If Rupert Murdoch were the Angel Gabriel, you still wouldn’t want him owning the sun, the moon, and the stars. That’s too much prime real estate for even the pure in heart.
But Rupert Murdoch is no saint; he is to propriety what the Marquis de Sade was to chastity. When it comes to money and power he’s carnivorous: all appetite and no taste. He’ll eat anything in his path. Politicians become little clay pigeons to be picked off with flattering headlines, generous air time, a book contract or the old-fashioned black jack that never misses: campaign cash. He hires lobbyists the way Imelda Marcos bought shoes, and stacks them in his cavernous closet, along with his conscience; this is the man, remember, who famously kowtowed to the Communist overlords of China, oppressors of their own people, to protect his investments there.
The ambitious can’t resist his blandishments, nor his power to get or keep them in office where they can return his favors. Mae West would be green with envy at his little black book of conquests: Tory Margaret Thatcher, Labor’s Tony Blair, George Bush. Even Jimmy Carter couldn’t say no. Now, Bill and Hillary Clinton, who know which side of their bread is buttered, like having it slathered by their new buddy Rupert. Our media and political system has turned into a mutual protection racket.
You will not be surprised to learn that Murdoch’s company paid little or no federal income tax over the past four years. His powerful portfolio positions him to claim a big stake in Yahoo and his takeover of The Wall Street Journal, now owned by the Bancroft family, which, like Adam and Eve, the parents of us all, are tempted to sell their birthright for a wormy apple.
Murdoch and The Journal’s editorial page are made for each other. They’ve both pursued the right’s corporate and political agenda of the past quarter century. Both venerate what The Journal editorials call the “animal spirits” of business. But The Journal’s newsroom is another matter — there facts are sacred and independence revered. Rupert Murdoch has told the Bancrofts he’ll not meddle with the reporting. But he’s accustomed to using journalism as a personal spittoon. In the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq, he turned the dogs of war loose in the newsrooms of his empire and they howled for blood. Murdoch himself said the greatest thing to come out of the war would be “$20 a barrel for oil.”
Of course he wasn’t the only media mogul to clamor for war. And he’s not the first to use journalism to promote his own interests. His worst offense with FOX News is not even its baldly partisan agenda. Far worse is the travesty he’s made of its journalism. FOX News huffs and puffs, pontificates and proclaims, but does little serious original reporting. His tabloids sell babes and breasts, gossip and celebrities. Now he’s about to bring under the same thumb one of the few national newsrooms remaining in the country.
But the problem isn’t just Rupert Murdoch. His pursuit of The Wall Street Journal is the latest in a cascading series of mergers, buy-outs, and other financial legerdemain that are making a shipwreck of journalism. Public-minded newspapers are being dumped by their owners for wads of cash or crippled by cost cutting while their broadcasting cousins race to the bottom. Murdoch is just the predator of the hour. The modern maestro of a financial marketplace ruled by money and moguls. Instead of checking the excesses of private and public power, these 21st century barons of the First Amendment revel in them; the public be damned.
We’ll be back next week unless we’re bought out.
Bill Moyers is the managing editor of the weekly public affairs program “Bill Moyers Journal,” which airs Friday night on PBS.
in australia, britain, and the US, we have a big problem: the elites LIKE murdoch and fox news type journalism. they allowed it to happen, and in britain and the US, all they had to do was look at australia to see what was coming their way when they licensed murdoch to gobble up media empires.
we have fox here in the US cuz our gov’t wants us to have Fox. but now that murdoch is poised to do to the bizness elite w/the WSJ what he’s already done to everyone else, some people start huffin’ and puffin’. gimme a friggin’ break.
I don’t understand all this outrage at Murdoch buying the Wall Street Journal. It’s just one fascist doing business with another fascist. To hold the WSJ up as some kind of pillar of integrity about to be destroyed by News Corp. is utterly preposterous.
Its the quality and independence in the national and business news they report.
His analysis of today’s newsrooms is absolutely correct.
