Canadian
tycoon Conrad Black's Daily Telegraph of Britain expanded its campaign against Rupert
Murdoch Wednesday by accusing him of censoring coverage of China in his London
newspaper (and Telegraph rival) the Times. In a front-page lead
story, the Telegraph quoted the Times ' veteran China specialist,
American academic and journalist Jonathan Mirsky, as saying that the
Times "has simply decided, because of Murdoch's interests, not to cover
China in a serious way." His comments were taken from the transcript of a forum
on press freedom that took place in London in January. For three months after
the hand over of Hong Kong to China last June, readers of the Times
"would have thought that Hong Kong had been airlifted up to Pluto, that it had
simply vanished," Mirsky said. "We have here what is arguably the traditionally
most famous newspaper in the world, and it has just decided--it has taken not
an executive decision, but an owner's position--to leave China and Hong Kong
alone," he added. The beleaguered editor of the Times , Peter Stothard,
replied in a statement that "the China coverage of the Times is wholly
and solely in the hands of the editor," adding: "I have never taken an
editorial decision to suit Mr. Murdoch's interests. Nor have I ever been asked
to." The next day, in a signed op-ed piece, Stothard asked Times readers
"to accept the Editor's word" that none of Mirsky's accusations against him
were true.
Meanwhile, the Times --already under attack for
failing to cover Murdoch's cancellation of a book contract with the former
British governor of Hong Kong Chris Patten --had tracked down Murdoch, in a car
on his way to a British airport. The interview ran on Wednesday's front page
under the headline "Our people screwed up in Patten row, says Murdoch." Murdoch
lashed out in the interview at senior executives of his London publishers,
HarperCollins, saying they had "chickened out" and left him "in a completely
inexcusable position." Murdoch admitted he had asked HarperCollins to drop the
book but said the executives should have been forthright about it, instead of
inventing nonsensical reasons. (They claimed that Patten's manuscript wasn't up
to the mark, when its editor at HarperCollins, Stuart Proffitt, was already on
record as finding it the most lucid and intelligent book he had ever received
from a politician.)
Thursday,
the Telegraph returned to the fray, reporting on its front page that
HarperCollins Chairman Eddie Bell was "very low" and contemplating resignation
after Murdoch's attack; and on an inside page that "outrage is bubbling to the
surface in America" over Murdoch's dumping of the Patten memoirs. The
Telegraph quoted New
York Times and Los
Angeles Times attacks on Murdoch and Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., as saying
Murdoch was China's "willing accomplice" in suppressing the truth about human
rights: "His action to kill Christopher Patten's book is not isolated and is
part of a pattern."
In Paris, Le Monde's editorial Thursday, titled "Kosovo is our
affair," said Europe should tell Serbia forcefully that it would not be
reintegrated into the international community unless there was a negotiated
solution "taking into account the legitimate aspirations of the Albanians of
Kosovo." Its main op-ed feature was about China's new yearning for
international respectability. On its front page, Le Monde ran a piece about the "the most important homosexual event in the
world"--the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras. Recalling that the first such
event 20 years ago had ended with 53 arrests, Le Monde pointed out that
this year there had been only one arrest--of a person possessing two grams of
cannabis--and that 30 uniformed policemen had crossed the security barriers to
join the party. It also boasted on its front page that France was "in a good
position" in the international cloning war and would be putting on show Friday,
March 6, a cloned heifer called Marguerite.
Le Figaro of Paris carried an
interview Thursday with Prince Talal bin Abdel-Aziz al-Saud, brother of King
Fahd of Saudi Arabia, in which he said that the United States had got its
policies wrong throughout the Middle East. "Their position is bad because it
doesn't rest on justice," he said. Asked if he also opposed sanctions against
Iraq, Prince Talal said that sanctions didn't work: "Look at Libya and
Cuba--there are sanctions against their peoples, but their regimes survive." In
an interview with El País of Spain, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said
that the Europeans understood nothing about the Middle East. "Our problem with
Europe is that you all have a colonial past and believe that the hills of
Jerusalem ... are like those which were occupied by the French in Algeria and
the Spanish in the Philippines," he said. "Only the United States understands
us, and not, as many people think, because there is a big Jewish community
there, but because they see us as the new promised land, like their own
America."
Having been caught
worshiping alone (with bodyguards) in the Roman Catholic Westminster Cathedral
in London, British Prime Minister Tony Blair was reported in all British
newspapers Thursday as denying that he was about to leave the Church of England
and become the first Catholic British prime minister since the Reformation.
The Times of London
reported that Tony O'Reilly, former chairman of H.J. Heinz Co. Inc., was about
to achieve sole proprietorship of the London newspaper the Independent by buying out
the Mirror Group's 46-percent stake.
