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Monday, August 29, 2005

Rupert Murdoch, Hu Jintao, and Wen Jiabao

Time details News Corporation’s rocky relationship with the Communist Chinese government. Murdoch, despite his long partisan rap in the West, is a staunch defender of freedom, democracy, and free trade. He once declared in ringing terms how his and others’ global broadcast abilities- namely satellite- would be “an unambiguous threat to totalitarian regimes everywhere.”

Turns out that threat is only imposed when there is no money that stands to be lost. When Murdoch’s freshly-launched satellite network in China, Star TV, broadcast a documentary on Mao, Beijing was infuriated and demanded censorship control. Since then, as Time documents, Murdoch has had a worrisome streak of placating the Communists in Beijing. The article is well worth reading.

Posted on August 29, 2005 12:59 PM. Permalink