WELCOME, MERE MORTALS, TO PLANET MURDOCH
By Dr Duncan Richard Shaw
Madrid, 23 June 2022
While 99 per cent of the world’s population struggles with Putin’s war, with the cost of living crisis, the ongoing Covid tragedy and soaring early summer temperatures, the ‘top one per cent’ are ordering their underlings to prepare their polluting ‘superyachts’ to cruise the oceans – at a very safe distance from democratic scrutiny and the law courts.
These ‘superyachts’ (many of them secretly owned by Russian billionaires) obviously have a massive carbon footprint – the same as the limousines and mansions of the ‘super-rich’.
Meanwhile, as his massive media empire continues to deny climate change, and while we mere mortals are struggling to cool down and get through to the end of the month, Rupert Murdoch is reportedly considering…his fourth multi-million dollar divorce.
You might be asking yourself: what planet is this man on?
Well, Planet Murdoch, obviously – where billionaires happily cruise the oceans, shoot off into space, and make obscene divorce payments – while the rest of us struggle to get by with underfunded public health and education schemes.
How many schools and hospitals could be built with the millions that Murdoch will now hand over to Jerry Hall (whom he only married six years ago, in ugly opulence)?
I have been keeping a wary eye on Murdoch ever since he bought the prestigious Times of London in 1981, when I was a 19 year-old student of history and politics.
The takeover of The Times by the brash Australian raised many ‘establishment’ eyebrows at the time, amid concerns that Murdoch would lower the paper’s legendary ‘standards’. And (surprise, surprise), despite his promises to the contrary, The Times under Murdoch quickly degenerated into into a right-wing, partisan, anti-trade union, anti-enviromentalist, anti-progressive, anti-feminist, pro-Thatcher, pro-Reagan, mediocre rag – just as did The Wall Street Journal a few sad years later.
It is no exaggeration to claim that Murdoch has been the most influential individual in the whole wide world in the past 50 years. He usually gets what he wants: Thatcher and Reagan re-elected, the Cold War won thanks to a massive increase in ‘defence’ spending, taxes on the wealthy reduced, inequality increased, Blair elected, Serbia bombed, Afghanistan and Iraq invaded, climate change denied, Trump elected, Johnson elected, Brexit brought to catastrophic fruition…
Like Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and their unaccountable ilk, Murdoch has never been brought to book, and his empire has never been subject to legal, democratic scrutiny; not by international organizations, nor by national courts and legislatures.
And this despite many important individuals finally realizing just how dangerous the ‘Dirty Digger’ really is.
President Biden, along with many other people, reportedly views Murdoch as “the most dangerous man in the world”, while former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd (one of the many politicians savaged by Murdoch’s media machine over the decades) has filed a petition calling on the Australian parliament to investigate Murdoch’s “media monopoly”.
According to Rudd: “The truth is Murdoch has become a cancer, an arrogant cancer on our democracy,”
Will other politicians in other countries (especially the US and the UK) now be brave enough to follow Rudd’s courageous lead – and finally, belatedly bring Murdoch’s dismal empire under proper investigation and scrutiny?
After all: how can any self-respecting democracy permit one man to own such a massive share of the media, to churn out so many lies and distortions – and to be completely unaccountable to boot?
You have laid it out so clearly, Duncan. Hiding in the shadows of his media empire, this man has contributed to the decline of true democracy in the most sinister manner. It is quite terrifying, really.