The rage Murdoch wrought

[Commentary] Amid the recent hubbub over the violent and paranoid rhetoric that stems from much of the American right, one name has been conspicuously absent. We've heard a great deal about Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly - the usual suspects. We've heard very little about the man who employs many of them for his financial and political gain: Rupert Murdoch.

Most coverage of Murdoch for the past couple weeks, in fact, suggests a very different story. The Good Rupert has been hard at work with Apple's Steve Jobs developing a digital newspaper, to be called the Daily, for the iPad. The other Murdoch story of recent weeks concerns the attempt of his company, News Corp., to buy Britain's Sky Broadcasting company, and whether the ongoing police investigation into illegal hacking by reporters at one of Murdoch's British papers, News of the World, will make government regulators less inclined to approve the deal. But the deal has raised additional concerns - chiefly, whether combining News Corp. and Sky will give Murdoch too much control over news in the United Kingdom. An Enders Analysis study of Sky's ratings and News Corp. readership concluded that 22 percent of the news that Brits consume would come from the merged conglomerate.

Even if Murdoch had no clearly defined political agenda, that level of concentration would still raise huge questions - about, for instance, such a company's ability to slant news in ways that enhanced its financial prospects, or its market power to exclude certain stories from public scrutiny. The political slanting of news from News Corp. outlets, however, is conscious and constant.