There really wasn’t need for a whole Parliamentary Committee to determine that Murdoch wasn’t fit to run a single newspaper, let alone a company that controls several media outlets and is worth billions of dollars.
[Black Star News Editorial]
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A U.K. Parliamentary committee along split party
lines concluded in a report that Rupert Murdoch, the media baron with
extensive interests –including The New York Post, Fox News and The Wall
Street Journal– is “not a fit person” to run a major international
business.
Murdoch controls News Corporation, with interests in print media, television, movies and books.
The
report by the Media Committee in the House of Commons comes after
months of investigations by U.K. police –the probes continue– of
routine phone hacking by Murdoch’s employees to illegally obtain news
scoops and after months of a review by Members of Parliament of
Parliamentary committee in the U.K. that included testimony from both
Murdoch and his son James.
Although James himself approved a
$1.1 million dollar settlement to a person whose phone had been hacked,
both he and his father later claimed they did not know it was routine
practice –indeed part of the news gathering process– at Murdoch’s
newspapers.
James Murdoch continued to lie even after
confronted with e-mail messages sent to him showing that he knew much
earlier than he had claimed, that phone hacking was routine at News Of
The World, the Murdoch tabloid now closed.
Murdoch’s company has
already set aside several millions of dollars to settle other claims
against the company by people whose phones have been hacked. The civil
claims against the company had reached $200 million by early this year.
There
really wasn’t need for a whole Parliamentary Committee to determine
that Murdoch wasn’t fit to run a single newspaper, let alone a company
that controls several media outlets and is worth billions of dollars.
His
New York Post is the standard unit by which racism in the media should
be measured — in other words a New York Post10 (or NYP10) score would
indicate a perfect score. An NYP3 would be relatively decent.
There
are no shortage of examples of animus towards people of African descent
on the pages of The New York Post, ranging from the demonizing campaign
against the so-called Central Park 5, Black teenagers who were
subsequently wrongfully convicted of raping a White investment banker,
to the cartoon depicting President Barack Obama as a chimpanzee shot
dead by two New York Police.
Perhaps members of the Board of
News Corp and major shareholders and institutional investors will
finally do the right thing and send Murdoch into the retirement that’s
been long overdue. |
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“Speaking Truth To Empower.”
