How Rupert Murdoch Changed the Media

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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

Social Media: The First 2,000 Years - Tom Standage

The author of this book argues social media is much older than we believe. Listen to this extract in which Tom Standage talks with Steve Paulson about his book, "Writing on the Wall: Social Media - The First 2,000 Years." which you can find here and answer the following questions:

 

1. What was the main content of the Martin Luther’s 'Ninety-Five Theses'?

2. What triggers him to follow up with a series of pamphlets in German?

     3. Did the Roman Church have any means of broadcast?

     4. What, according to the interviewee, is the difference between social media and broadcasting?

     5. What has been the effect of the role of the internet in this development?

     6. What’s the interface between broadcasting and social media?

     7. Explain the meaning of following phrases in bold uttered during the interview:

a.       They were masters of social media long before Mark Zuckerberg was a in twinkle in his mother’s eye there was media and it was social.

b.      It’s an incredibly effective way for him to galvanize support for his idea that the catholic church needed to be reformed

c.       My tongue is somewhat in my cheek

d.      I've actually plotted Luther's traffic stats.

e.      This is what modern scholars call synchronization of opinion.

f.        You are not describing the mass media here as the institutions we tend to know as the major newspapers, as television networks, where the news has gatekeepers and it's centralized and there are professional journalists.

g.       So we end up with this very centralized media system which has, yes, this small priesthood of journalists and politicians and businessmen that have access to it.

h.      The mass media era is the anomaly, a blip that has now come to an end.