... I am influenced by having spent five months in the US over the last two years and watching the impact of Fox on public debate in that country. Fox demonstrates the business genius of Mr Murdoch: the mixture of popular entertainment with right-wing populism has proved extraordinarily successful. But it has also helped destroy the middle-ground in American politics and made coherent discussion of policy alternatives nigh on impossible.
Martin Wolf: Why News Corp should be blocked from taking over BSkyB
http://blogs.ft.com/...
Wolf's professional creds: Martin Wolf is a British journalist, considered to be one of the world's most influential writers on economics, the associate editor and chief economics commentator at the Financial Times.
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
However, the British reserve, "coherent discussion of policy alternatives," grossly understates the problem.
Credo and Color of Change have another view:
The extreme rhetoric espoused by Beck and others on FOX News is scary because it's easy to see how this rhetoric could inspire violent acts against progressives. Unfortunately, a new report makes clear that's exactly what happened in at least one near-tragic case.
Three months ago, a heavily armed man named Byron Williams was on his way to kill people at two non-profit organizations in San Francisco when he got into a gun battle with police. Luckily, they arrested him before he could carry out his plot. Now, in an interview from jail, the "progressive hunter" has revealed that in fact Fox News' Glenn Beck was a major inspiration....
http://www.colorofchange.org/...
and offers an opportunity to warn Fox advertisers of their collaboration in violence.
Media Matters adds:
What has Glenn Beck's response been to the revelation that his false and paranoid attacks on the Tides Foundation inspired viewer Byron Williams to target Tides employees for death?
Doubling down.
.... Instead of recognizing the danger and taking appropriate action, Fox News is allowing and encouraging Beck's violent rhetoric, abdicating the responsibility the public expects of a powerful broadcaster. That is why targeting Glenn Beck's advertisers is no longer enough -- we need to hold the entire network accountable.
http://mediamatters.org/...
Unfortunately, media bully Rupert Murdoch will glory in the uproar and egg Beck on to even more extreme rhetoric.
Murdoch loves his sewage pool with its crew of scum suckers, best beloved and biggest scum sucker Glenn Beck, the Fox retinue of bints (Brit slang term, not the Arabic form), and the old, reliable conduit of sewage, the superhuman filth pipeline Roger Ailes.
One wishes that one could strip his American citizenship away from Australian lowlife R. Murdoch and exile him to a tiny hut in the midst of the Australian desert. "Business genius"! my ass! Murdoch is an ugly, dirty old man who opens his trenchcoat constantly to reveal to unsuspecting innocents a bevy of vulgar, buggerous, bodging bogeys whose excretions feed bolshie Republicans and members of the faux tea party.