Corporations bring down the hammer on a newspaper editor who courageously told the truth:
<<< ... The day after the "mourn on the Fourth of July" piece was published, a senior executive of the New York investment company Tweedy Browne, major shareholders in the Trinity Mirror newspaper group, called the Mirror and shouted down the phone at senior management, demanding Morgan's head and mine. This pressure continued as the Murdoch press in the United States and other lunar right-wing papers and broadcasters railed against the "treacherous" Mirror. When, on 1 May last, the Mirror published its "torture" photographs, Tweedy Browne again led the charge of powerful shareholders, notably Fidelity Asset Management, the biggest mutual company in America, run by the billionaire Edward C Johnson III, a donor to the Bush re-election campaign. "We will have to look very carefully," said an executive of Deutsche Asset Management, another shareholder, "at what Trinity Mirror does next in order to protect the value of the Mirror brand." Was corporate influence on the press, and its right to be wrong, ever more eloquently expressed? Morgan had only just survived a year earlier when a new Trinity Mirror senior management under the chief executive, Sly Bailey, ordered him to "tone down" the anti-war coverage and return the paper to celebrities and faithless royal butlers (who had never departed) ... >>>
How To Silence An Awkward Newspaper
by John Pilger
newstatesman.com
zmag.org |
