News Corp supremo Rupert Murdoch has never been shy about imposing his personal agenda on his globe-straddling news empire, nor has he made any secret of his fervent desire to be an important player in the emerging Chinese media market. To that end he's been happy to do Beijing's bidding, banishing the Beeb from StarTV, spiking a book by former Hong Kong governor Chris Patten, and belittling the Dalai Lama. News Corp's latest kowtow has been to ignore the collective voice of hundreds of thousands of Hong Kong's citizens as they struggle against repressive "security" and "subversion" laws.
Just compare a search of FoxNews.com for "hong kong protest" with the same search of Google News and Yahoo! News.
Murdoch has even managed to out-censor Beijing this time. While FoxNews.com might not have noticed a half-million people on the move, The Hong Kong edition of the China Daily has mentioned the protests (albeit only to issue a warning to Hong Kong's residents).
This is cynical corporate censorship on a massive scale, made worse by the prospect of Big Content being given complete control over how we use their product. Whether it's a DRM time-bomb that deletes media from your computer (or phone or set-top box) or the ability to wall off content from the "public" network (see NYTimes.com v Google caching), Big Content has shown that it can't be trusted with this much power. They can take what you own away from you. They can rewrite history. They can even make 500,000 people disappear.
