Good grief: Peter Oborne resigns from the Telegraph on a point of principle. Its lack of coverage of the HSBC tax scandal was “a fraud on its readers”. Whether or not we like his political views, we cannot surely doubt his principles when condemning his former employer for suppressing stories about HBSC.
Oborne referred to the importance of a free press which always causes a problem for me since I do not believe we have a free press. With the exception of The Guardian, which is owned by a trust, every major national newspaper is owned by a rich individual or a huge corporation. None of these papers are accountable to their readers, the only way in which we can influence them is to not buy them, but even that hasn’t stopped Rupert Murdoch who continues to own the loss-making Times newspapers.
The Sun, owned by Murdoch, and the Mail, concerns me as much as any papers. Right now, The Sun is pumping out relentless attacks on Ed Miliband. I do not have access to the same lawyers Murdoch has but let’s just say that not all the articles are based entirely on fact. And the reason is simple: Murdoch wants a Tory government in order to benefit his cross-media interests. He wants the BBC, another Sun target, to be destroyed in order to allow us to ‘choose’ only from his portfolio of TV channels. And it’s about revenge too. Murdoch doesn’t like the way in which Miliband has taken on the vested interests of big money and big media and he wants his revenge. And to do that, he wants to influence as many Sun readers as possible to vote in the General Election for a party that will work against their interests.
The Sun is no more part of a free press than Pravda, other than this is a paper that represents the views of its owners, as do the Mail, Express etc etc. The definition of a free press according to big money newspapers is that papers are not own and controlled by the state. I wouldn’t want that either but to suggest a private monopoly of ‘free speech’ is somehow how different and better than a public monopoly is fatuous to say the least.
There is no questioning of fraudulent unemployment figures in the media as a whole, never mind in the written press. The tragic stories of the disabled and terminally ill poor dying before the DWP has sorted out their PIP payments exist only in the minds of the victims and their families and meanwhile the papers carry pictures of the smirking chancellor Osborne and the gurning features of Iain Duncan Smith, who has been responsible for what is almost war against the poor.
Well done to Peter Oborne to standing up to vested interests but I don’t see many other journalists who might not have his wealth or connections to do something similar. The same papers who support whistleblowing in the NHS wouldn’t want their own employees to do the same.
Free press, my arse. It’s as free as their owners want it to be and it’s about as free as the UK where we have a General Election every five years and then the new government does exactly what it likes.
