(As only a momentary break from the EuroTrip series)
It came across my Twitter feed that someone tried to "pie" the Murdochs during James Murdoch's Parliament testimony on the NewsCorp hacking-gate. Now, I haven't been following this story to closely because I was already pretty sure that NewsCorp was a bunch of hacks. But seeing good ole' James, who some of you might remember I saw live in action late last year (see my full post on his event here), in the news was kind of fun. Here's an excerpt of my impressions of Mr. Murdoch...
“May I ask you a question…what’s wrong with market incentives?” – John Murdoch, CEO of News Corp (aka Rupert Murdoch’s son)
Now to the juicy stuff. As I mentioned, the final panel discussion consisted of the wunderkind Murdoch, John Witherow (Editor, Sunday Times), and Mathias Dopfner (visiting professor, German media mogul, and very tall Arnold Schwarzenegger sound alike). Turned out to be an interesting panel in its lack of ideological diversity.
Here’s how it went down…Murdoch played the role of slick, personable politician expounding on the beauty of journalism, how it betters society, and how the intrusion of government on media space is dangerous. All fair and important points on their face…but you can certainly see room for misapplication (not to mention nausea from the pure schmaltziness of it). Mr. Witherow fired the first real salvo (aka the shot heard round the world) with his attack on the BBC’s ‘intrusion’ into the Times’ domain of print media with their establishment of a robust, freely accessible website that was ‘unfairly competing’ because it was funded by government money. This fired up the Cambridge crowd to no end (they apparently love them some government subsidized media). The situation deteriorated quickly from there.
Mr. Witherow gave no pretense of being evenhanded, which I half admired. He came right out and said that if the government keeps propping up BBC, all private media will disappear and all we’ll have left is government subsidized news. That this argument is completely ludicrous for its sheer simplicity is pretty much irrelevant…at least we know where he stands. Like I said…ideologues typically dislike nuance or matters of degree. They prefer black and white. This way of thinking creates problems because it makes it difficult to explain apparent anomalies like…how is the private media said to be ‘free’ and ‘untainted’ (as compared to say the BBC) when the majority of the mainstream media outlets are controlled by huge, highly centralized media conglomerates (e.g., News Corp) with their own political and corporate agendas and ideologies? If media is such an important public good, why is publically sponsored media an attack against personal freedom? Once again it’s all about the nuance and ambiguity.
Meanwhile, Dr. Dopfner maybe said something like, “the BBC is a tumah.” That’s how I imagined it at least.
Here’s the kicker though, Mr. Slick and Cool himself, finally cracked in an exchange with a particularly vehement defender of the BBC and unleashed my most favorite quote above. Nothing better encapsulates the simplicity of strident and unrelenting ideology. “What’s wrong with market incentives?” In other words, if you don’t hate the BBC, then it directly follows that you have a particular disdain for ‘the market’…capitalism…private enterprise…whatever. If you support public media, you want to live in China. Such extreme dichotomies are patently absurd…yet they persist in so many areas of our world. It’s a sad and troubling phenomenon.
