Rupert Murdoch- good example of

[mustardman]

unfettered capitalism. Franny and Tom wasn't he your shining example of freedom and truth in journalism ?

Maybe they can get Glenn Beck as a witness for their defence and he can bring his Blackboard and show how Its all a conspiracy against poor Rupert. LOL

[Fransisco]

Mark Steyn: It's time to re-aim our pitchforks

Something rather weird happened in London last week. For some time, The Guardian, a liberal, broadsheet, "respectable" newspaper, has been hammering The News Of The World, a populist, tabloid, low-life newspaper, over its employees' penchant for "hacking" the phones of Royals and celebrities – Prince Harry and Hugh Grant, for example. This isn't as forensic as it sounds: Until recently, most British cellphones were sold with the default password set either to 0000 or 1234, and most customers never bothered to change it.

But last Monday, it emerged that The News Of The World had also hacked into the telephone of a missing schoolgirl subsequently found dead, as well as those of family members of the July 7 Tube bombing victims and of British servicemen killed in Afghanistan. Nobody much cares if the Aussie supermodel Elle Macpherson and other denizens of the demimonde get their voice mails intercepted, but dead schoolgirls and soldiers changed the nature of the story, and events moved swiftly. On Thursday, Rupert Murdoch's son and heir announced the entire newspaper would be closed down. The whole thing. Gone.

The News Of The World wasn't any old fish-wrap. Founded in 1843, it was by the mid-20th century the most-read newspaper in the English-speaking world, selling nine million copies a week. Even in today's emaciated market, every week more than 2.6 million Britons bought "The News Of The Screws" (as it was affectionately known). Last Sunday, it was the biggest-selling newspaper in the United Kingdom and Europe. This Sunday, it's history. To put it in American terms, consider those George Soros-funded websites claiming they pressured Fox into "firing" Glenn Beck. This is the equivalent of pressuring Mr. Murdoch into closing down the entire Fox News network.

I confess to feeling a little queasy at the sight of bien pensant liberal opinion gloating at having deprived four million people of their preferred reading matter. If one were so inclined, one might be heartened by the swift responsiveness to pressure of the allegedly all-powerful bogeyman Murdoch. But you can't help but notice that this supposed public shaming is awfully selective. In the week of the News Of The World revelations, it was reported that the Atlanta Public Schools system has spent the last decade systemically cheating on its tests. Not the students, but the Superintendent, and the union, and 38 principals, and at least 178 teachers – whoops, pardon me, "educators," and some 44 of the 56 school districts. Teachers held "changing parties" at their homes at which they sat around with extra supplies of erasers correcting their students' test answers in order to improve overall scores and qualify for "No Child Left Behind" federal funding that could be sluiced into maintaining their lavish remuneration. Let's face it, it's easier than teaching, right?

The APS Human Resources honcho Millicent Few had an early report into test-tampering illegally destroyed. So APS not only got the federal gravy but was also held up to the nation at large as a heartwarming, inspirational example of how large urban school districts can reform themselves and improve educational opportunities for their children.

And its fake test scores got its leader, Beverly Hall, garlanded with the National Superintendent of the Year Award, the Administrator of the Year Award, the Distinguished Public Service Award, the Keystone Award for Leadership in Education, the Concerned Black Clergy Education Award, the American Association of School Administrators Effie H. Jones Humanitarian Award and a zillion other phony-baloney baubles with which the American edu-fraud cartel scratches its own back.

In reality, Beverly Hall's Atlanta Public Schools system was in the child-abuse business: It violated the education of its students to improve its employees' cozy sinecures.

The whole rotten stinking school system is systemically corrupt from the superintendent down. But what are the chances of APS being closed down? How many of those fraudulent non-teachers will waft on within the system until their lucrative retirements?

Or consider "Operation Fast and Furious," about which nothing is happening terribly fast and over which Americans should be furious.

