New York Times continues Murdoch series, and News Corp responds
Posted by
Martin Stabe
on 26 June 2007 at 07:20
Tags: Journalism
As a News Corp takeover of Dow Jones inches nearer, The New York Timessecond installment of investigation into Rupert Murdoch and News Corp that it began yesterday. This time, the focus is on Murdoch’s dealings in China.
The New York Times piece portrays Murdoch as a little too cosy with the government of the one-party state. It covers much old ground, including the well-known tale that Murdoch’s Chinese satellite television service, Star TV, dropped the BBC in 1994 to suit Chinese authorities.
The piece also contrasts a disparaging quote by Murdoch about Chinese government opponants like the Dalai Lama and Falun Gong to the fact that the Wall Street Journal once won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing the Chinese government’s supression of Falun Gong.
Once again, Murdoch did not comment directly, but this time News Corp did issue a statement:
News Corp. has consistently cooperated with The New York Times in its coverage of the company. However, the agenda for this unprecedented series is so blatantly designed to further the Times’s commercial self interests — by undermining a direct competitor poised to become an even more formidable competitor — that it would be reckless of us to participate in their malicious assault. Ironically, The Times, by using its news pages to advance its own corporate business agenda, is doing the precise thing they accuse us of doing without any evidence.
The Los Angeles Times, meanwhile, takes up the same issue, with a piece looking at one of New Corp’s Chinese ventures in particular: MySpace.cn, which launched in April. The Chinese version of the social-networking site, the Los Angeles paper says, “goes out of its way to keep users from discussing topics sensitive to the government”, such as Taiwanese independence and Tibet. Attempts to blog about the Dalai Lama on the site, it reports, are blocked and flagged as “inappropriate”, the story says. However, under Chinese local-ownership laws, News Corp is only a minority investor in MySpace China, and there is some question about the level of control it has over the site’s policies.
Tags: Journalism
