Flickr, Donkey Hotey
Water under the bridge? That was my gut reaction when – to no one’s great surprise – Rupert Murdoch announced last December that, once more, he wanted 100 per cent control of the broadcaster Sky. Murdoch’s media empire is, I thought to myself, less toxic than it was when it came within a whisker of securing the 61 per cent of the group that it did not already own in the summer of 2011.
Then, parliament – in a wave of revulsion over the revelations about the extent of the criminal behaviour of journalists at News International, News Corporation’s British subsidiary – united to urge the parent company to withdraw its bid for what was then British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB).
Murdoch has since done some things that, on the face of it, make a bid less objectionable than it was half a decade ago. He has, at least to a degree, split his company’s publishing arm from the more profitable entertainment division – although, in the end, all roads lead to Murdoch.
His organisation may have been slow to realise the enormity of the crisis at the heart of its British operations, but to its credit, it spent several hundred millions of pounds on the clean-up operation over phone-hacking and associated legal actions (we can argue elsewhere about the methods it chose). Legacy print circulations are generally on the slide, dwarfed by the new digital giants, possibly softening some of the arguments about plurality …
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Alan Rusbridger, New Statesman
