words which created the biggest media storm of the Queen’s reign when in 1997 on the sudden death of Princess Diana in a Paris car crash the Queen stayed at Balmoral for another four days. ibid.