Monday, January 31, 2011

Connect The Murdochs

The Rupert Murdoch-owned NY Post runs a story about an "explosive" interview that Rupert Murdoch-owned Joel Klein gave to the Rupert Murdoch-owned Sunday Times about how 5%-10% of NYC teachers are incompetent and should be fired but the UFT protects them.

Now there is nothing remotely "explosive" about this charge.

Hell, Klein has been making this charge for eight years or so, as has his old boss, Mayor Bloomberg, and his new boss at News Corp., Rupert Murdoch.

And Rupert Murdoch has been calling for seniority and tenure busting in all his various media outlets - from Fox News to the NY Post to the Wall Street Journal (see here, here and here for the latest teacher-bashing in the Journal) to his overseas papers like the Sunday Times.

In fact, the only thing explosive about any of this is that an oligarch like Murdoch is allowed to get away with the anti-teacher propaganda without somebody in power saying, "You know, maybe we ought to take away some of these media outlets from him."

Seriously, how many news media outlets can one oligarch own?

Here in NY he has the Post, the Journal, Channel 5, Channel 9, FOX News and FOX Business.

That's an awful lot of places to do some teacher-bashing.

No news at any of those places, but plenty of teacher bashing.

And as for Klein, he signed a DOE contract with Wireless Generation, a provider of online education services, right before he quit as NYC schools chancellor, then Rupert Murdoch hired Klein and bought Wireless Generation within two weeks of Klein's quitting the DOE.

Illegal?

Dunno.

Unethical?

Certainly.

Business as usual in the oligarchy known as Bloomberg's NY where Rupert Murdoch owns SIX media outlets?

You betcha.

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