EU in Death Throes: Fox’s BSkyB Gets Greenlight from European Union to Create PAY TV GIANT

Have you ever seen such a fucked up disaster as the European Union?  The European Union is in its death throes, drowning in a cesspool of greed and corruption, gasping for its last breath.  Now the ultimate betrayal, they have given Rupert Murdoch unconditional control of the airwaves in the EU, throwing their citizens under the perpetual war for profit bus. 

Whoever controls the media, controls the mind.

Jim Morrison

So on Thursday while Obama was ginning up the fear factor in the U.S. for war on Syria (no, not ISIS, Syria) this headline dated September 11, 2014 escaped the media:   From Variety:  Fox’s BSkyB Gets Greenlight from European Union to Create Pay TV Giant.   I mean really? 

Excerpt:

LONDON — U.K. satcaster BSkyB has cleared the first of the hurdles as it seeks to create a pan-European pay TV giant.

On Thursday, the company said it had received unconditional clearance from the European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, and the Austrian Federal Competition Authority for its acquisition of Sky Italia and at least 57% of Sky Deutschland.

What does it mean when they say, “unconditional clearance?”  If anyone reading this knows, please let me know. 

BSkyB announced the deal in July to take control of its German and Italian sister companies. 21st Century Fox owns a 39% stake in BSkyB, 100% of Sky Italia and 57% of Sky Deutschland. The proposed deal will see BSkyB acquire Fox’s stakes in Sky Italia and Sky Deutschland. It also will bid for the remaining Sky Deutschland shares.

The merged entity, which some observers are calling Sky Europe, will have 20 MILLION PAY TV SUBSCRIBERS IN THE U.K., IRELAND, ITALY, GERMANY AND AUSTRIA. POTENTIALLY, SKY EUROPE WILL BE ABLE TO REACH UP TO 97 MILLION HOUSEHOLDS.

Well, caaaaching!!  BSkyB that sounds familiar.  Hmmm, what’s this from New York Times. 

Excerpt:

Hack Attack

Now comes Nick Davies, an award-winning special correspondent for The Guardian, with “Hack Attack: The Inside Story of How the Truth Caught Up With Rupert Murdoch.”

This book, too, is a Guardian-centric tale: in this case, about the pivotal role the newspaper played in exposing the British phone-hacking scandal that forced the closure of Mr. Murdoch’s tabloid The News of the World, and cast an unforgiving light on the incestuous ties among the country’s most powerful media conglomerate, the police and the political elite…

Lawyers who won court orders forcing the disclosure of information that underpinned much of The Guardian’s early reporting on The News of the World’s widespread use of voice mail interception to land front-page “splashes” are supporting characters in this telling.

So, too, is Tom Watson, a member of Parliament whose relentless inquiries helped keep the story alive. For their trouble, they found themselves under surveillance, their private lives laid bare in reports commissioned by the News of the World’s parent company, News International. 

The whistle-blower Sean Hoare risked jail when he became the first former News of the World reporter to go on the record to say that phone hacking was endemic in the newsroom and encouraged by top editors.

Murdoch’s empire owns Cameron and most of the British Parliament and if you investigate Murdoch’s criminality, you will be sorry he’ll bring down the weight of the British Parliament and justice system on you.  From the Daily Mail:

Excerpt:

Former Downing Street spin doctor Andy Coulson stood to profit from Rupert Murdoch's BSkyB takeover through shares he held in News Corporation, it had been claimed.

Mr. Coulson is understood to have been awarded the stock in the U.S. Company when he resigned as News of the World editor in 2007 over phone hacking claims.

Excuse me, what’s that?  Coulson was awarded stock in the U.S. Company when he resigned over phone hacking claims?

He went on to become Downing Street Communications Director with close links to Mr. Cameron, who would later become the Prime Minister overseeing the deal. Mr. Cameron has previously admitted that he and Mr. Coulson were 'close friends'.

Yep, failing up that’s the American way, you are alleged to have committed a crime and now you have a cushy job as “Downing Street Communications Director” because of your close ties to the next Prime Minister, Cameron.  How much you want to bet that Cameron’s position was a sure thing and Murdoch’s empire would see to it.  Did Murdoch have anything to do with the “sexed up” justification for war produced by Britain?

The revelation could cause further damage to Mr. Cameron as Mr. Coulson prepares to give evidence to the Leveson Inquiry this Thursday. Former News International boss Rebekah Brooks will give evidence on Friday…

As a special advisor and civil servant Mr. Coulson would had to have declared the holdings when he joined Downing Street in 2010.

In the run-up to the anticipated acquisition of BSkyB the share price of News Corp soared to almost $19.

But after it emerged that News of the World staff had hacked the phone of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler the share price plummeted to around $14 - wiping tens of millions of dollars off the value of the firm.

