What Rupert Murdoch Wrought
A media thanatopsis that's unrelenting, unyielding and drawn from a deep well of disregard from which one conclusion can be drawn: he hates us.
In a continued meditation on Black History Month that cuts through the corporate glad-handing associated with the month of February, I offer Part 2. Part 1 can be read here.
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Let’s just say this, in the spirit of full disclosure: I come from a media family. My stepfather won the Silurian Award, he banged out everything from pieces on New York gangs during the ‘70s to anything else he could get his hooks into that might aid and abet the upward progress of The Little Guy, when people cared about such things.
This from a background in what they used to call “anti-poverty” initiatives on the Lower East Side, a fluency in Spanish and himself being from a media family that included noted sports columnist Red Smith, a mother who was a world beating journalist when it was strange for women to be so, and a father who discouraged him from being one, despite them being family friends with the F. Scott Fitzgeralds.
He came home one night from work though, in a lather. He was going to quit what to my 14-year-old head seemed like a “good” job. “Good” as in respected, respectable and with a certain amount of note and power. It seemed he and a klatch of others were resigning in protest as Dorothy Schiff, the owner of the New York Post was selling it.
To? Well, that was the problem: she was selling it to some Australian named Rupert Murdoch. It was 1976 and for a cool $31 million ($148 million in 2022), it was now Murdoch’s. This was not an ill-considered decision, the sale or the quitting. Schiff thought her money-losing paper would continue to lose and Murdoch needed a foothold in the New York media market.
[W]ere the attackers Black and the victim non-Black? After decades of the Post, Fox et al we’d say “Bingo” here if it didn’t seem like overkill.
For my part I’d creep into my stepfather’s study and read the papers of Murdoch’s that he had gathered in a swelter of due diligence, prior to his decision to bail.
Now as an avid reader of anything with words attached to it, and with a burgeoning interest in anything with bikinis attached to it, Murdoch’s papers vibed to me like a more upmarket Enquirer. Insofar as, I guess, the formula was clear: slop for thems that like eating slop. I never saw myself quitting over his Page Six nudies, but whatever.
Stephen Dunleavy, Murdoch’s Apollo, rode a wave of controversy into the gig and his entire tenure featured wave after wave of it. How much? Enough that Oliver Stone and Robert Downey Jr. used him as the model for the glory-seeking journo in Natural Born Killers. He took the Platonic Triad and fashioned it into a world of shit. Both allowing Murdoch to maintain some clean hands (and a generally genial public affect) and make money the old-fashioned way: hand over fist.
The Murdoch creep since has been gradual and insistent. At this point in 2023 it is fair to say, he’s everywhere. Vice, Wall Street Journal, Fox News, and a half a dozen other places that make a few things exhaustingly clear: It’s his world and we are just extras in it.
Something that crossed my mind a few days ago when a story kept popping up on my feed. For folks in Silicon Valley about to blame my algorithm and repeat the oft-repeated saw of my feeds showing me what I have shown I want to see, I call bullshit on that. As the father of four daughters I have steadfastly refused any “news” items that have as their raison d'être, abused girls.
But it was insistent. And I know the formula of it leading because it’s bleeding. On a school bus in Florida, naturally, a nine-year-old girl was beaten by two older classmates. It was filmed, naturally. No adults on the bus intervened…naturally. This is the thrust of the story but with any and all other misery porn it never ends there because this is a knife that cuts twice, going in and coming out.
Could we safely assume that the attackers were white? And the victim? White as well? Or with the kind of energy being dedicated to the propagation and encouragement of a narrative that the world is collapsing while we watch, were the attackers Black and the victim Black as well?
[I]n the end, the Fourth Estate initially envisioned as a bulwark against unrestricted powers, has been shanghai’d into advancing the interests of unrestricted powers.
Or…were the attackers Black and the victim non-Black? After decades of the Post, Fox et al we’d say “Bingo” here if it didn’t seem like overkill.
So now I had to watch. And it was sickening. As sickening as all of the other slop fed to us via the Murdoch-mind-meld, whose tone and timbre now has seeped into the Internet and frames almost all of our 2023 lunacies.
Am I immune and, moreover, is this a contrivance where we’re being manipulated against the very real discourse of how life is?
I’ll answer that question after I briefly advocate, on my Facebook feed, the pursuing of a little street justice against a guy who beat the 90-something owner of a sweet shop on the Lower East Side that used to feed all of the hardcore kids who hung around there. Most of us into hardcore have moved on, at least out of the Lower East Side, but he’s still there and on refusing to buy something from a street guy who has now been caught, he was beaten.
I was advocating, like some Fritz Lang movie that anyone still down there who found him first, do what we used to do in the early ‘80s. The young(er) attacker was Black. The attacked? Not.
So, to answer the aforementioned query with another query, what is real? At this point?
It’s hard to know but I know this because I know editorial: every thing you see, read, hear, view, listen to, someone, and usually someones, were making decisions about whether to advance that over something else. Over which photos to use. And more importantly how it’s positioned and for what kind of political gain because in the end, the Fourth Estate initially envisioned as a bulwark against unrestricted powers, has been shanghai’d into advancing the interests of unrestricted powers.
So, the machinery gears itself up to (and for) taking a tuning fork to all of our heads for reasons that extend far beyond the usual suspects of lucre, class privilege and the status quo into darker and more curious climes. Which has me remembering something I believe the beleaguered Bibi Netanyahu once said, “Given the history of my people on this planet if given the choice between overreacting and under-reacting I know which I’d choose.”
[S]o we must consider the ringmaster Murdoch, and now Murdochs, as it is a family concern, who have absolutely no real skin in the game in any way, shape or form.
The othering and advance of these Birth of a Nation tropes against a population in crisis almost justifies the soft extirpation of a people from public life (I have only once in 30 years of work EVER worked in a company with more than TEN other Black people in it). Now I’m not saying the news stories are made up. I am saying the mix of stories we’re fed are designed to make us feel a very specific kind of sick and will beget, algorithmically, more of the same.
With no consideration of the endgame. And so we must consider the ringmaster Murdoch, and now Murdochs, as it is a family concern, who have absolutely no real skin in the game in any way, shape or form. They’re richer than Croesus, have their hands on the levers of political power unrivaled and no real expressed interest in freeing the rest of us from the dystopia they’re so comfortably insulated against.
Well, what’s that that Alfred Pennyworth, Batman’s butler once said: “Some men just want to watch the world burn.”? Batman, Batman…you know…? The Dark Knight…owned by Warner Bros., formerly owned by 21st Century Fox?
Yeah…nevermind.
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ANNOUNCEMENT: Apropos of assholishness in high places…TOMORROW, Monday, at 12:30 pm, PST, we continue with our twice monthly, 30 minute podcast BAD BOSS BRIEF. Subscribe and spend lunch hour laughing at bosses that challenge you to fistfights (true story).
And, once again, I've learned something new from reading your work... that a shirttail relation of mine worked a long time for Murdoch.
My Irish ancestors should be spinning in their graves over that one, but I've yet to hear of any earth moving in dear auld Éire. Then again, if he was born in Australia, it's possible that his branch was forcibly moved over there. Who knows? Still doesn't exculpate him from doing Murdoch's bidding.
I didn't know "thanatopsis" either. Thanks so much!