After years of the cold shoulder from Chinese censors and regulators, entertainment giants are shifting their efforts to a regional rival. From the New York Times:
After many years of fervent lobbying and deal-making in China, American media companies have little to show for their efforts there and are increasingly shifting their attention instead to India.
Media executives still believe that Chinese audiences are receptive to Western culture – “SpongeBob SquarePants” is a big hit in China – but many companies have been pulling back out of frustration over censorship, piracy, strict restrictions on foreign investment and the glacial pace of its bureaucracy.
In recent weeks, America Online shut its operations in China, for the second time. Warner Brothers, the movie studio that shares a corporate parent with AOL in Time Warner, had plans as recently as 2006 to open more than 200 retail stores throughout China, with a local partner. Today there are no such plans.
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Bestselling author Jeffrey Archer is a man of many parts — he was captain of the athletics team at Oxford, he ran for his country, and was a Conservative MP at 29. He wrote his first novel, Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less, in 1976. Since then he has kept producing works that always topped the charts. His stint in jail for perjury saw him write a well-received prisoner’s diary, and, adapting the tales he was told by fellow prisoners, he put together a short-story collection called Cat O’ Nine Tails. Archer was recently in India to promote his latest book A Prisoner of Birth. In an interview with The Indian Express Editor-in-Chief Shekhar Gupta on NDTV 24×7’s Walk the Talk, he speaks about cricket, of which he is an avid fan, about politics in the UK, and about getting on in life without being in the dumps over the mistakes one makes.
Wonderful to have you here in a bookshop in Gurgaon, Landmark, in a mall.
Yes, which wouldn’t have been. When I first came to India 15 years ago, there wouldn’t have been a mall.
•You said you never came to India because you were never invited. You need an invite to come to India?
I thank Landmark very kindly. They said, ‘We would like to do a proper tour. We know you have been to India, but we would like to take you around the country because you’ve got a lot of fans here.’ And I said, ‘Well, I have seen the figures from the Kane & Abel days, which is 30 years ago. And they said, ‘Oh, they are buying more now that you are even more popular. So we would like you to come over.’ So I had just done Australia for the fifth time, and I had just done America for the seventh time.
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He might run a slew of tabloids but Rupert Murdoch’s own private life has been pretty much off-limits. With the publication of a kiss-and-tell book (Rupert’s Adventures in China: How Murdoch Lost a Fortune and Found a Wife, Penguin Books, 2008), former Australian journalist Bruce Dover goes where few men have gone before. Eric Elis reviews the book in The Asia Sentinel.
Few of Rupert Murdoch’s former employees are eager to write about him. Likewise, few of his publications are eager to review a book about him. This review was turned down by the Far Eastern Economic Review, which is part of Murdoch-owned Dow Jones, after it was initially accepted. Nor has it been reviewed by the Murdoch-owned Australian or the Australian Literary Review.
Such is the real or imagined damage that Rupert Murdoch could inflict on a media career that few of his minions have been so bold as to write a kiss-and-tell account of their time at his elbow.
I can think of only one; Harold Evans, the ex-editor of London’s Sunday Times who Murdoch tapped to be editor of London’s Times after buying it in 1981. Evans lasted a year, resigning in high dudgeon over the editorial independence the man Britons call “The Dirty Digger” — pace his Australian antecedents — supposedly guaranteed to secure the purchase.
Evans’ splenetic book Good Times, Bad Times became a best seller and his joust with Murdoch did his career no harm — he later ran Random House, edited some worthy U.S magazines and penned magisterial histories. Like Murdoch, he became a naturalized American. Unlike Murdoch, he was knighted by the British establishment in 2004 for “services to journalism.” There are other tomes posing as Murdoch insiders like ex-Sunday Times editor Andrew Neil’s Full Disclosure and the hugely funny Stick It Up Your Punter: The Uncut Story of the Sun Newspaper but they are better assessed as snapshot newspaper biographies.
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