Cute & Pasty
Posted by John, July 10th, 2011 - under Cute & Pasty.
I am really looking forward to Monday and reading Cut & Paste ripping into Rupert Murdoch and the rest of his media empire. You know, Cut & Paste, that section of The Australian that rips into all the bad media. You now, The Australian - Murdoch owned. Oh….
While we are on it, The Australian has played a straight bat to the News of The World crisis, merely reprinting factual reports from other Murdoch outlets like The Times. Except for an editorial in Saturday’s paper, which among other things shared the revulsion, but added:
For the most part Australian journalists have shown greater respect for the division between private and public lives than their European counterparts. Newspapers here have long eschewed corrupt newspaper gathering techniques, such as paying police for information.
Maybe, but how would we know, apart of course from relying on the word of The Australian editor? After all, the same pressures that drove the criminals at the News of the World to bribe police, to hack the phones of a dead schoolgirl, the grieving families of soldiers killed in Afghanistan and Iraq and the relatives of those killed in the terrorist bombings in London exist across the globe.
Combine falling readership numbers and competition from other media forms with a particularly aggressive approach to media – journalists as an expensive cost of production eating into profits, journalism as entertainment and shock horror revelations to titillate and excite the alienated working class and keep their minds off the politics of change – and there is every reason to imagine the Murdoch model of news on the cheap and reaction at the ready, complete with bribery and illegal phone hacking, is being replicated across the globe, and not just by sections of the Murdoch press.
The Murdoch tabloids,as part of their culture of reaction, bang on and on about ‘law and order’. I look forward to their campaign to lock up Rupert Murdoch for his possible crimes. Treat him like Bradley Manning.
Comment from PAUL WALTER
Time July 11, 2011 at 3:41 pm
I’d actually be feeling sorry for many Murdoch journalists- they’d love to do a real job of work for their money, but if they step out of line they are crucified, as media/culture writers like Simper, Meade, Adams, Emma Tom and Elizabeth Wynhausen have found out over time.