Well…If you haven't been following there's no point in this post for you...

...and I shall not recapitulate for the inattentive.

To continue, yesterday, chillaxing Dave got on the case and stated something along the lines of, "Well, even though events have proven me wrong, I was right to put pro-Murdoch crony Jeremy BerkHunt in charge of the bid that Murdoch's proxies were making to buy the remaining portion of BSkyB."

Jeremy Hunt's email has been published by Leveson, wherein he shows at least as much positive bias towards Murdoch as Vince Cable showed negative.

Now what I want to know is of these two, BerkHunt and Cable, which would the ordinary informed person think of as the most likely to follow the proper process of examining the bid, and the fitness of the folk who were making it, and referring it to the proper agencies of oversight?

As we now all know (as though we hadn't before) that Murdoch's organisation has more than a few dodgy folk therein, and some of its ways are not like the ways of other law-abiding citizens; perhaps because, as article of faith, it always has to test and thereby prove the limits of legal jurisdiction, whilst remaining within the law; even when that law interferes with what Murdoch regards as the natural fulfilment of his stage of media-empire building. Laws can be changed, after all. Processes can be evaded avoided.

Given this, I should find it surprising, and an actual dereliction of political duty from all sides of the political spectrum, for a politician to give Murdoch's organisation or any cross-media organisation an easy ride. Even those sympathetic to Murdoch's modus operandi, fellow travellers of the libertarian/new right/newconservative inclination, even they should be naturally wary of the media-mogul/newspaper-baron, given the media baron's nature.

I mean to say, look at some of the modern list:

Robert Maxwell

Conrad Black

Silvio Berlusconi
Actually Silvio deserves a couple of pages to him: so I'll throw in another link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trials_and_allegations_involving_Silvio_Berlusconi

and

Rupert Murdoch

Now, in the general population one wouldn't expect to find as many criminals* per capita, and I doubt there are anything more than a hundred actual media moguls of the stature of the above named quartet in the modern era, so I should find it unsurprising if any media mogul was ever given an easy ride. Call it profiling, I suppose. We have to remember, in the era of the Nietzschean man, companies are people too.

I'm just surprised that these folk companies don't get stop-and-searched a bit more, just on sus. I mean, if there were a gang as obviously dodgy as this crew outside, waiting to be let in, we'd have our border guards give 'em an intensive body-frisk or two before we allowed 'em into civilisation. And even then, some of us would be trying to get 'em all deported.



*Not, of course, that Murdoch is a deliberate criminal - in such cases it takes a noble journalist to step up to the plate, rather than a proprietor.