Murdoch, R $
SEE TWO
see roy cohn
1/20 bak
1/20 villain evil pending on oz fire BS
see bad trinity on fires oz
james not denier
capt 3 23
mma tag
https://www.mediamatters.org/murdoch-family
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jan 6
fox-news-executives-denounce-trump-myth-january-6-riot-rcna73669
march 8
By early January 2021, Fox News hosts and executives were ready to move on from then-President Donald Trump and his insistence that the election was stolen.
"it's been 8 weeks and none of them has produced anything tangible or verifiable. and now he wants thousands of his supporters to go to DC without shelter or food to demonstrate," host Lou Dobbs texted a producer on his show on Jan. 3. "I believe the election was stolen — but without evidence we can do nothing significant."
"We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights," Tucker Carlson wrote in a Jan. 4 text to an unidentified person. "I truly can't wait."
"I hate him passionately," he continued. "I can't handle much more of this."
The revealing private messages were unsealed Tuesday night, part of a massive cache of evidence in the $1.6 billion Dominion defamation suit against Fox News and the Fox Corp. They paint a remarkably frank picture of how key players at Fox News viewed the stolen election lie that motivated a mob to storm the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Fox News argued the voting systems manufacturer was skewing the evidence.
“Dominion has been caught red handed again using more distortions and misinformation in their PR campaign to smear FOX News and trample on free speech and freedom of the press," a Fox News spokesperson said in a statement.
Dominion has said the released documents speak for themselves.
Trump and his lawyers "have so discredited their own case, and the rest of us to some extent, that it's infuriating," Carlson continued in his texts. "Absolutely enrages me."
The next day, Jan. 5, Fox Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch tapped an email out on his iPhone: Maybe our top talent needs to take a stand.
"It's been suggested our primetime three should independently or together say something like 'the election is over and Joe Biden won. We are all disappointed by it happened. We love America and have to turn the page. We will now be the loyal opposition criticizing every liberal mistake the new administration makes,'" Murdoch wrote to Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott.
"Not those words, but a refinement would go a long way to stop the Trump myth that the election stolen," he added. "And the basis of his 2024 campaign."
Scott forwarded the email to Meade Cooper, the executive vice president of prime-time programming.
"I told Rupert that privately they are all there — we need to be careful about using the shows and pissing off the viewers but they know how to navigate."
Trump's troubles multiplying. His businesses now ruined! Who is going to throw a party at one of his golf clubs or hotels?
Rupert Murdoch in an Email on Jan. 12, 2021
But the top talent at Fox News never did take a stand.
Instead, prime-time hosts talked up the Stop the Steal rally taking place in Washington on Jan. 6.
On the night of Jan. 5, prime-time host Sean Hannity put Eric Trump on the air, who ran through a laundry list of exaggerated or debunked fraud claims he suggested cost his father the election.
"The Republic, its future, our futures, are hanging in the balance," Dobbs said on Jan. 5, teeing up Judicial Watch's Tom Fitton, who argued that the outcome of the election could be changed by state legislatures and Congress on Jan. 6.
And next morning, a mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitolin an effort to block the certification of the results of the 2020 election. Rioters smashed windows and doors, looted and ransacked offices andengaged in hours of violent clashes. About 140 officers were assaulted that day, andtwo pipe bombswere also planted nearby, but did not detonate.
The privatetexts and emails included in Dominion's evidence offer a remarkable snapshot of the frustration and discontent at Fox News hours and days after the attack — messages that were far different from what they were putting on air.
"he isn't saying what's actually going on. just beating around the bush," Carlson producer Alex Pfeiffer complained in a text exchange with Carlson senior executive producer Justin Wells and an unnamed individual, dissecting Carlson's show on Jan. 6. "why do people think it was stolen? didn't happen immacutately. trump told them thats what happened."
Inside the Fox companies, the shift was urgent, sometimes frenzied.
"Fox News very busy pivoting. ... We want to make Trump a non person," Murdoch wrote in one email on Jan. 8.
Fox News "is pivoting as fast as possible. We have to lead our viewers which is not as easy as it might seem," he wrote in another days later.
Related coverage
- 'I hate him passionately': Tucker Carlson was fed up with Trump after the 2020 election
- In private, Fox News stars and staffers blasted election fraud claims as bogus, court filing shows
- Steve Bannon declares war on Fox News: 'You’ve disrespected Donald J. Trump long enough'
- Rupert Murdoch admits some Fox News hosts 'endorsed' false election fraud claims
- Fox Corp. and the Trump campaign hit with FEC complaints over Dominion revelations
The day after Biden's inauguration, Murdoch was facing heat from Republican senators.
That morning, he met with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and other GOP senators who were opposed to impeaching Trump.
“Still getting mud thrown at us!” Murdoch wrote. “Maybe Sean and Laura went too far,” he continued, referring to Hannity and Laura Ingraham.
He asked Scott whether it was “unarguable that high profile Fox voices fed the story that the election was stolen and that January 6th an important chance to have the result overturned.”
Scott punted the request to a group of executives, noting “please send specifics.”
Six hours later, Irena Briganti, the Fox News executive in charge of communications, responded with more than 15 pages of transcripts of examples.
In a Jan. 12 email exchange with former House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., Murdoch said "everything changed" on the day of the riot.
"Trump's troubles multiplying. His businesses now ruined! Who is going to throw a party at one of his golf clubs or hotels?"
He went on: "Could he still resign and get Pence to pardon, then just disappear? Would Mike Pence agree?"
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dominion discovery --> mma 3 23
The recently released legal filing in Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News shows the extent to which multiple Fox executives and anchors knew that the network was pushing lies about the 2020 presidential election results on air. The filing also contains a startling statement by Fox Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch: that Fox News executives who knowingly allowed lies to be broadcast should potentially be fired. From the filing (emphasis in original):
Q. What should the consequences be when Fox News executives knowingly allow lies to be broadcast? A. They should be reprimanded – They should be reprimanded, maybe got rid of.Rupert Murdoch, Chairman, Fox Corporation.
The filings also show the extent to which Fox executives knowingly spread the conspiracy theory that Dominion Voting Systems had rigged the election at least in part in order to keep up with its far-right media competitors. These decisions now leave multiple Fox executives implicated as potentially worthy of firing, according to Rupert Murdoch’s own declared standard.
Rupert Murdoch
First off, and most obvious, is Rupert Murdoch himself. As chairman of the Fox Corp., Murdoch could have intervened at any time and stopped the hosts and guests featured on his network from spreading lies about the 2020 election, a fact that he bluntly admitted under questioning by Dominion’s lawyers. From the filing:
Q. And you could have said to Suzanne Scott or to the hosts, “Stop putting Rudy Giuliani on the air”?
A. I could have. But I didn't.
Furthermore, Murdoch did nothing about the entreaties by Fox board member Paul Ryan, a former Republican speaker of the House, who argued according to the filing “that Fox News should not be spreading conspiracy theories.”
Murdoch did, however, take direct action to get rid of a Fox executive who told the truth. On November 20, 2020, Murdoch personally signed off on firing vice president and Washington managing editor Bill Sammon, who had been involved in the network’s projection that President Joe Biden had won Arizona, which assured Biden his Electoral College victory. “Maybe best to let Bill go right away,” Murdoch said, per the filing, adding that this move would “be a big message with Trump people.”
Lachlan Murdoch
Rupert Murdoch’s son and Fox Corp. CEO Lachlan Murdoch is also clearly guilty under the standard that his father enunciated, as he helped tailor the network’s messaging to help promote lies about the election. As just one example,Lachlan instructed the network to give positive coverage to a “Stop the Steal” rally on November 14, 2020,which served as a prelude to the January 6 insurrection, and to brand the violent and far-right event as a “celebration of the president.”
The Dominion filing further alleges that in addition to Lachlan’s close interactions with his other key executives, “specific evidence shows he attended the November 13 afternoon editorial meeting” that preceded an episode ofLou Dobbs Tonight that featured disgraced Trump-allied attorney Sidney Powell.The then-Fox Business host Lou Dobbs repeatedly called Powell a “great American,” while she claimed that Dominion had been “created to produce altered voting results in Venezuela for Hugo Chavez, and then shipped internationally to manipulate votes for purchase in other countries, including this one.”
Suzanne Scott
Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott also played a clear role in spreading lies and suppressing the truth on the network. Under questioning, Scott affirmed that she had always believed, since at least when the network itself had called Arizona and thus the election on November 7, 2020, that in fact Biden had won legitimately.
And yet on multiple occasions, Scott reprimanded on-air talent who called out the lies and conspiracy theories. Examples include her involvement with Lachlan Murdoch in reprimanding then-anchor Leland Vittert’s coverage of the November 14 “Stop the Steal” rally, as well as her reported “screaming” about negative coverage by anchor Dana Perino and then-Fox reporter Kristen Fisher of the infamous November 19 press conference by Trump attorneys and election conspiracy theorists Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell. “The audience feels like we crapped on [them] and we have damaged their trust and belief in us….We can fix this but we cannot smirk at our viewers any longer,” Scott said at the time.
The filing also reveals that Scott worked personally to preserve the network’s relationship with right-wing billionaire conspiracy theoristMike Lindell, CEO of MyPillow, assisting him in spreading dangerous lies about the election and Dominion Voting Systems. In mid-December, after Lindell publicly claimed that Fox was supposedly “in on” stealing the election, the filing details that Scott sent a personal note and a gift to Lindell. She further suggested that shows should book Lindell in order to “get ratings.” (Rupert Murdoch himself admitted that Fox went out of its way to preserve its relationship with Lindell, one of the network’s largest advertisers, to shore up its profits.)
When the network later hosted Lindell on the January 26, 2021, edition of Tucker Carlson Tonight, the star prime-time host depicted his network’s top advertiser as a champion of free speech, rather than challenging him on his false claims about the election or his apparent effort to urge Trump to impose martial law.
Viet Dinh
Fox Corp. chief legal and policy officer Viet Dinh also admitted during his testimony that Fox executives had a duty to “prevent and correct” falsehoods.
Q. But when the executives at Fox News know that hosts of shows are broadcasting allegations that the executives know or believe to be false, in that situation, the executives have an obligation to act, right?
A. If they are within the chain of command and if they -- and if they come to that knowledge, yes.
Q. And by “act,” that means to put a stop to it, right?
Q. They have an obligation under those circumstances, the executives do, in the chain of command, to put a stop to those broadcasts, right, sir?
A. Yes, to prevent and correct known falsehoods.
Dinh confirmed under questioning that he had “pretty easily” been able to look up and debunk the claim that Dominion was owned by a Venezuelan company and founded in order to rig elections for the late dictator Hugo Chavez. But the filing suggests Dinh failed to require Fox News hosts and guests to debunk such easily discredited lies. On the contrary, the network aired that bogus claim over and over again.
Raj Shah
Fox Senior Vice President Raj Shahsent numerous internal communications about the damage to Fox’s reputation among conservative viewers, including the supposed “brand threat” posed by Fox figures who openly debunked Trump’s fake claims of mass election fraud. On November 13, he sent a “Brand Protection Unit Roundup” to Lachlan Murdoch, Dinh, and Scott, stating there was “strong conservative and viewer backlash to Fox that we are working to track and mitigate.” He further explained that “[p]ositive impressions of Fox News among our viewers dropped precipitously after Election Day to the lowest levels we’ve ever seen.”
In order to mitigate this damage, at one point he pitched the idea of “some sort of public mea culpa for the AZ call,” or “some programming that’s focused on hearing our viewers grievances about how we’ve handled the election.” In other words, Shah wanted the network to apologize for actually broadcasting a truthful story.
In another instance, when host Tucker Carlson briefly feuded with Sidney Powell, Shah instructed a producer for Carlson’s show to downplay the extent of her ludicrous claims. At the same time as Shah described Powell’s claims as “so fucking insane,” he also advised Carlson’s team to “pivot to being deferential.”
Shah suggested the phrasing “we hope she is able to provide the evidence in court and we’ll bring it to viewers when they do” — even though he knew no such evidence existed or could ever be offered in court. In another message just the next day, Shah described Powell’s claims as “MIND BLOWINGLY NUTS.”
Jay Wallace
Fox News President and Executive Editor Jay Wallace is also responsible for his inaction on the network’s continued lies about the election, even as a Dominion consultant repeatedly :{reached out to him personall:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:y (citations removed):
The day before the WSJ editorial and article appeared—November 16— Dominion’s Communications Consultant Tony Fratto, former Deputy White House Press Secretary under President George W. Bush, personally brought the false allegations to the attention of the two top executives at FNN—Scott and Wallace— telling them that Dominion, “as you know, has received a great deal of attention on FoxNews [sic] and from the President. An enormous amount of misinformation -- actually, completely and verifiable wrong information—is finding its way on-air.” Fratto offered to provide the two of them a briefing about Dominion and concluded: “I think this situation is crossing dangerous lines.” Scott responded asking Wallace to provide his thoughts, and Wallace and Fratto then spoke over the phone. When Lou Dobbs again broadcast lies about Dominion that very night, Fratto reached out again to Wallace. He forwarded part of the transcript to Wallace and told him: “More fucking out [and out] lies. Honestly. He is a disgrace.”
Irena Briganti
Irena Briganti, Fox News senior executive vice president of corporate communications, also presided over the network’s continued inaction, even as it was clearly brought to her attention via a press inquiry (citations removed):
On December 1, a reporter with The Washington Post emailed FNN stating that Powell had appeared on both Dobbs and Hannity’s programs the day before making claims of voting machine fraud. The reporter asked,
[D]oes Fox News Media management have any concerns about the veracity of the claims that Powell has been making on network shows? Is Sidney Powell welcome to appear on any Fox News Media show? Has Fox News Media encouraged show hosts to fact-check claims about voter fraud?
Irena Briganti forwarded the inquiry to Scott and Wallace, stating “FYI—we spoke with Lauren [Petterson] and Meade [Cooper] and there’s nothing to combat this, so we are not responding.”
David Clark
David Clark, senior vice president for weekend news and programming, was directly responsible for Fox host Maria Bartiromo’s Sunday Morning Futuresprogram, in which she hosted Giuliani and Powell. The filing reveals that he also agreed with the statement that there was “no credible evidence of massive cheating or fraud,” and yet he allowed her to continue spreading conspiracy theories by hosting figures such as Powell and Giuliani, and to not push back on them. Interestingly, the Dominion filing notes the ways in which Clark took active steps to temporarily rein in Fox host Jeanine Pirro, but he seemingly failed to do so with Bartiromo.
Fox Business executives
Fox Business executives Lauren PettersonandGary Schreier spoke of using Fox Business shows to grab viewers who were going away from Fox News proper, by supporting the election lies. (They just couldn’t be as open about it, compared to Fox’s far-right competition at Newsmax.) From the filing (citations removed):
The night of November 7, after Fox called the election, Fox Business Network (“FBN”) President Lauren Petterson wrote FBN executive Gary Schreier that she had turned off Fox’s coverage: “I don’t know how we work here. Honestly. We are going to look back at this week and know this was when we lost a significant part of our audience who won’t come back. As soon as Facebook starts telling people to go to [N]ewsmax.” But Schreier and Petterson saw an opening: “You know though between us. This is a problem for the channel yes. But if we keep doing what we do, fbn will get a bunch of the disenfranchised folks too.” Petterson responded: “100 percent. I was talking about exactly that with my husband last night.It’s actually an opening for us.” Schreier: “Yes. We just can’t play for it openly like newsmax and oan.”
london protests 7 22 break glass in emergency so they did
wow omg ingraham?
an 7 22
with thousands dying from extreme global heat in recent days, and as President Joe Biden announced new executive actions to address the climate crisis, right-wing media figures and climate deniers are downplaying the heat wave and the threat from human-caused climate change.