Wow, that’s pretty horrible, I would think Cameron would be quaking in his boots.

The revelation came as it emerged that David Cameron’s aides will pore over his text messages to Mrs. Brooks this week amid fears he will be embarrassed by fresh details about his links to the Murdoch empire.

I’m sure they’ll save those text messages for the investigators.

The Prime Minister, with his lawyers and special advisers, have set up a unit to study the texts to the former News of the World editor to search for ‘landmines’.

No 10 is braced for a difficult week as Mrs. Brooks and Mr. Coulson will both be giving evidence to Lord Justice Leveson’s inquiry into press standards.

It has been claimed that Mr. Cameron was so close to Mrs. Brooks that he texted her up to a dozen times a day – and that Mrs. Brooks has kept all the communications.

Prime Minister must be a pretty cushy job that he has all that time on his hands for sexting with Mrs. Brooks.

Mr. Cameron and Mrs. Brooks are said to sign-off some of their text messages to intimate friends with the friendly ‘x’ preferred by many habitual phone texters.

If they did so in messages to each other, it could add to the Government’s growing discomfort over the Leveson disclosures.

Who paid for the Prime Minister’s lawyers to scrub “landmine” texts to Cameron from News of the World editor?

It has been claimed that Mr. Cameron was so close to Mrs. Brooks that he texted her up to a dozen times a day – and that Mrs. Brooks has kept all the communications…

Mrs. Brooks is expected to be asked about her relations with politicians and senior police officers when she appears before Lord Leveson on Friday.

She could also be pressed over Mr. Cameron’s admission that he had ridden a horse loaned to Mrs. Brooks by the Metropolitan Police.

Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt is facing questions about the nature of his relationship with the Murdoch Empire

Thick as thieves.  Is there any way these criminals will be brought to justice?

Mr. Cameron and seven other Cabinet Ministers will be given advance sight of witness statements from Mrs. Brooks and Mr. Coulson after successfully winning ‘core participant’ status at an emergency hearing on Friday…

So Cameron and the cabinet ministers get advance copies of the testimony of Brooks and Coulson.

The ministers are David Cameron, Nick Clegg, Vince Cable, Jeremy Hunt, Michael Gove, Theresa May, Ken Clarke and George Osborne.

This latest worry for the Prime Minister comes hot on the heels of the Jeremy Hunt scandal.

According to The Independent on Sunday, David Cameron agreed to a meeting with one of Rupert Murdoch' senior executives, that was arranged by the lobbyist now at the centre of the scandal.

Jeremy Hunt's culture secretary has already had to step down over emails sent from the same senior executive Frederic Michel about a BSkyB contract he was overseeing at the time.

Mr. Michel set up the meet in 2009 between the Prime Minister and Jose Maria Aznar, the former Prime Minister of Spain, and a member of New Corporation's board.

Man, those Murdoch tentacles stretch all over the EU.  In Spain ex-Prime Minister, Jose Maria Aznar is a member of News Corporation’s board. 

His involvement in the meeting - that came just weeks after The Sun switched its support from Labour to Conservatives - brings into doubts claims by Mr. Hunt and that Prime Minister that he is just a lobbyist.

The meeting further demonstrates the Prime Minister’s close relationship with the Murdoch’s and members of their organisations.

But a Number 10 spokesman told the newspaper: 'All contact with News International and News Corp has been declared in the correct way. The Prime Minister has had no inappropriate discussions about the BSkyB bid either as Prime Minister or before.'

Cameron is up to his ears in the Murdoch Empire and now he has steered the EU to expand that empire across the European Union to ensure the propaganda message to scare people into submission.  The latest, immediate danger the EU and the Murdoch are trying to sell is ISIS. Scotland stay with UK or ISIS will get you.  America ISIS is coming for you, bomb, bomb, bomb Syria.   FromBusiness Insider:

August 29^th, 2014

UK Raises Terror Threat Level To 'Severe' — US Has No Plans To Do The Same

Britain's government has raised the country's terror threat level to "severe," Home Secretary Theresa May said on Friday.

It's the second highest of five potential threat levels. According to the U.K. government, it means an attack is "highly likely." But there is no intelligence to suggest an attack is imminent.

May said the threat level was raised because of the risk from the deteriorating situation in Iraq and Syria, where extremist militants from the group calling itself the Islamic State (also ISIS or ISIL). May said, however, that there was no specific threat to Britain that caused the raise in the terror level. This is the first time Britain's terror threat level has been at "severe" since 2011.

Of course there’s no intelligence to even suggest that such an attack is imminent, it’s pure bullshit. These people are lunatics.  But guess what, once Fox is on every channel in the European Union… well, I’ll let you finish that. 

