Media – Page 19 – Prog Gold

The Future Dragon Queen of World Media or Much Maligned Mother of Two?

Published on August 2, 20072 Comments

I think it can safely be asserted that who owns the media is equally if not more important than who the politiciians are: indeed it can be argued that it’s the media that chooses the politicians.

In all, 16 of the top 30 media owners are from the US. The other countries with media owners in the top 30 are Japan (with four representatives), France and the UK (with three each), Germany (two) and Italy and Mexico (one each). Non-American companies on the top 30 list include Axel Springer, Bertelsmann, BSkyB, ITV plc., Fuji TV and Televisa.

The top 30 media owners in the report generated a total of $215bn in media revenue. Two online companies, Google and Yahoo made it into the top 30, ranked number 13 and 15 with revenues of $6bn and $5.2bn respectively

Mass media ownership transcends international borders and the polioy decisions and editorial influence of owners now has worldwide scope. Take Rupert Murdoch for example, whose overwhelming grip on American public discourse just tightened with his purchase of the hawkish, rightwing Wall Street Journal.

But is it even really Murdoch’s grip any more? Is he, to use a vulgar American phrase, pussy- whipped by a nubile young wife? Many western journalists would like us to think so.

Murdoch is in his seventies and has a much younger Chinese born wife, Wendi Deng, who’s causing much media paranoia over whether China, in addition to being one of the world’s largest creditor nations and buying up western banks, is planning to take a massive slice of worldwide media control with Deng as some sort of proxy.

Or it could be anti-Chinese racism and mysogyny, an occidental fear of the Yellow Peril, focused onto one woman, Deng. There’s plenty of evidence for that.

Private Eye has had fun for years with Wendy Deng, casting her in typical neocolonial style as a Dragon Lady who uses her sexy oriental (Did they say she’s oriental, by the way? And sexy?) ways and remorseless physical demands to shag her ageing husband to death and grab his billions for the seething communist hordes of China.

Here’s typical public schoolboy racism from Private Eye in 2003:

“Never Too Old”
by Dame Silvie Krin

The story so far: Multibillionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch has married a fragrant young oriental beautyfrom the land odf birds-nestsoup.

Now read on…

“I got great news for you Lupert.” purred the lovely Wendy Deng as she entered the gymnnasium of their 48th storey Manhattan penthouse apartment.

“You mean you’re going to switch off this lousy rowing machine and give me an ice-cold tinnie?” puffed the sweating septuagenarian tycoon, as he tried to keep up with the machine’s remorseless demands,

“First guess wrong,” hissed his peach-skinned paramaour, as she turned up the machine to Olympic Standard (Bronze) Level.

You get the drift, and besides, I’m not copying the whole thing out.

As much as I enjoy and admire Private Eye (I’ve been a regular reader for over 20 years), let’s face it, in its attitudes to women and minorities it ican often be paternalistic, colonial and crass, the cuteness and likeability of Ian Hislop on HIGNFY notwithstanding. So if I didn’t absolutely dismiss the rumour (because leaving ethnicity aside she is young and he is old and it’s been known) I suspected the motivation behind it.

But then I started to google and to read stories about how recent Murdoch decisions have favoured Chinese state interests and how his media interests in China itself collude with state censorship; and how a meticulously researched and sourced profile of Deng was suppressed by the publisher that commissioned it when Murdoch sold his stake; and how a series of publications in their turn declined to publish, for no other apparent reason than they feared to offend Rupert.

Oddly enough the only place the profile is available in full online is China’s New Century Weekly – in Chionese – it’s come to something when China will publish something western journalists are too scared to.

Murdoch has attacked anyone who seeks to write about his wife on the grounds that Deng is a private person; which is a bit flimsy considering Deng is now Chief of Strategy at MySpace China, an arm of Murdoch’s empire, and they have two daughters who will potentially inherit a substantial slice of media control in their own right, aside from anything Deng herself inherits when her husband predeceases her, as he’s almost bound to do barring medical miracles. Even the Murdoch billions can’t cheat death.

