Jackie Ashley on Sauron…I mean…Murdoch

Today’s Guardian has something for fans of the Lord of the Rings. Yes, it’s an old-fashioned batlle of good versus evil!

Jackie Ashley offers the following:

This time, with the communications bill soon to become law - even as amended - Murdoch has a chance of getting into terrestrial British TV. If he was able to curb the BBC in its funding and its journalism, shoving it into a narrow little box, from which timid establishment- style reporting and dreary documentaries were all that trickled out, he would be in business. He hates the BBC not because of the licence fee or its alleged liberal bias, but because it is popular and trusted. Everything his papers are now doing is designed to attack that popularity and trust.

Borrowing from the Lord of the Rings trilogy, I’ve distilled Ashley’s arguments down as follows:

Murdoch = Sauron
Blair = Gollum
Davies = Gandalf
Dyke = Aragorn
BBC = Hobbits