Media
It’s Time, Rupert
IN THE blue corner, there’s ‘Dave Snooty’ as Private Eye depicts the British Prime Minister; a privileged old Etonian, an embodiment of the elite. He’s a royalist, the glorified PR schmoozer with little actual qualification except a profound sense of entitlement. In the other, more Thatcherite, corner, there’s Rupert Murdoch; … read more >>
Murdoch: All The Truth That Fits
AFTER swearing on the Bible to begin a two-day interrogation in Court 73 of London’s Royal Courts of Justice last Wednesday, an octogenarian once feared as the world’s most powerful media mogul began taking questions, the first few being perhaps the only ones he answered with clear and indisputable truth. … read more >>
What’s Rupert’s Game in Scotland?
IT WAS a humble tweet, just 52 characters, one of around 300 million made on February 20 — initially little noticed in London but resonating across the bonny Caledonian highlands. “Let Scotland go and compete. Everyone would win,” tweeted one Rupert Murdoch last month. While that’s not how London … read more >>
The Anti Rupert Murdoch
ENGLAND can be confusing, and John Bird isn’t helping. Bird is the Anti-Rupert, a social entrepreneur who in 1991 founded – with Gordon Roddick, who also founded The Body Shop with his late wife, Anita – The Big Issue, that ubiquitous “street newspaper” distributed by homeless people from Brisbane to … read more >>
UK: The Bomb-Chucking Blogger
A DISCUSSION with Paul Staines develops not so much as conventional-journalist-interviews-gadfly-blogger-of-British-politics, as form dictates it should. Rather it mutates into an hour of grilling each other, as perhaps was destined to occur upon meeting the bomb-thrower better known as Guido Fawkes, named after the anarchist who plotted to blow up … read more >>
Why David Cameron is sounding a lot like Hosni Mubarak
CAIRO: David Cameron doesn’t look like Hosni Mubarak — hated scourge of Egyptians. That would be Robert De Niro. Nor does dapper Dave look like Tunisia’s ousted strongman Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, or Syria’s aptly-onomatopoeaic Bashar al-Assad, or any other tyrant from Pyongyang to Minsk. But in making a … read more >>
TV hit blasts Kabul bumblers
KABUL: If, near a decade after 9/11, you’ve been wondering about the billions taxpayers have spent to build a shiny new Afghanistan, spend a few minutes YouTubing the trailer for The Ministry, a TV comic hit that’s sweeping Kabul. Among the first few results, it’s an excoriating little piece of … read more >>
Wendi Deng Murdoch: La Bella Ambiciosa Que Llegò de China
LONDRES: Fue en marzo de 2007 en Pekín, adonde yo había ido a ver un hermoso siheyuan —el patio tradicional de las casas chinas— al lado de la Ciudad Prohibida, cuando por primera vez noté que algo extra- ño pasaba con mis comunicaciones. Podía enviar correos electrónicos, pero no llegaban … read more >>
Behind Wendi Deng’s billion-dollar spike
TIGER WIFE or Trophy wife? Slam-down Sister or caring partner doing a Tammy Wynette? New York socialite or about-to-be global media mogul? When Wendi Deng soared on Tuesday, 42 and pretty-in-pink, left across our TV screens to clobber the idiot cream-pieing her struggling octogenarian billionaire husband, my first thought was … read more >>
Murdoch: No profile
LAST WEEK, as the corruption eating at Rupert Murdoch’s British operation threatened gangrene over the rest of his global empire, I sent an email to Judith Whelan, editor of Good Weekend magazine. This was ‘the media’s Arab Spring,’ I wrote. ‘Nobody is scared any more… no more meetings in the … read more >>
Australia: Our Julian
FOR ONCE, Australia really is punching above its weight in the world My mother, Sage of Winchelsea, Skyped me from her rural Victorian hearth to ask what I was doing in Cairo. ‘Profiling Egypt’s richest man, and writing about Australia’s relevance in the world,’ I told her as the Nile … read more >>
Media mogul makes his mark in a troubled land
Melbourne-raised Saad Mohseni is forging an empire in his homeland of Afghanistan SAAD Mohseni is the Australian media mogul you’ve probably never heard of. His writ runs wide and influentially in a country at the crossroads. At 44, his authority is sought by some of the world’s most powerful people: … read more >>
Afghanistan: Media mogul makes his mark in a troubled land
Melbourne-raised Saad Mohseni is forging an empire in his homeland of Afghanistan SAAD Mohseni is the Australian media mogul you’ve probably never heard of. His writ runs wide and influentially in a country at the crossroads. At 44, his authority is sought by some of the world’s most powerful people: … read more >>