Empire time:

In the news:

BBC launches public attack on Murdoch 'imperialism'

[The BBC spokeswoman's] comments come in the wake of a speech to the country's senior broadcasting executives by Tony Ball, chief executive of British Sky Broadcasting, in which Mr Murdoch's News Corporation is the major shareholder.

Mr Ball told the Edinburgh International Television Festival last week that the BBC ought to be forced to sell its most successful programmes, such as EastEnders, Casualty and Have I Got News For You to its commercial rivals, who would screen all future episodes instead. The money raised by such sales should then be ploughed into experimental programming, he said.

Executives at the BBC and elsewhere see the plan as a Murdoch-inspired attempt to cripple the corporation by depriving it of its most popular shows - and the large audiences that go with them.

Mr Ball told a questioner at the festival that it "would not be such a disaster" if the BBC were eventually to become a marginal broadcaster.

and

BBC chief warns over Murdoch dominance

The BBC will be left to fight a lone battle against Rupert Murdoch's BSkyB if the government does not intervene to prevent the collapse of ITV as a public service broadcaster, the corporation's director general Greg Dyke warned yesterday.

Really, what can you say when a corporation admits in public that it wants to take profitable entities from the government, simply to fatten their bottom line and shut down an alternative voice?


posted by Quiddity at 8/25/2003 02:04:00 PM