Just as environmentalists ought to be concerned about the drive for profit in mining advocates for the free press ought to be concerned about a similar emphasis by those presenting the news under governmental licence.
The moderate Murdoch son said this a few years back in Great Britain as he badmouthed BBC News.
“Years earlier, when James was fighting in Britain for the first failed Sky deal, he expressed contempt for government meddling in the media’s affairs and impugned the nationally esteemed BBC as a “chilling” media monolith. “The only reliable, durable and perpetual guarantor of independence,” he said in a lecture at the annual Edinburgh International Television Festival, “is profit.” “
Quote taken from today’s NY Time’s story on the Murdochs Part II.
SOME HOPEFUL REPORTING
Rupert Murdoch sold the biggest part of his media empire a recently acquired 21st Century Fox a movie making goliath. Check the italicized words in this portion of the Times Story:
“Lachlan was furious. His father was talking about dismantling the empire not even three years after coaxing him back from Australia to run it, an empire that had taken a lifetime to build. He argued that 21st Century Fox was big enough to compete as it as was. The smaller piece of the empire that he would be left with — a network with an aging audience in the increasingly anachronistic business of cable television — was hardly a growth business. As the talks with Iger progressed, Lachlan’s opposition hardened. “Why the [expletive] would I want to run this company?” he told people close to him. Lachlan’s anger at his father boiled over during a dinner in Manhattan in the fall of 2017, three people who were familiar with the incident told us. “If you take one more call on this deal, you will not have a son!” he threatened. “I will never talk to you again.” (Representatives for Murdoch and Lachlan denied that he made these threats.)”