The gobbling up of newspapers and tightening of budgets nationwide and worship of the elites’ agenda is killing real journalism in the mainstream.
You can learn a lot by what these bought and paid for medias DON’T SAY.
Independent media has put the pressure on MSM, forcing them to mention subjects they would normally avoid. I love seeing the spin they use, it helps me understand what they are up to.
purvis ames: you nailed it.
The WSJ and Robert murdoch deserve each other. Both have been succesfully brainwashing the American public for some time now. Look what we got as a result!
there’s some BS about the WSJ going around. in some ways, the WSJ is a model MSM product. they maintain strict separation b/n editorial and journalistic pages. in the journalistic pages, the WSJ is about as MSM as you can get, way more so than FOX. the editorial page is also, at the same time, as about as openly fascistic as you can get in the MSM.
i know that’s hard for some people to imagine, but it’s true. WSJ is NOT just a right wing rag. the op-ed page, definitely.
anyway, the point is, murdoch is threatening to do to the bizness page of the western world what he has already done to numerous other news sources, FOX being the most obvious example. and suddenly bizness types are having doubts about that. they could care less about what he did to broadcast journalism, but now that he’s broaching their stock portfolios, they are pissed.
wtf?
I have read the WSJ sporadically for several years. The editorial page is nauseating. However, I have found good articles in the other pages, and they have evolved over the years to be a little more environmentally reasonable. The WSJ seemed to do its own investigating; I found original articles in their pages and much more indepth information than other newspapers. There is so much junk out there. Even Popular Science has a slant and if I know anything about the content, I find huge errors. I can’t dismiss a Murdoch takeover of the WSJ as irrelevant.
I am no fan of the WSJ, but, at least, in reading it, I can read the NEWS. Now, I might have to allow for omissions, assumptions and distortions, but it does do journalism. Sometimes, quite good journalism. On FOX and in FOX owned outlets we get, instead, the Paris Hilton news, rumors, suggestions, rants, but no journalism. There is no news to sort OUT from the chaff. The outright LIES are shameful. I would not subscribe to the WSJ, but I am pleased that it exists. It might present a very corporate slant to the world, but, as readers, we’re aware of it and it doesn’t pretend to do otherwise. Below is a post from Leobixby on another article on this site. I cannot add to the case he makes.
Leobixby wrote:
As a long time media activist, student of journalistic inquiry, and professional environmental activist, I have finally come to the realization that fairness in reporting is a joke. I am very sorry to say that. The truth is, there are NEVER multiple sides to a story! There is the story; what actually happened, and there are various interpretations of the story. Dig? All this flap about right, left and center is pointless. There are those who will exercise what my mentor called a “shit filter”, and then there are those who will lazily soak in whatever the television or Internet, or radio news people tell them too. In the US, most will unfortunately take the lazy road.
To demand truthful representation of the news - not balanced interpretation - is a requirement of any democratic citizen, and should be instilled in us from the moment we are old enough to contemplate the idea. As for journalistic interpretation - otherwise known as editorializing, or opinion - it is much more healthy if there are sources that make their point of view well known. In Hungary, where I am right now, everybody knows which paper represents which part of the political spectrum, and accordingly read. As a matter of fact, if you stop the average person on the street and ask them which papers they read, they will say they read pretty much all of them, but that they only trust one or two, depending upon their particular ideological bend.
The so-called fairness doctrine does nothing but make it much easier to require much less of a citizen’s critical thinking skills.
The point has been made several times in this forum that the Wall Street Journal has had good reporting despite their frequently off-the-mark editorial page.
If Rupert gets his fingers in the pie… say goodbye to any good reporting!
Any “reporting” done, will surely be to benefit whatever Rupert’s personal goals of the moment encompass. What a great way to kite your own investments!
Good points from Unknown-Arts.org via Leobixby.
We should recognize that Americans are not readers by and large ( only about 1/3 of the population reads any sort of literature ) and that the rise of Bush began with the rise of Reagan “conservatism”, which is just the perspective of your average troglodyte businessman in disguise.
