Posted by John, July 14th, 2011 - under Murdoch, News Corp, News Ltd, News of The World.



Does it get any better than this – Rupert Murdoch beating the retreat? Well, maybe if he died along with his media empire it would be even better.

Illegal phone hacking, bribing police, perhaps covering up criminal activity, paying what looks suspiciously like hush money to victims….It just goes on and on.

The crisis has forced Murdoch to close down The News of the World in Britain, the paper at the centre of the allegations. It was a slimy sensationalist right wing rag whose journalism made Murdoch’s reactionary Daily Telegraph and The Herald-Sun here in Australia look like serious journals.

Murdoch’s decision to close The News of the World down was a calculated attempt to save his bid for British Sky Broadcasting. Murdoch owns 39 percent of this river of gold and wanted full control.

It didn’t work, given the scale of the illegality, the contempt for ordinary people and the anger they feel, normally compliant British politicians rebelled and Murdoch withdrew his bid.

Now Murdoch is manoeuvring to buy back shares in his main company and cement his control and that of his family. The fact that he is doing this means he fears his own position might be under threat from other shareholders who want to protect their investment. Oh the irony – Murdoch eaten by the market.

There are reports he is considering selling off all his British newspapers.

The drivers for hacking the phone of a murdered school girl, terrorist bomb victims and their families and the relatives of British soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan are money, advantage over the competition, more advertisers, more sales and more profits.

It would be foolish indeed to imagine that this phone hacking was the result of a few bad apples, or that Rupert Murdoch’s News group in the UK is the only media institution to sink so low. Certainly Murdoch’s The Australian has pointed out the long list of other British newspapers which used the services of the same private investigator The News of the World had used for some of its illegal activities.

Surely this level of media criminality and gross disregard for ordinary people could never happen in Australia, could it?

Don’t bet on it. The same competitive pressures that drove the criminals at The News of the World in Britain to bribe police, to hack phones and illegally obtain banking and family information about the former Prime Minister exist across the globe.

Combine falling readership numbers and competition from other media forms with a particularly aggressive approach to media – journalists as an expensive cost of production eating into profits, journalism as entertainment and shock horror revelations to titillate and excite the alienated working class and keep their minds off the politics of change – and there is every reason to imagine the Murdoch model of news on the cheap and reaction at the ready, complete with bribery and illegal phone hacking, is being replicated across the globe, and not just by sections of the Murdoch press.

In the United States four senators have asked for an investigation into reports that Murdoch journalists hacked into the phones of 9/11 victims and their families.

It is possible too that the drive for an increased audience might infect public authorities as much as private ones and that pressure could lead to seemingly august public media institutions undertaking journalistic pursuits which are less than pure.

It is no accident that the man who successfully attacked the journalists’ union in the UK would have reporters who thrive on a culture of sensationalism and illegality where others, including murdered school girls, are but a mechanism for a greater good, Rupert’s profits.

The man who gave us Wapping has now given us a whopping great insight into media criminality.

The News of The World scandal in the UK has linked an important part of the propaganda arm of capitalism with the police, one of its repressive arms, and bourgeois politicians, the mainstream political arm. It shows the interconnectedness of all 3 arms of capitalism in pursuing their interests at the expense of ordinary people. The News of The World revelations have given us a glimpse of their seedy and shady dealings and their chummy scratch my back relationships.

The actions of News of the World show too the utter contempt the rich and powerful have for ordinary people, the people who make their profits for them. Politicians have only begun to act because of the outrage of ordinary British workers. The politicians were too scared to do anything until a few weeks ago. Indeed fear probably didn’t enter into it. They smooched up to him and his journos as part of the task of running capitalism.

Western leaders in countries where Murdoch has a significant media presence have tried to get him on side, fearing the power of his media to destroy them. That is as true of Australia as it is of the UK. But now that British working class anger with Murdoch’s contempt for them is so strong those formerly close to him and his acolytes, like British Prime Minister David Cameron, have abandoned him.

Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown described Murdoch’s group as ‘descending from the gutters to the sewers’.

‘The tragedy is they let the rats out of the sewers,’ he added.

Accurate, but don’t feel too sorry for Brown. He refused to order an enquiry into phone hacking when he was PM in 2009. He and his wife greed to the cystic fibrosis story about his son going public. He employed two journalists to attack political enemies in News outlets.

Clearly the system of political and media co-operation continues. This is the system that makes it acceptable for elected politicians to grovel at the feet of people whose only power stems from their ownership of media outlets and their ability to exploit workers every day.

In Australia that cosy relationship is with conservative politicians and some labor ones.

Murdoch’s The Australian has been going since 1964 as a national newspaper and has never made a profit. 47 years without a profit! That has to be some sort of record, matched only perhaps by multi-national pharmaceutical companies in Australia. But you’re not reading this to see what a loss earner The Australian is for Rupert. You’re waiting for the punch line, aren’t you?

I read the Australian because it tells me what I used to call the fruitcake faction of the bourgeoisie is thinking. I no longer use that term because while it might seem obvious to me that The Australian is run by maddies, they represent an important stream within ruling class thinking. They are the attack wing of neo-liberalism who wants to drive down workers’ living standards, their wages and conditions openly and massively cut government spending on social services. They want to open up public health, education and transport to the market.

Addressing climate change stands in the way of that agenda, so The Australian and its more down market sister papers The Daily Telegraph in Sydney and the Herald Sun in Melbourne, are full of climate change deniers, skeptics, scientists who aren’t and Lords who believe in one world d government conspiracies.

The style of the Daly Telegraph and the Herald-Sun is sensationalist. The Australian covers its sensationalism in a veneer of self-proclaimed respectability. This is important because some workers might be tempted to accept their snake oil.

If polls are to be believed the Opposition under the anti-worker Tony Abbott will win a landslide at the 2013 election. Lots and lots of workers accept the snake-oil. As Tony Abbott is showing, they might be mad as cut snakes but they have a vision for Australia and the working class which is anything but mad from the point of view of the ruling class or significant sections of it.

The Australian is Tony Abbott’s paper and Tony Abbott is Rupert’s man. And the mining companies’ man. And the big polluters’ man. And… but that’s a story for another day.

Marx once wrote words to the effect that the ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class. Yet the ideas of the ruling class are not monolithic. The bourgeoisie has differences not only of opinion but of worldviews. Well, sort of world views. Where they fundamentally agree is support for the rule of capital over labour and the extraction of value from workers to make their profits.

In the newspaper world that profit can only be gained through sales, through competition in the market. And of course in the digital age that competition is also with forces outside the daily hard copy newspaper market.

The Fairfax group’s Age newspaper in Melbourne and its Sydney Morning Herald have a supposedly left of centre view of the world and The Australian a more conservative or even reactionary approach. Yet they agree on the fundamentals of profit, profit and profit, not just for themselves but as the foundation of society.

None of the major media chains challenges the dominant ideology of neoliberalism. They argue instead over its application and the speed it spreads and deepens, depending on how much resistance the neoliberal juggernaut meets.

Rupert Murdoch doesn’t run the world. He influences it at the same time that his papers reflect that world. His methods of profiteering off the grief of others flow from the wellspring of competition.

It is not surprising that in a time of reaction, where the Left in Australia is minuscule and both major parties are in the death grip of neoliberalism, that Murdoch media and its anti-worker policies attract support, not just from middle class and ruling class members but from significant numbers of workers too.

The whole troika of evil that News is revealing shows clearly the need for a democratic society, not the current one in which power flows from the ownership of media.

Only in a democratic society in which ordinary working people decide democratically what to produce to satisfy human need rather than make profits for Rupert and his ilk can the media be free.

Readers might also like to look at Why isn’t Rupert Murdoch in jail?, News Corpse? and I love reading Rupert Murdoch’s Australian newspaper.