What he said
James Murdoch's attack on BBC is specious and out of date: Will Hutton.
Murdoch's economics is out of date, preceding both the lessons we have learned about free markets from the financial crash and the latest thinking about what is good and bad about the market mechanism. Markets are prey to group think. They need public agencies and regulators to save us from gross mistakes, and, paradoxically, to protect the pluralism that the market process extinguishes. It is true that great innovative advances, from the printing press to the internet, were helped by many "plural" hands. Unfortunately for the Murdoch thesis, some of those hands – whether protestant German princes in the 15th century or the Pentagon's support of the internet – were public. There is, and always has been, an interdependence between private and public.Murdoch's political philosophy is also ancient, locked in a cold war time warp. The BBC is not a Soviet-style unaccountable state-sponsored broadcaster; it is an independent, self-governing public corporation with a constitutional remit to serve the public interest and the citizen. Public, "publicness" and citizenship are not concepts with which the Murdochs – a clan where genes mean preferment and citizenship obligations are for little people – are comfortable.
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