Bush is the quintessential anti-intellectual, which accounts for his broad appeal, since that is the character of the majority of Americans.
Bill Moyers concern over the sale of the WSJ is the liberal fear that Murdoch will adapt it to the lowest common denominator.
Liberals are smart people by and large. Liberalism is the refuge of the intellectual who has the capacity to entertain two contradictory ideas. Conservatives, as we know them today, are absolutists. They are afraid of contradictory ideas. Many of them lack the willigness to engage in thought.
I will not mourn the loss of the WSJ, however, since it is merely a foil for men in expensive suits trying to disguise the fact that they are troglodyte businessmen and aspiring robber barons.
There is nothing liberal about the WSJ, so I can’t see why Bill Moyers gives a damn.
Hellooooo!
The fairness doctrine has no application to the WSJ or any other print media.
The fairness doctrine, when it was applied, was intended to ensure reasonable opportunity for the airing of opposing viewpoints on controversial issues — it was intended for licensed broadcast entities, not to newspapers.
micki
what you say is true, but the notion of a fairness doctrine prevails in journalism and is called “objectivity”.
The NYT is so boring for this reason. The journalist puts himself/herself in a straight jacket trying to be objective when we know since the work of Werner Heisenberg that the observor always determines the nature of what is being observed.
When a journalist tries to be objective, the result is a still birth, which describes the NYT. The truth is honesty, which is not the same as objectivity. Honesty is possible, objectivity is not.
The problem is accumulation of too many media outlets into too few hands. The FCC regulations that were watered down under this mis-administration went largely unnoticed. The WSJ may not be worth wrapping fish in but rest assured that the fewer people who have stakes in the MSM the less truthful and more manipulative it will become.
Some Americans I talk to still believe that it is illegal to “air” false information. The ideas of false advertising and slander and character assasination have no meaning in today’s courts, unless a poor person commits the infractions. But the belief in those concepts is still pervasive to the uninformed. Thus the success these crooks have had with the gullible and naive public.
Rupert is the enemy. Whether he works for George and Dick or it’s the other way around is anyone’s guess, but his practices are as much responsible for the deterioration of our democracy as the first two asshats.
If we don’t reign in these media moguls soon there will be no truth at all for the masses. The small publications that may not sell out like Mother Jones and others will simply be priced out via regulation and postage rate hikes. Further, if they are alloweed to proceed, the internet will be next.
If you think Americans are dumb and uninformed now, wait until these fools have EVERY media outlet in the country.
Thus the outrage….
“If Rupert Murdoch were the Angel Gabriel, you still wouldn’t want him owning the sun, the moon, and the stars. That’s too much prime real estate for even the pure in heart.
But Rupert Murdoch is no saint; he is to propriety what the Marquis de Sade was to chastity. When it comes to money and power he’s carnivorous: all appetite and no taste. He’ll eat anything in his path. Politicians become little clay pigeons to be picked off with flattering headlines, generous air time, a book contract or the old-fashioned black jack that never misses: campaign cash. He hires lobbyists the way Imelda Marcos bought shoes, and stacks them in his cavernous closet, along with his conscience; this is the man, remember, who famously kowtowed to the Communist overlords of China, oppressors of their own people, to protect his investments there.”
*********************
Moyers in two compact paragraphs has rather thoroughly labeled Murdoch for the amoral, self-indulgent, perverse, juvinile, tycoon that he is and not used any profanity, vulgar street slang, or other signs of the ignorant and uninformed. That(along with most of his positions with whose progressive slant I agree) is what I enjoy so much about Bill Moyers writing.
fox news is every where not because the pols or the elites want them. They are there beacause the dumbass public wants the news just the way it wants it.
I saw Moyer’s show last week, where he interviewed African American Baptist turned Muslim Imam Zaid Shakir. Moyer acted no different than Glenn Beck when he interviewed Rep Keith Ellison. Moyer expected the Shakir to condemn the radical Muslims as if it is some litmus test of acceptance so the Iman could be labeled a good muslim.
