Looking at the news-makers

I sent out 29 pages of articles about the environment. While looking up articles I found some news sources that should be added to the list I offered 12/1. These two offer a non-American point of view on the news:

http://news.xinhuanet.com/ and http://news.xinhuanet.com/english Xinhua News Agency is, of course, an organ of the P.R.C. government. Its news and views are those deliberately published by the Chinese state. While this is not a very reliable source of general news, Xinhua makes an interesting comparison to the news and views of the American press. Its carefully chosen language on Copenhagen may be worth reading.

http://www.spiegel.de/international Der Spiegel is a famous German newspaper, and the international edition is published online in English. Because it is "out of step" with the American government and media, one occassionally finds a different sort of news here. Spiegel may be critical of the Afghan war, for instance, or look at trade issues quite differently than the New York Times.

A third source is:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/
The Times is part of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., which also owns quite a large number of other famous media:
The Wall Street Journal
The Sun (a London tabloid)
Fox News
Sky Satellite Network
Star TV
National Geographic Channel Worldwide
20th Century Fox (movie and TV studios)
HarperCollins (huge book publisher)
Digital News Media (a popular Australian digital news source)
My Space

Murdoch was also responsible for the creation of the Weekly Standard, a neocon opinion magazine edited by William Kristol:

http://www.weeklystandard.com/content/public/articles/000/000/006/025sapgi.asp
As luck would have it, Kristol knew Rupert Murdoch thanks to a mutual friend, Irwin Stelzer. So when Murdoch dropped by Kristol's office a few weeks later, Kristol popped the question. Would he be interested in funding a new conservative magazine? Yes, he said. To lock up the deal, Kristol, Podhoretz, Tell, and I met over dinner with Murdoch in March 1995 at his home in Beverly Hills. Thanks to Murdoch's generosity, The Standard was born a couple of months later.

Murdoch's relationship with the state of Israel can be seen in this Jerusalem Post article he wrote:
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1237392665709&pagename=JPArticle%2FShowFull

This is what the Center for American Progress (an American think tank with strong connections in the Obama administration) has to say about Murdoch:
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2004/07/b122948.html

'But who is the real Rupert Murdoch? As this report shows, he is a far-right partisan who has used his empire explicitly to pull American political debate to the right.

'… Murdoch owns the Weekly Standard, the neoconservative journal that employed key figures who pushed for war in Iraq. As the American Journalism Review noted, the circulation of Murdoch's Weekly Standard "hovers at only around 65,000. But its voice is much louder than those numbers suggest." Editor Bill Kristol "is particularly adept at steering Washington policy debates by inserting himself and his views into the discussion." In the early weeks of the War on Terror, Kristol "shepherded a letter to President Bush, signed by 40 D.c= opinion-makers, urging a wider military engagement." [Source: AJR, 12/01]

'… The last governor of Hong Kong before it was handed back to China, Chris Patten, signed a contract to write his memoirs with Murdoch's publishing company, HarperCollins. But according to the Evening Standard, when "Murdoch heard that the book, East and West, would say unflattering things about the Chinese leadership, with whom he was doing satellite TV business, the contract was cancelled. It caused a furor in the press - except, of course, in the Murdoch papers, which barely mentioned the story." According to BusinessWeek, internal memos surfaced suggesting the canceling of the contract was motivated by "corporate worries about friction with China, where HarperCollins' boss, Rupert Murdoch, has many business interests." [Evening Standard, 8/13/03; BusinessWeek, 9/15/98]

'… Time Magazine reported that while Murdoch is supposedly "a devout anti-Soviet and anti-communist" he "became bewitched by China in the early '90s." In an effort to persuade Chinese dictators that he would never challenge their behavior, Murdoch "threw the BBC off Star TV" (his satellite network operating in China) after BBC aired reports about Chinese human rights violations. Murdoch argued the BBC "was gratuitously attacking the regime, playing film of the massacre in Tiananmen Square over and over again." In 1998 Chinese President Jiang Zemin praised Murdoch for the "objective" way in which his papers and television covered China. [Source: Time Magazine, 10/25/99]'

The Times Online is often a source of breaking news. But it's good to compare its viewpoint with that of the Guardian, which is run by the Scott Trust on a non-profit basis, dedicated to "liberal journalism". These two British papers represent opposite sides of the politcal fence on several issues, and you may find it interesting to see both sides.

It's amazing that one man can so affect the information that Americans (and thus Taiwanese) receive, however. Of course, he's not the only powerful media tycoon. We'll look at some more next week.