Woo-hoo! Time for a mini celebration. Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox bid to takeover Sky has hit the buffers as it’s been deemed not in the public interest by the government’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA). Too right it’s not. His plan to take control of the 61% of Sky that he doesn’t already own would give the press baron and his family too much power, too much control over Britain’s news media and the brownnosing politicians who fawn at his front door because they’re scared witless of garnering negative headlines in his grubby papers.
Laughingly, the CMA also concluded that Fox is committed to broadcasting standards. Yet Murdoch presides over a mucky empire that is a toxic influence on public life, producing some of the crappiest and ill-informed rags on the newsstands and programmes on the box.
I’m thinking in particular of the Fox ‘News’ channel which is a sewer of lies and misinformation and beset by allegations of sex abuse and the daily red tops that are often journalistic jokes and forever tarnished by the phone-hacking scandal.
Despite the blocked deal we can’t unfurl the bunting or go dancing in the streets just yet. It’s provisional so there is still a chance, albeit a slim one that he could win the day. That being said, I can make do with this piece of good news for now until I hear about his empire’s collapse.