Deng, with that amount of potential clout, is no private person. She makes decisions that affect millions:

Myspace China to Move Servers to China
Mon, Jul 23, 2007 Myspace | web 2.0

In a recent interview with local media, Luo Chuan, the CEO of Myspace China, which is part of News Corp, (Public, NYSE:NWS), said the company will move its servers to China. According to Luo, the server move will be enhance the site’s appeal to local audience while keeping the China site connected to Myspace’s global database. However, the process will be technically and financially challenging and there is no set schedule for the server move. Source: 163.com

This decision of course will give the Chinese government ultimate physical control of the servers should they so choose and a hell of a lot of leverage over MySpace in terms of censorship.

Deng would like more decision making power and the question of who will control News International on Murdoch’s death is a typically toxic dynastic stew of ex-wives, alimony, alowances, inheritances, jealousy, sibling rivalry and a gliimpse of parent/child conflict.

A simmering debate over the trust that owns the family’s 28.5 percent voting stake in the News Corporation surfaced with the resignation last week of Lachlan, Mr. Murdoch and Mrs. Mann’s elder son, from his job at the News Corporation, where he was seen as a potential successor to his father.

The precipitating reason for Lachlan’s departure, he has told several people, was his father’s undermining of his position within the company over a long period.

[…]

People close to both father and son have also acknowledged, however, that tensions over the trust were a factor, and those tensions stem from the conflicting maternal ambitions of Ms. Deng and Mrs. Mann.

Last year, Mr. Murdoch told his children that he wanted to change the trust to give his two daughters by Ms. Deng, Grace, 3, and Chloe, 2, a greater role in the trust, which currently has an interest in the News Corporation worth $6.1 billion.

But Mr. Murdoch’s four adult children – three with Mrs. Mann and one with his first wife – have a say in the trust and are its primary beneficiaries, and they must approve this change.

[..]

Mr. Murdoch raised the issue of including his youngest daughters in the trust last year at a family meeting in New York, where one person close to the family said the debate was lively.

Oh, I bet it was lively.

It certainly sounds as though Deng may be trying to gain control of News International for herself and her children by Murdoch. It’d all be great fun, like a bastard sitcom mashup of Dallas and Dynasty with Drop The Dead Donkey, if it weren’t future control of worldwide tv, radio, newspapers and the internet we were talking about.

But let’s come back to Rupert’s latest purchase of the Wall St. Journal and what motivated it. Was he really pushed into by Deng as proxy for Chinese interests or was the motivation much more human – embarassment and retaliation at Deng’s past being revealed?

1. Until the details were published in the Wall Street Journal, Murdoch apparently did not know much about Deng’s past, including the affair and marriage with Jake Cherry, which secured her a US visa. One WSJ journo describes Murdoch as “ashen-faced” at their next meeting. As Ellis writes, Murdoch got a rude taste of his own tabloid journalism medicine. I can’t help wondering if that has anything to do with his current bid for the Journal?

A past Deng apparently has, according to commenters at the Wendi Deng Watchers Club:

At the tender age of 18, she freely walked into Guangzhou hotel rooms to sleep with a 50-year old married American (Jake Cherry) who spoke a language she didn’t understand (English) and was introduced to her by his then-wife (Joyce Cherry). On top of that, she suckered Jake Cherry into persuading his then-wife (Joyce Cherry) into sponsoring her into the U.S., where she lived rent-free in their home with their children, ate their food (with them), went places with them, took everything the Cherrys gave her (and also things meant for their daughter), ALL THE WHILE CONTINUING ON WITH HER AFFAIR WITH JAKE CHERRY IN FRONT OF THEIR FACES!

