Curing Murdoch-aphobia: A Lesson in Media Democracy

Thanks to The Commentator for publishing my latest piece (titled above) as the Digger flies in to give evidence at the Leveson Inquiry on Tuesday and Wednesday.

For the full article go here but here's a taster:

Fears over “journalistic integrity”, however, just don’t stack up in Britain. Even when son James as Sky CEO, there was no discernible ideological and editorial differences between Sky, BBC and ITV; all three lean left in their anti-US, anti-Israel, anti-Christian news reporting and analysis. Equally, Murdoch’s Sun newspaper supported New Labour not the Conservatives during the Blair years; years at a time when the Conservative Party was much further right-of-centre than it has become under Cameron’s ‘liberal conservativism’.

Not that the anti-Murdoch media war being waged against News Corp is a “fair and balanced” struggle about democracy and genuine debate in the public square – if only it were. If propaganda and bias were really the concern in Britain, the BBC would have lost its ‘public service’ broadcast licence years ago. The notion of the BBC unbiasedly serving its public is demonstrably untrue. Whole websites exist to document the BBC’s left/ liberal culture of bias in its reporting on Israel, climate, poverty, race and religion. Even its own internal reports confirm its on-going biases. Time and again the BBC has to be told to be more balanced in its coverage of the climate issue, for instance. Against this background, concerns over “journalistic standards” at Sky, especially its possible “Fox-ification”, are laughable.