In Europe, extreme “red” heat warnings were issued in the United Kingdom for the first time, and Wales recorded its highest-ever temperature. Railroad lines, major highways, and airport runways in the U.K. buckled under the extreme heat. Multiple regions of Germany also set all-time highs, as did at least part of Denmark. Over 2,000people have died in Spain and Portugal due to the extreme heat, which has fueled wildfires there and in parts of France. These record-setting events are not contained to Europe. Parts of the U.S. and Central Asia are suffering from extreme heat as well.
Even though the extreme heat event in Europe is truly exceptional, and its connections to the climate crisis are unquestionable, multiple right-wing media figures used the extreme heat event to downplay and criticize any possible action to address the climate crisis.
Right-wing media also attacked Biden for considering declaring a climate emergency during this deadly heat wave. Instead Biden unveiled much more modest steps to address climate impacts, such as putting $2.3 billion toward community resilience and infrastructure and bolstering offshore wind development. The Federalist falsely declared that “Biden has no right to declare a ‘national climate emergency,’' though The Washington Post explained that such a move would “tap a variety of long-standing emergency authorities under the National Emergencies Act and other laws.” LifeSiteNews fearmongered thatthe emergency powers would result in “climate lockdowns.” And other right-wing media suggested that there is no crisis at all.
Right-wing media denied the existence of the climate emergency
Fox News host Dan Bongino questioned whether the planet is getting warmer and whether humanity played a role in it, asking: “What kind of a dunce believes that? Come on. Is it [the planet] getting warmer? The answer is maybe. … The question isn’t is it getting warmer; the question is what’s human beings' role in it.” Fox News, *Hannity*, [7/19/22]
Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton wrote on Twitter: “There is obviously no ‘climate emergency'.” Twitter, [7/19/22]
Fox host Tucker Carlson devoted a monologue to undermining the existence of climate change, reducing climate predictions to: “It’s gonna be hot and then it’s gonna rain hard.” “No one really believes in global warming,” he continued, “and that’s why all of the liberals in the United States live on the coasts – because they don’t believe it… The entire theory is absurd and they know it. … The whole thing is a joke.” Fox News, *Tucker Carlson Tonight*, [7/20/22]
On Fox, conservative British political commentator Douglas Murray dismissed the urgency of the climate crisis, saying, “Whenever there is not an absolutely vital recent emergency, we can always fall back on – oh and the climate emergency.” Fox News, *Fox & Friends*, [7/20/22]
Fox anchor Dana Perino asked: “What has changed with the science that would lead a president to need to declare an emergency?” Fox News, *America’s Newsroom*[, 7/20/22]
Fox host Todd Piro said that climate impacts, particularly the ones affecting the most vulnerable communities, did not meet his criteria for an emergency: “While we all love clean air and clean water — I, in fact, use both … this is not an emergency that we need to focus on today. We got a lot of other problems in the world.” Fox News, *Outnumbered*, [7/20/22]
Fox host Sean Hannity responded to new actions by the Biden administration to address climate change by dismissing the role of human influence over global warming saying, “I think these might be acts of nature, and God, and way out of the realm of something that human beings can prevent.” Fox News, *Hannity*, [7/20/22]
Conservatives also downplayed the deadly extreme heat
Climate change denying author Bjorn Lomborg dismissed the dangerous extreme heat event, writing on Twitter: “Standard climate scare.” Twitter, [7/17/22]
Climate denier Steven Milloy on Twitter dismissed a Washington Post article linking the Europe heat wave to climate change, writing: “Hot in some places. Cool in others. Just weather. Not climate.” Twitter, [7/19/22]
Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade dismissed the dangers extreme heat poses to human health, saying: “Don’t panic. It is summer. If it was December and this was happening, then I would say, this is a little weird. But it's just a little bit hotter than usual.” Fox News, *Fox & Friends*, [7/20/22]
Daily Wire founder Ben Shapiro said on his radio show that the heat wave and wildfires were being reported so fervently because “you always know that it’s the slow season newswise when you start getting weather reports from Europe. … The thing that they will never tell you, the media, is that more people die of cold every year than die of heat every year, but the cold narrative doesn’t tend to play into the climate change narrative that they wish to progmulate.” The Daily Wire, *The Ben Shapiro Show*,[7/19/22]
Fox host Jesse Watters dismissed the extreme heat event as regular seasonal weather, saying: “Joe Biden has seen more seasons than a lot of us. He knows that it gets cold in January and hot in July.” Fox News, *Jesse Watters Primetime*, [7/20/22
Watters followed this up with an interview during which an on-screen graphic read: “Dems worried about weather, not real problems.” Fox News, *Jesse Watters Primetime*, [7/20/22]
Fox host Greg Gutfeld said: “We are in a full-blown heat wave hysteria.” He said that while he does believe “it’s getting warmer,” climate advocates should “think about the opportunity cost of all the zealotry. You know? Panic didn’t work.” Fox News, *The Five*, [7/20/22]
Right-wing media also attacked the Biden administration for considering a climate emergency declaration
Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones claimed on his Infowars show that a climate emergency would be orchestrated by a “scientific global dictatorship whose aim is 90% world depopulation,” and that it would lead to a “dystopia”: “You’re gonna live in a 200-square-foot coffin apartment, you’re gonna be given forced inoculations five, six times a year, you’re gonna be sterilized, you’re gonna be killed.” Infowars, *The Alex Jones Show*,[7/20/22]
The Wall Street Journal editorial board called a possible emergency declaration “a serious abuse of power.” The Wall Street Journal, [7/19/22]
Kilmeade called Biden’s executive orders tone-deaf and “agenda-driven,” insisting that they “will do nothing but hurt the price of oil and gas.” Fox News, *Fox & Friends*,[7/19/22]
Hannity quoted climate denier Joe Bastardi, saying on his radio show that Democrats’ response to climate change is the “systemic dismantling of the American way of life. It’s not a rational response to a climate crisis.” Premiere Radio Networks, *The Sean Hannity Show*, [7/19/22]
Hosts of Fox’s Outnumbered claimed a possible climate emergency declaration from Biden “could cause a global depression,” is “suicide,” and is “going to kill the economy.” Fox News, *Outnumbered*, [7/19/22]
related: Tucker Carlson tells idiotic lie that “no one really believes in global warming”
07/20/22
Fox contributor calls for more coal plants as a solution to extreme heat
07/20/22
National TV networks mention climate change in 32% of segments on global extreme heat
07/19/22
HE BROKE AMERICA DEMOC?
(SOC MED HELPED)
common dr 421
...Oh, for a simpler, saner time – and I don't mean that white American idyll that never was, a rightwing fever dream in which all is falsely remembered as sunshine, jellybeans and petroleum products burnt without a care. Rather, as columnist Frida Ghitis notes, "It wasn't very long ago that the country had two reality-based, generally centrist parties. Democrats and Republicans, with different philosophies, debated the merits of their ideas, in search of a workable compromise.
But then, bit by bit, the GOP started veering in a different direction. By the time Trump became president, the maximalist, nativist, conspiracy-driven, scandal-manufacturing, hate-stoking wing was already ascendant, propelled by the engines of Fox News and other far-right provocateurs. Trump's victory was the coup that toppled the old GOP and turned it into the extremist MAGA machine.
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And now, what's left? A handful of old-fashioned, conservative Republicans in Congress and their supporters who apparently still believe in some semblance of democracy and the republic that gave their party its name. But they're overwhelmed by a crowd of fanatics and sycophants: men and women, in Frida Ghitis' words, busily "promoting the delegitimization of America's duly elected president, people who are endorsing or refusing to rectify dangerous lies."
You know who they are: Cruz, Hawley, Graham, Jordan, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, et al. They include, of course, Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, "rewarded by recklessness," to use campaign strategist Rick Wilson's phrase, and as of this moment still standing, despite more and more evidence of his misogyny and possible abusive behavior, sexual and otherwise.
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Like so many among these ranks, Trump fanboy Gaetz is one of the smarmy, privileged, attenuated frat boys who refuse to believe that rules and norms apply to them – much like the man who was their president and would be forever more if the rest of us become indifferent and lower our guard. Gaetz cares about his job title only as far as it gets him booked on talk shows and the lecture circuit – so far, he has failed to sponsor a single piece of significant legislation.
In his new memoir, former Republican House Speaker John Boehner describes these types of Republican rabblerousers as "the chaos caucus," not caring about the country but only about their power base and appearances on Fox News and right wing talk radio: "They didn't really want legislative victories," Boehner writes. "They wanted wedge issues and conspiracies and crusades."
Not that Boehner is blameless. He and so many Republican colleagues let themselves be bullied, then acquiesced to our current dilemma, yielding to those pledged to lunacy and a lemming-like fealty to a president as bereft of thought and feeling as they are. You see the results: a shattered party not of ideas and programs, but only insults and bogus intrigues. No wonder the Biden infrastructure proposals infuriate them; they have nothing to offer in return.(Remember Trump's Infrastructure Week, always imminent but never occurring over the whole four years of his presidency?)
They fear any and all success during Biden's first term. Think back to 1993, when now anti-Trumpist conservative Bill Kristol advised Republicans to shun any healthcare plan from Bill and Hillary Clinton. In a memo—Kristol was then head of the Project for the Republican Future—he warned his colleagues, "It will revive the reputation of the party that spends and regulates, the Democrats, as the generous protector of middle-class interests. And it will at the same time strike a punishing blow against Republican claims to defend the middle class by restraining government."...
aha: fox is a corp, and like all psychopathic robots, its function is maximize profit which means max ratings [instant quant fdbk] which means max activation of trumpistas via red meat; this is in conflict w/ mission/function of jrnlism, straight news provides cover/fig leaf; successful red meat hypes fear and anger, and includes energizes the RW trump story/schemas of victimization. murdoch war crimes on AGW amd covid? was UK Aus coverage better? fires?
https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/media-critic-fox-news-is-bigger-than-trump-if-he-fights-the-network-hell-lose
do executives at Fox News secretly hope that Donald Trump loses this November because that would be good for the network’s ratings? Before you dismiss that as crazy talk, given the record ratings Fox News has seen during Trump’s presidency, realize that Fox could see even higher ratings when it no longer has to defend Trump’s unpredictable words and deeds and can solely focus on what Brian Stelter calls its “secret sauce”: attacking Democrats and liberals.
Stelter, the host of CNN’s “Reliable Sources” and author of the new book, “Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News, and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth,” raised that very scenario during our “Salon Talks” conversation. As he explains it, Fox News has always been more comfortable attacking Democratic administrations, which traditionally has yielded a ratings boon for the network. “The network in a Biden presidency is almost a situation where tails you win and heads you win,” he said. Fox News might face other problems with Trump as a former president, however. Stelter describes Trump as the Frankenstein monster that Fox News helped create, and as in the tale of Frankenstein, he could end up turning against his creator and starting a competing right-wing network.
In our recent conversation, Stelter also addressed Trump’s nonstop attacks on the media, which Stelter says have taken a toll on the credibility of the Fourth Estate: “He has said ‘fake news’ and ‘hoax’ so many times that it has poisoned the public discourse. It’s like a slow-acting poison that kind of gradually moves to the veins of the American body. And we can’t fully know what the impacts are of that yet.”
Watch my “Salon Talks” interview with Brian Stelter below or read the following transcript of our conversation — lightly edited for length and clarity — to learn more about “Hoax,” his harsh words on the Fox News obsession with ratings and his blunt advice for how larger media outlets can rehabilitate their credibility in a post-Trump America.
Your book “Hoax” is like a feedback loop. Does Trump drive Fox News, does Fox News drive Trump, or does it move back and forth all the time?
It is hard to tell where Fox ends and Trump begins. But if I had to choose one side of this, I would say Fox drives Trump more than Trump drives Fox. Fox has more of an agenda setting role than the President does,which is an astonishing thing to say. But when you look at the power of “Fox & Friends,” when you look at the power of Sean Hannity and recently Tucker Carlson, who is achieving policy goals based on segments he produces on his show. I think it’s clear that Trump is usually in a reactive mode, reacting to what he sees and hears on Fox.
Just this morning Trump was tweeting again about what was going on on “Fox & Friends.” It really is his morning briefing. You mention in the book that Fox News does not have a traditional standards-and-practices department like other news organizations do. Even I have encountered this as a columnist for CNN Opinion. Just this past weekend, the standards department made me rework an op-ed. I was like, “But it’s an opinion piece!” They still had issues because they had our common best interests in mind. Could you share with people what standards and practices do traditionally? And by contrast what is going on at Fox News?
Fox is described as a news operation, a news network, but it’s also a political operation. And right now the propaganda is winning and the news is losing. I had staffers at the network say to me that it’s like working at a place that’s anti-journalism. So you’re trying to produce journalism at a place that’s anti-journalism. I’m wearing my CNN hoodie right now. It says “The World Needs Journalists.” The sense that the world needs journalists, that should be a pretty basic concept. It’s hard to disagree with that idea. However, at Fox, there is disagreement. So Sean Hannity says journalism is dead. You’ve got all these folks on Fox denigrating the media every single day and saying the world doesn’t need these journalists.
That creates a real hostile environment for the actual reporters who do still work at Fox. I point out in “Hoax” that many have left. And I have a lot of stories about people that have left for various reasons, including Shep Smith, but a lot of other names you might not know. For the journalists who remain there, it’s this really awkward, tough, sometimes hostile environment. I think the lack of standards and practices speaks to this problem. There is not a unit, a desk or a division that’s charged with vetting news before it gets onto the air. There are some informal processes, but there’s not that official checks and balances system that CNN has. And every other outlet has — forget about CNN — at the New York Times or Washington Post, there are reasons why there are editors and vetters and researchers. That structure just doesn’t exist at Fox.
You make the point that at Fox, ratings are everything. Everyone is profoundly afraid of losing the audience. Does that then mean that the people bringing in a lot of money, Hannity or Tucker Carlson or Laura Ingraham, can literally say anything they want on air, as long as it feeds the audience? Is there no one at Fox News who will say, hey, that’s beyond the pale of what’s acceptable?
There are some exceptions, but what you just said is broadly correct, broadly true and really problematic. There is not this kind of follow-through or accountability that I know happens at other networks and should happen everywhere. This is really most clear in primetime with Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham. When something really bad happens, when something really outrageous or racist happens on the air, there’s finger-pointing that goes on inside Fox. Some people will point the finger at the head of the network, Suzanne Scott. Others will point at a woman named Meade Cooper, who’s the executive vice president of primetime. Others will point at the executive producers for those specific shows, right? So they’ll shift the blame, no one agrees on who’s responsible or who’s at fault. And then there’s an attempt to move on and pretend that these embarrassing episodes didn’t happen.
That’s when they go on vacation, right. All of a sudden Tucker Carlson is on a pre-planned vacation?
Sometimes. Although I promise some of these vacations are actually scheduled, they’re just at bad times. Bill O’Reilly truly was always going to go to Italy when the scandal erupted about his secret settlements with women that accused him of harassment. So he decided to go on the vacation that he already scheduled, and then of course, he never came back. He was forced out when he was in Italy. But there are other times, yes, where Fox uses this vacation illusion where they’ll say someone’s going on vacation to let the noise subside around their program and try to preserve their advertisers.