Moyer even goes on the defensive of loonie Christians like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, James Dobson, that they aren’t as crazy as the Islamic Radicals. Of course, Moyer seems to exonerate the imperial mass slaughterers these loonie Christians have enabled while condemning the small time beheaders out there in Iraq.
The show is here:
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/06222007/profile.html
with the transcript here:
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/06222007/transcript2.html
Had Dr. Faust been around today , he would have ended up selling out to Murdoch rather than the other guy. Simply because he’d get a far better ROI.
Its just another attempt to silence any thought-provoking organization from possibly altering their bottom line with the truth. Don’t confuse them with the facts. It may interfere with personal prosperity. How sickening that this can actually happen in our so called Democracy. They can buy anything they want, manipulate and distort, and call it “news.” I for 1 will never succumb to such vulgar displays of false journalsim.
Thankfully, we have forums such as these to seek truth…….for now.
It’s no small comfort to know that there’s one tax collector that not even Rupert Murdoch can avoid - death.
Bill Moyers has been and still is one of the only voices of fairness, reason and sanity in the MSM and I will eternaly salute him for it.
Wangman I watched the interview with the Iman, not very closely as other things were going on in the room but close enough and found it to be very much in the Moyers tradition of giving his guess (good, bad, or ugly) a forum to express their views, while still trying to midly challange them with a con to their pro, both from his own beliefs and opinions and from what the prespective of what others had had to say in difference to the guest.
nigelUK . Sorry to sound cynical , but my guess is Murdoch must already be planning for his immortality , thinking of deals he should be able to swing with Mephistopheles . ( Given that he has to be the very epitome of Evil , the Almighty ,would give short shrift to him. Hence deals with the Almighty would be a non-starter.)
Murdoch has to be the very Anti thesis of Carnegie , who firmly believed the ‘he who dies rich dies disgraced’.The contrasts between the two couldn’t be more stark . Just goes to show the depths to which we’ve sunk , since then , as far as simple Morality goes.
Robber Murder-Orc - Rupert Murdock
nigelUK July 1st, 2007 3:40 am
“It’s no small comfort to know that there’s one tax collector that not even Rupert Murdoch can avoid - death”…
Unfortunately, Murdock’s son the principle beneficiary in the estate, is another little snooty nosed fascist right winging money grubbing debaucher like his infamous mongrel father…..
One of the components of this problem is the necessity of the media to entertain the general viewing or reading public. It might have started with T.V. but my guess is each technological wonder that entertained helped lead us where we are now-basically illiterate children. About fifteen years ago I was talking to one of my kid’s teachers and I asked him why he was so successful with the kids and he said “I have to entertain for 45 minutes of every class I teach or I lose them”.
So as we are currently the ultimate consumer driven economy we get what we want.
btw, Murdoch is an evangelical christian, like erik prince und der Fuehrer, dumbya. how many more of these stupid christians can the world take?
“When it comes to money and power he’s carnivorous: all appetite and no taste…..He hires lobbyists the way Imelda Marcos bought shoes, and stacks them in his cavernous closet, along with his conscience….”
Bill Moyers is so eloquent!
Adam Smith in the “Wealth of Nations” warned us about control freak puppeteers like Ruport Murdock along with the dreadful consequences resulting from the power they wield over ambitious, political sheep-puppets who are willing to represent the interests of the corporate elite over average citizens. As we all know, this manuring has been going on since the inception of this country and exponentially increasing over the last 50 years.
After the last 6+ years of a secretive and lying administration and a Mass Media that defended it, I would hope that the majority in this country have awakened from their naive belief that the MSM is feeding them the truth.
Of course, there will always be a frightening number of people who exist in their ignorant and comfortable paradigm who will only allow themselves to believe that which falls nicely within their comfort zone; but for the most part, it seems that those who actually go to the polls and vote are aware of and fed-up with lies and omissions from the Mass Media.
What concerns me more than Murdock owning the WSJ is the Internet falling under the control of a diabolical media empire.
