Showing posts with label USA. Show all posts
Showing posts with label USA. Show all posts

Sunday, 14 April 2019

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.



Sunday, 24 July 2016

HISTORY banned for not being racist in 40s USA

A quote I've picked up on as
(1) it shows you can glean useful material from all sorts of sources, and
(2) its a sharp example of how profoundly censorship has shifted to reflect evolving social values

To be clear, this is about a stage musical - NOT a film (the movie came out shortly after, in 1950).

Peter Guralnick (1994) Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley. London: Abacus.
'In the late 1940s [Memphis city censor Lloyd Binford] banned the stage musical Annie Get Your Gun, because it had a Negro railroad conductor and "we don't have any negro conductors in the South. Of course it can't show here. It's social equality in action."' (p.46)

Tuesday, 10 March 2015

DIGITISATION GLOBALISATION Is Guardian now an AMERICAN paper?

Unique charitable ownership (Scott Trust) guarantees a future?
[UPDATE: Points from new article on Guardian linking up with several other media brands to jointly sell online display advertising added below the line]

This has been coming for some time, and reflects the globalising impact of ongoing digitisation. As well as highlighting investment in video content, American offices and ad sales staff to sell US-targeted ads (I already frequently see US ads within the Android Guardian app!), and detailing the wider corporate strategy, the central role of the US audience is made abundantly clear. We have to ask several questions here:
  • Can a US/world-facing paper be properly regulated by UK media regulators?
  • Lets not forget that the Guardian continues to boycott IPSO (at the time of writing)
  • Does a separate press regulator make sense when convergence is essentially making the Guardian into an online TV producer as well as written/photographic news provider? Furthermore...
  • Okay, the Guardian at a mere £1bn net worth is not on the scale of Murdoch et al, but nonetheless it does own other media interests - why is there still so little focus on cross-media ownership?
  • Is it feasible that under pressure to please its US (and other nationalities) readers the Guardian won't shift its editorial style or approach on the US? Where might this leave British readers/users?
  • Given the near-absence of any 'left-wing' within mainstream US politics, could this signal a further threat to pluralism within the UK press market?
  • There are more positive issues too - the Guardian has built up a considerable record in recent years of collaborating on major, expensive projects with French, German, American and other papers, and this could enhance the prospects for more of this. Globalisation meant that the UK government's rather clumsy attempts to silence the Snowden reportage (physically smashing a Guardian PC received widespread mockery and contempt) was doomed to failure.
Make particular note of the 2nd paragraph below [article in full]: