US influences in the Chinese media

Fascinating NYTimes article about Fox News Network owner Rupert Murdoch and his forays into the Chinese media.

Isn't it interesting that a news network that is labeled the most right-wing conservative is the only news-network that has made so many connections with the Communist party leadership in China.

Rupert Murdoch and his Chinese wife Wendi, NYTimes June 25, 2007

http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2007/06/25/world/26murdoch.ready.html

This is a topic that fascinates me--the role of the Chinese media in disseminating government ideas and ideology, its assigned role in educating the public and raising consciousness and awareness. US culture and ideologies that are disseminated through the media surely do have an important influence on the people in the US as well and likely have an important influence on attitudes and behaviors around the world. Does the media educate and inform us as well as it should? And is media that is for the most part driven by the profit motive really "free" and objective? I am not a scholar of mass communications but these are questions that interest me.

Very obliquely related somehow in my mind, last night we watched an interesting documentary called "Crude awakening" (this is a link to a trailer--please do watch it) about the oil shortage that is fast descending upon the world. The movie suggests that life as we know it in the world, and the US in particular, could change dramatically as a result in the next 10-20 years. The documentary just leaves you in awe of really how much we depend on petroleum for EVERYTHING EVERYTHING and how we consume this precious commodity with reckless abandon and almost in a frenzy even as it is being depleted with enormous rapidity. This seems to me to be one of the things that the media in China and in the US should be raising awareness about.