One of the really interesting things in the book are the little details. You mention Bill O’Reilly going to Italy and meeting with the pope. It seemed like, at least the way you were shaping it, that perhaps the pope could save his job. Even that didn’t work out.
I think there’s so many stories about the last five years, these big stars at Fox, who thought they were kings of the world, who thought they were bigger than the network. And it turns out no, Fox is the star, not these individuals. No matter who’s on at 8 p.m. or 9 p.m., Fox’s ratings are going to remain really high. It speaks to the fact that Fox has a monopoly position in this area of the media.
You write about how Fox got sued because of what some people viewed as misinformation regarding COVID-19 by some of the hosts. When it comes to Fox News and the misinformation that it has shared about COVID, do you feel that the network has responsibility for misleading Americans?
I think there’s a lot of blame and a lot of responsibility to go around about the pandemic, but Fox had the biggest platform on cable and President Trump had the biggest platform in the country. He has the loudest megaphone and he knows how to use it. So the failures of Trump and his media allies to warn the country and prepare the country for what was coming were absolutely shameful. That’s why we called the book “Hoax.” We were originally going to call it “Wingman.” But when Trump came out and said, “These Democrats, they tried to impeach me, now they’re hyping coronavirus, they’re politicizing the virus. It’s their new hoax.” And Sean Hannity said something very similar a week and a half later. They were viewing this as politics, not as a medical emergency. That was the fundamental problem.
And they were always two or three weeks too late, meaning that when Trump finally took action involving flights from Europe, the virus had already gotten in and it was spreading silently across New York City and several other states. And of course, when he announced the European restrictions, there were these long lines of people all shoved together at airports. Fox, to its credit, had a reporter who called that out and criticized the government for it. There were these moments on Fox where there was great reporting, excellent medical advice, excellent segments with doctors. But I think those segments were drowned out by the downplaying of the disease, by the attempts to politicize this and downplay it.
I’ve never seen a president make life and death a partisan issue. And it’s not over. In North Carolina, he and his supporters were not wearing masks. Donald Trump Jr. has been out there attacking the media saying that it’s a lie, that people were wearing masks. Last week, Trump made fun of Joe Biden for wearing a mask. If you take a step back and look at this is, does it feel surreal that you have a president dealing with a life-and-death pandemic in this way, where it’s all about him? Everyone’s doing things to hurt him as opposed to wanting to simply save lives.
It’s embarrassing. And sometimes you need a little bit of perspective, you need to zoom out a little bit. You need to think back six months — it’s been about exactly six months since all our lives changed and these lockdowns began. Now we’re slowly coming out of it and looking around and seeing what the world is like. And the words from the president six months ago sound even worse now, right? We had a sense when he was contradicting his science experts and health experts that he was doing damage. We had a sense when he was downplaying the disease that it was dangerous. We know now, much more clearly, how dangerous and damaging it was.
This is true for his media allies as well. His pro-Trump propagandists. Trump was calling up Hannity at the end of March and saying, “How are my ratings? How do we rate? I called into your show, Sean, how did I rate?” A good friend would have said to him, “Donald, don’t ever ask about that again, we’re in the middle of a crisis. We’ve got hospitals overwhelmed by the surge, we’re trying to order body bags. Don’t ask about your ratings. Please don’t tweet about your ratings again. Please don’t do it, it’s bad for you.” But instead, his so-called friends feed his ego rather than trying to actually help him. I would argue that they actually hurt him when they claim to help him by telling him about his ratings.
The book could have been called “Ratings, Ratings, Ratings” because that’s what Fox News is moved by. It’s a profit machine. When your only touchstone as a news outlet is ratings, what compromises do you end up seeing on screen?
Let me be clear, I’m in television, I’m on CNN. I care about ratings. I care about my show doing well. I look at the ratings every day. But there’s much more of a fixation at Fox on winning because this network’s been No. 1 for 18 years. Everybody knows what’s at stake and what’s on the line, and there’s this intense desire to feed the audience what it wants and keep the audience at all costs. I had producers at Fox describe this as a really unhealthy relationship, where sometimes they fear the audience. Sometimes they don’t respect the audience, but they’re desperate to keep the audience’s attention. What that leads to is Trumpier and Trumpier segments. Segments that are unhinged from reality, that are based in conspiracy theory, that are feeding the audience’s wants and desires and not what they need. And again, this is the problem across television. It is much more severe at Fox.
As you mentioned, at CNN, MSNBC and all the big media outlets, ratings are important. They are connected to profits. But when your only goal is ratings, it’s going to cause massive compromises. Shep Smith and others behind the scenes at Fox News understood that they were putting their careers on the line given that ratings are everything.
Well, also, the ratings also tell you what the audience wants, what the audience expects. Shep Smith’s show at 3 p.m. was the lowest-rated show in daytime, the lowest-rated hour of the day on Fox. It meant that viewers were turning the channel actively when he came on. They did not want to hear him with his corrections to what was aired earlier in the day and his fact checks of the president’s lies.
In the ratings for notable Democratic events, like Joe Biden’s speech or the funeral of John Lewis, you see dramatic declines in Fox’s ratings. Viewers turn it off when the Democrats are speaking and they turn it back on when the rebuttal from the Republicans is starting. So you end up thinking that the audience has been radicalized. What else can you say?
They’ve been served a diet of red meat. Fox News should come with a warning: It serves so much red meat that it’s not healthy. I mean, look, Chris Wallace, Bret Baier, they’re more news journalists. On some level, though, they’re part of the Fox News machine. Is it fair to say they’re also complicit in what is going on?
Well, that’s certainly what some of their friends say, or their former friends. The Trump era has done damage to those kind of gentlemanly, old-fashioned, courteous relationships that you see between television anchors and rivals and all that. And certainly throughout my reporting, talking to dozens of people that were complicit that came up a lot, this sense that the news anchors there are like fig leaves of respectability. One person once said to Chris Wallace at a Columbia event, “Do you think you are there to truth-wash primetime?” That was an interesting term, “truth-wash.” Wallace is on one hour a week, Sean Hannity’s on one hour, five nights a week, in a much, much higher-rated program. You’ve got to look at Fox and say that the identity of Fox is Hannity and “Fox & Friends,” these bigger shows.
But I still think the journalists there do serve important purposes. I understand why they stay. They want to be there for big events. They want to provide a reality check, a fact check to the rest of the programming. But let’s say Bret Baier’s show, for example, is on at 6 p.m. “The Five” is much higher rated at 5 p.m., and then the ratings drop at 6. Not everybody wants to see a newscast, but even his newscast is tilted to the right toward Trump. His panels, for example, in the back half of the show, are tilted to the right. Sometimes the lefty will be a journalist and then he’ll have a pro-Trump person and another right-wing figure.
He tells people that he does this because he wants to have left, right and Trump. And I get it that sometimes “right” and “Trump” are not the same thing, but those panels are not balanced. Those panels are not representative of where the country is, right? If you want to have a panel that represented the country, that’s not how it would look. My point is, even on the newscasts, these programs are tilted in Trump’s favor.
Clearly, Trump has had an impact on Fox News. You’ve mentioned that Trump is their Frankenstein monster, but I want to get a sense from you on how the rest of the media is doing. Do you think the media is better at covering Trump this time, in terms of using the right language? For a long time, people didn’t want to call him a liar, you probably remember that. Now we’re beyond that. We’re two months out from 2020, using terms like “white supremacist” about Donald Trump, using the term “fascist” in an academic sense, not a hyperbolic sense. Are we at the point where the media can speak bluntly about it? ...[much more]
https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/trump-fears-that-fox-news-doesnt-have-his-back-as-election-day-draws-closer-and-had-a-humongous-blowup-with-rupert-murdoch/
Fox News is full of Trump sycophants, from Sean Hannity to Tucker Carlson to Laura Ingraham to Jeanine Pirro —and the right-wing cable news outlet is stridently pro-Trump more often than not. But for President Donald Trump, any criticism at all from Fox News or Fox Business is way too much. And journalist Gabriel Sherman, in Vanity Fair, addressesTrump’s fears that Fox News will be insufficiently supportive of him as Election Day draws closer.
Two of the people at Fox News who haven’t been shy about criticizing Trump at times are Andrew Napolitano, a libertarian, and Chris Wallace — who, on September 29 in Cleveland, will be hosting the first of three presidential debates.
Sherman explains, “Perhaps anticipating a grilling by Wallace, Trump has been ratcheting up his anger at Fox. Last week, Trump called on Fox to fire national security correspondent Jennifer Griffin after she appeared on air and confirmed parts of Jeffrey Goldberg’s explosive Atlantic story detailing Trump allegedly making disparaging comments about America’s war dead. Trump has also taken to promoting fringe Fox competitor One America News, which has provided glowing coverage of the president and amplified pro-Trump conspiracy theories.”
Trump, according to Sherman’s sources, is even complaining about Fox News’ Rupert Murdoch. An anonymous source described by Sherman as a “Republican close to the White House” told Vanity Fair, “Trump definitely thinks Rupert is not in his corner.” And another source told Vanity Fair that Trump screamed at Murdoch during a phone conservation earlier this summer.
"They had a humongous blowup,” according to that source. “Trump yelled that Fox’s coverage is unfair and the polling is fake. Rupert defended the network’s standards and polling.”
Some of Trump’s sycophants at Fox News, Sherman reports, wish that Wallace weren’t moderating the first Trump/Biden debate. A source described by Sherman as a “pro-Trump Fox personality” told Vanity Fair, “Chris hates Trump. He’s a passionate Democrat” — which is misleading. Although Wallace is a registered Democrat, he leans conservative and has said that he has a long history of voting for Republicans. But Wallace registered as a Democrat in order to vote in primary elections in Washington, D.C., where Democrats dominate the city government.
“The Trump campaign had hoped that the Commission on Presidential Debates would choose Bret Baier or Martha MacCallum — Fox anchors who are seen as less aggressive than Wallace,” Sherman reports. “Sources close to Trump are worried that Trump is unprepared to handle what Wallace could throw at him.”
A source described by Sherman as a “former West Wing official” told Vanity Fair, “Any Republican who thinks Wallace will go easy on Trump is badly mistaken. He’s no joke.”
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james defects
https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/rupert-murdochs-son-and-daughter-in-law-drop-more-than-2-million-to-help-elect-biden-and-democrats/
openDemocracy
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Why the Murdochs backed Donald Trump’s COVID-19 denialism
2020/4/17 01:00 (BST)
©openDemocracy
Table of Contents
Hammy contrition
Murdoch’s miscalculation
Sean Hannity, one of Fox News's biggest stars, said that the coronavirus was a "new hoax" in March. | Fox News
Earlier this month, Fox News aired a one-hour special, ‘America Together’, that featured some of its biggest stars. In a radical departure for the fiercely partisan network, the show ostensibly marked the launch of a new “editorial initiative” aimed at promoting national unity. The content of the special, however, remained typically Fox. “As we face this COVID-19 crisis, you, me, our kids, our parents and our grandparents: We can and should turn to one place for comfort – the Holy Bible,” host Peter Hegseth advised viewers with a commendably straight face.
This was the same Peter Hegseth who alleged on air on 28 February that Democrats were “rooting” for the infection. “They have yet to find a reason to drag down the presidency of Donald Trump,” he said. Sean Hannity, one of Fox’s most famous names and a close ally of Trump similarly told viewers, “If you are over the mass hysteria, if you're over politicizing and weaponizing the coronavirus, you are not alone.” With only one exception – the extreme right-wing host Tucker Carlson– Fox News repeated the line that COVID-19 was nothing to worry about, no more dangerous than the flu, or “a hoax” that was being used to “bludgeon Trump”, in Hannity’s words.
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This was not simply a matter of a big media outlet getting the story wrong.This was the biggest, most consequential mistake of Fox News chairman Rupert Murdoch’s career, including the Hitler Diaries farce and the UK phone hacking scandal, which cost his companies well over £300 million. Fox’s support for Trump’s line, from January to mid-March, that the threat from the virus was negligible and that the spread was, in any event, under control may have cost lives among its devoted viewers who, with a median age of 65, are most at risk from the often fatal outcome of the disease.
Fox not only failed to report the chaos and missteps in the White house, it also cheered the president’s denial and delay, the effects of which are writ large in the United States coronavirus figures. At the time of writing, the US has had 609, 516 reported cases of COVID-19 and 26,057 deaths from the virus, a third of which have occurred in New York State. The disease is spreading rapidly from big conurbations, which are largely Democrat to the Midwest and South, which tend to be Republican.
This week, Trump clashed with state governors, including those in his own party, over who has the ultimate authority to reopen states and when. Meanwhile, protests have erupted in some conservative and rural counties demanding an end to stay-at-home measures.Fox News's Laura Ingraham was among those heaping praise on protesters, tweeting that it was "time to get your freedom back".
Hammy contrition
Fox’s lets-bring-America-together-again response is reminiscent of the hammy contrition displayed by Murdoch’s News International after the phone hacking scandal, but it is unlikely to silence the anger over Fox’s coverage. MSNBC, CNN, the New York Times, Boston Globe and the Washington Post regularly remind their audiences of how Trump and Fox News supported each other’s denialism. Trevor Noah’s ‘Daily Show’ on Comedy Central gathered all the clips from Fox and other corona-sceptics in one item, which they called the “Heroes of the Pandumbic”.More seriously, an open letter signed by 74 journalism professors criticised the company for spreading misinformation that endangered the public. In addition, Washington non-profit WASHLITE has filed a suit against the company alleging it “wilfully and maliciously deceived the public.”
Fox viewers were far less likely to take the crisis seriously... 90% said that they were not staying at home.
Since its founding under the former Nixon aide Roger Ailes, Fox News has been seen as a damaging and divisive force in journalism. But now, there seems to be striking evidence that actual, physical harm may have been caused by Fox’s editorial line on COVID-19 before its mid-March volte face. A poll by Survey 160 and Gradients Metrics carried out between 13-16 March shows that Fox viewers were far less likely to stay at home, or take the crisis seriously, which is important given that its viewership is particularly at risk from the virus. Of those who identified as Republican and who had watched Fox News in the past 24 hours, 90% said that they were not staying at home. That fell to 70% among those Republicans who had not watched Fox News.
The link between cause and effect will never be conclusive. Nonetheless, it is significant that when asked whether the threat from COVID–19 had been exaggerated, 60% of Republicans who had watched Fox New said “yes”, while only 40% of those Republicans who hadn’t watched agreed. The difference between the two may be a measure of Fox News’s influence.
Murdoch has promised a robust defence of the case brought by WASHLITE and this, too, is reminiscent of the company’s initial response to the phone-hacking allegations, when it threw everything at the Guardian newspaper, which published the allegations over several years, and its then editor Alan Rusbridger. “They went round the lobby (in Parliament) saying it was all lies,” he recalls, “issued a statement that it was all lies, published pieces in the Sunday Times and Times saying it was all lies. Let’s not forget this was a public company making dishonest statements.”
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Fox Corp, which owns Fox News, is also a public company, although the Murdoch family have 39% of the voting power. Rupert Murdoch, 89, executive co-chair of Fox News and his eldest son Lachlan, 48, co-chair and chief executive, have clearly decided that the only way to deal with this disaster is to pretend it never happened. That is why Fox now promotes uplifting stories of Americans helping each other. They are counting on mass forgetfulness and hope Sean Hannity, its biggest star, will be believed when he said of the journalism professors, “It’s the same Democrats, media mob and liberal professors who are so lazy they won’t even look at what I’ve said about the virus… I never called it a ‘hoax’. I said it was a hoax for them to be using it as a bludgeon on Trump.”
