Fox On the Run

A couple of weeks ago Rupert Murdoch made his long-expected - and in some cases, eagerly awaited - retirement announcement, with plans to hand over control of his media empire to his son Lachlan.  As far as I'm concerned, good riddance to bad Rupert. 

By hiring the late Roger Ailes to start the Fox News Channel, Murdoch probably did more than any other individual in America to corrupt broadcast journalism with lies, smears, racism, and reactionary politics.  His anchors and commentators did a great deal of damage to the body politic by promoting all sorts of conspiracy theories and corporate-friendly analyses of serious issues such as taxes and the environment.  And the channel's bashing of liberals and Democratic politicians for the sake of character assassination for fun and profit only widened the divide between the two major parties in Washington.  Also, I need to point to Murdoch-owned papers like the New York Post, which only amplified Murdoch's right-wing polemics in print.

It wasn't just Fox News, of course.  Murdoch dumbed down popular culture with its sister broadcast network, which, despite airing a couple of watchable sitcoms and dramas, mostly aired shows lacking in taste and dignity.  It's as if the Fox network, which went on the air in prime time in 1987, aimed to attract the same undereducated, low-information proles to watch lowbrow entertainment to prime them for the ethically challenged "news" channel that came later.

It should be noted that Murdoch broadcast shows to appeal to lucrative audiences that would enable him to obtain the capital necessary to launch the Fox News Channel in 1996.  Even as he was appalling folks with "Married . . . With Children," Murdoch aired respectable black sitcoms like "Roc" and "Martin," which inevitably drew black audiences to Fox and helped his bottom line.  None of that had anything to do with a desire to help black actors break through to wider audiences. He pretty much much made the money he needed to start a cable news channel off the eyeballs of black audiences and the popularity of black celebrities.  And when the Fox News Channel debuted in 1996, it began running racist stories about how food stamps were used the most in poor "urban" (read black) neighborhoods with liquor stores.  This was some time after Murdoch had black-oriented public affairs shows on local stations he'd purchased, like WNYW-TV in New York (which he'd bought from MetroMedia) canceled entirely.

No wonder Martin Lawrence - a comedic genius with the same level of intensity and madness as the late Robin Williams - went crazy.

I can also assure you, dear readers, the Fox's acquisition to broadcast rights to National Football League, whose games it began airing in 1994, had nothing to do with the Australian-born Murdoch having a personal interest in American football.  It didn't even have anything to do with expanding the broadcast schedule of the Fox network (which still ends prime-time programming an hour earlier than the Big Three networks).  It was all in the interest of funding the Fox News Channel.  And the purpose of the Fox News Channel was to keep the Republican Party dominant in American politics.

While I'm happy to see Rupert go, lets not kid ourselves.  Lachlan Murdoch is every bit as conservative and ruthless as his father, and he will most likely keep Fox News' standard for journalistic malfeasance going strong.  Besides, after 27 years ofthe Fox News Channel on the air and 37 years of its sister broadcast network on the air, Murdoch has already done so much harm to American culture that it will likely never recover from it.

After all, despite his own better judgement, Rupert Murdoch promoted Donald Trump.

Tuckered Out

Tucker Carlson, a stepson of the heir to the Swanson TV dinner fortune who appeals to the common man (common woman? highly implausible), will now get to live like the common man.  He just got fired from Fox News with no foreseeable job prospects in the future.  Which means he'll be filing for unemployment and  sustaining himself on TV dinners,  realizing how you can be fired without warning, just like many of his viewers who on a Friday worked at the steel mill or auto factory and was out of work by Monday. 

As Carlson has promoted the replacement theory of whites being replaced by people of color, it appears that this theory has come true in a way for himself.  Now he's the one due to be replaced in his time slot! 

Carlson, 53, was a key figure in spreading conspiracy theories that tarnished Fox News' already blemished reputation, and he's being forced out in the wake of the Dominion voting-machine suit.  In the investigation for the suit, Carlson was revealed to have said that what he said about the election being stolen was jive and professed to "hate" Donald Trump, which probably didn't sit well with Fox News viewers.  But his harassment of women on the set of his program - which has brought about a lawsuit from a former Fox News producer - and his attempts to have reporters fired for telling the truth about the big election lie likely didn't sit well with Rupert Murdoch, whose daughter Elisabeth likely has more smarts than her brother Lachlan and James put together.

