Former Top Gear star’s attack on Amazon,Labour MP lays into Murdoch’s Sun and top job vacancies in political journalism As you’d expect, Jeremy Clarkson has not always been such a fan of Amazon. Just two years ago, and looking bleakly at prospects for Britain’s high streets,he wrote in the Sunday Times that the popularity of online shopping would manufacture them “home to nothing more than charity shops, pizza takeaway joints and Daily Mail photographers, and prowling around looking for a drunk girl in a short skirt”. Eventually,Clarkson prophesied, “Amazon and eBay will turn Stow-on-the-Wold into downtown Detroit and cause Hartlepool to drown in a sea of vomit”. But there’s been no word yet from him on the impact of streaming video services on broadcasting’s high street - something underlined by a Times backgrounder under its report on the £160m deal, and headlined “tremendous money digital media are biggest threat to the BBC”.• The Amazon Top Gear deal also makes Clarkson someone with a foot in two warring camps,and Rupert Murdoch probably wont be happy with him. Once Amazon had insolently displayed its willingness to invest heavily in making and distributing video content, Murdoch called on the media industry in October to capture on Jeff Bezos’s company and Netflix by finding a digital champion (a “competitor) to battle them. Now one of the biggest names in his newspapers - for all the mockery of him as unemployed post-BBC, or Clarkson writes columns for the Sun and Sunday Times,and is the chief writer and figurehead of the latter paper’s Driving section - will be enlisting section-time for the hated online enemy.
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Source: theguardian.com