Hannity’s contortions are a footnote to the national tragedy. The bigger story is about Fox’s journalism and Murdoch’s credibility as a media owner. While every other established outlet can point to Trump’s record and hold him to account in the run up to the election on 3 November, Fox must abjure because of its past support for the president’s calamitous policy failings.
Murdoch’s miscalculation
Even though those who, like me, regard Rupert Murdoch and his interests as an international menace, still credit him with a sure judgment when it comes to using politicians to further the interests of his company. In the past, he has never had a problem shedding long-standing allies to catch a new political wind. He famously deserted the British Conservative Party in the mid 90s to support Tony Blair’s New Labour, despite the Tories’ support for him through his fight with the print unions. In 2016, he quickly discarded Jeb Bush in favour of Trump in the run up to the primaries, but not before tweeting in 2015, “When is Donald Trump going to stop embarrassing his friends, let alone the whole country?” Trump is more than an embarrassment now. The economy is tanking, a depression is threatened, thousands of Americans are dying and record numbers of them are filing for unemployment, but Fox can’t apply itself to the job of scrutiny without questioning its own role.
When Murdoch plumped for Trump in 2016, it seemed a sensible business decision. No obstacles were placed by the Trump administration in the way of the $71 billion sale of Twenty-First Century Fox’s film and TV assets to Disney, although Trump was revealed to have tried to block a very similar merger between AT&T; and Time Warner which also went through a year ago. The new Fox Corp which runs Fox News and is headed by Lachlan Murdoch is doing well financially, reporting total quarterly revenues of $3.78 billion, a 5% increase from the $3.58 billion of revenues in the prior year quarter.
Being shackled to a lunatic is all very well if it serves your purposes – until that lunatic drags you into the path of an oncoming train. For Fox, it’s too late to escape: Lachlan Murdoch has failed to create a distance between his company and Trump. In an article in the New York Times that pulled no punches, the media correspondent Ben Smith blamed Lachlan Murdoch. “Fox failed its viewers and the broader public in ways both revealing and potentially lethal. In particular, Lachlan Murdoch failed to pry its most important voices away from their embrace of the president’s early line: that the virus was not a big threat in the United States.”
How could Rupert Murdoch and his son make such a catastrophic error of judgment? Why are they still chained to Trump as he loses support and, in the face of the daily death toll, can only react with a repellent display of narcissism and self-interest? The answer is surprisingly simple. Supporting Trump wasn’t just a strategic choice, but Rupert Murdoch’s personal political conviction. It has all the hallmarks of the same crude conservatism evident in the editorial line pushed by his Australian media outletswhich heaped blame for last year’s bushfires on environmentalists.
As with climate change, Rupert Murdoch put his politics ahead of business interests by pushing coronavirus skepticism. It’s bad for him and Fox, but much, much worse for humanity.
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https://www.mediamatters.org/murdoch-family/fox-news-prime-time-avoided-covering-australian-bushfires-until-murdoch-paper
no lnx pix vid
Fox News prime-time avoided covering Australian bushfires until a Murdoch paper minimized the role of climate change
Instead of engaging with the reality of climate change, Fox hosts latched on to a false narrative about arson
Special PROGRAMS
CLIMATE & ENERGY
WRITTEN BY ALLISON FISHER & MADELINE PELTZ
PUBLISHED 01/21/20
According to a Media Matters review Fox News prime-time hosts completely ignored the devastating bushfires raging across Australia during the first three months of the crisis It was only after a Rupert Murdoch-owned Australian newspaper started pushing a misleading talking point about arson that Fox’s Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham picked up the story to distract from the role of climate change in accelerating the crisis.
Carlson has hosted one segment about the fires, referring to arson in Australia as “beyond” disgusting without mentioning the climate connection. Sean Hannity has not discussed the fires on air, but he tweeted a link to his own website pushing the false claim that nearly 200 people had been arrested for arson. And Laura Ingraham hosted two separate segments on arson in Australia.
The bushfires have taken the lives of at least 30 people, are threatening to push certain endangered species of animals into extinction, and have destroyed millions of acres of forest and residential areas. The link between climate change and the severity of the bushfires has been described as “scientifically undisputable.” In response, climate deniers have perpetuated a counter-narrative, casting arson as the primary culprit of the catastrophic fires. In reality, experts say “arson alone cannot explain the unprecedented blazes,” with one estimating “that only a handful of the hundreds of massive fires that have broken out in Australia since September were due to arson,” as NBC reported. That handful of fires were likely deliberately lit by a few dozen people -- 24 people are currently facing criminal charges -- and not a result of widespread arson, the red herring that climate deniers have intentionally spread.
Dale Dominey-Howes, a professor of hazard and disaster risk sciences at the University of Sydney, told HuffPost, “The majority of these bushfires have been generated by lightning strikes associated with weather and climate effects.” The fires then spread and burn more intensely due to conditions made possible by climate change.
Despite the evidence, Carlson, Hannity, and Ingraham have intentionally misled their audiences and Twitter followers by ignoring the climate connections and hyping the anecdotes about arson. This effort fits with the broader pattern of climate denial that has been prolific across Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, and it bolsters recent criticism about climate change coverage lobbed by his son James.
Tucker Carlson
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Citation From the January 8, 2020, edition of Tucker Carlson Tonight:
On January 8, Tucker Carlson hosted former Fox personality Anna Kooiman, reporting from the Taronga Zoo in Sydney, Australia, to discuss the impact of the bushfires on wildlife in the country. The segment irresponsibly did not mention climate change, but Kooiman did highlight arson arrests in New South Wales, which Carlson referred to as “beyond” disgusting.
Sean Hannity
Sean Hannity has not covered the fires in Australia on his show. However, he did tweet an article published to his own website titled “AUSTRALIA BURNING: Officials Charge Nearly 200 with Arson, Looting as Wildfires Rage.”
Laura Ingraham
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CitationFrom the January 6, 2020, edition of The Ingraham Angle:
Laura Ingraham has repeatedly pushed the arson talking point on her show. On January 6, she closed the program by claiming of the fires: “It was arson, perhaps not climate change.” Earlier in the program, frequent Ingraham guest Raymond Arroyo was upset about celebrities at the Golden Globes talking about climate change and the fires, and he noted that police had “arrested 12 people in Australia for those fires; they were blaming it on climate change -- wrong again.”
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CitationFrom the January 8, 2020, edition of The Ingraham Angle:
On January 8, Arroyo again misled viewers when he called commentary on the role of climate change in accelerating fires “incomplete reporting,” saying, “It’s not correct to say climate change caused these wildfires. The New [South] Wales Police Force in Australia report they’ve taken legal action against 180 people who lit fires or discarded a match on land. There’s a complicated story here -- the media only wants to report one half of it.”
Methodology
Media Matters searched the Nexis database for television transcripts with any of the terms “bushfires,” “blaze,” or “fires” within transcripts that contained the term “Australia” from September 1 through January 20 on Fox News. We analyzed Fox News’ prime-time programming (8 p.m. to 11 p.m. Eastern time), which includes The Ingraham Angle, Tucker Carlson Tonight, and Hannity.
We reviewed transcripts for any mention of “arson” or arrests for arson. We counted a segment as discussion of the Australia fires if it included significant discussion of the topic, weather reports that mention the fires, or news briefs that reported on the fires. We excluded topic teasers, defined as a short blip from the host that mentions a segment coming later in the broadcast.
Related
From the sidelines, James Murdoch slams climate denial in Murdoch properties. The problem is even worse than he lets on.
01/14/20 3:10 PM EST
Amid raging bushfire, Rupert Murdoch's Australian media empire turns a blind eye to climate crisis
01/06/20 3:32 PM EST
Murdoch's flagship Australian newspaper pushes climate denial as devastating bushfires rage
01/17/20 11:57 AM EST
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https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/08/world/australia/fires-murdoch-disinformation.html
no lnx
News analysis
How Rupert Murdoch Is Influencing Australia’s Bushfire Debate
Critics see a concerted effort to shift blame, protect conservative leaders and divert attention from climate change.
By Damien Cave
Published Jan. 8, 2020
Updated Jan. 13, 2020
WOMBEYAN CAVES, Australia — Deep in the burning forests south of Sydney this week, volunteer firefighters were clearing a track through the woods, hoping to hold back a nearby blaze, when one of them shouted over the crunching of bulldozers.
“Don’t take photos of any trees coming down,” he said. “The greenies will get a hold of it, and it’ll all be over.”
The idea that “greenies” or environmentalists would oppose measures to prevent fires from ravaging homes and lives is simply false. But the comment reflects a narrative that’s been promoted for months by conservative Australian media outlets, especially the influential newspapers and television stations owned by Rupert Murdoch.
And it’s far from the only Murdoch-fueled claim making the rounds. His standard-bearing national newspaper, The Australian, has also repeatedly argued that this year’s fires are no worse than those of the past — not true, scientists say, noting that 12 million acres have burned so far, with 2019 alone scorching more of New South Wales than the previous 15 years combined.
And on Wednesday, Mr. Murdoch’s News Corp, the largest media company in Australia, was found to be part of another wave of misinformation. An independent study found online bots and trolls exaggerating the role of arson in the fires, at the same time that an article in The Australian making similar assertions became the most popular offering on the newspaper’s website.
It’s all part of what critics see as a relentless effort led by the powerful media outlet to do what it has also done in the United States and Britain — shift blame to the left, protect conservative leaders and divert attention from climate change.
“It’s really reckless and extremely harmful,” said Joëlle Gergis, an award-winning climate scientist at the Australian National University. “It’s insidious because it grows. Once you plant those seeds of doubt, it stops an important conversation from taking place.”
News Corp denied playing such a role. “Our coverage has recognized Australia is having a conversation about climate change and how to respond to it,” the company said in an email. “The role of arsonists and policies that may have contributed to the spread of fire are, however, legitimate stories to report in the public interest.”
Yet, for many critics, the Murdoch approach suddenly looks dangerous. They are increasingly connecting News Corp to the spread of misinformation and the government’s lackluster response to the fires. They argue that the company and the coalition led by Prime Minister Scott Morrison are responsible — together, as a team — for the failure to protect a country that scientists say is more vulnerable to climate change than any other developed nation.
Editors and columnists for News Corp were among the loudest defenders of Mr. Morrison after he faced blowback for vacationing in Hawaii as the worst of the fire season kicked off in December.
In late December, the Oz, as the News Corp-owned paper is known here, heavily promoted an interview with the government’s energy minister, Angus Taylor, warning that “top-down” pressure from the United Nations to address climate change would fail — followed by an opinion piece from Mr. Taylor on New Year’s Eve.
Other News Corp outlets followed a similar playbook. Melbourne’s Herald Sun, for example, pushed news of the bushfires to Page 4 on New Year’s Eve, even as they threatened to devastate towns nearby and push thick smoke into the city.
Days later, residents in a town nearly flattened by the fires heckled and snubbed Mr. Morrison during a visit to assess the damage. A new hire for Mr. Murdoch’s Sky News channel, Chris Smith, branded them “ferals” — slang for unkempt country hobos.
[The Daily Poster
Listen to ‘The Daily’: Why Australia Is Burning
As firefighters battle flames across the country, Australia’s prime minister is fighting to keep climate change out of the conversation.
transcript
0:00/28:11
Listen to ‘The Daily’: Why Australia Is Burning
Hosted by Michael Barbaro; produced by Michael Simon Johnson, Annie Brown, Adizah Eghan, Eric Krupke, Neena Pathak and Sydney Harper; with help from Daniel Guillemette; edited by M.J. Davis Lin and Theo Balcomb
As firefighters battle flames across the country, Australia’s prime minister is fighting to keep climate change out of the conversation.
michael barbaro
From The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.”
Today: The prime minister of Australia is calling for a high-level investigation into how the country’s government has responded to the devastating wildfires there. My colleague Livia Albeck-Ripka on the events that led up to this moment. It’s Monday, January 13.
...
That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.
As is often the case at Murdoch outlets around the world, there have been exceptions to the company line — an article about the Australian golfer Greg Norman’s declaration that “there is climate change taking place”; an interview with an international expert who explained why this year’s fires are unique.
But a search for “climate change” in the main Murdoch outlets mostly yields stories condemning protesters who demand more aggressive action from the government; editorials arguing against “radical climate change policy”; and opinion columns emphasizing the need for more backburning to control fires — if only the left-wing greenies would allow it to happen.
The Australian Greens party has made clear that it supports such hazard-reduction burns, issuing a statement online saying so.
Climate scientists do acknowledge that there is room for improvement when it comes to burning the branches and dead trees on the ground that can fuel fires. But they also say that no amount of preventive burning will offset the impact of rising temperatures that accelerate evaporation, dry out land and make already-arid Australia a tinderbox.
Even fire officials report that most of the off-season burns they want to do are hindered not by land-use laws but by weather — including the lengthier fire season and more extreme precipitation in winter that scientists attribute to climate change.
Still, the Murdoch outlets continue to resist. “On a dry continent prone to deadly bushfires for centuries, fuel reduction through controlled burning is vital,” said an editorial published Thursday in The Australian. It went on to add: “Changes to climate change policy, however, would have no immediate impact on bushfires” — a stance that fits hand in glove with government officials’ frequent dismissals of the “bogey man of climate change.”
It’s that echoing between officialdom and Murdoch media that has many people so concerned.
“Leaders should be held to account and they should be held to account by the media,” said Penny D. Sackett, a physicist, astronomer and former chief scientist for Australia.
Timothy Graham, a lecturer at Queensland University of Technology who conducted the study of Twitter accounts exaggerating the role of arson in Australia’s fires, said media companies also needed to be cognizant of the disinformation ecosystem and stop contributing to the problem. That includes mainstream outlets, like ABC News, sharing inaccurate maps that exaggerate the reach of the fires.
But in the case of the arson issue, he said, scores of bots and trolls — many of which previously posted support for President Trump — have joined conservative media like the Murdoch outlets in promoting the idea that Australia’s fires are not a “climate emergency” but an “arson emergency.”
“Maybe 3 to 5 percent of fires could be attributed to arson, that’s what scientists tell us — nevertheless, media outlets, especially those that tend to be partisan, jump on that,” Dr. Graham said.
Of course, it is often hard to know just how much influence any media company has. Gerard Henderson, a columnist for The Australian, said he didn’t think there was much need to address climate change because it was already a focal point across the rest of the media.
“It’s hard to distract from climate change because it’s spoken about constantly,” he said.
But there are signs that the Murdoch message is making headway — at least in terms of what people make a priority. Many firefighters working the smoky hills south of Sydney hesitated to state their views on climate change this week (some said senior leaders had told them to avoid the issue). But they were quick to argue for more backburning.
Similarly, in Bairnsdale, Tina Moon, whose farm was devastated by the fires, said she was mostly furious about the government’s failure to clear the land around her property.
“I don’t think it’s climate change,” she said.
Livia Albeck-Ripka contributed reporting from Bairnsdale, Australia.
==
==
https://www.desmogblog.com/2020/01/09/these-climate-science-deniers-are-spreading-misinformation-about-australian-bushfires
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has doubled down on his refusal to strengthen his administration’s approach to climate policy as his country burns. While Morrison acknowledges that climate change is one factor driving the fires, he is unwilling to consider reversing his government’s poor record on climate action to help prevent similar disasters happening again.
