Presumably, in the case of News Corporation, we can read Vince’s ‘deeply unhelpful’ as ‘not fully part of my favoured liberal-left media consensus’. How dare individuals own large numbers of newspapers and influence the British political scene. Disgraceful. Anyway, our dear Business Secretary went on to add:

We have learned from the past that having media moguls dominating the British media is deeply unhelpful, not simply in terms of plurality but because of the wider impact on the political world.

What I want to see is a very clear set of unambiguous rules… about market shares, that we don’t have dominant players and a presumption against cross-ownership between press and television.

It isn’t simply an issue of Rupert Murdoch, there are other big media companies who could have the same influence in future and we’ve got to stop that happening.

This, you may remember, is the same man who ‘declared war’ on Rupert Murdoch and News International before the phone hacking scandal re-broke (remember it was old news until the Guardian and BBC dug it out again for their own ends), and was consequently stripped of his status over media policy on the BSkyB bid. This is not about phone hacking and never was – it is about ensuring the stranglehold grip of the liberal-left over the media establishment.

Of course, a fantastic way of ensuring greater plurality of media in Britain, which Saint Vince says he so desires, is the abolition or significant downsizing of our beloved national broadcaster. The BBC is a huge, sprawling organisation, owned by the state and funded by the television licence fee. What better way of opening up the media playing field than taking apart the BBC monopoly? But will Vince be seeking to break up their dominance over the broadcast and online media? Not likely.

Even so, I’ve managed to keep a few tabs on the news (if you could really call it that) in the evenings via Sky News in my hotel room (it was a choice between that, CNN and a selection of rather dubious foreign comedy channels).

Amusingly, I also caught a late night news round-up on the BBC World Service with Richard North as a panellist. Amazing really; you go abroad to get away from the work, the blogs, Richard North et all, and yet the man still manages to find a way through!

No doubt parts of our beloved national media are being overcome with similar feelings. As much as the press try to ignore the current economic realities, they just keep cropping back up to divert their attention from the vital task of endlessly discussing themselves.

Just before my return, it seemed that, all of a sudden, the broadcast and newspaper media had finally woken up to the fact that, yes, the hacking affair was not perhaps the most important item of news on the current, reality-based agenda. The Euro zone economies are collapsing under a mountain of self-inflicted debt, and there is a very real possibility that this could destroy the single currency.

This collapse has been on the cards for some time now, and yet if you listen to large sections of the media then it would appear that they have only recently uncovered this crisis, such is the wide-eyed wonderment with which it is breathlessly reported.

It strikes me that the treatment of the financial crisis by the media is in many ways similar to the famine in Somalia. It wasn’t until this week when the United Nations publically declared that there was a famine in Somalia that the media suddenly took interest. Before the announcement, it was if the famine had not existed, such was the miniscule level of reporting. Similarly, now that the European Union, in the form of our dear leader, José Manuel Barroso, has spoken of the severity of the European economic situation then suddenly, guess what, it’s a crisis! Who would have thought it..?

It seems, in the collective eyes of the media establishment, that for something to exist or become fact then it must be acknowledged by the U.N. or receive other supposedly ‘expert’ approval. And it’s not just any old ‘expert’ that will do either, but ones carefully selected from ‘accepted’ groups and organisations who have a monopoly on officially and legitimately being allowed to care about suffering, starvation or our old favourite, climate change. If anyone outside of the bubble expresses an opinion, however valid or important, then nothing is done. It is ignored, until suddenly, an oik at the BBC or Guardian decides that, you know what, the European economies might actually be on the verge of hitting the fan because José told us so. Only then, apparently, is it worthy of being ‘news’…

It was never my newspaper of choice, being rather light on actual news and rather heavy on the kind of moronic celebrity gossip designed to keep the plebs occupied rather than focused on anything meaningful or important.

Yet, it is highly unlikely that The News of the World will disappear all together, with News International PLC almost certainly planning to re-launch the paper under a different brand. Furthermore, the same journalists working at The News of the World will simply transfer across to the new paper or indeed another paper – so nothing much or substantial will have changed in that regard beyond the image.

