Company offers to sponsor state school scandal!

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The newspaper that employed Jon Hari clearly maintains its standards with this headline:

News Corp offered Gove £2m to build 'free school'

Terrible! Corruption! Set the dogs on him!

Except that this is a gross misrepresentation of the meeting and what was offered:

Rupert Murdoch's News International offered £2m to sponsor an academy in east London close to the company's headquarters at Wapping, it emerged yesterday at the Leveson Inquiry.

So it wasn't a "free school". It was an academy - set up under the legislation that Mr Murdoch's old buddy Tony Blair introduced where businesses were encouraged to 'sponsor' new and existing schools that switched to being academies. Under Blair's rules sponsors were expected to make a financial contribution of at least £2 million (this has now changed and there is no absolute financial requirement). 


So the money wasn't offered to Michael Gove - it was offered to the Department for Education and/or Newham Council. It wasn't for a "free school". And it wasn't done in any underhand or misleading way - just part of the process of recruiting partners to help improve education in England.


People may not like or agree with the policy but it has been around for a while under Labour and Coalition governments. And News International were doing nothing wrong in pursuing the idea of sponsoring an academy.


All-in-all a pretty dreadful piece of reporting!


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What are you looking at?

Once again the world (or rather what the BBC and Guardian choose to call the world) has erupted into a spasm of indignant, righteous screams about "phone hacking". Every has-been politician and forgotten celebrity is hastening to the nearest lawyer claiming they've been "hacked" and that this is a gross interference in their privacy. The media will love it, the celebrities will love it, the BBC will get the chance to be all smug and pompous about Rupert Murdoch and the world's real news stories will get relegated to secondary pages.

It really annoys me that this episode - a sordid chapter in the hideously sordid world of the mass media (and please don't try to tell be that BBC and Guardian journalists haven't been partial to the odd piece of illicitly obtained celebrity or political gossip - of course they have) - has meant we are not looking in the right places, talking about the right things. While the BBC regales us with the evils of Murdoch on every bulletin, we're missing the robbing of savings through inflation, the upheaval in the Maghreb as governments totter before the mob, floods and famine - the real world news.

Our understanding of the world. The task of providing information to the people that the BBC supposedly cares about. This is being sacrificed on the altar of the Corporation's campaign to protect its market share from BSkyB and News International. this isn't about the politics of Westminster, it's about a great corporate battle between these two big players in UK media. I know what I'm looking at.

What are you looking at?

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On-line news - the BBC is the problem not Murdoch

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There has been some debate about News International’s decision to put the new content of The Times behind a pay wall – to make us pay for “quality journalism” as dear old Rupert put it. Most of the views have tended to go something like this:

“It’s not going to work because we’ll get our news on-line from somewhere else. Doesn’t Murdoch realise that times have moved on. Duh!”

Or like this…

“We hate Rupert Murdoch and hope that his initiative fails so we finally get the chance to point our fingers at him, laugh and chant, ‘fail, fail, loser, loser’.”

I don’t know whether or not Murdoch’s decision will work but I’ve a suspicion that those clever online ‘experts’ will be shown up in the fullness of time. After all, journalism – quality or otherwise – has to be paid for somehow. It really is a simple as that and we should be asking how long The Guardian can be bailed out by the Scott Trust, whether the Telegraph’s ‘reader offer’ strategy will bring in the income and how many other newspapers will put their copy behind a pay wall over the next few years.

And then there’s the BBC. At present the BBC’s news is available free on-line (or rather ‘paid by the license fee’ online) and this undoubtedly acts as a malign drag on the development of an effective, sustainable on-line supply of information. So long as the BBC’s journalism is paid for by a poll tax on the populace, making us pay for news content on-line will present a challenge.

Murdoch’s criticisms of the BBC’s market-making activities and cross-subsidising of news on-line through are valid and we should pay more attention to them if we are interested in sustaining a free press. It’s hard not to agree with this from James Murdoch:

“The corporation is incapable of distinguishing between what is good for it, and what is good for the country. Funded by a hypothecated tax, the BBC feels empowered to offer something for everyone, even in areas well served by the market.”

It is the last part of Murdoch’s observation that should exercise us when thinking about on-line news. At present the BBC’s actions are preventing the development of a market by, in effect, forcing competing news providers to continue distributing their on-line content free. Again young Jimmy nailed it:

“Dumping free, state-sponsored news on the market makes it incredibly difficult for journalism to flourish on the Internet. Yet it is essential for the future of independent journalism that a fair price can be charged for news to people who value it. We seem to have decided to let independence and plurality wither. To let the BBC throttle the news market, and get bigger to compensate."

I hope The Times succeeds behind its paywall – it certainly deserves to for have the bravery to say that the emperor has no clothes and that if we want good journalism we have to pay for it.

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