So as of August 29^th when Cameron raised the terrorist threat level in Britain due to ISIS, the U.S. had no intention of raising the threat level.  What happened between August 29 and September 11, 2014?  FromThe Intercept:  

NEWS ORGANIZATIONS FINALLY REALIZE OBAMA’S WAR PLAN IS A HOT MESS

President Obama’s plan to “degrade and destroy” the Islamic State counts on pretty much everything going right in a region of the world where pretty much anything the U.S. does always goes wrong.

Our newspapers of record today finally remembered it’s their job to point stuff like that out.

The New York Times, in particular, calls bullshit this morning — albeit without breaking from the classic detached Timesian tonelessness…

I love that term “Timesian Tonelessness”, I think I’ll use it.

Mark Mazzetti, Eric Schmitt and Mark Landler (with contributions from Matt Apuzzo and James Risen) start by pointing out the essential but often overlooked fact that “American intelligence agencies have concluded that [the Islamic State] poses no immediate threat to the United States.”

And then, with the cover of “some officials and terrorism experts,” they share a devastating analysis of all the coverage that has come before:

Some officials and terrorism experts believe that the actual danger posed by ISIS has been distorted in hours of television punditry and alarmist statements by politicians, and that there has been little substantive public debate about the unintended consequences of expanding American military action in the Middle East.

How much you want to bet they’re talking about Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News and the politicians in the U.S. Murdoch owns.

You’ve got to love these quotes:

Daniel Benjamin, who served as the State Department’s top counterterrorism adviser during Mr. Obama’s first term, said the public discussion about the ISIS threat has been a “farce,” with “members of the cabinet and top military officers all over the place describing the threat in lurid terms that are not justified.”

Yep, the ISIS threat justifying the U.S. bombing Assad in Syria is just a Murdoch myth.

“It’s hard to imagine a better indication of the ability of elected officials and TV talking heads to spin the public into a panic, with claims that the nation is honeycombed with sleeper cells, that operatives are streaming across the border into Texas or that the group will soon be spraying Ebola virus on mass transit systems — all on the basis of no corroborated information,” said Mr. Benjamin, who is now a scholar at Dartmouth College…

Looks like Obama and Cameron are looking to recreate the Cheney floor plan for lying your people into war using Murdoch’s media.  Remember in the lead up to the Iraq War, Cheney’s office would leak exclusive, unsubstantiated, anonymously sourced information to Judith Miller of the New York Times regarding Saddam’s “nuclear weapons.”  Then on Sunday talk shows Cheney would cite Judith Miller’s column in the New York Times as proof that Saddam had nuclear weapons.  From Salon May 5, 2004:

Excerpt:

When the full history of the Iraq war is written, one of its most scandalous chapters will be about how American journalists, in particular those at the New York Times, so easily allowed themselves to be manipulated by both dubious sources and untrustworthy White House officials into running stories that misled the nation about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. The Times finally acknowledged its grave errors in an extraordinary and lengthy editors’ note published Wednesday. The editors wrote:

“We have found … instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been … In some cases, the information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged. Looking back, we wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims as new evidence emerged — or failed to emerge … We consider the story of Iraq’s weapons, and of the pattern of misinformation, to be unfinished business. And we fully intend to continue aggressive reporting aimed at setting the record straight.”…

Aggressively reporting or aggressively transcribing government lies.

The reporter on many of the flawed stories at issue was Judith Miller, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and authority on the Middle East. The Times, insisting that the problem did not lie with any individual journalist, did not mention her name. The paper was presumably trying to take the high road by defending its reporter, but the omission seems peculiar. 

While her editors must share a large portion of the blame, the pieces ran under Miller’s byline. It was Miller who clearly placed far too much credence in unreliable sources, and then credulously used dubious administration officials to confirm what she was told.

That’s right, Miller was enthralled with Chalabi who was known in intelligence circles as an unreliable drunk.  Chalabi and “Curveball” in their palatial digs, were feeding Miller the pap she sought that solidified her own biased opinions formed by right-wingers like Cheney and his lap dog Scooter Libby.

And of all Miller’s unreliable sources, the most unreliable was Ahmed Chalabi — whose little neocon-funded kingdom came crashing down last week when Iraqi forces smashed down his door after U.S. officials feared he was sending secrets to Iran.

Ha, ha, his neocon-funded kingdom.  And where do you think the neocons got the money to fund his kingdom?  U.S. taxpayer funds, funneled to neocon think tanks through the State Department.

And don’t forget, when Cheney traveled he insisted all TV channels be on Fox News.  Murdoch owns almost all the stations and newspapers in the U.S. and Fox viewers have consistently been the most misinformed sector of our population.  And guess what, Obama has announced he’s going to war with ISIS after the U.S. and U.K. have recognized that ISIS is not a threat to America or Britain.  See what a Murdoch Media can do for warmongers?

