With Murdoch’s
News Corp mastheads dominating the local newspaper landscape in the NSW Northern Rivers region this should interest readers…….
Rupert Murdoch, the
founder of a global media empire that includes Fox News, has said he “never
asked a prime minister for anything.”
But that empire has
given him influence over world affairs in a way few private citizens ever have,
granting the Murdoch family enormous sway over not just the United States, but
English-speaking countries around the world.
A
six-month investigation by The New York Times covering three
continents and including more than 150 interviews has described how Mr. Murdoch
and his feuding sons turned their media outlets into right-wing political
influence machines that have destabilized democracy in North America, Europe and
Australia.
Here are some key
takeaways from The Times’s investigation into the Murdoch family and its role
in the illiberal, right-wing political wave sweeping the globe.
THE MURDOCH FAMILY SITS
AT THE CENTER OF GLOBAL UPHEAVAL.
Fox News has long
exerted a gravitational pull on the Republican Party in the United States,
where it most recently amplified the nativist revolt that has fueled the rise
of the far right and the election of President Trump.
Mr. Murdoch’s newspaper
The Sun spent years demonizing the European Union to its readers in Britain,
where it helped lead the Brexit campaign that persuaded a slim majority of
voters in a 2016 referendum to endorse pulling out of the bloc. Political havoc
has reigned in Britain ever since.
And in Australia, where
his hold over the media is most extensive, Mr. Murdoch’s outlets pushed for the
repeal of the country’s carbon tax and helped topple a series of prime
ministers whose agenda he disliked, including Malcolm Turnbull last year.
At the center of this
upheaval sits the Murdoch family, a clan whose dysfunction has both shaped and
mirrored the global tumult of recent years.
The Times explored those
family dynamics and their impact on the Murdoch empire, which is on the cusp of
succession as its 88-year-old patriarch prepares to hand power to the son whose
politics most resemble his own: Lachlan Murdoch.
A key step in that
succession has paradoxically been the partial dismemberment of the empire,
which significantly shrunk last month when Mr. Murdoch sold one of his
companies, the film studio 21st Century Fox, to the Walt Disney Company for
$71.3 billion.
The deal turned Mr.
Murdoch’s children into billionaires and left Lachlan in control of a powerful
political weapon: a streamlined company, the Fox Corporation, whose most potent
asset is Fox News…..
The Murdoch empire has
also boldly flexed its muscles in Australia, which was for many years Lachlan’s
domain.
In Australia, Lachlan
expressed disdain for efforts to fight climate change and once rebuked the
staff at one of his family’s newspapers, The Australian, for an editorial in
support of same-sex marriage (He says through a representative that he is in
favor of same-sex marriage). He also became close to the politician Tony
Abbott, whose 2013 election as prime minister was given an assist by Murdoch
newspapers.
The Murdoch family
changed Australian politics in 2016 when it took control of Sky News Australia
and imported the Fox News model. They quickly introduced a slate of right-wing
opinion shows that often focused on race, immigration and climate change. The
programming became known as Sky After Dark.
Last year, Mr. Turnbull
and his staff accused Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch of using their media outlets
to help foment the intraparty coup that thrust him from office in August. Mr.
Turnbull, a moderate and longtime nemesis of his friend Mr. Abbott, was replaced
by the right-wing nationalist Scott Morrison.
The Murdochs have denied
any role in Mr. Turnbull’s downfall.....
The night after his
arrival, Lachlan invited a small group of Sky employees and managers to his $16
million mansion in Sydney for drinks. With its new prime-time lineup of
hard-right opinion hosts, Sky had become a force in Australian politics. Its
audience was still small by American standards, but it was the network of
choice in the capital, Canberra, and it was finalizing a deal to expand its reach
into the Australian Outback — demographically speaking, the equivalent of Trump
country.
