The story that the Daily Mirror ran last night and on the back page of today’s newspaper appears to have some accuracy to it, however, also appears to be wide of the mark.
The first thing to mention is that James Murdoch is in Abu Dhabi. That is a fact, and has been mentioned by Kevin Eason this afternoon who said at 17:16 UK time “Just spotted the boss. James Murdoch speeding away from Yas Marina hotel. Not on way to secret meeting but dinner date.”
Last night, the story that the Daily Mirror ran said that James Murdoch was having “top secret” talks with McLaren, Mercedes, Red Bull and Ferrari. From that moment, the story was in the public domain which would in turn mean that any other media organisation could quote ‘According to the Daily Mirror…..’. But none of reputable sites did. AUTOSPORT did not. BBC did not. F1Fanatic.co.uk did not. On the other hand, sites who tend to cut and paste stories did (or get them from tend-to-be inaccurate news agencies did), but none of the aforementioned did. I ran the story last night because I had received confirmation from a second source that Murdoch was in Abu Dhabi. As I said earlier, that bit is true. But if the “top secret” talks was true, surely anyone with a spine in the paddock would have put a microphone up to those four team bosses and asked if it was true. Or are the journalists scared of doing so in case they lose their paddock passes?
Or, it is not true. Well no one else has run the story, only Bryon Young of the Daily Mirror. Twenty four hours on nearly, no one else has followed. When Eddie Jordan revealed that Lewis Hamilton was joining Mercedes before everyone else, the whole F1 media jumped on it. No jumping this time. It is within the realms of possibility that a meeting is taking place tomorrow, but if so, I would be questioning the fact that no F1 journalist has asked questions today. But does that make it a ‘non-story’ because half of the story is false? Not particularly. The fact that a media mogul at that is in the Formula 1 paddock is enough to raise questions about why he is there and is enough of a story in itself.
The more likely scenario, and something a F1 paddock member has mentioned to me today as being far nearer the truth is that Murdoch is there to look at the Sky Sports F1 operation. There are plenty of reasons why Murdoch could be there to look at the operation, some to do with Formula 1, some probably not to do with Formula 1. The first one that comes to mind is the F1 channel model. Does Murdoch believe that the F1 channel model is financially successful in the United Kingdom and therefore can be replicated in other countries, where the broadcasting rights structure is similar? Back in June, it was revealed that in Italy, Sky Italia were going to screen eleven races live. In Germany, F1 is broadcast on Sky Deutschland. It may be in Murdoch’s interests to replicate the Sky Sports model in the United Kingdom and have ‘Sky Italia F1’ and ‘Sky Deutschland F1’ if Murdoch believes that ‘Sky Sports F1′ has been successful so far, after all we must remember that this is the first year the channel has existed. If you were to have three Sky F1 channels, in theory you could run the same programming on the three channels with voiceover in English, Italy and Germany, thus saving costs across the board. I may be far wide of the mark there, but it is just a theory.
Another line of thought is that Murdoch is looking at changes in the Sky Sports F1 line-up for 2013, however I would rate that as highly unlikely. If anything, that decision would either be Martin Turner’s (Executive Producer of Sky Sports F1) or Barney Francis’ (Managing Director of Sky Sports). I would be extremely surprised if James Murdoch had a say in the decision making process at Sky Sports.
They’re just my initial thoughts, although unless you are Murdoch yourself, it is unlikely for a little while that we will know his full intentions by visiting the Formula 1 paddock this weekend. I do not claim to be a major expert in this area, whilst I do like to talk broadcasting, some of the wider talk does confuse me from time to time (such as the agenda’s of Murdoch) but those are my initial thoughts. If it is anything significant, and if the Daily Mirror article does turn out to be accurate, then I expect AUTOSPORT and the such like to be reporting it soon.
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