{"id":428,"date":"2007-05-16T09:57:00","date_gmt":"2007-05-16T15:57:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/?p=428"},"modified":"2007-05-16T09:57:00","modified_gmt":"2007-05-16T15:57:00","slug":"the-unintended-influence-of-rupert-murdoch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/2007\/05\/the-unintended-influence-of-rupert-murdoch\/","title":{"rendered":"The unintended influence of Rupert Murdoch"},"content":{"rendered":"

T<\/span>he influence of Rupert Murdoch<\/span> is a subject of much discussion online. Personally, I’m in agreement with Felix Salmon<\/span> of Market Movers<\/span><\/a>, who wrote: <\/p>\n

[W]here editorial independence is valuable, Murdoch values it. Where it isn’t, he doesn’t. So even if he’s interfered in editorial decisions in China in the past, that doesn’t mean he’ll do so with the WSJ<\/span> in the future. Yes, Murdoch interferes in the editorial decisions of papers like the Sun<\/span> and the New York Post<\/span>. And the readers of those papers couldn’t care less.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

IMO, the problem is not so much with influence, it’s more with news executives anticipating or second guessing the prejudices of the proprietor.<\/p>\n

In 2001, foreign correspondent Sam Kiley<\/span>, formerly of the London Times<\/span><\/span>, wrote about why he quit the paper over it’s treatment of his reporting from the Middle East: <\/p>\n

…no newspaper has been so happy to hand the keys of the armoury over to one side than The Times<\/span>, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News International. Murdoch is a close friend of Ariel Sharon, Israel’s prime minister.<\/p>\n

Knowing these details, and that Murdoch has invested heavily in Israel, The Times<\/span>‘ foreign editor and other middle managers flew into hysterical terror every time a pro-Israel lobbying group wrote in with a quibble or complaint, and then usually took their side against their own correspondent – deleting words and phrases from the lexicon to rob its reporters of the ability to make sense of what was going on. So, I was told, I should not refer to \u201cassassinations\u201d of Israel’s opponents, nor to \u201cextrajudicial killings or executions.\u201d<\/p>\n

The professional Israeli hits in which at least four entirely innocent civilians have been killed were, if I had to write about them at all, just \u201ckillings,\u201d or best of all – \u201ctargeted killings.\u201d The fact that the Jewish colonies on the West Bank in Gaza were illegal under international law because they violated the Geneva Convention was not disputed by my editors – but any reference to this fact was \u201cgratuitous.\u201d The leader writers, meanwhile, were happy to repeat the canard that Palestinian gunmen were using children as human shields.<\/p>\n

One story which referred to Sharon’s \u201chard-line government\u201d and to a Palestinian village which was \u201chemmed in on three sides\u201d by settlements was ripped out of the paper altogether after the first edition. These terms were deemed unacceptable, even though Sharon would have sued had I called him a softie; even though the settlements have all been built as military camps, and that the thesis of the piece, on the eve of the Arab League summit in Jordan, was that support for Yasser Arafat and participation in the \u201cAl Aqsa Intifada\u201d (another phrase The Times<\/span> hated, since they thought it romanticised the uprising) was dwindling.<\/p>\n

No pro-Israel lobbyist ever dreamed of having such power over a great national newspaper.<\/p>\n

Murdoch’s executives were so scared of irritating him that, when I pulled off a little scoop by tracking, interviewing and photographing the unit in the Israeli army which killed Mohammed al-Durrah<\/a>, the 12-year-old boy whose death was captured on film and became the iconic image of the conflict, I was asked to file the piece \u201cwithout mentioning the dead kid.\u201d After that conversation, I was left wordless, so I quit.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Agree or disagree with the executives or the correspondent, there was certainly an unintended influence at work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The influence of Rupert Murdoch is a subject of much discussion online. Personally, I’m in agreement with Felix Salmon of Market Movers, who wrote: [W]here editorial independence is valuable, Murdoch values it. Where it isn’t, he doesn’t. So even if he’s interfered in editorial decisions in China in the past, that doesn’t mean he’ll do […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[177,47,207],"class_list":["post-428","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journalism","tag-rupert-murdoch","tag-times","tag-wsj"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=428"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=428"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=428"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=428"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}