In recent days, Morrison’s position has been bolstered by a group of fringe climate science deniers pushing conspiracy theories and misinformation about the relationship between the fires and climate change.
Alex Jones’ NewsWars
An article on the alt-right website NewsWars makes the false claim that “authorities in Australia are working on the premise that arsonists and lightning strikes are to blame for bushfires that have devastated numerous areas of the country, not ‘climate change’ as many global warming alarmists have claimed.” Independent factcheckers from Climate Feedback judged the article to be “misleading”, saying the claim's “flawed reasoning misunderstands that fires are exacerbated by hot and dry conditions and Australia is currently facing a severe drought amidst increasing temperatures.”
NewsWars is published by Alex Jones, who has been described as “the most prolific conspiracy theorist in contemporary America” by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit which tracks hate groups.
Jones has interviewed numerous climate change deniers on his InfoWarsradio show including Lord Christopher Monckton, Marc Morano, John Coleman, and James Delingpole. Jones has promoted the idea that the United Nations seek a “global government” and has described the UN as “the founders of the global tyranny” when criticizing the 2009 Copenhagen climate change negotiations.
Jones’ material has been variously banned or suspended from Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube for violating the sites’ respective guidelines around abusive behaviour and hate speech.
Myron Ebell and Patrick Michaels
Two stalwart climate science deniers and fossil fuel industry promoters published an article in the Washington Examiner arguing that, “it’s very convenient for alarmist greens to blame the fires of Australia and California on global warming. In reality, the policies they themselves advocate are the culprits.” In other words, they claim that only poor land management is to blame — not decades of rising emissions and global temperatures.
Myron Ebell is the Director of Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI). In 1998, Ebell was a member of the “Global Climate Science Communications Team” (GCSCT) assembled by the American Petroleum Institute (API), which worked on a plan to convince the public that climate change was uncertain. In September of 2016, Myron Ebell was selectedto lead Donald Trump's U.S. Environmental Protection Agency transition team, though he later admitted he had never actually directly spoken to the President.
CEI has received over $1.5 million from the oil giant ExxonMobil. It has also received a combined total of over $6 million from the secretive DonorsTrustand Donors Capital Fund, groups used by organisations including the industrialist billionaires the Koch family to funnel funds to conservative causes.
Patrick Michaels is a relatively recent recruit to the CEI, having previously been director of the Center for the Study of Science at the Cato Institute. He has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the energy industry to spread misinformation on climate change.
Tony Abbott
In an interview about the fires, Australia’s former Prime Minister Tony Abbott told radio in Israel that human-caused greenhouse gas emissions were “not the only, or even main factor” in driving climate change, the Guardian reports. In the same interview, he said the world was “in the grip of a climate cult”.
Abbott gave the annual lecture for the UK’s principal climate science denial campaign group, the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), in 2017. In the speech he said rising carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel burning could be “beneficial” and compared acceptance of human-caused climate change to religion. University of Melbourne climate scientist Dr Benjamin Henley said at the time that the lecture was “full of falsehoods, miscomprehension, and basic untruths.”
The GWPF has recently promoted at least seven articles trying to play down or counter the message that the fires were related to climate change.
Christopher Monckton
Not to be outdone, Viscount Christopher Monckton, a man who once rode into the annual UN climate talks on a camel felt the need to “nail the childish myth that global warming caused the bushfires in Australia” in a long blog post.
A journalist by trade and former advisor to the Thatcher government, Monckton’s assertions on the causes of climate change have been widely discredited. He has also been reprimanded by the House of Lords for falsely claiming to be a sitting peer and warned not to use official imagery on his presentations.
Roy Spencer
Another fringe blogger arguing that climate change has less to do with the fires than credible scientists suggest is Roy Spencer, a research scientist at the University of Alabama, Huntsville. On his blog, he argues that population rises and natural variability can explain the raging fires.
Spencer is an advisor to the Cornwall Alliance, formerly the Interfaith Steward Alliance (ISA), an evangelical Christian group that claims environmentalism is “one of the greatest threats to society and the church today.” He has done work with other religious groups denying climate change including the Evangelical Climate Initiative.
Murdoch media
Australia is home to one of the world’s most influential media moguls, Rupert Murdoch. Yet his outlets “continue to spread climate denial, attack other outlets providing lifesaving coverage, and ignore local fire threats,” according to a report from nonprofit watchdog Media Matters for America (MMFA).
MMFA points to multiple commentators on Sky News Australia who refer to those saying climate change is driving the fires as having “joined a cult” and “been brainwashed.” One commentator, Andrew Bolt, reportedly called the “big global warming scare” a “con” when discussing the fires. Bolt is one of many conservative-leaning commentators to attack youth activist Greta Thunberg, calling her “deeply disturbed”.
The Murdoch-owned The Australian has also published multiple opinion pieces attacking the Australian Broadcasting Corporation for its comprehensive coverage of the fires, the Guardian reports, including its reports linking them to climate change.
Bots
Multiple reports have also pointed to the role of social media bots helping to spread conspiracy theories to counter the claim that climate change is driving the fires.
Analysis by Queensland University of Technology senior lecturer Dr Timothy Graham found a “current disinformation campaign” on Twitter’s #arsonemergency hashtag due to the “suspiciously high number of bot-like and troll-like accounts”, the Guardian reported.
Analysis by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation found “some of the suspicious accounts were amplifying unproven suggestions arson had been the overwhelming cause of Australia's disastrous bushfire season.” These claims have been contradicted by official statements from Australian police.
Reputable sources
In contrast to the misinformation, a large number of climate scientists have been busy talking to the mainstream media to explain the links between climate change and the bushfires.
Stefan Rahmstorf, a lead author of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fourth Assessment Report, told Time that Australia’s record high temperatures and droughts have both driven the fires, and that both have “well-established” links to climate change.
Likewise, Australian National University climate scientist Dr Imran Ahmed, University of Sydney ecologist Glenda Wardle, and Richard Thornton, the chief executive of the Bushfires & Natural Hazards Co-operative Research Centre, all told the BBC that climate change was “exacerbating” conditions that drive the fires.
So contrary to what climate science deniers, unqualified commentators and bots would have people believe, there is a large body of research showing the bushfires are “undeniably” linked to climate change.
==
https://www.desmogblog.com/2020/01/08/australian-fire-conspiracy-theories-alex-jones-murdoch
desmog 120 1/8
no lnx
Debunked Australian Bushfire Conspiracy Theories Were Pushed by Alex Jones, Murdoch Media
By Justin Mikulka • Wednesday, January 8, 2020 - 18:29
As unusually intense and widespread bushfires have ravaged a drought-ridden Australia, bots and trolls have begun pushing climate science denial across the internet in the form of conspiracy theories about the fires. Thanks to climate change, exceptionally hot, dry drought conditions have worsened and lengthened Australia's typical fire season.
Two of the main conspiracies about the fires are based on the false ideas that they are caused by a spate of arson and they have been worsened by the Green Party's supposed efforts to stop controlled burns as a fire management and reduction measure.
Dr. Timothy Graham from the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) did an analysis of the online activity and concluded there was a high level of bots involved in spreading these conspiracies. As ZDnet reported, Graham is “at least confident” that that this was some type of disinformation campaign.
Sites like NewsWars — which was founded by the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones who falsely claimed the Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax — are already pushing these conspiracies.
Notorious climate deniers Patrick Michaels and Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute promoted the same conspiracies in the Washington Examiner. And the discredited extremist science denier Lord Monckton also weighed in.
However, it isn’t just fringe sites pushing these ideas.The New York Times reports that Rupert Murdoch’s media empire has also been instrumental in publishing these debunked claims (and others claiming that these fires are no worse than normal).
Despite multiple sources clearly discrediting these myths, CNN’s top story in its World News section today, which is also featured in its website's top stories banner this morning, included the misleading headline, “Police in Australia are accusing 24 people of deliberately setting bushfires” — reinforcing the work of conspiracy theorists' messaging.
Police and Firefighters Debunk the Myths
A common theme in these myths is that the Australian police and firefighters are the source of these purported claims about the wildfires, which has been strongly refuted by none other than the police and firefighters.
The Guardian reported that a spokeswoman for the Victoria police said, “There is currently no intelligence to indicate that the fires in East Gippsland and the North East have been caused by arson or any other suspicious behaviour.”
That same article notes that according to a Rural Fire Service spokesman, “The majority of the larger fires in the state [of New South Wales] were caused by lightning, and that arson was a relatively small source of ignition.”
Members of the New South Wales fire brigade have also dismissed the idea that the fires are due to efforts by the Green Party to stop fire management practices.
==
:{Amid raging bushfire, Rupert Murdoch's Australian media empire turns a blind eye to climate crisis:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:
https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/william-barrs-corruption-tour-continues-with-secret-rupert-murdoch-meeting/
...Trump’s top cop, Attorney General William Barr, had a private meeting in New York with none other than the ogre of media, Rupert Murdoch.According to *The New York Times*, Murdoch and Barr met Wednesday at Murdoch’s residence. Whether or not there were any others in attendance is not clear, and what the two men discussed over eye of newt and goblets of blood is also unknown. What is known is that Murdoch is powerful and he represents a lot of right-wing propaganda outlets, and Barr is suspected of having involved himself in high crimes and treason.
Fox News has been a poisonous beacon of Trump’s misinformation campaign against the world and reality for the past few years but in recent months, the cable network’s unwavering support of the president has shown some cracks. This has been coupled with random attacks from the sputtering orange white supremacist himself, unhappy at the network for what he has seemingly perceived as a betrayal...
==
intercept
https://theintercept.com/2019/07/10/the-problem-at-fox-news-is-not-just-tucker-carlson-its-the-murdoch-family-that-owns-and-controls-the-network/
:{The Problem at Fox News Is Not Just Tucker Carlson — It’s the Murdoch Family Who Owns and Controls the Network:(style="box-sizing:border-box;font-weight:normal"):}:
Harper Collins, a publishing company owned by Rupert Murdoch, who also owns the Fox TV
Media Matters senior fellow Matt Gertzelaborates: "Lachlan Murdoch has consistently lied about what his network does and what it is, even as the people who work for him have breached the norms of their profession in increasingly flagrant ways and become ever more entangled with the Trump administration. ... Lachlan Murdoch is ultimately accountable for Fox’s programming. If he wanted the network to operate as a responsible media outlet, he could make that happen. Instead, he suggests that any attempt to rein in his network’s stars would constitute unacceptable censorship of their opinions. ... Lachlan Murdoch is gaslighting America about the damage Fox News is doing to the country."
Media Matters president Angelo Carusone adds: "Lachlan Murdoch is steering the ship at 21st Century Fox and shaping the strategic direction of the company. It’s Lachlan who is ultimately responsible for Fox News now and in the future. Under Lachlan, Fox News has actually gotten worse -- more bigoted, more extreme, and more deceitful, and morphing into a full-fledged propaganda operation."
Fox News wants it both ways: They want to push bigotry while being accepted as just another media outlet. Murdoch is emblematic of that. When questioned recently, Murdoch compared Fox News to other media outlets and said that he was not embarrassed by the propaganda and bigotry of its personalities.
But it is not sustainable. At a normal media company, leadership would step in to address this level of bigotry and extremism. But at Fox News, such things are only encouraged. In response, advertisers have fled Fox News this year.
As long as Lachlan Murdoch is in charge, it's only going to get worse.
==
hmmn
https://www.c-span.org/video/?283933-1/man-owns-news
JANUARY 13, 2009
Man Who Owns the News Michael Wolfftalked about The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch (Publisher: Broadway; December 2, 2008). The book is a look inside the building of Rupert Murdoch’s media conglomerate and the intra-family fight over who will inherit it. The focal point is Mr. Murdoch’s acquisition of the Wall Street Journal, claimed to be his most personally satisfying takeover. Mr. Wolff’s research included several interviews with Mr. Murdoch and his family members. Following his remarks, the author responded to audience members' questions.
Michael Wolffis a Vanity Fair columnist and two-time National Magazine Award winner. He’s also a commentator for CNBC and founder of www.newser.com. Wolff is a former columnist for New York Magazine, as well as the Guardian and Spectator, published in the United Kingdom. He’s the author of Autumn of the Moguls and Burn Rate
:{Murdoch's Trump support pays off }: Rupert Murdoch agreed to sell his entertainment and international television assets to Disney. But, thanks to Trump's FCC, Murdoch is now poised to expand his local TV empire. Analysts suggest that Murdoch could fill these stations with Fox News programming, creating another right-wing local television conglomerate (in addition to Sinclair). |
Paul Krugman on the Movie that Big Money Doesn't Want You to See
Why learn the lessons of history when you can just rewrite it.
By Janet Allon / AlterNet December 18, 2015
Paul Krugman has not quite become a film critic, but he does give “The Big Short," the new movie about the financial crisis of 2008, a thumbs up in Friday's column. His over-arching point is that some powerful interests want to spin the history of the crisis into something it was not, namely a problem of too much government regulation, when in fact the opposite is the case. And they are doing their best to make sure that "we don’t remember what happened, or that we remember it wrong."
That brings Krugman to the "new movie the enemies of financial regulation really, really don’t want you to see:"
“The Big Short” is based on the Michael Lewis book of the same name, one of the few real best-sellers to emerge from the financial crisis. I saw an early screening, and I think it does a terrific job of making Wall Street skulduggery entertaining, of exploiting the inherent black humor of how it went down.
The film achieves this feat mainly by personalizing the tale, focusing not on abstractions but on colorful individuals who saw the rot in the system and tried to make money off that realization. Of course, this still requires explaining what it was all about. Yet even the necessary expository set pieces work amazingly well. For example, we learn how dubious loans were repackaged into supposedly safe “collateralized debt obligations” via a segment in which the chef Anthony Bourdain explains how last week’s fish can be disguised as seafood stew.
Krugman does not go too far down the path of film critic; his message is that the movie gets the basic underlying story right:
I could quibble over a few points: The group of people who recognized that we were experiencing the mother of all housing bubbles, and that this posed big dangers to the real economy, was bigger than the film might lead you to believe. It even included a few (cough) mainstream economists. But it is true that many influential, seemingly authoritative players, from Alan Greenspan on down, insisted not only that there was no bubble but that no bubble was even possible.
And the bubble whose existence they denied really was inflated largely via opaque financial schemes that in many cases amounted to outright fraud — and it is an outrage that basically nobody ended up being punished for those sins aside from innocent bystanders, namely the millions of workers who lost their jobs and the millions of families that lost their homes.
The story is not one that the rich and powerful want disseminated, and they are doing everything in their power to spread the Big Lie that too much government was to blame because it pushed too many loans on the poor. This despite that view being thoroughly debunked, according to Krugman.
Murdoch-owned papers are going after the movie big-time, but their agenda is obvious."The attackers obviously worry that the film is entertaining enough that it will expose a large audience to the truth," Krugman writes. "Let’s hope that their fears are justified."
==
alternet 7/15
Rupert Murdoch’s Donald Trump Nightmare: He Can’t Control the Monster Fox News Created
Even the powerful mogul can’t stop his biggest media asset from acting as Trump’s biggest booster.
By Sophia Tesfaye / Salon July 22, 2015
36 COMMENTS
If there seems to be a split in the way Rupert Murdoch-owned media outlets are covering the presidential campaign of Donald Trump that’s because one of Murdoch’s holdings is reportedly out of control — Murdoch can’t get Fox News to stop positively covering The Donald.
