An almost tangible atmosphere of anticlimax seemed to permeate this morning's Today programme (BBC Radio 4). The news bulletins told us next to nothing about yesterday's proceedings in the committee rooms of Parliament. It was almost as though all the Today team knew about was what they'd seen on the Sky News headlines.
You may think that this was because the Murdochs had cleverly said nothing beyond what they had determined to say and that, in consequence, the Today editors had decided that there was nothing to report that suited their agenda except, of course, that Rupert Murdoch is senile. I could not possibly comment. Well, yes, I could, actually, but you knew that.
Today's focus was mostly on the alleged frailty of Rupert and James's verbosity, with a brief look-in for 'a pie-chucker' who, although named, was not described as the soi-disant anarchist-exhibitionist founder of UK Uncut.
The 08:10 interview ('unmissable in the Westminster village') was with Trevor Kavanagh, the veteran political columnist at News Corp. It will have given no comfort to our elected representatives or to the BBC but will have caused gasping, rib-holding hilarity in the nation's board rooms newsrooms. In matter-of-fact tones, he explained that Rupert Murdoch's enemies would be most unwise to mistake the old boy's taciturnity for senility because it's a familiar tactic to anyone who knows him, being the life-long mannerism of a brilliant man whose razor sharp brain is undiminished at the age of 80. 'Beware those long pauses,' cautioned Kavanagh, 'because that's when he's thinking most clearly and planning his responses extremely carefully. He's still in total command of a vast world-wide business with 200 newspapers including a small loss-making newspaper business in this country of which the NOTW is about 1 per cent. Everything he said yesterday would seem perfectly reasonable to anyone who understands business.' None of this made the slightest impression on the interviewer, young Sarah Montague.
Nor did it cut any ice with the omniscient Robert 'I can Reveal' Peston when he was wheeled on to say that the old man's on his way out (hence the share price rise: shareholder relief) because his obvious senility has doomed him in the eyes of most shareholders. We'll see.
Nor did it percolate into the predictable turn of veteran Guardianista 'wit', Simon Hoggart, who repeated all the jokes made yesterday on Twitter by Mirror hacks and 15 year old UK Uncutters. Hoggart's lifelong anti-Murdochery is so familiar that I was delivering his jokes faster than he was. Shame, really. I worry that even his mates at the BBC will think poor old Simon's past it.
Kavanagh kept a straight face as he patiently gave young Sarah a short lesson on how the world works outside the BBC, specifically the world of international business and in particular proper media organisations. He explained that the Murdochs' responses yesterday struck him as unremarkable and entirely reasonable, and would have seemed so to anyone who knows about the real world, as opposed to, for example, most of the unworldly, inexperienced and ignorant MPs on the committee. Those are my adjectives, by the way; Kavanagh didn't actually say those words out loud.
Young Sara is, apparently, a trained journalist, yet, when she challenged Kavanagh to say whether he had asked properly searching questions of the people below him at the Sun newspaper, she seemed nonplussed when he replied, the raising of his left eyebrow as audible as his sigh, 'There is no-one below me. I am an Associate Editor.'
Young Sara, the experienced journalist, seemed surprised to learn that being 'Associate Editor', a familiar honorific in all print media, does not involve either executive responsibility or the management of staff but she persisted with her stupid question using different words. Kavanagh patiently replied that he does not even work in the Sun's offices but files his copy from home. Real journalist 1 - BBC 'journalist' 0.
Young Sara went for revenge on her captive Murdoch employee, challenging Kavanagh to agree with those who say that this whole furore is got up by Murdoch's enemies. Kavanagh (yawning, now, I thought) said that Murdoch's commercial competitors were perfectly entitled to go for him but how strange it was that Britain's publicly funded national broadcaster has concentrated its enormous news and current affairs resources almost exclusively on this matter for four full weeks while all but ignoring the world currency system now teetering on the edge of collapse, and the probability that millions are about to die in the north African famine, not to mention the €400 billion bill* about to arrive on people's doorsteps to shore up the Euro. Young Sara lost patience at this point, cutting Kavanagh off by talking over him. It wasn't going well and one can imagine what she was hearing in her headphones.
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*Later, La Flanders came on for about 90 seconds to inform us that European citizens are angry because the €400 billion 'Save The Euro' invoice should really be delivered to the banksters instead of to their national governments and therefore to them. Someone should introduce the BBC's economic editor to Worstall so that he can explain to her how, just as all public money ultimately comes out of the pockets of the little people (Flanders does seem finally to have grasped that) so do the taxes and penalties paid by wicked banksters. Maybe Peston could have a quiet word at the water cooler.
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