why is this man smiling?

via FishBowlNY

’cause he can have it both ways: he can peddle crap and claim there are limits even for him. He’s got nowhere to go but up.

p.s. Those of you watching global media trends should take note:

[Murdoch] made it clear his ardor had cooled for the media business in China. India “is a working democracy, with rule of law. We find it is most exciting” among developing countries for media.

“China is immense, [but its government] is not opening it up yet.” He cited problems that Google (GOOG) and Yahoo! (YHOO) have had with the government, and noted that eBay (EBAY) has “folded its tent.”

Incidentally, there’s a long piece in the business section of yesterday’s New York Times about the success of market capitalism in India–worth a read.

Deregulation and new technology have combined to produce an explosion of new offerings. Before the early 1990s, a single government broadcaster provided a handful of channels. Now a crowded field of domestic and global media companies, including the News Corporation, Sony Entertainment and Walt Disney, offer hundreds of channels.

Indian films, especially the flashy musicals and dramas of Bollywood, have grabbed plenty of attention in the West. But the country’s lesser-known television business is more than twice as big, with an estimated $3.4 billion in revenue in 2005, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers. It is also starting to exert greater cultural influence. …

There are roughly 105 million homes with televisions in India, up from 88 million in 2000. The current number of television households is about the same as in the United States, though for India that amounts to only about half of the country’s households, compared with 98 percent in the United States. …

Interestingly, the growth exploded after the Indian government deregulated:

Previously, India’s ruling elite had a dual and somewhat contradictory view of broadcasting. On the one hand, politicians considered it too powerful a force to be left to the private sector, especially in the years after independence in 1947, when the nation’s unity and secularism were considered vulnerable. On the other hand, television was seen as too frivolous to merit much investment at a time when politicians were focused on turning India into an industrial power.

Those attitudes began to change after a financial crisis in the early ’90s forced the Indian government to devalue its currency, the rupee, and to start relinquishing its tight control over the economy. Then, in 1995, the country’s highest court declared the government’s monopoly over broadcasting unconstitutional.

When it did yield, India went further in deregulating television than it did in other sectors of the economy. It also gave up far more control when compared with China, the country against which it is most often measured. Foreign media companies can fully own entertainment networks here; they cannot in China. (India does, however, limit foreign ownership to 26 percent of television news channels and newspapers.)

Interesting.