According to New York Magazine’s Gabriel Sherman, the conservative media mogul has been unsuccessful in his attempt to wield influence over the editorial decisions of Fox News CEO Roger Ailes. Sherman reports that Ailes has pushed Fox’s on-air personalities to defend Trump’s controversial comments in recent weeks, boasting that the conservative network was covering the Trump campaign to his personal specifications. For his part, Murdoch appears to be dead set against a Trump candidacy, publicly blasting the Republican’s incendiary rhetoric:
Trump, who has a longstanding relationship with Fox News, met with Ailes for an extended lunch around the time of his announcement and has called the cable news executive “one of the great geniuses in television history.” During the month of June, Trump appeared on Fox 10 times, amounting to 1 hour and 48 minutes of free airtime from the network and it’s become evident that there is little Murdoch can do to stop it. According to Sherman, Murdoch, whose 21st Century Fox is the parent company of Fox News, recently called Ailes to ask him to “back off the Trump coverage.” Trump was back on “Fox & Friends“, a show where he held weekly appearances before entering the presidential race, this morning to push-back against all of the negative scrutiny his stunt giving out Lindsey Graham’s personal cell number generated. Per usual, the host provided Trump his softball interview. And as Sherman points out, “yesterday, at a campaign event in South Carolina where he gave out Lindsey Graham’s personal cell-phone number, Trump heaped praise on Fox & Friends’ Doocy, Brian Kilmeade, and Elisabeth and Hasselbeck, ‘They’re great people.’” Sherman, a veteran Fox News observer, describes “Fox & Friends” as “a show that is used by Ailes to inject his point of view into debates.”
And as the New York Times explains, there is little Murdoch can do to wrangle editorial control over the network from Ailes: “As the creator of the highest-rated cable news channel in the country (even surpassing ESPN in total viewers on some nights) and one of the most profitable assets in Mr. Murdoch’s film and television company, 21st Century Fox, Mr. Ailes has been given the freedom to operate largely outside the purview of Mr. Murdoch.”
So, for now, Murdoch’s control is relegated to the front page of the NY Post, the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal and his personal Twitter account. But the head of one of the most powerful media conglomerates in the world can’t stop his biggest media asset from acting as Trump’s biggest booster, as the carnival barker marches his campaign to the first Republican debate stage — on Fox News
http://www.alternet.org/media/rupert-murdochs-donald-trump-nightmare-he-cant-control-monster-fox-news-created
time warner
==
cato: powerbase
Media Industry Links
Rupert Murdoch, President and CEO of News Corporation joined the Cato Institute board of directors in 1997, he was welcomed as ‘one of the most successful entrepreneurs in the world, a strong advocate of the free market and a committed civil libertarian’.[16]
Rupert Murdoch worked closely with fellow board member John C Malone (then president and CEO of Tele-Communications Inc, the largest U.S. Cable operator) to ‘actively promote the deregulation of the television and telephone industries’.[17] The Cato institute advocates the privatization of the Internet and communications systems.[18]Despite Murdoch and Malone’s place on the board of a libertarian think tank both profit from government subsidies. Murdoch’s News Corporation profits from licences issued by the state which are worth millions of dollars.[19]Similarly, cable TV corporations such as TCI (Fronted by Malone) are able to expand their services, and in turn their profits, under the protection of federal regulations which limits the power of license fees to be set at a local level.[20]
==
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http://www.kqed.org/a/forum/R201311040900
NPR's media correspondent David Folkenflik writes about the billionaire businessman in his new book, "Murdoch's World: The Last of the Old Media Empires."
PR sock puppets, trap reporter w/ fake email; outed one for detox
- "Murdoch's World: The Last of the Old Media Empires" book review (Indiebound)
- David Folkenflik: Rupert Murdoch's Rules (Salon)
==
Media mogul Rupert Murdoch could rake in up to $28.3 million next year after News Corp. splits into two companies this summer, according to an SEC filing Friday.
Murdoch’s base salary for fiscal 2014 will be $8.1 million, with a target bonus of $12.5 million and a long-term incentive opportunity of $7.7 million. That’s 15 percent more than the $24.6 million he’ll report for fiscal year 2013, which ends in June, the company noted. And following the News Corp. split into separate publishing and entertainment businesses later this year, a “significant portion” of Murdoch’s total compensation will be “at-risk and linked to performance,” the company added.
==
It was a memorable week in which the conservative media's highest profile newspaper, Rupert Murdoch's New York Post, seemed committed to getting as many stories wrong about the Boston attack as possible.
The hapless Post somehow managed to completely botch the simplest Journalism 101 fact of how many people were killed in the Patriot's Day attack. But hey, according to beleaguered Post editor Col Allan thePost tried its best and that's all that really matters. (It would've taken a "crystal ball" to get the story right, Allan now complains.) So no, there doesn't appear to be much introspection unfolding inside Murdoch's daily; a big-city tabloid that managed to get wrong, for days, a breaking crime story.[m defended in holywood reporter]
boelert, mma:
As CMD previously reported [59], News Corp. has been a member of both ALEC's Education Task Force and Communications and Technology Task Force. Wall Street Journal editorial board member Stephen Moore, is an ALEC "scholar" and both the Wall Street Journal and Fox News have gone to bat for ALEC as member corporations began to flee earlier this year. What is less well known is that News Corp. owns Wireless Generation, a for-profit online education, software, and testing corporation, acquiring it in 2010 for $360 million. Wireless Generation is also an ALEC member. Apparently, Murdoch was anxious to get a piece of the nation's education system, which he describes [60] as a "500 billion sector in the U.S. alone that is waiting desperately to be transformed." News Corp's senior Vice President in charge of its education division is none other than former Chancellor of New York City Schools, Joel Klein, who promoted a corporatist model of education reform.
Lubienski, for one is skeptical of "self-proclaimed experts on the topic of education" like Murdoch who "aren't accountable to the public" and who have a profit motive coupled with a political agenda of widespread privatization.
Michelle Rhee, Former D.C. Chancellor of Schools, Pushes Parent Trigger
The film is being promoted by former Washington, D.C., public schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee. Rhee spoke at both the RNC and DNC screenings of "Won't Back Down," and her involvement underscores what is often the bipartisan nature of the modern "school reform" movement.
Her tenure as the head of the D.C. school system was so controversial, she is widely credited with losing D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty's reelection campaign. She was credited with greatly improving test scores in Washington, D.C. schools, but this accomplishment was cast into doubt by a USA Today [61] investigation that suggested that test score gains during her term may have been the result of cheating on the part of school officials. The report found extremely high erasure rates that were statistically anomalous.
After resigning from her position in 2010, Rhee went on to start StudentsFirst [62], a 501(c)4 non-profit organization planning to engage in "direct and grassroots lobbying" on education issues including Parent Trigger. [63] Derrell Bradford, a state director for StudentsFirst, [64] spoke on "Enacting a Comprehensive K-12 Education Reform Agenda" at the 2011 ALEC annual meeting.
Rhee's group receives funding from Murdoch, who "has pledged to spend more than $1 billion to bring for-profit schools, including virtual education, to the entire country by electing reform-friendly candidates and hiring top-notch state lobbyists." News Corp's Joel Klein serves [65] on her organization's board. Other supporters include New Jersey hedge funder manager David Tepper [66], and Alan Fournier (reportedly [64] big backers of Romney).
Rhee was also
[55] in Anschutz's film "Waiting for 'Superman'."
http://mediamatters.org/blog/2012/07/24/his-reputation-shattered-in-uk-murdoch-embraced/187294
His reputation in the UK may lay in tatters, but Murdoch remains without a doubt the most powerful media player in Republican circles today simply because of the right-wing megaphone Fox News has become as it completely overshadows the Republican National Committee and other traditional political power bases and serves as the de facto headquarters of the GOP in America.
Murdoch's American role is considered so important that when he tweeted a couple passing critiques about Mitt Romney's campaign and how it was being managed, the online comments were quickly seized upon as being newsworthy. They were just as quickly echoed by many conservative commentators, especially Murdoch's employees. The mini-echo chamber highlighted again how Murdoch sets the right-wing agenda in America and how his words take on an oversized meaning.
At this point it's almost impossible to overstate the degree to which Fox News has dedicated its entire programming enterprise to defeating Obama and playing defense for Romney. You can almost pick recent examples at random, since Fox's campaign for Romey/against Obama has become a full-time obsession.
The churning is endless:
Fox & Friends Echoes GOP Spin On Welfare Rule, Leaves Out The Facts
*Fox & Friends*Drops The Veil, Produces Four-Minute Anti-Obama Attack Ad
Fox Criticizes Networks For Not Jumping On Its Manufactured Obama Controversy
*Fox & Friends*Deceptively Edits Obama's Comments On Small Business
REPORT: Fox News Spends Two-Plus Hours Distorting Obama's Small Business Comments
And yes, Murdoch himself even got into the Fox-fed attacks last week, tweeting misinformation about the bogus controversy his channel had ginned up regarding comments the president made about business.
So here in America Murdoch is mixing things up, setting the right-wing media agenda, and forever on the attack.
It's the same role Murdoch played, and relished, in Britain for decades. With the revelation he was overseeing a criminal enterprise disguised as a newspaper business, where employees allegedly hacked phones and emails when not paying off police sources for information, Murdoch's public role there has been reduced to almost nothing, except that of villain.
http://www.k12newsnetwork.com/2011/12/occupybiged/
For example, in November of 2010, after purchasing an education technology company, Rupert Murdoch of News Corp announced that “When it comes to K through 12 education, we see a $500 billion sector in the US alone that is waiting desperately to be transformed by big breakthroughs that extend the reach of great teaching.” (Mind you, Murdoch’s FOX News is the only infotainment network that leaves its viewers demonstrably less informed — negatively intelligent — about current events than if they’d watched no tv at all.)
So I’m borrowing “Big Ed” to describe those moneyed interests and point out how we parents, educators, and students of all ages through college can fight back. Because the promise of an excellent, free public education through high school (or an affordable and very good public university education) is something that’s essential as DNA to our country in order for it to work the way it’s supposed to. We need people who can understand and solve complex problems, and come up with intelligent, creative solutions. We need to treasure — and nurture — the incredibly varied humanity in our country, and grasp that similar to a healthy eco-system that’s biodiverse, our society and our economy flourish best when everyone is given the opportunity to shoot for the highest reaches of his or her own unique potential.
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Fox in the Schoolhouse: Rupert Murdoch Wants to Teach Your Kids!
News Corp.'s major move into the education business.
By Stephanie Mencimer | Fri Sep. 23, 2011 2:00 AM PDT
Rupert Murdoch's reputation precedes him—but one thing he's not well known for is his education reform advocacy. But that could soon change. Next month, Murdoch will make an unusual public appearance in San Francisco, delivering the keynote address at an education summit hosted by former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush [1], who has lately been crisscrossing the country promoting his own version of education reform.
The high-profile speech to a collection of conservative ed reformers, state legislators, and educators is just the latest step in Murdoch's quiet march into the business of education, which has been somewhat eclipsed by the phone-hacking scandal besieging his media empire. (On Tuesday, word of Murdoch's appearance at Bush's conference came just hours after reports that News Corp. had agreed to pay more than $4 million[2]to the family of a 13-year-old British murder victim, Milly Dowler, whose voicemail was hacked [3] by reporters for Murdoch's News of the World. ) But Murdoch has made it very clear that he views America's public schools as a potential gold mine.
"In every other part of life, someone who woke up after a 50-year nap would not recognize the world around him…But not in education," he remarked in May during a speech at the "e-G8 forum" that preceded the G8 summit in France. "Our schools remain the last holdout from the digital revolution."
Last November, News Corp. dropped $360 million to buy Wireless Generation, [4] a Brooklyn-based education technology company that provides software, assessment tools, and data services. "When it comes to K through 12 education, we see a $500 billion sector in the US alone that is waiting desperately to be transformed by big breakthroughs that extend the reach of great teaching," Murdoch said at the time.
A few weeks before the deal, News Corp. had hired one of the nation's most prominent education figures, Joel Klein, away from his job as New York City schools chancellor. As it happens, Klein was already familiar with Wireless Generation, which began working with the New York City school system during his tenure.
While Murdoch's arrival to the education business is being cheered by Jeb Bush and other conservatives, the idea of the parent company of News of the World and Fox getting into the school biz hasn't gone over well with the education establishment. Murdoch's new venture has stirred controversy in New York, where this summer the state sought to enter into a $27 million contract with Wireless Generation to track student performance. Given Klein's hiring, the deal prompted an outcry by teachers' unions and other critics who saw the public school system becoming just another example of revolving-door politics and crony capitalism. ("They chose us because we're good," and not due to any connection to Klein, says Wireless Generation's spokeswoman, Joan Lebow.)
In early August, New York teachers' unions demanded the state rescind its plans to contract with Wireless Generation. "It is especially troubling that Wireless Generation will be tasked with creating a centralized database for personal student information even as its parent company, News Corporation, stands accused of engaging in illegal news-gathering tactics," representatives from the state and New York City teachers' unions wrote.
Wireless Generation had caused controversy even before Murdoch purchased the company. Last year, when New Jersey lost out on millions of federal education funding due to a screw-up on its grant application, the company landed at the center of the debacle [5]. The state, after all, had reportedly paid the firm $500,000 to ensure the accuracy of its application, among other things.
News Corp.'s entrance into the education sector raises broader education policy questions, says University of Arizona education professor Kenneth Goodman. Having a multinational corporation in charge of assessing kids' reading skills, he notes, shows that "decision making in education is so far removed from people who have anything to do with kids." And like many educators, he is suspicious that Murdoch will bring his conservative ideology to his education ventures: "They'd like everything to be privatized."
Already, Murdoch's phone-hacking baggage is hurting his bottom line. In late August, New York rejected its plans to contract with Wireless Generation [6]. The reason, according to the state's comptroller: "vendor responsibility issues involving the parent company of Wireless Generation."
Source URL: http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/09/rupert-murdoch-news-corp-wireless-generation-education
Links:
[2] http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/sep/19/phone-hacking-milly-dowler-family
[3] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2011182/News-World-phone-hacking-Rebekah-Brooks-linked-Milly-Dowler-private-eye.html
[4] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/24/nyregion/24newscorp.html
[5] http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2010/09/nj_attorney_general_to_review.html
[6] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/30/education/30wireless.html
Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair is the godfather of one of Rupert Murdoch's daughters, according to an interview with Murdoch's wife Wendi Deng in Vogue UK.
Blair, along with Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman, was present when Murdoch's daughters, Grace and Chloe, were baptized on the banks of the Jordan river in 2010. The Vogue article says that he is Grace's godfather. She was born while he was still in office. The piece also describes him as "one of Murdoch's closest friends."
The admission is one of the clearest signs yet of the deeply close ties that Blair's Labour party cultivated with Murdoch after decades of poisonous relations. Top members in the party were convinced that Murdoch held the key to their electoral success, especially after 1992, when The Sun famously proclaimedthat it had played a crucial role in Labour's shock loss to John Major. As Blair turned the party rightward, he also began a campaign to woo Murdoch. In the most infamous incident, he even flew to Australia in 1995 to attend a News Corp. conference. Blair's plan paid off when the Murdoch press endorsed Labour in 1997.
