On Television

...The Observer then observed the irony that Murdoch's papers, especially the New York Post and the Sunday Times, are perhaps the last English-language practitioners of old-fashioned Red-baiting...

...It was like...

...This does not make them evil...

...The speaker of the evening was the Speaker...

...By contrast, until NBC withdrew its complaint before the FCC, its arguments and public posture were redolent of the highest concerns for the national welfare and the future of the medium...

...In addition, he told reporters they were kept out for two reasons...

...But the evidence is all around us that institutions organized to make a profit find precious little of it in honest reporting...

...The chief of the FCC's Mass Media Bureau, the official to whom this information would have been disclosed, says he was not made aware of it...

...On Television TURNING KNOWLEDGE INTO PROFIT BY REUVEN FRANK LAST JANUARY 26, a Chinese-made rocket carrying an American-made communications satellite smoothly completed its predawn liftoff from the People's Liberation Army rocket-launching site at Xichang, deep inside South China's mountainous interior...

...Or China to Rupert Murdoch...

...Minority Leader John D. Dingell of Michigan, the former chairman of the committee, objected to the closed-door meetings: Speaker Gingrich defended them as a "legitimate act of inquiry...

...There are those who contend that the foreign ownership rule is outmoded, that in economic terms it is nonsense...

...In response, Murdoch acknowledged the percentage, but insisted that it had been made clear to the FCC from the outset...

...No one has forgotten that it was Rupert Murdoch who brought a coating of cheap sensationalism to the storied London Sunday Times, despite promises to the contrary when he took it over...

...Except to acknowledge that an investigation was going on...

...The NAACP's position was, and continues to be, that such competition from overseas makes the possibility of minority ownership of television stations even more difficult than it already is...

...All accounts noted that NBC had at the same time reached an agreement with Murdoch to distribute two cable services it owns on his Hong Kong based star satellite...

...The star satellite, bought by Murdoch not quite two years ago, transmits to cable services and the growing number of home receiving dishes from Turkey to the Pacific and the Siberian border to Indonesia—a potential audience of two-thirds of the globe's population...

...But their support had less to do with the matter of falsifying official documents than with their exceedingly low opinion of today's most powerful international media baron...

...The FCC had long wanted to dilute what it saw as the undue power of the three big networks...

...Recently, the chief executive officers of 47 broadcast, cable, satellite, telephone, and computer companies—leaders in the whole field vaguely called "communications"—met for two days behind closed doors with the Republican members of the House Commerce Committee...

...Fifty-one seconds later the Long March 2E rocket blew up and scattered debris over the countryside...

...We like to pretend that in the long run it could be, just as we like to think that free markets must lead to free governments and democratic institutions...

...their shareholders, after all, bought their shares in the expectation of financial gain...

...One is CNBC, its business channel...

...IT IS DAILY becoming more obvious that the biggest threat to a free press and the circulation of ideas is the steady absorption of newspapers, television networks and other vehicles of information into enormous corporations that know how to turn knowledge into profit—but are not equally committed to inquiry or debate or to the First Amendment...

...Rupert Murdoch was there, as were Ted Turner of CNN, Robert Wright, president of NBC, and the presidents of ABC and CBS...

...Indeed, it bent many rules to make that possible...

...Hitching a ride on star, industry analysts agree, will at the very least make CNBC the prime television business information channel in the world...

...The program was not carried by the BBC World Service, but Murdoch threw it off star anyway...

...Whether he did this on his own or at the request of the Chinese officials he was anxious toplease, we probably will never know...

...China's leadership was unhappy with the BBC itself for several reasons—among them a biographical treatment of Mao Zedong that, although generally flattering, mentioned in passing his reported affinity for very young girls...

...But the money for the purchase, it turns out, came from Murdoch's Australian company...

...The trouble is that a free press is not necessarily an enhancer of the bottom line...

...People and Fortune...

...One was to prevent the Japanese and Europeans from listening in as the Congressmen learned how the U.S...

...At the conclusion of the meetings there was a closed-door dinner hosted by the American Heritage Foundation, usually described as a "Right-wing think tank...

...Now he is apparently trying to do in London's quality daily, the Independent, by aggressively cutting the price of his own sheets in a way it may well be unable to match...

...Gerald Levin, CEO of Time Warner, asked what media companies like his could do to make coverage more "fair...

...His complaints of brutal treatment from the press seem to have been sympathetically received" by the current and future communications proprietors, it informed the public...

...Get your children to behave,'" the staffer said...

...Told he would have to convert to Catholicism before ascending the throne of France, the Protestant Prince Henri of Navarre famously remarked that "Paris is worth a mass...