It was a mirror of Fox
News, with its fixation on race, identity and climate-change denial. Night
after night, Sky’s hosts and their guests stirred anger over the perceived
liberal bias of the media, “suicidal self-hatred” of Western civilization and
the Australian equivalent of the Central American “caravans” that were dividing
the United States: asylum seekers coming to the country by boat from Indonesia
and Malaysia, many of them Muslim. Days before Lachlan’s arrival, a national
neo-Nazi leader, Blair Cottrell — who had recently been fined for “inciting
contempt for Muslims” — appeared on one of the network’s shows. Cottrell had
been interviewed on Australian TV before, but his deferential treatment by Sky
caused a national outcry. Under gentle questioning, he called on his countrymen
to “reclaim our traditional identity as Australians” and advocated limiting
immigration to those “who are not too culturally dissimilar from us,” such as
white South African farmers. (Sky apologized and suspended
the program.)
Inside Lachlan’s living
room, the talk turned to national politics. “Do you think Malcolm is going to
survive?” Lachlan asked his staff. Malcolm was Malcolm Turnbull, the relatively
moderate Australian prime minister who took office a few years earlier. Inside
the government, a small right-wing uprising had been brewing over his plans to
bring Australia into compliance with the Paris climate accord. It is well
established among those who have worked for the Murdochs that the family
rarely, if ever, issues specific directives. They convey their desires
indirectly, maybe with a tweet — as Murdoch did in the spring of 2016 when he
decided to back Trump — or a question, the subtleties of which are rarely lost
on their like-minded news executives.
In the days that
followed, Sky Australia’s hosts and the Murdoch papers — the newspaper editors
had their own drinks session at Lachlan’s mansion — set about trying to throw
Turnbull out of office. Alan Jones, a Sky host
and conservative radio star, called for a party “rebellion” against him on his
program. Days later, the Murdochs’ major paper in Sydney, The Daily Telegraph,
broke the news that a
leadership challenge was in the works. Cheering on the
challenge, Andrew
Bolt, the Murdoch columnist who was once convicted of violating the
country’s Racial Discrimination Act, told his Sky viewers that Turnbull’s
“credibility is shot, his authority is gone.” Peta Credlin, the
commentator who was Tony Abbott’s former chief of staff, chewed out a member of
Parliament for the chaos inside Turnbull’s administration. The Australian, the
Murdochs’ national newspaper, was soon declaring Turnbull a “dead man walking.”......
It was always difficult
to separate the personal from the financial and the ideological with the
Murdochs. All appeared to be in evidence in their decision to turn against
Turnbull. To begin with, he took office a few years earlier by ousting
Lachlan’s friend Tony Abbott, and it was Abbott who helped lead the Turnbull
uprising. Turnbull’s policies were also not perfectly aligned with the
Murdochs’ interests. For instance, he had expedited the construction of the
country’s national
broadband network, which directly threatened the family’s highly profitable
cable business by giving Netflix a government-subsidized pipeline into
Australian homes.
The small number of
Australian media outlets that the Murdochs did not own portrayed
Turnbull’s ouster as a Murdoch-led “coup.” Kevin Rudd, a former prime
minister whom the family had helped push out of office years earlier, described
Murdoch in an op-ed in The Sydney Morning Herald as “the
greatest cancer on the Australian democracy.”
Turnbull was replaced by
the right-wing nationalist Scott Morrison, who quickly aligned himself with
Trump. The two met in person for the first time in late 2018 at the G-20 summit
meeting in Buenos Aires. “I think it’s going to be a great relationship,” Trump
said afterward. With a national election scheduled for May 2019, Morrison
quickly staked his party’s prospects on the polarizing issue of immigration,
promising a new hard-line approach. It dovetailed with Sky’s regular prime-time
programming. Andrew Bolt, who previously warned of a “foreign invasion,”
said in
one segment, “We also risk importing ethnic and religious strife, even
terrorism,” as the screen flashed an image of Australia’s potential future:
rows of Muslims on a city street, bowing toward Mecca. When the opposing Labor
Party managed to muscle through legislation that would allow doctors to
transfer severely sick migrants in detention centers on the Australian islands
of Nauru and Manus into hospitals on the mainland, Sky Australia’s prime-time
hosts went on the offensive.
Read the full
article here.