The official explanation is that the federal government used stimulus funding to buy guns from Arizona gun shops for known criminals to funnel to Mexican drug cartels. As I said, that's the official explanation: As soon as your head stops spinning, we'll resume the narrative. Supposedly, United States taxpayers were picking up the tab for Mexican drug lords' weaponry in order that the ATF could identify high-up gun-traffickers. But, as it turns out, these high-up gun-traffickers were already known to other agencies – FBI, DEA and other big-spending acronyms in the great fetid ooze of federal alphabet soup in which this republic is drowning. And, indeed, some of those high-ups are said to have been paid informants for those various federal agencies. So, in case you're wondering why Obama's second annual Recovery Summer is a wee bit sluggish at your end, relax: Stimulus dollars went to fund one federal agency to buy guns for the paid informants of another federal agency to funnel to foreign criminals in order that the first federal agency might identify the paid informants of the second federal agency.

Meanwhile, what did the drug cartels, the recipients of the guns, do with them? Well, they used them to kill at least one member of a third federal agency: Brian Terry of the United States Border Patrol. If that doesn't bother you, well, they also killed not insignificant numbers of Mexican civilians.

If, by this stage, you're wondering why U.S. stimulus dollars are being used to stimulate the Mexican coffin industry, consider the dark suspicion of many American gun owners – that the real reason the feds embarked on this murderous scheme was to plant the evidence that the increasing lawlessness on the southern border is the fault of the gun industry and the Second Amendment, and thereby advance its ideological agenda of ever greater gun control.

We're not talking about hacking a schoolgirl's cellphone here. Real people are dead. Yet nobody's going to close down any wing of the vast spendaholic DEATFBI hydra-headed security-state turf-war. And while Eric Holder, the buccaneering attorney general at the center of this wilderness of mirrors, doesn't yet have as many Distinguished Public Servant of the Year awards as Beverly Hall, judging from his cheerfully upfront obstruction of the congressional investigation, he's not planning on going anywhere soon.

So, at The News Of The World, every single employee is clearing out his desk. But, at the Atlantic Public Schools, at the DEATFBI, life goes on. A curious contrast. The striking feature of big government, from Athens to Sacramento, is its imperviousness to any kind of accountability – legal, fiscal, electoral, popular.

A media mogul, a bank chairman, an oil executive, a corporate-jet depreciation-claimant are easily demonizable: As President Obama cautioned CEOs a couple of years back, "My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks."

More fool us. Our pitchforks are misdirected.

[jensend]

so the murdochs are very wealthy, very powerful scum who own serfs like mark steyn and control the thinking of a lot of people on this board. lol.

[Fransisco]

He actually controls very little, next to nothing really. You mistake popularity and success with "control".

Big, big difference.

I'll take the Murdoch's of the world over the likes of the parasitic CBC any day.

[Fransisco]

Tahrir Square Comes to Fleet Street

July 11, 2011 7:53 P.M.

By Mark Steyn


The New York Times has shown an inordinate interest in the demise of Britain’s News Of The World, a newspaper 99.99 percent of Times readers have never read and I’d wager a majority had never heard of until a week ago. By contrast, the paper appears to have absolutely no interest in, say, the use of stimulus funds to murder a U.S. Border Patrol agent. One understands, of course, that the Times is rattled by Rupert Murdoch’s revitalization of the Wall Street Journal as a broadsheet with appeal to more than merely the financial world, and so it is in the paper’s interest to pile on Mr. Murdoch. But, even so, this is ridiculous:


In truth, a kind of British Spring is under way, now that the News Corporation’s tidy system of punishment and reward has crumbled. Members of Parliament, no longer fearful of retribution in Mr. Murdoch’s tabloids, are speaking their minds and giving voice to the anger of their constituents. Meanwhile, social media has roamed wild and free across the story, punching a hole in the tiny clubhouse that had been running the country. Democracy, aided by sunlight, has broken out in Britain.

“British Spring” as in Arab Spring? Ruthless tyrant Rupsi Murdaroch forced into exile at Sharm al-Sheila back in Oz? British MPs, no longer “fearful of retribution,” are transformed overnight: Yesterday, they were Claude Rains in Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, corrupt toadies doing the bidding of Boss Murdoch. Today, they’re getting in touch with their inner Jimmy Stewart.

