The Murdoch model that has worked in the UK and Australia and has been less successful in the US is to buy enough of the media outlets to have real political power - and to use it to obtain concessions (ie monopolies) that allow him to dominate the home entertainment media market. He has had no compunctions about slanting the news to suit his political ends - not only to suit advertisers - while claiming that his editors have editorial independence. It is notable that all but one of the Murdoch newspapers were strongly in favour of the war in Iraq - the exception being in Papua New Guinea!
Now that it is easy to compare several news sources his technique works less well. It is notable that he failed to give the Tories an outright majority in the UK. Had he done so I'm pretty sure it would have been curtains for the BBC. With the Libdems holding a balance of power that's less likely to happen but I've no doubt he'll try.
On the other hand the Times Crossword is be best I know! Sad that it has to be in such a lousy "news" source.
I've already commented on the BBC website about the audio report - but the more complaints
the more likely they will take notice. They haven't responded yet on this one - they have on previous though.
This seems to be flogging a dead horse, but my point was not intended as a criticism of the original post - which perhaps
was slanted appropriately towards us open source biased nerds who read slashdot. It was
intended to point out the BBC's steadfast unwillingness to use terms like "open source" or "linux"
in the context of OPLC. As I said, in the audio report they managed to squeeze in a mention
of only one operating system: the cut down version Windows - which had nothing to do with OPLC.
Nor is the BBC saying anything about Linux or open source as far as I can see. They had an audio report on the OLPC a few weeks ago in the BBC World Service program "Digital Planet". That didn't mention anything about the operating system - hardware support for Linux - or BIOS, but they did say that Microsoft were shipping a "cut down version of Windows". Towards the end of that program they reported that some readers had complained about pro-MS bias in previous editions. They dismissed this complaint of course.
Slashdot Mirror
The Murdoch model that has worked in the UK and Australia and has been less successful in the US is to buy enough of the media outlets to have real political power - and to use it to obtain concessions (ie monopolies) that allow him to dominate the home entertainment media market. He has had no compunctions about slanting the news to suit his political ends - not only to suit advertisers - while claiming that his editors have editorial independence. It is notable that all but one of the Murdoch newspapers were strongly in favour of the war in Iraq - the exception being in Papua New Guinea! Now that it is easy to compare several news sources his technique works less well. It is notable that he failed to give the Tories an outright majority in the UK. Had he done so I'm pretty sure it would have been curtains for the BBC. With the Libdems holding a balance of power that's less likely to happen but I've no doubt he'll try. On the other hand the Times Crossword is be best I know! Sad that it has to be in such a lousy "news" source.
I've already commented on the BBC website about the audio report - but the more complaints the more likely they will take notice. They haven't responded yet on this one - they have on previous though.
This seems to be flogging a dead horse, but my point was not intended as a criticism of the original post - which perhaps was slanted appropriately towards us open source biased nerds who read slashdot. It was intended to point out the BBC's steadfast unwillingness to use terms like "open source" or "linux" in the context of OPLC. As I said, in the audio report they managed to squeeze in a mention of only one operating system: the cut down version Windows - which had nothing to do with OPLC.
Nor is the BBC saying anything about Linux or open source as far as I can see. They had an audio report on the OLPC a few weeks ago in the BBC World Service program "Digital Planet". That didn't mention anything about the operating system - hardware support for Linux - or BIOS, but they did say that Microsoft were shipping a "cut down version of Windows". Towards the end of that program they reported that some readers had complained about pro-MS bias in previous editions. They dismissed this complaint of course.