Whatever the truth of thiose allegations Deng certainly has Murdoch wrapped around her finger; her influence in News International is profound and will only increase if she gets her way. But in this she is no different from the many other women worldwide (cough, Huffington, cough) who marry for power, whatever their nationality. It wouldn’t be the first time a young woman with a bit of a past snares a rich old man at an opportune moment, but I do think an enormous amount of the hoohah about Deng the Dragon Lady as a Chinese double agent in the heart of the western free-market system is exaggerated and inspired by a mixture of envy, stereotypical male ideas about Chinese and Asian women and a fear of China itself.

There is truth there in that Deng has given Murdoch access to Chinese markets but the non-Murdoch media depiction of her as an evil oriental genius I think is a projection of journalists’ own misogyny, ingrained racism and worries about the potential power she is likely to wield on the demise of her husband.

Given the shrewdness and alleged lack od scruples with with she’s operated to her own advantage so far, Deng should certainly not escape scrutiny – and the claim by her husband that she is a private person and not up for discussion or beyond criticism, when he has made her a public person, is completely risible.

Yes, scrutinise Deng with a big magnifying glass, but scrutinise what she does, not what she is.

Is Age An Excuse For Wingerism?

Published on July 30, 2007

Orcinus has a couple of posts up that illustrate something profound yet generally unspoken about US politics, the generational gap in politics. First is the consistently thought-provoking Sara Robinson who writes about right wing pundits preying on US senior citizens: and suggests that as with children, the political messages they receive should be monitored:

Revenge on the Grandma-Snatchers

— by Sara

The story of Rick Perlstein’s poor Billowashed grandmother has struck a plangent chord with a lot of us who have been looking at our beloved elders and wondering: Who Ate Grandma’s Brain?

Perlstein’s article has prompted a flood of comments, here and elsewhere, from anguished progressives whose mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles, and grandparents once instilled them with their liberal values — but are now estranged from their families and lost to the right-wing airwaves. It’s as though, while we weren’t looking, the body-snatchers snuck in through the pipe and made off with their votes, their brains, and (occasionally) their money.

Sara sees it terms of media leeches preying on old people, but I don’t – I think old people should not be absolved from blame from the political situation we find ourselves in. I can understand the need to see elders (because they are our well-loved relatives and parents and friends and neighbours) as passive victims of the media/televangelical spin machine – and many are, that’s undeniable – but many more aren’t.

Most of us are very cautious and circumspect about leaving our children’s developing minds to the tender mercies of the media. Those of us who care about the elders in our families might be equally vigilant about their media diets as well. We do not have to take the political hijacking of our seniors lying down, or assume that’s just the way it is. We just have to do what we do with our kids: make sure they’ve got consistent access to appealing, age-appropriate media that gives them hope, confidence, and truly balanced ways of seeing the world.

This approach denies senior citizens moral agency, as though age brings an inevitable incapability to think for oneself. In some perhaps, but mostly it doesn’t. Nancy Pelosi, for example, is 67 and no-one would say she should be excused responsibility for anything.

Since when has age conferred innocence?

People are are selfish assholes whatever their age. There’re other stations on the dial after all: what we watch or listen to is a choice and this is what old people choose. They are as morally responsible for that as the rest of us, as are those who vote or give political funding, whatever their age. (Let’s not forget the eldest of them are also the generation that brought up the one that’s in power so they have responsibility there, too.)

Besides what are you going to do, deny the vote to the over-70’s in case they vote wrong?

On age generally, it’s apparent when observed from a distance that the current leadership of both the Democratic and Republican parties is, like the old Politburo, pretty aged; one might say they’re even decrepit. Most of them were born around or not that long after WWII (a few were actually there) – but despite their best efforts with exercise and botox and flattering camera angles and vaselined lenses, they are old, even the ones thought of as realtively youthful.

But like our own parents, off spending their retirement packages and real estate equity on jaunts around the world, rather than become wise, responsible elders of the kind they idolise they have carried the selfishness and solipsism of their youth into their old age while still expecting the respect due to seniority.