However, the fate of The News of the World is not actually the really important matter, but instead the manner of its downfall and what was subsequently brought to light (and I am not referring to the alleged phone hacking – which is rather unimportant and a matter for the police and the courts).

The so-called phone hacking scandal is firstly an absolutely classic example of Westminster-village journalism, and illustrates just how the news corporations make the news and set the public agenda to the exclusion of much more important stories and events outside of the political classes’ bubble. As Richard North observed, did our MPs ever demand an emergency debate over the banking crisis, or more recently the Euro zone and debt crisis in Greece, as they have over phone hacking? The answer is, of course, er, no…

Predictably, the Labour Party (full of brain-dead morons like Chris Bryant) have obsessively attacked the Murdoch paper over phone-hacking, in part as revenge for the paper’s favouring of the Tories at the General Election, and in part because it directly affected them – nothing vexes the political class more than an attack on their own bank balances, privacy or privileges. But when they spy on us, force us to carry ever more draconian forms of identity, tax us into oblivion and destroy our lives, economy and society, then that’s absolutely fine – no problems. End of. Anyway, more importantly, as Autonomous Mind notes:

The phone hacking scandal, while criminal and disgusting, is nothing more than a rider for a campaign where something far greater is at stake – maintaining the left-liberal media consensus that holds sway in this country…

Unsurprisingly, the efforts of the BBC and the Guardian in exposing News of the World misdoings coincide handily with the decision-making process of the Culture Secretary on whether to allow News Corp to buy the sixty one per cent of shares in BSkyB that it does not already own. Thus, the real agenda is not focused on phone hacking but the potential future make up of the broadcast news.

While I do not share Autonomous Mind’s view that Rupert Murdoch is especially conservative or has intentions in that direction with his pursuit of the BSkyB deal, then I think he’s spot on to highlight the widespread coverage of the issue as being induced by the liberal-left media’s fear of competition for control of the airwaves and digital arena. The argument goes that if the image of News Corp and its entities can be sufficiently tarnished, then the Culture Secretary may come under significant political pressure to snub the takeover, thus safeguarding the liberal broadcast monopoly.

Only then does it become clear as to why the media have expended so much time and effort into bringing the phone hacking to the fore. Vested interests and bread and circuses once again rear their head.

That is like saying, the inflation has been caused by the inflation – or indeed, that old classic, the bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy. It tells us absolutely nothing about why the prices of alcohol, transport or energy actually rose!

I’m so glad that licence fee payers fork out £3.5bn a year to fund such quality reporting by our beloved national broadcaster.

The title of the dissertation is ‘New Leader, New Conservatives?’ The document was submitted for review on the 1st May 2009 and I will receive word of the grade in the middle of June. The abstract for the dissertation is as follows:

Since the election of David Cameron as Leader of the Conservative party, very little scrutiny by academics and the media has been afforded to the nature of its policies and the political agenda of the party leadership. This study argues that David Cameron has fundamentally re-aligned his political party, and attempts to rectify the notion that the Conservative party still pursues conservatism in any meaningful way. In doing so, this study shall highlight how the Conservative party in Britain has surrendered itself to the neo-liberal Leftist political consensus.

At roughly ten thousand words, it might take a little longer to read than most of my usual blog postings. I hope, however, that you will feel it is worth the time and effort. The content of the document has not been added to since it was submitted and therefore represents the dissertation in its original form.

Download a copy of the dissertation (.pdf – 487kb)

I would imagine that a number of people may not necessarily like my conclusions. However, I am hardly alone in taking this point of view. If you disagree with any point that I’ve made or have any remarks then please leave them in the comments area.

The BBC are reporting that porn protesters have hit Westminster to complain about new laws that will ban the possession of extreme images showing ‘a threat to life or serious injury to a person’s genitals’. Wonderful stuff as you can imagine.

Now, the protest consisted of a mere twenty people and it would seem that as a consequence the BBC felt the issue of violent pornography and yesterday’s march warranted an entire news article on their website with an accompanying video.