...What is Asia worth to NBC...

...FCC rules and other Federal regulations limit this to less than 25 per cent...

...The informal sessions were an early step in the committee's consideration of a new, eagerly awaited Telecommunications Act...

...So it looked kindly on Murdoch when in 1985 he proposed to buy Metromedia, a group of TV stations mainly based in large cities, for use as the nucleus of a fourth network...

...Well, it might be good business...

...Had it reached orbit, CNBC and the Asian version of SuperChannel would have been carried by the Hughes satellite...

...It took some doing for reporters hovering outside—ignored by their bosses as they strolled in to dine—to find out what Gingrich said...

...The second was because "these companies will tell you if they were to say on the record in front of the press what they honestly believe, they feel that the regulatory agencies would single them out and punish them...

...Following his remarks, Gingrich submitted to questions...

...When his business interests seemed threatened by the accusations before the FCC, for example, Murdoch thought it worth his while to visit with House Speaker Newt Gingrich...

...When that literally blew up, says the Journal story, "NBC again approached News Corp., only to be told that no deal was possible as long as the regulatory challenge was continuing...

...Some senior NBC executives," reported the New York Times, "said the decision to back away from pursuing these issues [raised with the FCC] to their conclusion left a bad taste, because the network's integrity could now be challenged by critics who could argue that NBC had abandoned the principles that drove its arguments as soon as Mr...

...A leading trade newspaper described it as a "startling about-face...

...Murdoch offered an attractive business deal...

...could keep its competitive edge in communications...

...Time Warner owns Warner Brothers movies and television, the present or about-to-become largest cable system in the United States, and magazines such as Time...

...Similarly, the alluring prospect of a billion Chinese watching commercials beamed down from his satellite may help explain why a Murdoch publishing house, Basic Books, decided to brighten the spring season with a turgid, cliche-ridden biography of Deng Xiaoping by the Chinese leader's daughter...

...It was the second Long March 2E to explode more than a minute before a Hughes Apstar-2 was supposed to be thrust into orbit, but the first rocket anywhere known to have claimed civilian lives...

...Many industry executives, though, are said to have believed from day one that whatever the truth, for the FCC the overriding issue was establishing a fourth network...

...According to the Wall Street Journal, some time during 1994 NBC approached Murdoch's company, News Corporation, to place CNBC and Super-Channel on star, but those talks were broken off when its petitions were filed with the FCC...

...Large flaming chunks landed in a peasant village four miles away, killing six people and injuring 23...

...There can be no doubt, however, about his skillful maneuvering...

...the other is Super-Channel, devoted to news and until now only available in Europe...

...The most complete account, quoting "people who attended," appeared in the Washington Post...

...Also dropped was the charge that Murdoch had from the beginning deceived the FCC by obscuring the extent of Fox' foreign— that is, Australian—ownership...

...Even habitual critics of the major network corporations were rooting for NBC in this case...

...Murdoch insists that the source of his finances was fully revealed at the time...

...Murdoch, for his part, dropped his Australian citizenship and became an American citizen to get around the foreign ownership restriction...

...The New York Times account called NBC's decision to withdraw its complaint "a sharp reversal...

...The reproaches against Murdoch go on...

...Hughes would not comment...

...Three weeks after the explosion, in Washington, D.C., the National Broadcasting Company agreed to withdraw its strenuous legal objections before the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) against the expansion of Rupert Murdoch's Fox television network...

...With the original petitioner, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), NBC had put forward a documented claim that Fox' foreign ownership was in excess of 99 per cent...

...The Chinese newspaper Tu Kumg Pao said the fault lay in the satellite, not in the rocket...

...A Congressional aide told the Washington Post Gingrich answered Levin by advising the assembled CEOs that it was they who were responsible for keeping reporters in line...

...Those shareholders include pension funds, mutual funds and insurance companies that need to fulfill commitments to ordinary people who are not at all rich...

...Pulling the BBC World Service from star, Murdoch has been quoted as saying, was purely "a business decision...

...Committee Chairman Thomas J. Bliley of Virginia said the media were excluded to ensure "honest and informative discussions...

...At the time he bought star, the satellite carried the British Broadcasting Corporation's all news TV service, called simply BBC World Service...

...The New York Observer pointed out that this book, replete with phrases like "running dogs of capitalism," "struggles against imperialism" and "Leftist opportunism," was promoted by Basic Books as "the first insider account" of Deng's life, written with "flair and insight...

...NBC then made arrangements to distribute its two services through Apstar-2...