Our current political classes certainties and experiences were formed growing up in a time of plenty, peace and easy access to education, the civil rights movement and Vietnam war notwithstanding. On the whole they’ve never had to truly suffer for anything; in many cases the exact opposite, when you consider how many are children of privilege or who took advantage of Reaganomics and deregulation to make their own immense fortunes. In power they have carried on their blithe, entitled way without a single thought to how their politics, which is all to the benefit of their own friends and associates, will work out for succeeding generations, because you see, there is no-one else who matters but them.

Their contemporaraies, our parents and grandparents think this just fine on the whole – after all, they have voted overhelmingly to keep the status quo several times over in their lifetimes.

But there are generations yet to come – the generation directly below those in power at the moment (ie mine), were born or were children during the overt war on the Vietnamese and covert wars in Cambodia, Central America and elsewhere. Our political constants have been war, terrorism, worldwide recession and climate change.

Many of us see the glaring mistakes our elders have made and what we are forced to pass onto our own children as a result and we despise our current leaders because we can see the current cohort for exactly what they are – a spoiled, cosseted generation who’ve fucked up massively for those coming behind, and who are now trying to mask their failures by playing dress-up in their parents old achievements, beating their chests to proclaim their omnipotent masculinity. That goes for Dems as well as Republicans, women as well as men.

They have to try and cloak themselves in the heroic deeds of their own parents (which weren’t actually that heroic, rather necessitous: but they have to have the drama) because they know damned well they are unworthy of respect themselves. They are a busted flush of a political generation.

Yes, politicians have made fatal mistakes throughout recorded history, but this generation’s mistakes may stop us having any future at all. Now we should just brush off the responsibility for putting them in power because their supporters say “Sorry, we’re old, we were fooled'” ?

I don’t think so.

The second post at Orcinus is to do with that same ageing political generation’s crisis of masculinity:

Digby thinks the conservative movement, as its world crumbles about it in a crashing heap of bodies, is reverting to infantilism, becoming the Baby Party. But I beg to differ (a novelty, when it comes to Digby): I think it has a lot more to do with their creeping old age.

The current fetish with all things manly, masculine, and otherwise male is, like all right-wing talk, mostly meant to act as a cover for their private fears and inadequacies. These guys — guys like Bill O’Reilly, and Glenn Beck, and Lou Dobbs, and Pat Buchanan, Rush Limbaugh — like to talk a lot about manly stuff because for them, manliness is mostly about image. What they know about masculinity they got from John Wayne movies.

These guys like to think of themselves as part of the Greatest Generation, but really, this is the Viagra Generation: growing more impotent each day and feeling like they can’t really do anything about it. Naturally, they strike out in anger at perceived slights and threats — thus the current O’Reilly attack on the left blogosphere.
more…

You could say the whole Us foreign policy for the last 20 years, especially the Middle East fiasco from Gulf War I to shock and awe, is all about a nations’ crisis of masculinity. It’s another aspect of the wingerism of the aged that Sara described.

Western society is so fixated on youth that the old feel irrelevant and marginalised, even though their contemporaries are actually filling some of the most important positions in politics, the media and public life. So they get more politically extreme to have their voice heard.

Their contemporaries on tv and radio are also in thrall to the cult of youth – their jobs depend on it – thus the need to prove their potency constantly by also being more politically extreme. It’s a self-reinforcing loop between the broadcaster and receiver.

But if senior citizens are to be absolved of responsibility for adopting wholesale the views of these ageing, masculinity-challenged tv and radio pundits, so must the pundits themselves be absolved, because they too are victims of the media machine.

Where does taking responsibility for your political actions stop? Does age and exposure to media lies absolve one from sheer selfish diumbassery?

The answer has to be no, of course not – if we’re to absolve senior citizens for helping create the mess we’re in then we have to do the same for anyone who can say they were misled by the evil rightwing media. One of the reasons we are in that mess is because of that tendency to want to walk away from responsibility for our mistakes.