However, compare this with the level of coverage two other past protests held outside the Houses of Parliament in Westminster gained that concerned calls for the Government to honour its manifesto commitment to give a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty.

The first was back in October of 2007 and the second in February of this year, both of which I was in attendance. Now, the Referendum rallies were not mass protests on the scale of the million strong Countryside Alliance or Stop The Iraq War coalition marches – but they were still pretty sizeable with a couple of thousand people in total, and very many more than the twenty individuals at yesterday’s ‘porn protest’. Yet did the BBC (or any other news agency for that matter) cover the Referendum protests? The answer is of course, no – they did not. Not once.

Calling for a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty did not just concern a few sick and depraved individuals wanting to photograph one another performing bizarre sexual acts, but the freedom, liberties and democratic rights of an entire nation of millions of people.

Yet, it is apparent that the BBC and most other news corporations hold the discussion of the laws on violent pornography more important than whether we wish to be a sovereign nation. Even the professional photographer and ringleader of the porn protesters, Ben Westwood (son of fashion designer Vivienne Westwood) acknowledged that:

There are more important issues to be debated than this.

In that Mr Westwood is entirely correct, but it would seem that large swathes of the media would disagree. Sadly, some things it would seem never change.

To put things into perspective, the Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King recently admitted that:

Not since the beginning of the first world war has our banking system been so close to collapse.

Compare such an alarming statement on the state of our banking system and economy with the BBC’s Political Editor, Nick Robinson and his account of George Osborne’s trip to Corfu. Someone’s journalistic priorities in the wrong place, wouldn’t you say?

It is also a rare occasion when I will not in some way directly involve mention of the European Union (oh no, I did it again!) or what I would deem similarly serious political matters or events.

So, as it happens, I noticed that a few of the self obsessed egos who involved themselves in 18 Vanity Street (which amusingly collapsed last year) but chose not to move sideways onto Stephan Shakespeare’s PoliticsHome project have reappeared in the team behind a new magazine called TotalPolitics.

Rather unsurprisingly the TotalPolitics magazine (much like its staff) will really only be interested in the soap opera of the Westminster Village rather than anything that could be even considered vaguely serious. I am not the only one of this opinion.

Yet, despite the magazine being funded in part by Lord Ashcroft and released to much fan fare on some few blogs, I think it may now well be a good time to place your bets on how long it will be before it goes the way of Doughty Street down the pan.

Since TotalPolitics will be sent free of charge to all politicians from our irrelevant MPs down to local district level and also many journalists, this seems to cancel out most of the people who may have actually bothered to buy it in the first place (another reason I think that this is no more than yet another ego trip for its producers and editors.) I mean really, would anyone actually want to pay to read yet more Westminster gossip – especially when (if you so chose) you can read it on the net for free?

Still, until the time that TotalPolitics completely collapses and disappears off the radar, I thought I would take the opportunity to participate in their Top 100 UK Political Blogs. You have to rate your top ten, so here below are mine:

1. EU Referendum
2. Peter Hitchens
3. Sam Tarran
4. Daniel Hannan
5. Archbishop Cranmer
6. ConservativeHome
7. Burning Our Money
8. The Huntsman
9. England Expects
10. Bruno Waterfield

I suspect however that we can all probably guess who will make the top of the final published list – Iain Dale, Paul Staines, Phil Hendren etc. the usual group of self promoting friends who enjoy nothing more than engaging in meaningless tittle-tattle and largely irrelevant gossip.

Much like the red top newspapers these blogs tend to have the most readers (and therefore will accumulate the most votes,) not because they are actually any good in my opinion, but simply because they have become a well established set (due to the fact that they continually promote one another) and that, bar one or two, they publish the sort of Westminster village crap that those in the Westminster village like reading.

In 2006 I managed to make 51st on APCO Wordwide’s list of Top Conservative Blogs – but I have a sneaking suspicion that I won’t be on there this time around. Also I challenge those on the list above to come up with their top ten blogs – not that they will of course but I thought I would just mention it anyway.