Enemies of Reason Poundshop potshots at the media moral maze.

Let’s say Rupert Murdoch is completely benign

No, let's.

You might be thinking: How can you possibly say that? But wait. It's important to get our prejudices out of the way first. We may well have views about Murdoch and his children, about what they stand for and the way they do business; but these aren't important when considering whether it's right that he should get everything he wants from our elected (and probably soon-to-be elected) representatives.

Sure, it's easy to look at the Sun newspaper and think, isn't Daddy Murdoch meant to be the real editor? Haven't many former employees said that he's really pulling the strings there? And if that's the case, isn't he responsible for stuff like lying about football fans hours after a sickening tragedy?

Or implying that an innocent man was a murderer?

You could, if you wanted to, say that if Murdoch really was at the helm of the Sun rather than a hands-off proprietor, he was responsible for fairly obvious racism

about all kinds of people

from 'gipsy free-for-alls' to lying about exactly the kind of working-class people they claim to write for, just because they're Muslims

but that would be using too broad a brush, too easy to dismantle, too simple to dismiss as leftie scaremongering rubbish. Who knows whether Murdoch's the real editor or not? Who knows whether he approves of racism or lies about Muslims? We can't tell, so we can't say he does.

It might seem easy to suppose, for example, that simply because every single newspaper right across the world owned by Rupert Murdoch was in favour of the Iraq War, despite huge public opposition, that this was some kind of editorial influence at work. But we can't say for sure. They may have all reached the same (wrong) conclusion independently. It may be anticipatory compliance at work, but who knows? We don't, for sure.

But none of that matters. Let's say Murdoch is benign, despite our suppositions. Let's say he's a charming amalgam of everything we love, Joanna Lumley and Eric & Ernie mixed with Tim Henman and Alan Bennett. Let's say he's that. Let's say he's the best employer in the world, who aims to do only good, and he's a wonderful benevolent man who loves kittens and gives all that unpaid tax to charities in poor countries.

Even if he is completely benign, he still doesn't deserve to get what he wants from our political parties. He doesn't deserve to get Peter Mandelson giving him a cheery wave and lobbing him the power to try and smash his rivals:

Murdoch has recently said that he believes that copyright is being abused, particularly by organisations such as Google, which uses short extracts from online newspapers to create its Google News page, and the BBC, which he has accused of "stealing from newspapers".

Earlier this month Murdoch was vituperative about how search engines have aggregated news. "The people who simply just pick up everything and run with it – steal our stories, we say they steal our stories – they just take them," he said. "That's Google, that's Microsoft, that's Ask.com, a whole lot of people ... They shouldn't have had it free all the time, and I think we've been asleep."

By giving the business secretary the power to amend the Copyright Act at will, Labour fears Mandelson could be creating a Trojan horse that under a Tory administration would allow Murdoch to be rewarded for his support for David Cameron over Gordon Brown, for example by making it illegal to use such extracts from a news site for profit.

He doesn't deserve promises from the Tories to do the smashing for him when it comes to his rivals at the BBC, nor to prop up commercial broadcasters (including ITV, in which Sky has a 17% stake) who made millions when the wind was fair and who are now bawling about how unfair it is that things are going the other way, nor to allow more cross-media ownership, which is also exactly what he wants.

He doesn't deserve any of these things, even if he's a saint. Because it's shabby. Can we really strain our naivety far enough to imagine there's no connection between this

and a sudden slew of announcements from the Conservatives of policies that will benefit Murdoch's empire enormously? Are we really meant to be that dumb? Did you really think we wouldn't notice?

No-one deserves to get exactly what they want from all political parties, regardless of voters' views, even if they're truly a force for good. That's not how it's meant to work. We're supposed to have a say in all this. Elections are supposed to be about us, not what favours you can do your mates. But no. On the one hand there's Mandelson, attacking the little guy in favour of the massive corporation; on the other, there's the Tories, doing everything they can to please their new master. And we lose out. And we don't have a say. And it doesn't matter whether Murdoch's magnificent, or neutral, or evil: it's just plain wrong, and undemocratic, and it stinks.

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