I’d like to see the so-called Greatest Generation and those who would claim that mantle say ‘Mea culpa’ not ‘Hey, don’t blame me’.

Once A Whore…

Published on July 12, 2007

Guess who wrote this in Forum magazine before he was famous?

‘a little known aphrodisiac – the dangling pipes of Scotland…It’s all tongues and teeth, lips and gentle squeezes..As I lie on a Lisbon hotel bed next to a Portuguese person crying out for more, I thank my pipes for doing most of the chatting up.’ So nothing autobiographical going on there, except in my dreams. I do so love a slut’

… and said this to The Sun twenty-odd years ago?

On the subject of being a gigolo, Alastair apparently appeared in a 1980 article in The Sun (so it must be true) headlined ‘WANTED, Men For Hire’, in which he said, “you would talk, have dinner, make love; in return they would give you money or gifts…It’s never hard work but the women do expect a high standard of performance.

Yup, it’s the Pepys de nos jours, Alistair Campbell. And he called Carole Caplin a flake and a liability…

Bush Offered To Kiss Blair’s Ass

Published on July 9, 20072 Comments

.. or so it was said on the BBC lunchtime news. There are more sordid revelations from the diaries of Alistair Campbell (Tony Blair’s very own Karl Rove/Tony Snow combo, but with added arrogance) to come.

The BBC is having a wonderful time reviewing his memoirs, finding as many ways as possible to damn it without sounding as it is (and fooliing no-one) while still featuring excerpts on its tv channels.

But who can blame the beeb after Dr David Kelly’s death, when the resulting Blair-appointed Hutton enquiry gave the BBC such an unjustified hammering that its chair Greg Dyke had to resign?

In a thirty- minute radio interview this morning Campbell showed he has absolutely no sense of probity or indeed any of the principles that most of us would consider a virtue in government. He also showed he has no concept of history other than that he understands that history is written by the winners, and he plans to be a winner – so he’s making his own retrospective reality, rewriting history in his own favour, just as he once rewrote the present on the orders of Bush as transmitted by Blair.

Campbell did so much damage to the country I hate to see him make money out of it. The diaries have apparently been filleted of all the interesting stuff but the bare bones and a few shreds of salaciousnesss. Cherie threatend to sue if he mentioned her children, and the diary’s been vetted by government before publication, so it’s hardly goihg to be revelatory.

Nevertheless I intend to read it, but I’ll wait. I’ll watch the tv version and it’ll be online soon enough. Why should I add to that slimeball’s profits?

Such Sweet Irony.

Published on June 29, 20071 Comment

The News International Wapping Strike

They say a liberal is a conservative who’s just been arrested, but let me modernise that aphorism slightly: a liberal is a conservative journalist who’s about to be downsized or outsourced.

The Wall St Journal, currently threatened by a fiscally inexplicable yet politically perfectly explicable bid for the paper by Rupert Murdoch, has been responsible for some of the most egregious untruths about the effects of unfettered tree trade, globalisation and Republican economic ‘policy’, not to mention its lies and exaggerations about the case for and conduct of the Iraq war and it’s self-interested spiel (USA No 1; all are equal butl some are more equal than others; God loves the almighty dollar) has caused untold worldwide misery.

So I must say I’m rather enjoying watching them get all militant about the Murdoch/WSJ merger.

Wall Street Journal Reporters Are Takin’ it to the Streets!