According to Alternet:  

Excerpt:

In June of last year, Jon Stewart went on air with Fox News’ Chris Wallace and started a major media controversy over the channel’s misinforming of its viewers. “Who are the most consistently misinformed media viewers?” Stewart asked Wallace. “The most consistently misinformed? Fox, Fox viewers, consistently, every poll.”…

Stewart’s statement was factually accurate, as we’ll see. The next day, however, the fact-checking site PolitiFact weighed in and rated it “false.” In claiming to check Stewart’s “facts,” PolitiFact ironically committed a serious error—and later, doubly ironically, failed to correct it. How’s that for the power of fact checking?

There probably is a small group of media consumers out there somewhere in the world who are more misinformed, overall, than Fox News viewers. But if you only consider mainstream U.S. television news outlets with major audiences (e.g., numbering in the millions), it really is true that Fox viewers are the most misled based on all the available evidence—especially in areas of political controversy.

Political controversy a problem for Cameron, Murdoch’s Fox News to the rescue.

Iraq War

In 2003, a  survey by the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) at the University of Maryland found widespread public misperceptions about the Iraq war. For instance, many Americans believed the U.S. had evidence that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had been collaborating in some way with Al Qaeda, or was involved in the 9-11 attacks; many also believed that the much touted “weapons of mass destruction” had been found in the country after the U.S. invasion, when they hadn’t.

But not everyone was equally misinformed: “The extent of Americans’ misperceptions vary significantly depending on their source of news,” PIPA reported. “Those who receive most of their news from Fox News are more likely than average to have misperceptions.” 

For instance, 80 percent of Fox viewers held at least one of three Iraq-related misperceptions, more than a variety of other types of news consumers, and especially NPR and PBS users. Most strikingly, Fox watchers who paid more attention to the channel were more likely to be misled.

I know, let’s see how successful the media is in whipping up terror in the U.S.  From FireDogLake:

            Excerpt:

Secretary Hagel Claims ISIS Is ‘Threat To Every Interest We Have’, ‘Beyond Anything We’ve Seen’

Sounds like someone wants more war.  Ooooh, a threat to every interest we have, beyond anything we’ve seen.  Scary.  You know what the biggest, scariest threat?  Homelessness, Hunger, Ignorance, joblessness, are they a threat to that?

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel attempted to terrorize the American people Thursday by claiming ISIS was a threat to every interest the US has and “beyond anything we’ve seen.” The dire statements have, not surprisingly, led many observers to think the Obama Administration is preparing a more involved military campaign against ISIS.

Though not-so-subtly skeptical of the Syrian bombing campaign against the Assad regime, the Pentagon now appears to be on board with launching attacks in Syria if they target ISIS with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey saying ISIS would be a threat as long as they had safe zones in Syria and that “This is an organization that has an apocalyptic, end-of- days strategic vision and which will eventually have to be defeated.” General Dempsey went on to call the Syrian-Iraq border “essentially non-existent.”

So how is Murdoch’s Fox News doing in ginning up terror in the U.S.?  How about a “Fox News Poll” to gauge the success of Fox News in selling a war weary nation on more more?

There’s an avalanche of bad news for the Obama administration in the latest Fox News Poll on foreign policy.

American voters feel:

- Barack Obama is weak and indecisive.

- The U.S. is less respected since Obama became president.

- The U.S. should do more to stop the Islamic extremist group ISIS.

- Obama isn’t willing to do what it takes to defeat ISIS.

- ISIS will try to attack the U.S. soon.

- Embarrassed about Obama not having a strategy for dealing with ISIS.

- Obama will try to “manage” ISIS rather than “defeat” it.

The poll also finds:

- For the first time, more voters than not feel the U.S. is less safe today than before 9/11.

- Obama’s job approval is at record lows on Syria, Iraq and terrorism. (Obama’s overall job approval matches his all-time low.)

- Most would tell Obama to kill extremists beheading Americans now, rather than caution him against overreacting.

The new poll was released Wednesday, hours before President Obama’s prime-time address to the nation about ISIS.

So, I’d like to say to the people of America and the World “Grow Up” the boogey men are in clear view, and they are not ISIS, they are not in Russia, they are not in Syria, they are not in Iraq and they are not in Gaza. 

So while Murdoch’s media has the people of America lusting for revenge against the Christian killing, apocalypse end-of-days visioning terrorist du jour the EU just handed over the world’s media to Rupert Murdoch’s BSkyB Fox News.

In today’s media a headline like Fox’s BSkyB Gets Greenlight from European Union to Create PAY TV GIANT doesn’t merit a mention, just a yawn.

By Patricia Baeten