Crux Puppy: I admire the eloquence of your stated points, and agree with them.
RJKT: Thanks for the satire on Murdoch’s time share vacation plan for the long-term future.
WSJ Murdock is a done deal. All his lies about journalism, non interference, and countering the New York Times is BS but is being reported with a straight face by the rest of the media.
If Murdock didn’t want to interfere why would he buy the WSJ. His journalism is demonstrated by the other media outlets he owns. If he wanted to counter the New York Times he already owns dozens of properties that could do that.
By the way, his so called Christianity is on display on the Fox network’s nightly sex and stupidity line up.
When will everyone get it? Hypocrisy is necessary among the evil.
Mr. Moyers on the mark again, and it’s because of Bill’s return to PBS, I can donate in good conscience. But PBS is such a small fish in a large cesspool of modern media which is nothing but jingoism.
ralph 442, from the few other interviews in Moyer’s new show, I don’t see him challenging his guests. He is mostly finding common cause with them, whether they are conservative, liberal, liberterian, christian, etc.
His recent interview with Barry Goldwater’s Deputy Press Secretary Victor Gold (someone from his arch enemy’s side) was all about how Goldwater’s people’s right to live their own life is a marked different from today’s theo-con state.
His other interview with Lori Wallach of Public Citizens was all about trade agreement circumventing American laws to destroy America, not how those agreements devastate other countries.
His interview with Ken Silverstein of Harpers was about the undercover work to solicit lobbyists to lobby for his fictitious firm. The interview became more of bashing 3rd world dictators since they have to make believe they are representing one in order to get access to the lobbyists. You can hear in the Silverstein’s response and voice which one he hated more (a Harpers’ trait). And Moyer gives him a free pass at that Borat trick of playing dirty joke at the expense of someone else.
Siouxrose: many thanks. I lay this particular bit of ‘inspiration’ at the feet of our malevolent muse murdoch. He certainly can draw out the very best in one.
bill fkn moyers… I LOVE YOU. i mean that, i really, really love this man. bill moyers was a fine journalist, but now he is a warrior-for-journalism. despite any flaws, no one can take that fine-act of service to us all away from him. bill moyers for prez.
Something not mentioned so far, I think:
Progressives definitely need to call, ASAP, for reversal of Bush’s FCC regs that [now] allow hyper-centralized ownership of news media –and there’s nothing to loose by pushing your congressperson to do this, starting today.
We all see that the denser/bigger corporate media ownership is, the more it slobbers-up to government power to keep its press perks, access, etc.; and the more it acts to protect big, corrupt political agendas, [because] it becomes a core part of the rottenness -never aking hard questions of the co-Pigs — always distracting the People with fear/celebrity worship/etc; always underreporting/master-slanting –just like Pravda did in the old USSR….
It’s sad but true that single-voice mainstream news fools a lot of people into ‘obeying;’ ‘believing;’never questioning Power. The word is Hypnosis.
If we’d had nationwide small-scale diversity in media ownership 6 yrs ago, chances are Bush & Co. agendas would’ve been shouted down long ago by a more-widely informed/skeptical public…. and/or at least some of the Pharaoah’s minions would be in jail by now. Actually, Bush never even would’ve been nomminated, let alone elected.
This FCC change definitely could be done by a [new] congress legislating new regulation parameters for media ownership — if a few more progressives get into[the next] congress, and enough of the People then absolutely scream bloody murder in favor of it.
Sure, the PlutoPigs would see such legislation for what it is and try to beat it down — but absent armed rebellion, it’s one change, that if passed, could make a big difference in how average people start to re-frame issues in their own mind.
Mega-multiple small-scale (local ownership) slants on news & issues tend to yeild truths closer-to-reality.
Big ownership news tends to move in the direction of lies and drag-along remaining small-frys too.
Internet sites like this are gonna become more crucial to progressive ends, no doubt; but mainstream media are still the chief hypnotizers/pacifiers of The Many. They need regulatory deconstruction, right now.
I still think Molly Ivins was right to ask Bill Moyers to run for President.