Jay Rosen noted in the heading of his widely-praised Guardian piece on News Corp. that the, “Phone hacking crisis shows News Corp is no ordinary news company. Rupert Murdoch's news organisations are not in the news business. What they crave is influence.”
I have read what seems like volumes of material on the Standard & Poor’s downgrade since the news came out Friday, and much of what I’ve read limits the scope of analysis to the rating agency itself, Standard & Poor’s. This is a mistake, imo.
Standard & Poor’s is just one segment of the huge conglomerate, McGraw-Hill, a corporation whose philosophy, leadership and conduct bear great resemblance to News Corp.’s, and who has similarly found itself in much controversy related to its reckless behavior and inordinate influence in recent years. I hope to show that Terry McGraw, McGraw-Hill’s Chairman and CEO, is using his corporation in a similar manner as Murdoch and to accomplish many of the same ends. I hope to show how Standard & Poor’s differs from the other major rating agencies, especially in terms of its much greater conflicts of interest as a subsidiary of a large conglomerate. Along the way, I have noted a possibly significant related event that has been largely ignored as far as I can see.
In the process of going through all this, I believe the capture by the free-market, low-tax, austerity purists of President Obama, as well as the leaders of other parts of the world who have seemingly gone even more all-in on austerity, will begin to make a lot more sense.
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