The war against Rupert
Murdoch by Conrad Black's British Telegraph Group continued Monday after the
confirmation of rumors that Chinese government officials have been trying to
sell the organs of executed criminals to American doctors ($25,000 for livers,
$20,000 for lungs of nonsmokers, $20,000 for kidneys, and $5,000 for pairs of
corneas). In a scoop last Friday, the Daily Telegraph revealed the
circumstances under which a Murdoch publishing company, the London subsidiary
of HarperCollins, had canceled publication of the memoirs of Britain's last
governor of Hong Kong, Chris Patten, for which it had already paid an advance
of $200,000.
The paper found that Murdoch
had personally intervened to get the book stopped, because he feared that its
anti-Chinese slant might threaten his TV interests in China. After one
ferocious editorial last Friday, the Telegraph published another Monday
saying that "behind the machinations within HarperCollins is Mr. Murdoch's
determination to suppress condemnations of a vicious and brutal dictatorship,"
which "allows its citizens to be shot, dismembered and sold in pieces." Murdoch
and Black have long been locked in a British newspaper price war.
Murdoch's
Times of London
provoked much comment by failing to publish anything about the affair until
last Saturday, when it carried a small story on Page 5 headlined "News Corp
Puts Its Side in Row Over Patten Book." But it grew more evenhanded Monday when
it said that HarperCollins was now "fighting a rearguard action to stop a
threatened revolt by some of its authors." The writer of this story, the
Times ' media editor, Raymond Snoddy, was widely reported as having said
in a radio interview that the lack of coverage in the Times had damaged
his own reputation and probably that of the newspaper as well. "I agree
entirely what has happened is unacceptable," he is supposed to have said.
The Financial
Times reflected in an editorial Monday that the Patten-Murdoch affair had
"brought forth a torrent of abuse from his newspaper rivals, of a kind that
might make a lesser person feel faint." But it said that this scandal was "not
nearly as shocking as his decision four years ago to drop BBC news from his
Hong Kong satellite service to appease China," and concluded that Britain
didn't need legislation to curb Murdoch's media power but needed "politicians
with the guts to snap their fingers at bullies."
In an
op-ed piece, FT columnist Philip Stephens wrote that those who fear
Murdoch "should stop for a moment to savour the delicious irony of his latest
obeisance before the Beijing gerontocracy." He concluded, "The frenzy with
which he seeks to expand his empire betrays a realisation that it will not
outlive him. The mogul has become a mouse." In the Guardian, Andrew
Neil, Murdoch's former editor of the London Sunday
Times ,
said his ex-boss had "shown neither integrity nor morality in his handling of
Patten's book. It is a sorry tale from which he emerges a diminished, tarnished
figure."
Most European newspapers led Monday with the
anointing of Gerhard Schröder as Helmut Kohl's Social Democrat opponent in the
fall election for the German chancellorship, though the British press made more
of Sunday's "countryside march," which brought at least 250,000 country folk to
London to demonstrate against proposed legislation to abolish fox hunting and
other assaults on the country way of life. The Times described the march
as "a public relations triumph" and attributed much of its success to one of
its organizers, Chicago-born Eric Bettelheim, "a wealthy barrister who works
for an American law firm in London," who was credited with supplying "much of
the ideological drive and marketing expertise." Other British newspapers
claimed that the U.S. gun lobby had helped finance the march.
El País of Madrid led on
Schröder but devoted its main
editorial to the "miracle" by which all European countries with the
exception of Greece had met the economic criteria for taking part in a single
European currency, which will now be launched on schedule next year. The
Italian newspapers carried much comment on the visit of Italian Foreign
Minister Lamberto Dini to Tehran, generally praising him for his highly
conciliatory posture, which included denying the existence of Iranian
sponsorship of terrorism and refusing to criticize Iran's application of
Koranic law. Quoted in La
Stampa of Turin, Dini said the still-extant death sentence on British
writer Salman Rushdie "will not be an obstacle to relations between the
European Union and Iran because Iran is willing to discuss the whole question."
London's Daily
Telegraph quoted U.N. Human Rights Commissioner
Mary Robinson as saying in Tehran Sunday that Iran had assured her that the
death sentence on Rushdie would not be carried out, although the Ayatollah
Khomeini's "fatwa" against him "cannot be revoked."
The Sydney Morning Herald reported Monday that the Australians had overtaken the Canadians
to become the Western world's second-largest share owners, after the Americans.
It also criticized President Suharto of Indonesia for trying to
"have his IMF cake, and eat it," saying that "Indonesia doesn't want more
Western advice--what it demands is more financial help."
Commenting on the Indian
elections, the South China
Morning Post of Hong Kong said in an editorial that it was "virtually
certain that the people will again face a hung parliament of uncertain
duration, cobbled together by the flimsiest of uneasy regional alliances." It
blamed this outcome on the intervention of onetime Prime Minister Rajiv
Gandhi's widow, Sonia, in the campaign. An editorial in the Pioneer of
India said that "the polling, it is true, has not in all cases been as peaceful
or free and fair as it should be in an ideal situation, but then nobody has
ever suggested that Indian politics today even remotely approximated the
ideal."
In Israel, the liberal
Ha'aretz reported
that Labor opposition leader Ehud Barak told President Clinton that a U.S. plan
to resume the peace talks with the Palestinians would be well received by the
Israeli public if put forward "without exaggerated pressure." The Independent of London
devoted an editorial to the report, denied by the White House, that Clinton
might be willing to admit that he kissed Monica Lewinsky without engaging with
her in an "improper relationship." "It cannot be long now before the tissue of
half-truths and leaks is stripped away and something resembling the truth is
told," it said, accusing the president of "a pattern of slipperiness." The
editorial concluded, "He smoked but didn't inhale. They had 'a physical
relationship' but it wasn't sexual. He spoke but we couldn't hear. He is in
office, but not in power."