Having already been on CNN and MSNBC, Carlson has no place to go except possibly for Newsmax (and maybe not even there, given the revelation of what he really thought ot Trump).  If he does move to a smaller right-wing channel, he'll have to take a big pay cut.  Or, he'll  disappear and be forgotten by historians of American media, just as Father Charles Coughlin and Walter Winchell were similarly forgotten.

Either way, Carlson's going to have to eat a lot of them TV dinners. 

A Poem About Rupert Murdoch and an Unhumble Pieman

Old Uncle Rupert was sitting in London,
Defending his media biz.
But telephone hackings had gotten quite nasty,
And one chap would have none of this.

He run up to Rupert and gave him a present,
Though not the sort Rupert would crave,
He threw at old Rupert an object so gooey,
It was a big pie made of

SHAVING CREAM!
BE NICE AND CLEAN!
Shave every day, and you'll always look keen!

:-D

Okay, I took liberties with the meter of that old novelty record, but what the hay, I gotta have some fun! :-)

News Corp News

Rebekah Brooks, the former editor of News Of the World, was arrested over the weekend for her possible role in the phone hacking scandal that has caused Rupert Murdoch's media holdings in Britain to unravel and taken down at least one Murdoch employee in the U.S. so far - Les Hinton, the former chairman of News International (Murdoch's U.K. subsidiary) and until just a day or two ago the head of the Dow Jones division that publishes the Wall Street Journal, has resigned. Unaware of the dirty deeds on the other side of the pond, Hinton nonetheless thought that resigning was the proper thing to do.

Brooks resigned July 15 as chief executive officer of News International and was taken into custody in London for questioning. She was released on bail. As all this is going on, the London Metropolitan Police are looking into accusations that officers on their force were paid for information on various stories. This is the biggest thing to hit the British media establishment since Thursday.

With the sun setting on Murdoch's British empire and with Brtitish politicans no longer afraid of calling him on his underhanded practices, some have turned attention to the U.S., where Murdoch bases his media conglomerate. If News Corporation, an American company, has bribed anyone, it's a violation of the anti-bribery statute of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Richard Durbin of Illinois, the U.S. Senate's second-highest-ranking Democrat, has called for a congressional probe into the affair. Republican reaction to the scandal involving the owner of Fox News has been incredibly silent, but we can expect Fox commentators like Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee to dismiss Durbin's call as a witch hunt.

Say, those two names sound familiar . . ..

Fox On the Run

Now we're getting somewhere. The news media have ratcheted up their coverage of Rupert Murdoch and the ongoing scandal in the United Kingdom that has reverberated throughout the landscape in the mother country. The withdrawn BSkyB deal has become a big story since I posted here last, and Murdoch is becoming increasingly isolated.

Now comes the story that brings it all back home: News Of the World reporters in Britain have reportedly tried to hack the phones of 9/11 victims and their families here in the United States. An investigation into Murdoch's News Corporation and its practices has been called for by various Democratic senators such as Barbara Boxer of California and Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey, but also by Representative Peter King, a New York Republican.

"It is revolting to imagine that members of the media would seek to compromise the integrity of a public official for financial gain in the pursuit of yellow journalism," King said in a statement. "The 9/11 families have suffered egregiously, but unfortunately they remain vulnerable against such unjustifiable parasitic strains."

Dude, when even Peter King is calling for your head, the jig is up.

But this jig dance can be expected to go on for awhile. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is now looking into the matter. At issue was whether the New York-based News Corporation, which owns Fox Broadcasting, HarperCollins, and several newspapers in addition to and Fox Broadcasting and Fox News, bribed foreign officials in London in violation of U.S. law.

