(The Daily Telegraph, 7 September 1999, daily, UK)

Murdoch's dirty business - Editorial

There is something almost endearingly wicked about the way in which Rupert Murdoch attacks the Dalai Lama in an interview published in the latest edition of Vanity Fair. He says of the exiled Buddhist leader of Tibet: "I have heard cynics who say he's a very political old monk shuffling around in Gucci shoes."

Notice that Mr Murdoch does not say this himself. Rather, he has heard "cynics" who say it, and he is merely passing on their views. He sounds like the little boy who says "Teddy doesn't want to go to bed", when he realy means that he doesn't want to go to bed.

We all know that the head of the News International would like the Chinese to believe that he shares the view that he attributes to these "cynics". This would be extremely helpful to him, after all, in his efforts to strengthen this business links with China, the country that drove the Dalai Lama in exile. In the same way, Mr Murdoch feels moved to confess that he may be "falling for [Chinese] propaganda" when he says that Tibet before the invasion was "an authoritarian, medieval society without any basic services". Somewhere inside him there is a decent, straightforward man trying to get out but Murdoch, the businessman, is keeping him firmly locked in.

What Mr Murdoch told Vanity Fair is profoundly wrong. The Chinese have treated the people of Tibet abominably since they invaded in 1959. They have attempted nothing less than the annihilation of a culture, destroying hundreds of monasteries off the tourist trail, moving Han Chinese settlers with the aim of outnumbering the indigenous population and brutally repressing every uprising against their authority. Mr Murdoch has no business to be making excuses for them.