Noted and notorious ex-BBC personality Jonathan Ross is at Comic-Con in San Diego. (Thanks for the tip, Denro!) I’m glad that Ross either never noticed, or didn’t care, that I posted his documentary In Search of Steve Ditko shortly after it aired in September, 2007.
A UK study by the Radio Advertising Bureau says that — surprise! — radio is great. Better than watching TV, and better than surfing the net. Despite the lack of impartiality, I think the study’s conclusion is right. At least for me it is.
As I’ve said many times, I’m a fan of BBC Radio 2, but I also enjoy listening to BBC Radio 4, “a speech station for curious minds.” There are lots of great documentaries and all sorts of dramatizations of great breadth and often depth, like Brian (friend of the blog) Sibley’s adaptation of Mervyn Peake’s strange, densely-packed novel Titus Groan. The production is excellent, with lots of aural treats, but this is not a programme that can be appreciated casually, so I recommend listening on headphones. The BBC doesn’t keep everything online forever, but for an intricate series like Titus Groan one would hope they’ll continue to make it available for some weeks.
I watched the attempted shaving cream “pie attack” on Rupert Murdoch as it happened today, and the same thought crossed my mind that Alec Baldwin tweeted, that it was a staged event… staged for Murdoch’s benefit.
I’m sure we’ll find out who the guy is who rushed Murdoch, and I seriously doubt he’s a Murdoch operative, but isn’t it curious that with all of the security at the hearing he got through? Because Murdoch’s organization has a history of having police on its payroll, there’s at least a semi-reasonable doubt it was a true protest born of outrage.
In fact, that was what today’s hearing was all about. Credibility. Does it seem reasonable that the entire problem of phone hacking and police payoffs was caused by irresponsible underlings, in a corporate structure that’s as top-down as Murdoch’s is?
Murdoch insists he’s the best person to deal with the situation, which he still doesn’t seem to feel is an actual crisis, except for the furor being raised by his media competitors. But he’s failing to see how the situation looks from the outside. If Rupert and his son James are going to claim they aren’t guilty of any wrongdoing, then the only alternative is that they must be incompetent, and they should be removed by the board of directors.
Follow-up: A statement by the confessed shaving cream pie guy is at this link.
Why is everybody picking on Rupert? He’s a lovable old bumbling bear, like Pooh or Paddington, who would never directly do anything to be mean or nasty to anybody, and he just wants to set things right. There’s no corporate-wide rot, there were just some aggressive subordinates who do bad things. They’re the ones to blame, and they’re gone.
That’s the image Rupert Murdoch would like people to believe — that he has a very large company, with lots of good people, and News of the World was only 1% of the organization, and he’s sorry about what happened, and that’s why he shut down the paper and withdrew his bid for BSkyB, so let’s put it behind us and move on.
If there’s one thing I can’t believe is in doubt, it’s that Murdoch’s corporation is run exactly the way he wants, and it has the culture and tone that he has set. It’s laughable when a tough, winner-take-all CEO like Murdoch claims no knowledge of major events and embedded business practices. Ken Lay did that when the Enron house of cards fell. Murdoch has a viable, financially successful media empire, and he hasn’t defrauded investors, but if Murdoch really didn’t know the particulars of what appears to be institutional corruption, it was willful ignorance. “Should we tell the chairman?” “No, the old man doesn’t want to know about this.”
Follow-up: Moments after I published this post, James Murdoch was asked if he knew the term “willful blindness,” and the name Ken Lay was used in the reference.
There’s a report that MSNBC might give Al Sharpton his own show. Al Sharpton?? I wrote him off as having no credibility as soon as the truth of the Tawana Brawley incident was revealed. If Sharpton’s brought on board I will stop watching MSNBC. Since Keith Olbermann started at the tiny Current cable network I’ve been jumping between him and Lawrence O’Donnell, so it will be bye-bye O’Donnell.
The 4th of July parade in Saugerties, NY featured grand marshall Joe Sinnott. Joe served in WWII, enlisting in the Navy after his brother Jack was killed in France.
Joe is 84, and take a look at his perfect-as-ever finished ink art over Alex Saviuk’s pencils for yesterday’s Spider-Man comic strip. Joe has said that he thinks he hit his peak about 50 years ago, and he’s just stayed there. It’s no brag, it’s just fact!
Here’s an example of Joe’s supremely masterful and clean inking over Jack Kirby’s pencils for Fantastic Four #63, in 1967 (borrowed from Rob Steibel’s Kirby Dynamics blog). The notes in the margins were written by Jack, and those notes get into the extremely contentious subject, that’s currently being litigated, of who created the characters of the Marvel Comics universe.