As with the Arab Spring, the British Spring can more or less be guaranteed to turn out the opposite of the Times’s sunny predictions. On the whole, I prefer an unrespectable reptilian press sticking its foot in the grieving widow’s doorway to, say, a media of portentous over-credentialed unreadable drones with no greater ambition than to serve as court eunuchs to the Obama administration. If the National Enquirer operated to the high-minded standards of the New York Times, John Edwards might now be vice president or attorney general. If Murdoch’s tabloids “destroy lives,” as the Times airily claims, they’re at least equal-opportunity destroyers, as willing to plaster a Tory rent-boy over the front page as a Labour one.

By contrast, the New York Times happily colluded in the destruction of the Duke lacrosse players’ lives for no reason other than ideological predisposition to a politically correct narrative. I would say that, whether through malice or intellectual torpor, that kind of bias is far more damaging to public discourse. And it’s the one Britain’s likely to end up with more of if the Times’ kindred spirits in London get their way. The actor (and phone-hacking target) Hugh Grant has become, somewhat improbably, a spokesperson for the anti-Murdoch forces. Here’s what he said on the BBC:


I’m not for regulating the proper press, the broadsheet press. But we need regulation of the tabloid press.

Ah, right. The papers you read are fine. It’s the papers those ghastly oiks read that need regulating because the great unwashed can’t be trusted to evaluate this stuff properly anymore than they can be trusted to choose their own light bulbs.

Does Hugh Grant’s statement sound like any credo of democracy? Or does it sound more like a smug, patrician elite that would find things more convenient if it could only narrow the parameters of public discourse? “All the news that’s fit to print,” as someone once said. “A tiny clubhouse running the country,” in the Times’s more recent words. And they should know.

[Fransisco]

He may be a scum bag, but at least he's an equal opportunity scum bag. Unlike the CBC who's manure only comes from one side.

[BTOfarmallll]

Ole Murdoch is a JEW, known fact. Jews are running The Show. Theys Control itall with the News Frannie, thought yous knew that. Tell yous what theys want yous to hear. Faux News - We Decieve, Yous Believe. With an estimated wealth of $6 Billion worth, excuse me, now $5 Billion with this debacle yous kin control a few people. Lesson Learned???? Don't get caught with yer fat little fingers in the Cookie Jar............

[TOM4CWB]

BTO,

Do something more productive...

Like; Go crouch in the grass and yell at gravel trucks! Perhaps with all the frogs we have this year... you can teach them to stay off the road and not get squashed!

[BTOfarmallll]

Lesson Learned????? You's kin Run, but you's kin't Hide.......

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2016132/Sean-Hoare-dead-News-World-phone-hacking-whistleblower-feared-life.html

[chuckChuck]

Murdoch owns part of Fox in the US. Will be interesting to see if they find any of the scum bag journalism extends to the US market.

CBC and CTV do a better job of covering issues fairly than FOX or any the other overtly biased news organizations.

Sun News is another example of biased unbalanced coverage. It is also pretty boring and poorly produced.

Francisco seems to think media concentration in the hands of very few is a good thing. Go figure? The more independent sources of news and analysis the better for democracy.

[TOM4CWB]

chuckchuck,

Are you saying the Quebecor/Sun network is not independant and a 3rd party perspective? CTV/CBC/Sunews

You do a superb job of proving you are biased and like the news concentrated in a few hands!!!.

"There are none so BLIND... as those who will not see!

What a hyp·o·crite (Noun: A person who indulges in hypocrisy)!!!

[Fransisco]

Sun news TV is a breath of fresh air. As was Fox when it first arrived. There is nothing more biased and less watched than the taxpayer dependent CBC.

If you don't like Fox or Sun you don't have to watch it and you don't have to pay for it. Even if you don't watch CBC tv or listen to the God awful CBC radio they're still climbing into your wallet.

[Fransisco]

And speaking of independent sources of news and analysis, chuckchuck you should listen to Rush Limbaugh every once and awhile.

[mustardman]

oh God Franny you do need some medication

[TOM4CWB]

Mustard;

"Limbaug criticizes liberal policies and politicians and promotes positions viewed as conservative. He frequently accuses the American mainstream media of having a strong liberal bias."

So... I take it that anyone who accuses the mainstream liberal media of being biased... especially when they signed an 8 year deal for $400M... and is the highest-rated talk-radio program in the United States...needs medication?

You are a funny soul... Mustardman!