MURDOCH US newspapers racist boycott

He closed the flagship NotW after a highly effective advertiser boycott threatened to spread to his US media (and with the PCC so disgraced by its mishandling of the Murdoch press' phone-hacking, condemning The Guardian for reporting it, that it disbanded itself! Some press regulator...).

Now Murdoch faces a potentially crippling boycott of his paper that once again shows how pressure from outside the formal press regulators can be much more effective than the regulators themselves.

The S*n has long been banned across Merseyside for its hateful portrayal of Liverpool fans as drunken hooligans responsible for the deaths of nearly 100 Liverpool fans at Hillsborough, eventually apologising for this decades later after official public enquiries trashed it's claims.

Now it's an unsubtle attack by the New York Post that has attracted a retail boycott. Up to 5000 Yemeni-owned outlets will cease selling the paper after what they see as a clearly racist front page attacking 1 of the just 2 Muslim Congresspersons. They say it endangers US Muslims by encouraging anti-Islam hatred.

KEY POINT: Consumer campaigns, especially pressurising advertisers with boycott threats, + distributor/retailer boycotts can be much more effective than a formal regulator.

Yemeni bodegas boycott New York Post over attacks on Ilhan Omar.

OWNERSHIP Leveson 2 n Murdoch sunk as Comcast seeks Sky

A name which may be familiar from its ownership of NBC-Universal, Comcast has launched a shock bid to usurp Murdoch's long-planned full takeover of Sky, the most lucrative arm of his now fragmenting global empire. Just as there are questions about the ethics and fitness of the Murdoch conglomerate, Comcast brings with it a tarnished reputation for behaviour that both Chomsky and Ben Bagdikian would recognise as predictable from their models:

Comcast, which last week unveiled a £22bn offer for Sky, has been labelled the “worst company in America” twice in recent years over shoddy customer service and pricing. It has also been involved in regulatory transgressions which legal experts believe means its plan to take over Sky should be closely scrutinised by watchdogs.
The pay-TV firm, which is poised to formalise its bid to try to steal Sky from under Rupert Murdoch’s nose, announced a $300m plan to spruce up customer service three years ago, but to little avail so far. Comcast was named “America’s most-hated company” in a respected customer satisfaction survey last year.

(Guardian: Sky bidder Comcast labelled 'worst company in America')

I'm picking up on points linked to Comcast, but this is a useful primer on the perceived failings of the latest press regulator, IPSO.

This comes just as Murdoch seemed to have won a vital victory, with the Tory government announcing they have rejected calls (including from an angry Leveson himself) to launch the 2nd stage of the Leveson Inquiry. This was part of their originally announced plans as fury swept the UK over the NoTW phone-hacking scandal - with the Tory government under huge pressure to do so given the presence of Andy Coulson, sacked NoTW editor, in the centre of government as then-PM Cameron's press advisor. 

NB: Hancock = current UK Culture Secretary, so oversees media policy.

Just two days before Hancock’s announcement, the Murdoch family’s long-held ambitions to own the whole of Sky faced a far mightier opponent than a government with a wafer thin majority. Comcast, a telecoms and entertainment giant valued by the market at some $184bn (£130bn) – more than twice the value of 21st Century Fox – looks set to outfox the man who started Sky in 1989 and built it into Europe’s most significant satellite television platform. By offering 16% more to Sky shareholders, who have been waiting for over a year while competition regulators agonise over the possibility of increasing Murdoch’s dominance, Comcast has highlighted that market economics can trump media power.

 

The appearance of a huge US business, the owner of NBC television and Universal Studios, to spoil Murdoch’s takeover plans, shores up his argument for a merger with Disney. Despite the local power held by his newspapers – which is largely unchanged – the Murdoch media empire is relatively small compared with the Apples and Amazons of the world. Comcast makes a fortune from telecommunications in the US but revenues from the rest of its business are just 9% of its total.

 

In this game of superscale, Murdoch’s desire to control Sky has twice been held up by regulatory questions over the behaviour of his employees: first through phone hacking, then with sexual harassment allegations. It’s worth pointing out that Comcast, like so many media groups, has been tarnished by the latter: its television network NBC fired its best known presenter Matt Lauer amid harassment allegations last year.

(Guardian: Leveson 2 is off but relations between press and power are little changed)