Big Solar And Renewable Energy In The Age Of Fracking

The world’s largest solar power plant is up and running in California. We’ll look at where solar stands now, and the future of renewable energy. You access the programme here.

How Rupert Murdoch Changed the Media

Cameron Spencer/Getty Images

Media mogul Rupert Murdoch built News Corp from its roots in Australia to become an international multimedia empire. NPR's media correspondent David Folkenflik writes about the billionaire businessman in his new book, "Murdoch's World: The Last of the Old Media Empires." Folkenflik joins us to talk about the magnate's politics and about the trial now underway of alleged bribery and phone hacking by Murdoch's journalists in London.

 Listen to minutes 0 to 15:09 and answer the following questions:

1. What are the links between Murdoch’s and 10 Downing Street?

      2.  What examples of people does the interviewee provide as to the targets of News Corp hacking?

       3.  Although it was well known up to the scandal blowup that News Corp was hacking people, why were the English tolerant of it?

      4.  Why is Rupert Murdoch said to have become a lot more wary of media coverage?

      5. What is said to be peculiar about Fox?

      6. Complete the following sentences with the word(s) you hear:

        a.       This trial’s getting under way, …………………, …………………….., …………………………., we recently saw an article about, well, …………….. being taken away by Rebekah Brooks and others.

b.      Rebekah Brooks used to head the News of the World and then she went on to head The Daily Sun tabloid. She’s been described by others as being a ……………….. daughter. 

      c.       Andrew Coulson, who was her colleague as editor of the News of the World, and who then went on to be ……………………  guy for PM David Cameron.

       d.      We’re looking at …………………….. essentially of the Wall Street Journal reporters on the News of the World hacking scandal. They tried a number of times to kill the story.

      e.       At this ………………………… moment in the summer of 2011 when hacking scandal first blew up in the UK.

      f.       A family that has never …………………………. except in this terribly tragic and painful way

      g.      It was almost as if they we ………………………. feeding on themselves.

       h.      She (Cheri Blair) certainly …………………….. against News Corp and its successor company 21^st Century Fox.

       i.       They wouldn’t talk to you, News Corp weren’t talking to you and they were ……………………. others from talking to you and in a way publicly denigrated your reputation.
  
  

      j.      Roger Ailes and Fox have made Murdoch a ton of money and therefore that wins you some …………………………. .

       7.   What is meant by the words and expressions in bold?

      The media and the political elite were hand in glove.

       Rather than working for public interest they were working to further their own interests.
      
      Tony Blair and some of these other politicians were the poodles of Rupert Murdoch rather than Bush’s as so often they alleged.

       It is a credit to the newspaper and its journalists that that news did appear

Diane Ravitch on the 'Reign of Error' of Privatization and Schools

Diane Ravitch ‘Reign of Error’

KQED Forum NPR

Michael Krasny asks his guest why she calls the privatization of schools a hoax between minutes 5:53-11:12. Look through the following extracts from the conversation and explain what each of the expressions and phrasal verbs mean within the context.

DR - I find myself stumbling over the word ‘reform’ when I see it attached to people like Bill, Arne Duncan, Joel Klein, Michelle Rhee, I go through the whole litany. These guys are the status quo.

DR - … and to call himself a reformer when he owns the levers of power, it doesn’t make any sense.

DR - … and the whole nation is now dancing to his tune.

DR - In fact, these whole crowd of people who now call themselves reformers, are in fact privatisers.

DR - The reason that I am so critical about the charter movement is that it has strayed so far from its original purpose.

DR - The original purpose was that they would find the drop-outs, they would bring the drop-outs back.

DR - They would find innovative ways to engage kids who were totally turned off of school. They would not be judged by test scores because they were taking the most challenging students, the most difficult students.

MK - Too often they turn them away though, don’t they?

DR - Well what’s happened and this is why it’s a great hoax is that charter school now seek out the highest performing students in the poorest communities and they have been critized even by federal agencies for having disproportionately low numbers of students with disabilities. They usually accept very low proportions of students who are English language learners and then they kick out the children with the low test scores.

DR - In the state of Michigan more than 80% of the charter schools are run for profit and there are districts there which went into deficit or which had very little test scores where the governor, who is a far right reactionary governor, gave the entire school district to a for profit charter chain.

MK - Education shouldn’t be a consumer product, it should be a social and political responsibility.

DR - Where there is low performance, where there are schools that are really in trouble is where there is a concentration of high poverty and high racial segregation. It’s as though we’ve decided not to talk about the root causes.

Host and guest go on to talk about different issues related to education, if you are interested you can listen to the rest of the programme and see what they have to say about the Finnish education system (minutes 14:00-17:30), choice as a code word to for education as a consumer good rather than a civic obligation (as from 17:45) and the use of technology and the emergence of the education industry (as from 19:19), among many others.

The Name Game

We listened to the first 7 minutes of this programme on names last week, if you want to go on listening to the rest, click on this link to the KQED Radio site Cool Cassidy or Classic Caroline?

Note how the host and guests hold an informal conversation where they use a number of expressions such as:

There's is a lot of fast cycling in and out of fashion

There's more of a tendency to choose a name that stands out

I don't remember the percentage off the top of my head

We're sailing out to sea

Names are social cues

Parents wring their hands over that decision