Tag Archives: Philip Stone

FollowtheMedia: Murdoch and Berlusconi in a battle of the media titans

‘One of life’s great joys is watching two media barons battle it out using all the weapons at their command,’ comments Philip Stone in a comprehensive piece on FollowtheMedia. While it’s not a new rivalry, Stone says that Berlusconi understands it was a ‘big business mistake to have allowed Murdoch to step on Italian soil,’ with Sky Italia.

An extract:

“While the international media has been dishing out some really low blows editorially against Berlusconi for the past few days it is Murdoch’s Times of London that called in a professor of classics at Cambridge University to compare the Italian Prime Minister with the Roman Emperor Tiberius – known for his sexual frolics – and then followed that up with a really vicious editorial with verbiage that more properly belongs in his tabloid Sun or News of the World than it does in the august(us) Times of London.”

Full story at this link…

FollowtheMedia (Write On): A look at Al Jazeera English coverage of Gaza

By and large, Al Jazeera is ‘doing ok’ in its Gaza coverage, writes Philip Stone. He takes a look at the aspects of its reporting and concludes that “its coverage of the Mumbai attacks and now Gaza shows it certainly has logistical advantages in that part of the world, and if it can only keep its reporters and anchors straight for a mainstream international audience, then it really can be a viable cable news alternative to CNN International and BBC World.”