Talk about waving a red flag: before giving his keynote address to audience in Abu Dhabi and saying there should be less media censorship in the country, Rupert Murdoch announced that News Corp, the owners of Fox News, would be opening an office in Abu Dhabi in April.
"In the face of an inconvenient story, it can be tempting to resort to censorship or civil or criminal laws to try to bury it. This is not only a problem here," Murdoch said. "In the long run, this is counterproductive."
Murdoch is talking about the UAE in general and Dubai specifically, which has recently been criticising international media for what it perceives as negative coverage in the emirate, especially around the debt-restructuring of Dubai World.
Murdoch summed this up as "the price one pays for success", and recounted that he himself had been the subject of negative media. Murdoch obviously knew that sometimes it's better to show than tell. During his speech, his teleprompter went out, derailing the News Corp chairman for about 30 seconds before he remembered that he was holding a hardcopy. Significant? Not at all, but media reports about the mishap appeared online almost as fast as stories about the speech itself.
Savvy businessman
The reasons for Murdoch's comments are not altruistic or supportive of free speech for free speech's sake, as some news reports have made them out to be. Murdoch is a savvy businessman who knows how to build a media empire. News Corp has now set up shop in Abu Dhabi, and Murdoch wants to be able to sell his news stories. In other words, we have a new product to sell here, please don't ban it.
That doesn't mean that the media shouldn't be culturally sensitive, he said.
"Certainly each nation and culture has the right to insist the people they allow into their country to do business respect their national values and traditions," Murdoch told the summit. "This is best administered, however, with a gentle touch."
A gentle touch? I'm surprised Murdoch knows the meaning of the phrase. This is the man who after all owns Fox News, one of the most bombastic news channels on the air. This is the man who, when confronted with dwindling advertising revenues at the Wall Street Journal, promised to return to a walled-garden business model to cut down news aggregators like Google. Subtle is generally not a phrase associated with Rupert Murdoch.
Number of truths
But that doesn't mean Murdoch is wrong, though. Indeed, his speech was filled with a number of truths about the region, including that fact that advertising should be more transparent, the protection of intellectual property is critically important, and that digital devices such as the Kindle or iPads are just shiny toys without content to put on them. Of course, Murdoch had just announced a partnership with Saudi Arabia's Rotana the day before. Rotana is the region's leading holder of copyrights for Arabic content and other media.
Again, Murdoch has something to sell. Whether anyone will listen to him is still to be seen. Cultural sensitivities in which criticism plays a major part are a fact of life in the UAE media. It will take more than just a western businessman with something to sell — even when it's someone like Rupert Murdoch to change that. It will be interesting to see what, if anything, happens when News Corp begins to push the envelope of its brand of journalism. But if something does happen, no one should be allowed to say they didn't see it coming.
