By John Ballard
The possible roots of the Arthurian character Morgan Le Fay therefore run deep into early British mythology and can be traced across several hundred years up to her final act as one of the three women who transported the fatally wounded King Arthur in a barge to the Isle of Avalon to be healed (outcome unrecorded). A speculative summary, based on Welsh and other Arthurian legend, suggest an identification with Modron and also with the river goddess Matrona, possibly derived from the Irish goddess Morrigan. Given the superstitious Christian attitude to supernatural women in the medieval era, the more she is humanised, the more the name Morgan Le Fay descends into an easy literary metaphor for devious, sometimes evil mischief.
Nonetheless the much-maligned Morgan Le Fay never becomes purely evil. Her attractive qualities remain - a healer, she is associated with art and culture, she is sexy, and in the end is worthy of redemption.
Timothy Garten Ash's reflections on the Murdoch affair are presented in British prose as satisfying as any good brandy.
Read slow enough to enjoy the hidden poetry.
But what does it all mean? �A kind of British Spring is under way,� writes the media columnist David Carr in the New York Times. �Democracy, aided by sunlight, has broken out in Britain.� Hyperbole, of course, but he has a point.
I'd put it like this: The Murdoch debacle reveals a disease that has been slowly clogging up the heart of the British state for the last 30 years. This is the heart attack that warns you that you are sick, but also gives you the chance to emerge healthier than you were before.
The root cause of this British disease has been overmighty, ruthless, out-of- control media power; its main symptom has been fear.
To talk of a British Spring, by analogy with the Arab Spring, is obviously poetic exaggeration. Compared to most other places in the world, Britain is a free country. In many ways, it is a better one now than it was when Murdoch bought The Times (of London, as American newspapers feel it necessary to add) in 1981. But at the apex of British public life, there have been men and women walking around with small icicles of fear in their hearts, and fear is inimical to freedom.
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This week we learned that Blair's successor, Gordon Brown, believes his family's medical, bank and perhaps tax records were hacked into. Brown tells us he was reduced to tears after Rebekah Brooks, who was then editor of the Sun, another Murdoch tabloid, rang him to say that the paper was going to reveal that his four-year-old son Fraser had cystic fibrosis.
Yet a few years later, Brown still attended the wedding of said Rebekah - who until Friday was Murdoch�s right-hand woman at News International, the British wing of News Corp. The Morgan le Fay of British journalism was just too powerful for a prime minister seeking re-election to slight.
Nice article by Garton Ash. But there's so much more to it than just the Morgan le Fay coincidence. (Red-haired women are always to be mistrusted, anyway.)
ReplyDeleteLet's bring that thinking to the US. Why has the US press been so afraid of the right wing, the wingnuts, the Tea Partiers, that they print their ravings as if they were the very truth? Why no fact-checking?
Could it be that they are the emissions of Murdoch's Fox Network, or even the creations thereof?
And we have no Guardian.
Indeed.
ReplyDeleteWhy has the US press been so afraid of the right wing, the wingnuts, the Tea Partiers, that they print their ravings as if they were the very truth? Why no fact-checking?
Could it be that they are the emissions of Murdoch's Fox Network, or even the creations thereof?
Dave's post describes those "icicles of fear" perfectly as they have immobilized out own elected representatives. There is a chess move called "castling" which enables a threatened king to be moved to safer territory by swapping adjacent squares with one of his rooks. That's what the Murdoch empire is attempting. I want to think it will fail, but it may succeed.
I submit that your list of lunatics are simply useful idiots having little or nothing to do with journalism and everything to do with public opinion. They are to corporate manipulation of public opinion what consumer advertising is to brand-name drugs or fast foods. The mission has nothing to do with information and everything to do with selling ideas, no matter how toxic those ideas may be. (The Debt Ceiling Kabuki Dance is a good illustration.)
Murdoch's acquisition of the Wall Street Journal was no accident. It was (and continues to be) the political equivalent of a nuclear deterrent. Let's see if that august institution provides him a fire escape from Hell.
Speaking of proxies, read Robert Fisk's Murdoch story Why I had to leave The Times.
ReplyDeleteRupert Murdoch is one smooth character.
These past two weeks, I have been thinking of what it was like to work for Murdoch, what was wrong about it, about the use of power by proxy. For Murdoch could never be blamed. Murdoch was more caliph than ever, no more responsible for an editorial or a "news" story than a president of Syria is for a massacre � the latter would be carried out on the orders of governors who could always be tried or sacked or sent off as adviser to a prime minister � and the leader would invariably anoint his son as his successor.