Saturday 5 March 2011

Free Cable

Polly Toynbee uses her column in today's Guardian to call on Vince Cable to resign from the Cabinet in order to fight from the backbenches Rupert Murdoch's acquisition of the rest of BSkyB. But Cable would be ideal as the new Chairman of Sky News, with the other independent national directors elected by and from among Sky subscribers, each of whom would vote for one candidate, with the requisite number elected at the end.

Who would they be? Well, we know who they would not be. Based on an unpublishable comment on this blog, then with the sort of person whom Murdoch has leaping into action in his defence against little old me, it is no wonder that he is already subject to a regime of independent national directors elsewhere, which present events provide a golden opportunity to strengthen very considerably. There is no such babysitting of the man who owns four national newspapers and a terrestrial television station. But a mere pornographer does not keep anything like such insalubrious company...

8 comments:

  1. Vote for David Lindsay. The Sky's the limit.

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  2. The Sky subscription at this address is not in my name. And in any case, I can think of several vastly better-qualified candidates.

    Who are the INDs at The Times and the Sunday Times, by the way? I can think of several for them, too.

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  3. Old Dunelm Yank5 March 2011 at 18:16

    And which British PM made him have his existing INDs? They might not have been too effective a lot of the time, but oh for anyone in America who would stand up to him even to the extent of requiring anything like INDs to exist in the first place.

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  4. Indeed. Those leaping to his defence on certain websites, or in the persons of certain of his employees, should take it up with Margaret Thatcher.

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  5. Lunchtime O'Booze5 March 2011 at 18:32

    You can get Sky News on Freeview, so I am not sure about restricting the franchise to Sky subscribers although I admit to having no better idea.

    But when it comes to people who could have done sterling service on Independent National Directors both there and on the Times/Sunday Times, so many are now dead. Michael Wharton, Bron Waugh, Paul Foot, Alan Watkins, George Gale, the list goes on, but who is there now?

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  6. Oh, I can think of a few. Not that I am going to name them on here, of course. But I can think of them.

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  7. Northern & Shell5 March 2011 at 20:16

    You love it, don't you? A US citizen who gives the common people what they want while also daring to own the Times, so he gets to be treated worse than a porn baron who can own as many papers and stations as he likes so long as nobody buys or watches them.

    Now you want a man who says that he is "at war with Murdoch" to chair a Sky News board full of old Fleet Street's finest Old Rightists and Old Lefties, the second as much part of the Establishment as the first.

    Anyone who wants to know the sort of people David wants as directors of Sky News needs to look no further than his blog roll. After all, both of those cranky, fogeyish tribes are always complaining that they cannot get onto the BBC, so they might as well be given the run of Sky News instead?

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  8. Richard Desmond does not stoop to employing Olver Kamm et al.

    As for the person in your second paragraph, David, he needs a smack. No pun intended.

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