Can Murdoch Buy the Sky?
· Jordan Rowe
The media isn’t usually a united sector. It would be hard to find similarities between the Daily Mail and The Guardian, yet they seem to share a common view on one subject: whether Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation should be allowed to buy the 60% of BSkyB it doesn’t already own. Their answer is a resounding ‘no’ – and so is mine. Whilst the ownership of Sky may not seem like a big issue at first, we must remember exactly what News Corporation already owns. The list is endless; chances are you’ll come across some part of the Murdoch Empire at least once this week. The Sun, News of the World and The Times are all owned by Murdoch; he also owns part of ITV and all of Fox, home to The Simpsons, Avatar, the Star Wars franchise and even the sweet innocence that is Glee. In addition, he also owns MySpace. No one remember that? Me neither, but apparently he does...
The latest on his shopping list is Sky, which reaches over 10 million UK households – one of those being mine. I’d be the first to admit that Sky does a great job and has revolutionised the way we all watch TV.
Just this week, Sky launched a new channel, Sky Atlantic, home to all of HBO’s content in the UK – shows such as Entourage, Boardwalk Empire and Six Feet Under. The rights to this cost a staggering £150 million.
Isn’t all this a bit scary? How can one man own so much of one industry – the one we rely on most to inform and educate us? You may have read about our local MP and Secretary of State for Business Vince Cable being involved in this story after saying he was “at war with the Murdoch empire”. Unfortunately this ‘bias’ has led to him being replaced on the decision making of this affair by Jeremy Hunt, the Culture, Media and Sport Secretary. If the deal is allowed to go through, it would create a media monopoly on our island. It would give Murdoch unprecedented power over what we see and hear. It may even pave the way for a Fox News-esque channel - a propaganda piece for the right which has been blamed in the States for inciting Islamaphobia over their handling of the ‘Ground Zero Mosque’ non-story and polarising American politics to the extent that a congresswoman in Arizona was shot earlier this year.
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