Even with all of that history, the news of the depth of Blair's relationship with Murdoch is still sure to cause controversy in the midst of the phone hacking scandal. The scandal first broke in 2006, while Blair was still the Prime Minister. Allies of Blair's successor, Gordon Brown, have claimed that he told Brown to back off any real investigation into phone hacking. (The current Labour leader, Ed Miliband, has sought to firmly distance himself from the Murdoch press.)
Blair himself was a reported victim of hacking. In June, he called the scandal "despicable."
The scandal shows no signs of slowing up. On Tuesday, top former staffers and executives at News International are set to testify to Parliament about new evidence surrounding the News of the World, the now-shuttered paper at the heart of the crisis.
Murdoch also controls several news outlets in the United States, including Fox News Channel and the Wall Street Journal. Here’s a look at how Murdoch, his company, and its affiliates influence politics here in the U.S.
- Murdoch personally contributed $34,900 to various candidates and PACs in 2009-10, including $10,000 to the National Republican Senatorial Committee He also gave $2,400 to Carly Fiorina, the republican candidate for Senate in California in 2010.
- All of Murdoch’s personal political contributions were to Republican-affiliated PACs and candidates, except for $5,000 he contributed to a PAC called News America Holdings, also known as “Fox Political Action Committee”, which is run by News Corp. The PAC made $317,840 in campaign contributions in 2009-10, 55 percent of which went to Democrats.
- Contributions from employees of News Corp, which runs Fox News, the New York Post, and other media outlets, made $594,498 in campaign contributions in 2009-10, 59 percent of which went to Democrats.
- News Corp spent $1,380,000 on lobbying in 2009-10 and lobbied on bills including the Free Flow of Information Act 2009, the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation Act, and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.
- Employees of Murdoch-owned Dow Jones, which publishes the Wall Street Journal, made only $4,050 in campaign contributions in 2009-10, 80 percent of which went to Democrats.
James "converted" his dad to the climate cause a few years ago, Rupert told Grist in 2007. Papa Murdoch then launched a company-wide climate plan in 2007, aiming to cut News Corp.'s emissions and spread climate messages through its programming and publishing. Earlier this year, the company announced that it had achieved its goal of carbon neutrality by upping energy efficiency and buying carbon offsets, but the editorial component of the climate plan seems to have gotten lost along the way. Fox News and the *Wall Street Journal* editorial page continue to spew out pernicious bombast designed to stop all climate action -- to such an extent that Rolling Stone this year made Rupert No. 1 on its list of 12 Politicians and Execs Blocking Progress on Global Warming. grist 7/11
RS
No one does more to spread dangerous disinformation about global warming than Murdoch. In a year of record heat waves in Africa, freak snowstorms in America and epic flooding in Pakistan, the Fox network continued to dismiss climate change as nothing but a conspiracy by liberal scientists and Big Government. Glenn Beck told viewers the Earth experienced no warming in the past decade — the hottest on record. Sean Hannity declared that "global warming doesn't exist" and speculated about "the true agenda of global-warming hysterics." Even Brian Kilmeade, co-host of the chatty Fox & Friends, laughed off the threat of climate change, joking that the real problem was "too many polar bears."
Murdoch's entire media empire, it would seem, is set up to deny, deny, deny. The Wall Street Journal routinely dismisses climate change as "an apocalyptic scare," and Fox News helped gin up a fake controversy by relentlessly hyping the "climategate" scandal — even though independent investigations showed that nothing in the e-mails stolen from British climate researchers undercut scientific conclusions about global warming.
Murdoch knows better. In 2007, he warned that climate change "poses clear, catastrophic threats" and promised to turn News Corp. into a model of carbon neutrality. But at his media outlets, manufacturing doubt about global warming remains official policy. During the 2009 climate summit in Copenhagen, the Washington editor of Fox News ordered the network's journalists to never mention global warming "without immediately pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question." Murdoch may be striving to go green in his office buildings, but on air, the only thing he's recycling are the lies of Big Coal and Big Oil.
As the World Burns: How Big Oil and Big Coal mounted one of the most agressive lobbying campaigns in history to block progress on global warming
SW
Milloy, an 'Adjunk' Scholar at Cato Institute[9] encountered Rupert Murdoch during Murdock's term as Cato Director -- thus leading to Milloy's Junk Science columns on Fox News website and newspapers. For many years, including Murdoch's term, a Philip Morris V.P. sat on Cato's board, which probably sufficiently explains Milloy's appearance on Cato's payroll.
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Rupert_Murdoch
sw
excerpt:
Media website kaputa cites Richard Stott's criticism of Bruce Page's depiction of Murdoch, who he said "is shown to be manipulative, devious, bullying, ruthless and unscrupulous. But that just makes him a newspaper proprietor. What makes him special is that he isn't interested in the usual playthings of newspaper owners such as Beaverbrook, Northcliffe and William Randolph Hearst, namely political power for mischievous personal ends. For him it is the currency to secure a bigger and better deal or to consolidate current ones." [5]
James Fallows, writing in The Atlantic Monthly, adopts a similar view. “The real difference between Murdoch and an activist like Scaife is that Murdoch seems to be most interested in the political connections that will help his business … In short, some aspects of News Corp's programming, positions, and alliances serve conservative political ends, and others do not. But all are consistent with the use of political influence for corporate advantage.
K. Rupert Murdoch
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K. Rupert Murdoch (Keith Rupert Murdoch) is chairman and chief executive officer of News Corporation and the Fox News. He is also a patron of the American Australian Association. His mother is Elizabeth Murdoch.
Contents[hide] |
History
Murdoch was born in Australia on 11th of March, 1931. Murdoch studied at Oxford and working in Fleet Street paper, the Daily Express. After his father’s death in 1952, Murdoch returned to Australia. While many of the newspapers in the family business were sold, Murdoch took over the running of the Adelaide News in 1954. In 1960 Murdoch bought a network of 24 suburban newspapers in New South Wales as well as the Sydney Daily Mirror and the Truth in Melbourne and Brisbane. Two years later he bought a major shareholding in the Nine Network TV stations and launched a national newspaper, The Australian in 1964. At that time he began his international expansion, buying a network of newspapers in New Zealand (sold earlier this year to the rival Australian newspaper company, Fairfax Limited) and in 1969 bought the UK titles the News of the World and The Sun.
His expansion into the US newspaper industry commenced with the purchase of the San Antonio Express and News in 1973 and in 1976 the New York Post. His global expansion continued with the purchase of the UK publications The Times and the London *Sunday Times* in 1976. In the 1980’s Murdoch’s News Corporation moved into television news in the US forming the Fox Network, the purchase of 20th Century Fox and in the 1990’s the development of satellite television in the UK and Asian markets.
By 2002 News Corporation revenues was about $17 billion. Ketupa.net cites comments by Murdoch explaining the rationale for the development of News Corporation in a June 2002 interview with a Financial Times journalist: "We start with the written word. Then we get to TV, originally with the idea that it will protect the advertising base and it then progresses into a medium of its own with news, programmes and ideas. You then look at TV and you say: 'Look, we don't want to just buy programmes from a Hollywood studio, we'd better have one.' Then comes the issue of people who are going to deliver your programmes. Cable is consolidating ... Instead of having 20 gatekeepers, you are going to have three or four. For content providers, that is very bad news. So, you try to protect yourself in having some distribution power." [1]^(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Rupert_Murdoch#cite_note-0)
^]^
On December 22, 2003 News Corporation finalised a $US6billion bid to take a controlling stake in Hughes Electronics and its US pay TV operation, DirecTV. "Now, with the addition of DirecTV, Murdoch has the last piece in a global distribution system that is unparalleled - and he will be rolling out a swag of new channels to run on that system. If you are a content company like Viacom, Disney or Time Warner, at some point in the future you will depend upon Murdoch to run your programs around the world," Neil Chenoweth and Sean Aylmer wrote. [2]
While Murdoch was negotiating the deal, US investor John Malone's Liberty Media Corporation began selling its non-voting shares in News Corporation and buying voting shares. By early January, Liberty had acquired a 9.15% share in the company’s voting shares while Murdoch holds 29.8 per cent of the voting stock. Writing in the Australian Financial Review, Neil Chenoweth and Sean Aylmer commented that "the move cements Mr Malone's key position at News as the man who can confirm or deny Mr Murdoch's plan eventually to pass control of the media group to one of his sons, Lachlan or James." [2]
In March 2005 Chenoweth reported in the Australian Financial Review that Rupert Murdoch "sidestepped stamp duty of $A53 million [U.S.$41.3m] and capital gains tax of up to $A1.2 billion [U.S.$936m] by moving control of his ultimate family company, Kayarem, to the Caribbean and listing it on the Bermuda Stock Exchange (BSE) a week before News Corporation was reincorporated in the United States last November. Documents filed with the BSE show that listing Kayarem in the tax haven allowed the Murdoch family to obtain a tax benefit when it sold its controlling interest in the Queensland Press group to News Corp." [1]
Ties to tobacco
Media magnate Rupert Murdoch joined the Board of Directors of Philip Morris in August 1989 and he continued to serve on their board into the 1990s. [2][3] The relationship appeared to serve PM well. A 1985 PM internal report shows that information that could negatively affect the tobacco industry was routinely withheld from Murdoch-owned newspapers worldwide:
As regards the media, we plan to build similar relationships to those we now have with Murdoch's News Limited with other newspaper proprietors. Murdoch's papers rarely publish anti-smoking articles these days. To sum up, then, on using our natural allies. We have made a start; we have proved that it can be done; we have found that they can be a very effective force; and we intend to do more in the future. at Bates Page 2023268390
This document appears to confirm a bias in reporting on tobacco issues by media outlets owned by Rupert Murdoch.
Politics
Murdoch told William Shawcross, who authored a biography of Murdoch, that he considers himself a libertarian. “What does libertarian mean? As much individual responsibility as possible, as little government as possible, as few rules as possible. But I'm not saying it should be taken to the absolute limit.”
Murdoch rejects any suggestion that doing business with the Chinese communist regime contradicts his conservative political views. Communist values to ingratiate himself with Beijing, he said: "I don't think there are many communists left in China. There's a one-party state and there's a communist economy, which they are desperately trying to get out of and change. The real story there is an economic story, tied to the democratic story," he told Shawcross.
Murdoch believes the criticism of him in the UK is attributable to his success in breaking the print unions and his success in establishing satellite broadcasting. "I'm a catalyst for change … You can't be an outsider and be successful over 30 years without leaving a certain amount of scar tissue around the place," he told Shawcross. [4]
While many attribute Murdoch with the conservative political views of his news organisations, some writers argue this is a misunderstanding of Murdoch.
Media website kaputa cites Richard Stott's criticism of Bruce Page's depiction of Murdoch, who he said "is shown to be manipulative, devious, bullying, ruthless and unscrupulous. But that just makes him a newspaper proprietor. What makes him special is that he isn't interested in the usual playthings of newspaper owners such as Beaverbrook, Northcliffe and William Randolph Hearst, namely political power for mischievous personal ends. For him it is the currency to secure a bigger and better deal or to consolidate current ones." [5]
James Fallows, writing in The Atlantic Monthly, adopts a similar view. “The real difference between Murdoch and an activist like Scaife is that Murdoch seems to be most interested in the political connections that will help his business … In short, some aspects of News Corp's programming, positions, and alliances serve conservative political ends, and others do not. But all are consistent with the use of political influence for corporate advantage. In the books I read and interviews I conducted, I found only one illustration of Murdoch's using his money and power for blatantly political ends: his funding of The Weekly Standard. The rest of the time he makes his political points when convenient as an adjunct to making money,” Fallows wrote.
Fallows points out that while Murdoch’s US news outlets were attacking Clinton in the late 1990’s they were backing the UK Labour Party leader, Tony Blair against the incumbent conservatives. One person interviewed complained about Murdoch’s use of his media outlets to advance his business interests which led Fallows to surmise “In this view, The Weekly Standard and the New York Post, neither of them profitable, are more means than ends”. [6]
In April 2004 Murdoch claimed in an interview with Australian conservative talk show host, Alan Jones, that the ability of individuals and organisations to cheaply publish on the Internet made concerns about the concentration of media ownership obsolete. “There is so much media now with the Internet and people … and so easy and so cheap to start a newspaper or start a magazine, there’s just millions of voices, and people want to be heard. And we don’t really have to worry … you know, the old ideas of it being too concentrated … I think that’s fading away,” he said.
Asked what he considered the major issues that government and others should address Murdoch identified education. “Well, we’re not spending enough money (on education), but probably … you know, we let the teachers unions set curriculas which … you know, don’t teach them the right things. There’s not emphasis on the … really the basic learning that you need if you’re going to go on in a college and into post-graduate work,” he told Jones. [7]
Murdoch and the British Labour Party
When polling indicated that the then Labour Party leader, Neil Kinnock, could lead the UK Labour Party to an election win, Murdoch's’ The Sun campaigned strongly against him. The front page on polling day proclaimed "If Neil Kinnock wins today, would the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights". Kinnock was narrowly defeated which prompted a self-congratulatory headline from The Sun: "It's the Sun wot won it".
In 1997, Murdochs UK newspapers – The Sun and The Times – backed Tony Blair’s “New Labour” against the Conservative Party which had been widely discredited after a string of scandals.
While Murdoch’s papers supported Blair in the last two elections, in November 2003 he signaled to Blair that his continued support can’t be counted on. In an interview with the *BBC*, Murdoch discussed his opposition to a proposed constitution for the European Union and a meeting he initiated with the new leader of the Conservative Party, Michael Howard.
'Let's just say we have a friendly relationship as I do with Mr Howard, and the jury's out … We'll have to see how the Tory front bench looks, [if] it looked like a viable alternative government, which it hasn't so far. And we will not quickly forget the courage of Tony Blair in the international sphere in the last several months, so we may be torn in our decision. So let's wait and see. It's a long way away, let's see what the Government is doing with Europe, let's see how Mr Howard performs, how the Government performs.'
Murdoch – a US citizen – claimed the proposed EU constitution would erode Britain’s economic sovereignty: “I don't like the idea of any more abdication of our sovereignty in economic affairs or anything else. We'll have to see what's in the final constitution, if it's anything like the draft then certainly we'll oppose it.” [8]
In an interview with Australian conservative talk show host, Alan Jones, Murdoch agreed that red tape was limiting business productivity. “If you want to see how bad things are go to Europe. I mean, that is just crazy there. You have your own national government to go through and quangos – and whatever you call them – and boards and then when they're finished with you you've got to go to Brussels and do it all again,” Murdoch said.
Murdoch went on to criticise Blair’s support for further integration with the European Union. “It can only be personal ego. You know, he's … oh, he's a friend of mine. We've supported him very strongly on Iraq. We think he's been very brave. He came in at a time when the conservative party had collapsed. But on this he just doesn't make any sense,” he said.
Asked about how governments could be prevented from passing more laws affecting individuals and corporations, Murdoch explained that his papers in the UK were campaigning to block further integration with the EU. “Well, I guess when it gets too bad, you do everything you can to change them. We're campaigning … what we're doing in Britain today, we're campaigning every day in our newspapers to get a referendum so it actually gets put to the people before they sign onto Europe or sign in any deeper and we're certain what the result would be,” he said.[9]
In late April 2004 in a major policy U-turn, Blair announced that a referendum would be held on the proposed EU constitution. Why Blair changed his mind, contrary to his strong recent opposition to a referendum, was the source of much speculation.
