Rupert Murdoch had it coming for a long, long time.
I was there back in 1975 at the height of the greatest
constitutional and political crisis in Australian history when Murdoch showed
his contempt for truth, for journalistic integrity, for democracy itself.
After 30 years out of power, the Labor Party led by Gough
Whitlam won election in 1972 in no small measure thanks to support from the
then liberal-minded Murdoch who had come from nowhere to best the press lords
and become a powerful force in Australian journalism thanks to topless girls on
page three of his tabloids and a shameless willingness to appeal to the lowest
common denominator.
By 1975, Murdoch’s invasion of British journalism was
well under way and his politics had shifted sharply to the right. He joined in
a relentless bashing of the Labor government whose own follies allowed the
Governor-General, the queen’s surrogate, to sack Whitlam, install conservatives
into power and call a snap election.
Murdoch, as he did periodically, flew to Sydney and took
over running the news desk of The Australian, his one respectable broadsheet
newspaper.
As a reporter there and sometime news assignment editor,
it was fascinating to watch Murdoch work and to listen to him as he held court
from time to time.
He was a journalistic genius, like no one I’d seen before
or since. The only one close to him was Gene Pope, the demonic founder,
publisher and editor of the National Enquirer.
There was a common thread to them both. They grew up amid
wealth and privilege, yet they had an intuitive instinct for the guts of a
story, an uncanny sense of the mind of ordinary people, born, I believe, from contempt for their banality.
As a rewrite man at the National Enquirer I always felt
what I wrote was true, I just didn’t know if it was real. With Murdoch, neither
truth nor reality seemed to matter which is what makes his downfall so
delicious.
With thousands of people protesting in the streets and
passions running out of control during the three week election campaign in
1975, Murdoch decided his lead political reporter’s work was too fair and
balanced so he took to throwing his stories in the wastebasket and writing them
himself under the reporter’s byline.
Labor’s last hope was that unemployment numbers coming
out on a Friday afternoon would show its economic policies were working and
that’s what the numbers released by the acting conservative government showed.
Murdoch was furious. He called the Minister of Labor and
demanded the numbers be revised and got what he wanted half an hour later,
allowing The Australian to report exclusively on the failure of Labor’s
policies.
It was astonishing to see how the news could be so
nakedly manipulated. The reporters and desk editors who saw what happened were
furious and by Sunday morning, a handful of us decided to do something about
it.
We pressed leaders of the journalists’ union to call a
special meeting but they refused, kissing off the complaints. We found a
provision in the by-laws that allowed us to petition for an emergency meeting
over their objections and Monday evening during dinner break about 600
journalists at The Australian, Sydney Mirror and Sydney Telegraph gathered to
consider a motion to strike.
Unlike America, unions in Australia are powerful with
some 55 percent of the work force unionized back then and many of them run by
Communists.
My impassioned pleas to stand up for the First Amendment
as if there was a Bill of Rights in Australia and to defend freedom of the
press and the integrity of our work seemed to be falling on largely deaf ears
as if my American English was truly a foreign language.
But then a drunken columnist with the tabloid Mirror
started jeering and disrupting the meeting, denouncing me in rhyming slang as a
“septic tank,” meaning dirty Yank and the room began to turn.
After much debate, we won the vote and no one went back
to work for 24 hours.
With Labor in tatters, Murdoch became the media story of
the final days of the election, appearing on television defending his actions.
The strike became part of the Murdoch lore. A couple of months later, I and two
other ringleaders were fired. Everyone went on strike again and we were offered
our jobs back or severance within hours. I went to work as correspondent for
Newsweek magazine and The Guardian in London.
For a long time, I loathed Murdoch and delighted in
heaping contempt on him. But as a got older and wiser I began to have a
grudging respect for what he had achieved as the greatest media mogul of the
last 50 years, of all time, in my estimation.
He had started with a small failing newspaper in
Adelaide, which he had gotten as settlement of a lawsuit based on broken
promises made to his father, a prominent newspaper executive who died young
while Rupert was in England as a Rhodes Scholar.
Within a year the Adelaide paper was flourishing and
Murdoch invaded Sydney and took over a failing tabloid from one of the three
press lords who dominated the nation’s media and hoped the upstart publisher
would drown in red ink.
Murdoch quickly became bigger than any of the press lords
and then did the same thing in Britain.
He tried to do the same thing in America, buying a paper
in San Antonio and the New York Post but the newspaper industry was different
here and so were newspaper readers for the most part. Still, the Post became
the model for the sensationalistic tabloid TV and Internet gossip mania that
has swept the country and Murdoch has made the Wall Street Journal livelier
much as he did the London Times.
Television, as it turned out, was the Murdoch medium in
America. Of all his achievements, the greatest is creating a fourth TV network
that has triumphed over the Big Three and making Fox News the most successful
cable news network and the most powerful political force in America.
Don’t cry for Rupert Murdoch. The collapse of his
overwhelming political power in Britain is good for the country. That his image is tarnished beyond repair is
good for the world. He had it coming for a long, long time.
To extrapolate on the legacy of Murdoch and his formula for sucess/money in the US is that an entire generation has grown up on trash dished out by papers that sell while our major dailies declined to shills for the powers that be. Due to the lag period & some smart people still in control where it matters, the results are not that obvious. However, it is just a matter of time when the Palins & Michelle Bachmans and other ignorant Tea Party leaders take over. You’ll be around to see the decline of the country. Enough will be written then about how it happened and when. Remember the Roman Empire!
