Progress Report on Rupert Murdoch

Big Brother Murdoch

Business Week profiles the right-wing billionaire coming to a TV near you: Rupert Murdoch. Last month, in a stunning blow for media diversity, the FCC approved a "$6.6 billion media mega merger " between DirecTV satellite television service and Rupert Murdoch's conglomeration, "providing the missing link in News Corp's worldwide satellite distribution system, creating the truly global media empire he has dreamed about for years." That means "as many as one in five American homes at any given time will be tuned into a show News Corp. either produced or delivered." According to Business Week, "Not since newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst in the first half of the 20th century has one man had such means to shape mass media."

MURDOCH'S POLITICAL AGENDA, PART 1: The Business Week story notes "Murdoch is not shy about using his media outlets to pursue agendas, whether they're politically conservative causes or his own business interests. Now his audience will be much greater...he has made Fox News a soapbox for a collection of shrill, right-of-center commentators like Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity. Coverage on Fox and in the New York Post during the Iraq war was widely criticized for being outright jingoistic and for eschewing the usual journalistic distance." As one Fox News staffer admitted, management regularly sends out memos enforcing conservative ideological discipline in news coverage.

MURDOCH'S POLITICAL AGENDA, PART 2: A Fortune Magazine cover story of Murdoch on 2/17/03 notes, "Murdoch has used both his personal charm and his media clout to cultivate powerful politicians" and pursue his right-wing agenda. The story quotes a former News Corp. executive saying Murdoch "hungered for the kind of influence in the United States that he had in England and Australia. Part of our political strategy here was the New York Post and the creation of Fox News and the Weekly Standard" – three of the most conservative news organizations in America. In a 1998 Columbia Journalism Review article, media critic Russ Baker wrote that Murdoch "wields his media as instruments of influence with politicians who can aid him, and savages his competitors in his news columns."

"A DECLARATION OF PRESS IRRELEVANCE": A new piece by Ken Auletta in this week's New Yorker magazine exposes a White House determined to manipulate and control the press, pushing them into an increasingly marginalized role in an attempt to control the flow of information and stay "on message." In a declaration of press irrelevance, Auletta writes, this sentiment isn't echoed by the current president. Listening to Bush explain why he doesn't watch the news or read the paper, one reporter asked, "How do you then know what the public thinks?" Answered the President, "You're making a huge assumption – that you represent what the public thinks." Echoing this was Chief of Staff Andrew Card: "They don't represent the public any more than other people do."

WE DON'T NEED NO STINKIN' PRESS CONFERENCES: With a desire to control the outflow of information to the public and to ensure the press receives information strictly on the White House playbook, President Bush has limited the access he gives to reporters. According to the New Yorker, Bush has had a paltry eleven solo press conferences since taking office. In a comparable period, "Dwight D. Eisenhower held seventy-four, John F. Kennedy sixty-five, Lyndon B. Johnson eighty, Richard Nixon twenty-three, Gerald Ford thirty-nine, Jimmy Carter fifty-three, Ronald Reagan twenty-one, George H. W. Bush seventy-one, and Bill Clinton thirty-eight." Explains Dan Bartlett, White House communications director: "At press conferences, you can't control your message."

DON'T SAY A WORD: President Bush isn't the only one not talking. Auletta reports, "In the current White House, Card and Rove usually don't return calls, and staffers boast of not answering reporters' questions." This can lead to some twisty logic. Railing about what he perceives as a diminished standard of the press, Andrew Card criticized reporters publishing facts with only one source to back them up. Asked how reporters could get more sources when the Administration refuses to speak to them, Card responded, "It's not our job to be sources...Our job is not to make your job easy.

source: Progress Report

....hey, do what you want...you will anyway...