This story has a lot further to go. No congressional investigations or hearings have been called for in Washington - and with Republicans in control of the House, it's not likely that they will be - but if this scandal gets any bigger, we might get a serious look into Fox News's business practices. We might not like what we find. Especially those of us who are Republicans.

It Doesn't Fit the Narrative

Democrat Janice Hahn won a special U.S. House election in California yesterday after the Tea Party tried every underhanded trick - including suppression of the women's vote - to defeat her. Some of their dirty tricks were so virulently bigoted toward women and minorities, I'd rather not mention them here.

Janice Hahn's victory, though, pretty much went unmentioned. I had MSNBC on for over an hour early this afternoon, and when the talk wasn't about the debt ceiling, it was about Casey Anthony and a Michigan woman arrested for planting a vegetable garden that violated local codes. I got to thinking about E.J. Dionne's comment from this past fall how Democratic successes and strengths are ignored by the media because they don't fit the narrative of a return to Republican perspectives on the issues.

Oh yeah, all six Tea Party henchmen running in the Democratic primaries for legislature recall elections in Wisconsin (now Wiskonsein) were defeated, and so the Democratic candidates intended to oppose Republican incumbents in the recall election on August 9 advance to that crucial round. MSNBC didn't mention that either. I learned both of these stories from e-mails from liberal activists groups.

The American media have been playing up the disastrous sloppiness of the British media and their incecstuous relationshops with polticians, as if to say the U.K. media are much worse. But the U.S. media aren't all that much better.

Chris Matthews is on soon, maybe he will bring up the California and Wisconsin stories on his show . . ..

One last thing - Rupert Murdoch gave up his attempt to buy a controlling interest of the BSkyB satellite channel in Britain as a result of the News of the World fiasco. I learned that from my British ladyfriend Therisa's mother.

News Of the Worst

The News of the World, Britain's largest newspaper in terms of circulation, a newspaper so much a part of British popular culture it is mentioned in two British rock songs ("Polythene Pam" by the Beatles and "Back On the Chain Gang" by the Pretenders) and lent its name to the title of a Queen album (the one with "We Will Rock You" and "We Are the Champions"), is publishing its last edition tomorrow, after 168 years in publication.

The paper, which Rupert Murdoch bought at the beginning of his quest for British media domination (world media domination would come later), was found to have hacked the cell phones of British royalty and celebrities, and then it hit a new low by hacking phones of murder victims and families of slain soldiers and terrorist attack victims. The News Of the World even hacked the cell phone of a thirteen-year-old girl who was murdered and kept listening to and erasing messages left by her family, leading them to think the girl was alive.

Though Murdoch is shutting down the paper after Sunday, the only people who will lose their jobs as a result will be low-level reporters and editors, not the News Of the World executives who allowed about all this and have since left.

Oh yeah, Andy Coulson, a former News Of the World journalist and a former aide to British Prime Minister David Cameron, was arrested for being greatly involved the scandal.

This affair shows just how incestuous British politicians and media executives are with each other - even more so than the United States. For a long time, British political leaders have acquiesced to the demands of the U.K.'s commercial media and have let them get away with anything. Fox News and the New York Post look like the BBC and the Boston Globe, respectively, in comparison to the media operations Murdoch runs in the mother country. Fox News merely promotes an agenda and hires Republican insiders as commentators; News International, Murdoch's British affiliate, pretty much has politicians from both the Labour and Conservative parties kowtowing to it for support . . . but especially to Murdoch and his henchmen - and henchwomen, like Rebekah Brooks, a former News of the World editor who's now a News International executive editor and a close friend of Cameron. The politicians looked the other way while the News of the World perpetrated this disgusting and reprehensible hacking practice.

News International recently handed over to the police e-mails showing that, while at News Of the World, Andy Coulson was actively condoning payments to the police, not just for stories - common practice in the United Kingdom - but also payments for confidential information and other things that are illegal to pay the police for.

Murdoch's attempt at buying acquiring parts of BSkyB, a major British satellite television company and subject to review by the British government, is pretty much in trouble now. Pretty soon, Fox News in the United States is going to be investigated for lying about, well, just about anything, and I hope I'm around to see it.