AP board member Rupert Murdoch set to buy Newsday from AP board member Sam Zell

Maybe we could get some press coverage of the feudalization of journalism? We're seeing fewer and fewer people owning more and more of the media in America.

I flipped to Fox News randomly earlier today and I saw this. Yep, Fox was reporting that "Sir Rupert" doesn't like Democrats.

I'm sure we're going to see nothing but high quality news reporting once "Sir Rupert" takes the helm at Newsday.

Update: George Monbiot on Murdoch's history of obtaining "anticipatory compliance."

Update 2: De ja vu. That's a link to a post I wrote about media consolidation and the danger it is to democracy a year ago, at a time when Murdoch was getting ready to purchase the Wall Street Journal. Add to that commentary this post by Greenwald pointing out that once again our press doesn't seem to mind so much being turned into a propaganda arm of the government, something similar to what I myself wrote about in the first guest post I wrote for Unclaimed Territory two years ago (where as he focuses on the press, I focused on our failure as a society to take corrective measure against the corruption of journalism.)

And while we're at it, I may as well quote from this post, seeing as we still haven't taken corrective measures to prevent the government from lying to us in an effort to subvert democracy

Think about what the purpose of this lie is. Its purpose is to fabricate a reality that will allow officials to institute policy that suits the ideological interests of this administration, while hiding the consequences of that policy from the public, who might not agree to it if they were aware of what the truth of the situtation was. If you consider that for a moment, you can see the germ of every thing that is wrong with this adminstration.

Yet there will be no consequence for this action. No one will be held accountable. Indeed, the public will likely never know, or care to know. But that's the absurdity of it. In a democratic society, shouldn't lies like this be simply intolerable? Shouldn't any individual in government who is caught engaging in such a blatant deceit be shamed into contrition or resignation?

If we tolerate lies that we catch, what kind of incentive does that give people in power to tell the truth? In a previous post about gov't secrecy I quoted Walter Lippman writing in 1919 that "there can be no liberty for a community which lacks the information by which to detect lies." Well, how much liberty can there be for a society which doesn't care about being lied to in the first place?