Some argued that the ongoing controversy was a major political liability for the EU elections in June and the general election, likely to be called in 2005. In a twist on the theme, some claimed that at a meeting in March with one of Murdoch's senior executives, Irwin Stelzer, that Blair was told that unless there was a referendum Murdoch would campaign against the Labour Party in the general election. It is a claim rejected by Blair's office. [10]
A few days later Murdoch told an audience of business people attending a Milken Institute business conference of his concerns about immigration in Europe. "The Muslim populations in France and Germany are much bigger proportionately to what they are in this country [the US] and they have made a very bad job of assimilating them," he said. According to the report he said that in the US most of the Muslim population had been assimilated though there were "pockets of trouble here and there".
"They [Europe] have major centres of problems that are just boiling up. Paris is surrounded by vast blocks of tens of thousands of apartments - all Muslim, all no-go areas for police and totally lawless," he complained.
The European Union, he said, was an "awful French socialist bureaucracy stuck in Brussels, which is deterring investment in Europe, which is over-regulating every business and everybody." [11]
Lance Price, who worked as a media adviser to Tony Blair between 1998 and 2001, writes that Rupert Murdoch "seemed like the 24th member of the cabinet. His voice was rarely heard ... but his presence was always felt." Price was required to submit his manuscript for his recently-released book, The Spin Doctor's Diary, to the Cabinet Office for vetting. He was surprised to discover that a third of the objections by Blair's staff related to Murdoch, reflecting the close relationship between the two. "All discussions ... with Rupert Murdoch and with Irwin Stelzer, his representative on earth, were handled at the very highest level ... The Sun and the Times, in particular, received innumerable 'scoops' and favours. In return, New Labour got very sympathetic coverage from newspapers that are bought and read by classic swing voters - on the face of it, too good a deal to pass up," he wrote. [12]
On the Iraq war
In March 2003, Speaking at the Milken Institute Global Conference, Murdoch backed Bush government plans to invade Iraq. "We worry about what people think about us too much in this country. We have an inferiority complex, it seems," he said.
"I think what's important is that the world respects us, much more important than they love us ... There is going to be collateral damage. And if you really want to be brutal about it, better we get it done now than spread it over months," he said. [13].
In April 2004, days after major military clashes in Iraq, Murdoch wholeheartedly backed the U.S. government policy and dismissed the magnitude of the ongoing guerrilla war against coalition military forces. “We have got to see the job through. And I think it is being misrepresented. There’s tremendous progress in Iraq. All the kids are back at school – ten per cent more than when Saddam Hussein was there. There is one per cent more fresh water. There’s … most of Iraq is doing extremely well,” Murdoch said.
“There is one small part where the Sunnis are, which were the people who supported Saddam Hussein, who are giving trouble, and more by, I think, giving cover to international terrorists and people from the Taliban and from Afghanistan coming in. And it’s not - this is notable - they’re not really trying to kill Americans even, they’re trying to kill people, like, from the United Nations. Anyone who is trying to come in and help get their country going properly,” he said.
Murdoch had no doubt that the war in Iraq would have no impact on Bush’s election prospects. “They’re with him on that, completely. He’s going to walk it in. The economy is doing extremely well and, you know, there is an international crisis,” he said. [14]
In November 2006, on the eve of the U.S. mid-term elections, Murdoch downplayed the number of deaths in Iraq. "The death toll, certainly of Americans there, by the terms of any previous war are quite minute," he said. "Of course no one likes any death toll, but the war now, at the moment, it's certainly trying to prevent a civil war and to prevent Iraqis killing each other."
"I believe it was right to go in there. I believe that certainly the execution that has followed that has included many mistakes," Murdoch said. "But that's easy to say after the event. It's much easier to criticize the conduct of the war today in the media than it was in previous wars. I'm sure there were great mistakes made in the past, too." [15]
On January 26, 2007 Murdoch participated in a panel discussion on "Who Will Shape the Agenda?" at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. In response to the moderator asking if "News Corp. managed to shape the agenda on the war in Iraq, Murdoch said: 'No, I don't think so. We tried.' Asked by Rose for further comment, he said: 'We basically supported the Bush policy in the Middle East...but we have been very critical of his execution.'" [16]
On the Fox Business Network
News Corp. announces that it will launch the Fox Business Network on October 15, 2007. Roger Ailes, chairman and CEO of Fox News, will also oversee FBN. Neil Cavuto will be the managing editor. [17]
On February 8, 2007, Murdoch promised guests at the McGraw-Hill Media Summit that, "a Fox channel would be 'more business-friendly than CNBC. That channel leap[s] on every scandal, or what they think is a scandal,' he said." [18]
U.S. political contributions
Books on Murdoch
There are numerous books on Rupert Murdoch with those considered to be amongst the best being:
- George Munster, A Paper Prince, Viking, Melbourne, 1985. ISBN 0670805033
- Neil Chenoweth, Virtual Murdoch: Reality Wars on the Information Highway Secker & Warburg, London: 2001. ISBN 0436233894 (This has been reprinted in the US as Rupert Murdoch: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Media Wizard, Crown Publishing Group November 2002 ISBN 0609610384).
- Bruce Page, The Murdoch Archipelago, Simon & Schuster, New York, 2003. ISBN 0743239369
A comprehensive listing of all the main books on Murdoch is available at http://www.ketupa.net/murdoch.htm
A comprehensive timeline on the rise of Rupert Murdoch and News Corporation is available at http://www.ketupa.net/murdoch2.htm
Affiliations
- Director, Partnership for New York City [3]^(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Rupert_Murdoch#cite_note-2)
Resources
Related SourceWatch articles
References
- ↑ "Murdoch & News", Ketupa.net, April 2007.
- ↑ 2.0^(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Rupert_Murdoch#cite_ref-Chenoweth_and_Aylmer_1-0) 2.1^(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Rupert_Murdoch#cite_ref-Chenoweth_and_Aylmer_1-1) Neil Chenoweth and Sean Aylmer, "Malone, Murdoch's new best friend", Australian Financial Review, January 27, 2004. (Not available online)
- ↑ Board of Directors, Partnership for New York City, accessed December 28, 2007.
External links
Articles and Speeches by Murdoch
- Rupert Murdoch, "Lecture 1: Aussie rules: bring back the pioneer", Radio National, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, November 2, 2008.
- Rupert Murdoch, "Lecture 1: Aussie rules: bring back the pioneer", Radio National, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, November 2, 2008.
- Rupert Murdoch, "Lecture 1: Aussie rules: bring back the pioneer", Radio National, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, November 2, 2008.
- Rupert Murdoch, "Lecture 1: Aussie rules: bring back the pioneer", Radio National, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, November 2, 2008.
- Rupert Murdoch, "Lecture 2: Who's afraid of new technology?", Radio National, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, November 9, 2008.
- Rupert Murdoch, "Lecture 3: The future of newspapers", Radio National, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, November 16, 2008.
- Rupert Murdoch, "Lecture 4: Fortune favours the smart", Radio National, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, November 23, 2008.
- Rupert Murdoch, "Lecture 5: The global middle class roars", Radio National, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, November 30, 2008.
- Rupert Murdoch, "Lecture 6: The 21st century", Radio National, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, December 7, 2008.
- Rupert Murdoch, "Rupert Murdoch’s Speech at the World Media Summit", Beijing, China, News Corporation website, October 9, 2009.
- Rupert Murdoch, "Rupert Murdoch Before the Federal Trade Commission’s Workshop: From Town Crier to Bloggers: How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age?", News Corporation website, December 1, 2009.
- Rupert Murdoch, "Journalism and Freedom: Government assistance is a greater threat to the press than any new technology", Opinion, Wall Street Journalism, December 8, 2009.
2003
- Ketupa.net, “Murdoch and News”, ketupa.net media profiles, accessed December 3, 2003.
- Roy Greenslade,"Their master's voice, Guardian Unlimited, February 17, 2003. "Rupert Murdoch argued strongly for a war with Iraq in an interview this week. Which might explain why his 175 editors around the world are backing it too" Greenslade wrote.
- Ted Turner calls Murdoch 'warmonger', stuff.co.nz, April 26, 2003. SAN FRANCISCO: Ted Turner says too few people own too many media organisations and calls rival media baron Rupert Murdoch a warmonger for what he says is Murdoch's promotion of the US war in Iraq.
- Owen Gibson, “Murdoch may back Tories at next election”, Guardian Unlimited, November 14, 2003.
- Jason Deans, “US must ditch 'inferiority complex'", Guardian Unlimited, April 3, 2003.
2004
- David McKnight, “Rupert Murdoch and the Culture War”, Australian Book Review, February 2004.
- Woopidoo.com, “Rupert Murdoch Profile”, profile of Murdoch with a selected listing of News Corporation companies, accessed August 8, 2004.
- Neil Chenoweth, “Malone, Murdoch's new best friend, Australian Financial Review, January 27, 2004.
- Neil Chenoweth, “The man the Murdoch children fear”, Australian Financial Review, January 31, 2004.
- Neil Chenoweth and Sean Aylmer, “Malone loosens Murdoch's grip on News”, Australian Financial Review, January 23, 2004.
- William Shawcross, “Rupert Murdoch:He turned a small-town newspaper into a diverse media empire that informs and entertains half the world”, Time, October, 25, 1999.
- James Fallows, “The Age of Murdoch”, The Atlantic Monthly, September 2003.
- Rupert Murdoch , Guardian Unlimited. This site contains an extensive archive of articles on Murdoch and his global business and political activities.
- Alan Jones, "Murdoch interview with Alan Jones", 2GB, April 7, 2004.
- Peter Fray, "Blair's last stand", Sydney Morning Herald, April 24, 2004.
- Peter Mitchell, "The thoughts of Chairman Murdoch, Australian Financial Review, April 28, 2004.
2005
- Neil Chenoweth, "Murdoch dodges tax of $1.25bn", Australian Financial Review, March 23, 2005.
- "Murdoch listing on BSE avoids stamp duty", Sydney Morning Herald, March 23, 2005.
- Jane Schulze, "Murdoch moves could save $51m", The Australian, March 23, 2005.
- Rupert Murdoch, "Speech by Rupert Murdoch to the American Society of Newspaper Editors", News Corporation, April 13, 2005.
- "Murdoch cornered by 75-year-old inquisitor", Sydney Morning Herald, July 1, 2005.
- Angus Grigg (ed), "How Iron Mark held the phone on Murdochs", "Rear Window", Australian Financial Review, June 30, 2005. (Sub req'd).
- Neil Chenoweth, "The big boys' second bet on the internet", Australian Financial Review, July 23, 2005. (Sub req'd).
- Neil Chenoweth, "Son no longer shines in", Australian Financial Review, August 1, 2005. (Sub req'd)
- Pamela Williams, "Italian wake for Lachlan exit", Australian Financial Review, August 1, 2005. (Sub req'd)
- Neil Chenoweth, "The Deng dynasty", Australian Financial Review, August 6, 2005. (sub req'd)
- Hamish McDonald , "Murdoch out of step in new China", Sydney Morning Herald, August 30, 2005.
- Colleen Ryan and Tony Walker., "Murdoch's mojo goes missing in China", Australian Financial Review, August 31, 2005. (Sub req'd).
- Tina Brown, "Rupert Murdoch, Bending With the Wind , Washington Post, September 15, 2005.
- "Rupert Murdoch offers $33,000 lunch date", ABC News, October 19, 2005.
- "Papers failing to adapt to net: Murdoch", The Age, November 28, 2005. (This is an AFP story).
2006
- "Cameron 'must offer alternative'", BBC News, January 22 2006.
- "Murdoch says Sky 'saved' football", BBC News, January 23 2006
- "Business overtaxed, Murdoch says", BBC News, January 23 2006.
- "Hear Rupert Murdoch speak about his political beliefs", BBC, January 23, 2006. (This is a 24 minute long audio file).
- Johnnie L. Roberts' , "Murdoch's new groove", The Bulletin , February 2, 2006.
- Lance Price, "Rupert Murdoch is effectively a member of Blair's cabinet: Only a spin doctor would deny that the media baron has a say in all major decisions taken in Downing Street", The Guardian, July 1, 2006.
- "Murdoch says US death toll in Iraq 'minute'", Times of India, November 6, 2006.
2007
- "Bush misunderstood: Murdoch", Sydney Morning Herald, April 26, 2007.
- Jo Becker, "Murdoch, Ruler of a Vast Empire, Reaches Out for Even More", New York Times, June 25, 2007.
- Joseph Kahn, "Murdoch’s Dealings in China: It’s Business, and It’s Personal", New York Times, June 26, 2007.
- "Rupert Murdoch Discusses His Political Control of U.K. Papers," Editor and Publisher, November 24, 2007.
2008
- Rupert Murdoch, "Philosophy papers", Sydney Morning Herald, November 8, 2008.
This article may include information from Tobacco Documents Online.
http://www.rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/Murdoch_Rupert
Rupert Murdoch heads one of the world's largest media empires, the News Corporation, which in 2008 had some $33 billion in total revenue from a diverse range of media products, including Fox News, Twentieth Century Fox, Dow Jones (publisher of the Wall Street Journal), HarperCollins, MySpace, the New York Post, and hundreds of other newspapers and television stations.[1]
Considered a close ally of neoconservative activists, Murdoch has helped bankroll neoconservatism’s more important media outlets, including the William Kristol-edited *Weekly Standard*, the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, and Fox News. A sign of Murdoch’s commitment to this rightwing faction’s causes was his willingness to support the Standard in spite of yearly losses in the millions; the magazine is widely credited as a pivotal force in building support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. According to a report by Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, “With a circulation of about 65,000 and annual losses estimated from $1 million … to $5 million … the Standard represented only a tiny fraction of Murdoch's vast media empire.”[2]
In 1983, a plan, hatched by CIA Director William J. Casey, called for raising private money to sell the administration’s Central American policies to the American public through an outreach program designed to look independent but which was secretly managed by Reagan-Bush officials.
The project was implemented by a CIA propaganda veteran, Walter Raymond Jr., who had been moved to the National Security Council staff and put in charge of a “perception management” campaign that had both international and domestic objectives.
In one initiative, Raymond arranged to have Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch chip in money for ostensibly private groups that would back Reagan-Bush policies. According to a memo dated Aug. 9, 1983, Raymond reported that “via Murdock [sic], may be able to draw down added funds.” For details, see Parry’s *[Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq*.]
Here is yet another chronicle of the life and times of Rupert Murdoch (Thomas Kiernan's Citizen Murdoch , LJ 10/15/86; Michael Leapman's Arrogant Aussie , LJ 6/15/86; Jerome Tuccille's Rupert Murdoch , LJ 11/1/89)
From Publishers Weekly
For this unauthorized biography of media baron Rupert Murdoch, a "uniquely important" information broker whose life has been "an unending assault upon the world," Shawcross ( Sideshow ) had privileged access to Murdoch, to his colleagues and family. The result is a mostly nonjudgmental, flat profile of a driven, often ruthless, lonely man of "invincible energy and ambition" who put together a communications empire stretching from Australia to London to New York, Chicago and Hollywood. Shawcross perceives "a certain dour puritanism" in the king of sensationalist tabloid journalism. Murdoch's life was a series of takeovers, wins and losses that included the acquisitions of the New York Post, the London Times , Fox film and television, and HarperCollins publishers. Murdoch, an ardent supporter of Reaganism and Thatcherism, viewed himself as "totally internationalist" and saw his media empire as instrumental in promoting the Americanization of the world, but Shawcross fails to explore the implications of that prospect. Photos. Author tour.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Library Journa
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