The strange case of Murdoch's lost empire

[depakid]

If you want to know how powerful Rupert Murdoch is, read the reviews of Bruce Dover's book, Rupert's Adventures in China:How Murdoch Lost A Fortune And Found A Wife (Mainstream Publishing). Well, go on, read them. You can't find many? I rest my case. Dover was Murdoch's vice-president in China, and took his orders directly from the boss. His book, which was published in February, is a riveting account of two of the world's most powerful forces at a time when one is about to host the Olympic Games. So why aren't we reading about it?

Murdoch, Dover shows, began his assault on China with two strategic mistakes. The first was to pay a staggering price - $US525 million - for a majority stake in Star TV, a failing satellite broadcaster in Hong Kong. The second was to make a speech in September 1993, a few months after he had bought the business, which he had neither written nor read very carefully. New telecommunications, he said, "have proved an unambiguous threat to totalitarian regimes everywhere … satellite broadcasting makes it possible for information-hungry residents of many closed societies to bypass state-controlled television channels".

The Chinese leaders were furious. The premier, Li Peng, banned satellite dishes from China. Murdoch spent the next 10 years grovelling.

Within six months of Li's ban, Murdoch dropped the BBC from Star's China signal. His publishing company, HarperCollins, paid a fortune for a tedious biography of the paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping, written by Deng's daughter. He built a website for the regime's propaganda sheet, the People's Daily. In 1997 he made another speech in which he tried to undo the damage he had caused four years before.

"China," he said, "is a distinctive market with distinctive social and moral values that Western companies must learn to abide by."His minions, Dover reveals, ensured "every relevant Chinese government official received a copy".

He described the Dalai Lama as "a very political old monk shuffling around in Gucci shoes". His son James said that the Western media were "painting a falsely negative portrayal of China through their focus on controversial issues such as human rights". Rupert employed his unsalaried gofer, Tony Blair, to give him special access: in 1999 Blair placed him next to the then Chinese president, Jiang Zemin, at a Downing Street lunch. To secure limited cable rights in southern China, News Corporation agreed to carry a Chinese government channel - CCTV-9 - on Fox and Sky. Murdoch promised to "further strengthen co-operative ties with the Chinese media, and explore new areas with an even more positive attitude". Most notoriously, he instructed HarperCollins not to publish the book it had bought from the former governor of Hong Kong, Chris Patten. Dover reveals Murdoch was forced to intervene directly (he instructed the publishers to "kill the f---ing book") because his system of control had broken down. "Murdoch very rarely issued directives or instructions to his senior executives or editors." He expected "a sort of 'anticipatory compliance"'. One didn't need to be instructed about what to do, one simply knew what was in one's long-term interests." In this case HarperCollins executives had failed to understand that when the boss objected to Patten's views on China, it meant the book was dead.

More: http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/strange-case-of-murdochs-lost-empire/2008/04/25/1208743246275.html

[Selatius]

1. I think Murdoch's existence makes the case for mutually owned news outlets.

What that basically means is that you'd have a news outlet owned by and funded by a large list of donors who are also viewers, with each donation capped at a certain amount to prevent wealthy individuals (like Murdoch) from essentially hijacking the news outlet from poorer viewers. It would guarantee a certain level of independence from influence by corporate advertisers (because the model would not rely on corporate ads but individual donations) and by powerful shareholders (like Murdoch).