Wow. Yesterday, when we got word that the Murdoch-Bancrofts courtship was going to go on for an additional three weeks, we thought to ourselves, “Sweet fancy Moses! Could the media story of 2007 get any duller?” Props to the reporters of the Wall Street Journal, then, who today injected a dose of much needed excitement back into the proceedings by staging a nationwide no-show this morning.
A key excerpt from the “statement from Wall Street Journal reporters”:

“Dow Jones currently is in contract negotiations with its primary union, seeking severe cutbacks in our health benefits and limits on our pay. It is beyond debate that the professionals who create The Wall Street Journal and other Dow Jones publications every day deserve a fair contract that rewards their achievements. At a time when Dow Jones is finding the resources to award golden parachutes to 135 top executives, it should not be seeking to eviscerate employees’ health benefits and impose salary adjustments that amount to a pay cut.”

Says a WSJ employee:

“…what is Murdoch going to do if the entire staff revolts? He can’t simply fire them all and easily replace them with people just out of journalism school.””

Oh no, you think not? Let me remihd you….

Wapping was the most vicious dispute ever perpetrated. After 15 months of so-called negotiations on the move out of Fleet Street, Rupert Murdoch provoked the strike that he had cynically wanted in a plot cooked up with his lawyers. Overnight, 5,000 people were sacked, and Murdoch’s plan was put into action. His secret workforce, men and women lured from unemployment blackspots with a promise of a prosperous future, arrived by the coachload.

Week in, week out, I attended the demonstrations and as the weeks turned to months, I watched the lives of people I’d known and worked with for years unravel. There were suicides, marriage break-ups; people lost their homes. Twenty years may have passed but those sacked overnight – secretaries, researchers and cashiers as well as printers – still bear the scars of Wapping today.

Events on the picket line are seared into my memory. The police would wait until the early hours of the morning, when most people had gone, then clear the remaining pickets. With no regard to safety, officers on horseback would charge people, driving them out of Wapping Highway. As the policemen finished their shifts for the night and headed off in their coaches, they would jubilantly wave their overtime pay packets at us, along with their copies of the Sun

The strike ended after a long bloody year, but the consequences of Murdoch’s victory are still felt by the industry today. Other employers rushed to exploit the opportunities he’d opened up. When it comes to cutting costs and creaming off bigger profits, newspaper bosses have slavishly followed Murdoch’s example.

His promises of a bright new future for journalism never materialised, just like the swimming pool he promised for the new plant. Wages for journalists have slumped in real terms. Far too many are desk-bound, and staffing levels are inadequate in many national titles as well as in the regional press. Instead of investing in quality journalism, companies are spending millions on promotional gimmicks, and as a result we’re awash with CDs that nobody wants to listen to.

Murdoch has used the profits from his newspaper titles to extend his grip on other industries, such as sport, through BSkyB. One way or another, most people in this country line his pockets. Yet he pays next to no tax in the UK; he changed his nationality to further his business interests, and considers he’s got the right to choose our next prime minister.

Murdoch is squeezing his other publications hard to pay for this WSJ takeover, with 100 jobs gone at Wapping already this year.

News Corp’s print titles have been punching above their weight for years. Unfortunately, this trend came to a halt during 2006, when papers contributed 16 per cent of revenues, but only 13 per cent of operating profits. Murdoch blames the business cycle for his newspapers’ recent poor performance. Here and in the US, interest rates are riding high and consumer spending remains sluggish. Since late-2005, advertisers have been tightening the purse strings with gusto.

On the horizon, however, a game-changing prospect looms – the possibility that News Corp investors might be asked to stump up a steep $5bn to acquire Dow Jones. Murdoch has plenty of ideas for expanding the Wall Street Journal’s revenue base. But in the short term, these plans will suck even more cash out of News Corp.

At the back of Hinton’s mind must be a concern that News Corp is planning to squeeze its British titles further – this time, to pay for Rupert’s proposed adventures in Manhattan.

The WSJ journos jobs are no safer, though they can protest as much as they like. Rupert doesn’t like unions, and he needs the cash. Look to see an influx of ex-WSJ types looking to make a bit of money into the blogosphere sometime soon. They can always join that bastion of journalistic integrity, Pyjamas Media..

I hear they’re looking for a replacement for Pam Atlas.