One can only hope that the final nail in his coffin is having his American citizenship revoked as quickly as it was miraculously granted so he could buy up American media, and his empire here shatters into a million pieces to be picked up and bought by legitimate U.S. people who appreciate our type of media.
The empty vessels make the loudest sound now. With Lord Black, Pandora Maxwell and Chris Bryant on his back, Rupert Murdoch will finally get some sympathy: http://dasteepsspeaks.blogspot.com/2011/07/empty-vessel-makes-loudest-sound.html
4:38, I did follow your link and could not understand head or tail of what it was about. It was too lowbrow to investigate in-depth. Don’t know if you support or despise Murdoch’s type of investigation.
Murdock only became a US Citizen due to FCC rules on creating the FOX network (as opposed to a regular cable channel.) What the shame of it all REALLY IS is that how a foreigner can come over here and buy and buy virtually the whole Nation’s media right out from under the whole of us American Citizen Dummies! Too much FOREIGN OWNERSHIP of OUR WEALTH will be what destroys America. China can call in it’s Loans Tomorrow and the U.S. would be guaranteed to fight W.W.III over the debts WE JUST CAN’T FRIGGIN PAY OFF! So the Chinese just float us more time and buy the whole world with our tax dollars we pay them for their continued “support” of our dumb Congress’ spending.
In 20 years, China will own 80% of all raw mineral rights WORLD WIDE, own all the Ports, and all the Airports. Then, THEY’LL CALL IN OUR LOANS—let’s see how we get the planes off the ground! Wanna see this? Google “China Afghanistan Copper mining deal.” You Janis Hahn Voters need to realize this (especially) that WE pay for the WAR in Afghanistan, THEN CHINA BUYS THE FRIGGIN LARGEST COPPER/GOLD FIND EVER IN THAT NATION FOR A FEW BILLION BUCKS!!! WE PAID OVER 1 TRILLION BUCKS FOR THAT WAR AND WE GET WHAT? Now tell your new Congressperson Hahn TO PULL OUT OF AFGHANISTAN now THAT CHINA HAS ALL THE TREASURES LOCKED UP!
Murdock, meanwhile, has you all tuned into his Fox networks to “take sides” Conservative vs. Liberal–while we let China take over the entire world without a shot fired! He’s SCUM. The Old School Brits get that. Maybe if they get their shit together, I’ll have somewhere to go to after Obama’s 4th term!
Ron, thank you for your thoughts, efforts and determination for all of our lives,liberties and
our happiness – you could be playing golf, fishing or “sleeping it off” , but you care. I appreciate you.
To Wayne From Encino,
In terms of getting out of the wasteful BS wars in the Middle East (Libya being the latest), sadly I don’t think Republicans or Democrats have been up to the task.
Janice Hahn talked a lot of trash and even the City Council wasted their time voting on a resolution to get the troops home.
I don’t see Huey or Hahn making a difference on that issue. There were a lot of Republicans who are Pro-war unless they want to go against Obama.
And we all know that McCain wanted to stay in as long as it takes.
So whether its banking de-regulation (Bill Clinton and Phil Gramm), NAFTA, or Iraq, there is no consensus to correct these mistakes.
Hahn will be surprised to learn in Congress that her seat DOESN’T vote automatically for her! So she’ll get alot of “present” votes until someone shows her how to have someone else vote FOR HER.
HA HA HA! Hope the Gov’t shuts down, as this 405 shut down made for a very nice day of driving!
To Wayne from Encino,
Good point about the famous “automatic yes voting” in the LA City Council when some Councilmembers are completely out of the chambers.
“For a long time, I loathed Murdoch and delighted in heaping contempt on him. But as a got older and wiser I began to have a grudging respect for what he had achieved as the greatest media mogul of the last 50 years, of all time, in my estimation.
He had started with a small failing newspaper in Adelaide, which he had gotten as settlement of a lawsuit based on broken promises made to his father, a prominent newspaper executive who died young while Rupert was in England as a Rhodes Scholar.
Within a year the Adelaide paper was flourishing and Murdoch invaded Sydney and took over a failing tabloid from one of the three press lords who dominated the nation’s media and hoped the upstart publisher would drown in red ink.”
I’m sorry but that’s akin to respecting Adolf Hilter for ascending to such great heights from a lowly beginning. His accomplishments are evil in nature and thus should never be respected.
Hey Ron:
C’mon, don’t hold back!
How do you REALLY feel about Murdoch and Fox News?
Remember, be Fair and Balanced…and Unafraid.
8:39 p.m., you have a great point that cannot be emphasized enough. What is forgotten again and again is that if you are not rich and powerful, you don’t matter. What matters even less is how you got there. This is what Ron and many of us are fighting. But I guess, Murdoch matters because of his wealth & power, ill gotten though it may be. What are our Mayor, City Council and other political folks all about. Are they decent & good human beings who got into these jobs to help society or to feather their own nests. Once in power, they are impossible to remove because of the awe they are held in. How do AEG & similar companies get wealthy and powerful that they can command everyone in the city to pay respects to them. Mostly, due to a silent public & corrupt politicians who for a few dollars keep selling the public interest.
Help us all in educating the public and getting rid of these scoundrels who should never get more than one term. Let’s exert power where we can. The conglomerates are beyond us at the local level other than not watching the Murdoch channels, which I never do. But the bastard bought the venerable Wall Street Journal, which I do read.
So, the whistle blower was found dead. The speculation is drug overdose–or, so they say.