Last week, in New York, we learned just how rich the Trump and Brexit years have made the Murdoch family. And in Sydney we (and Malcolm Turnbull) learned how they use the power that money gives them.
In the US, Forbes magazine released their annual billionaires list, demonstrating (as Australia’s rich list did just last month) what a lovely pandemic it’s been if you’re rich enough. The Murdoch family now sits at number 71, with assets of about $30 billion.
Just five years ago when Trump was the outsider US presidential candidate and Brexit a laughed-off distant possibility, the family’s wealth was a more meagre $14.6 billion.
Meanwhile, in Australia, the Murdoch companies were making news for another reason: a shock-and-awe strike in Tuesday’s The Daily Telegraph (three stories and an editorial) against the appointment of former PM (and vocal News Corp critic) Malcolm Turnbull as chair of the NSW Government’s Net Zero Emissions and Clean Economy board — a strike that was rewarded with a same day governmental back-flip.
It was a peculiarly Australian version of the story told in the newly released memoir by former Republican speaker John Boehner, describing his party’s descent into “Looneyville”, driven by Fox News. He tells of a 2011 threat from one of his caucus to take her unhappiness over a particular appointment to Fox: “I wasn’t the one with the power, she was saying. I just thought I was. She had the power now. She was right, of course.”
Just as Boehner was forced to recognise his limits in Fox’s Republican Party, Turnbull has come to recognise his own in Murdoch’s Liberal Party — although both are now seemingly more prepared to talk about it after they’ve retired from politics.
For News Corp, it’s not personal — or not ALL personal, anyway. It’s business. It’s News Corp application of monopoly tactics to right-wing politics, seeking to control both the news and the politicians who make it, relying on its traditional mix of strong product design for market fit, a ruthlessly waged war against potential competitors and regulatory and political capture.
It’s the little things that make the difference: deals under the news media bargaining code that minimise benefits to new players, building an internal competitor to the relaunched AAP news service, or federal government funding support to outbid the Nine network for broadcast rights to cricket and netball.
It’s the sport-focused tabloids apparent downgrading of rugby union coverage since the broadcast rights moved from Foxtel to Nine’s Stan: just six pars in the 20 ad-free pages of yesterday’s Sunday Telegraph — Sport.
It’s jiu jitsu against the ABC by asserting that only News Corp opinionistas can provide the balance the broadcaster requires. (“Go woke, go broke,” as Sky News exalted at falling Q+A ratings last week.)
Once, News Corp hoped to bring its skills to dominate the Anglosphere attention economy through newspaper and pay television monopolies delivering the companies’ own news, sport, and entertainment content.
Now that the social media internet has exploded the attention infrastructure, they’ve pivoted. In 2016, Rupert Murdoch recognised that streaming services like Netflix meant domination in film and television entertainment was beyond reach, selling out of the sector in a share swap with Disney. (The rise in those Disney shares now underpins the family’s wealth.)
Over the past month, new investments have shown the sectors the companies now hope to dominate: books, business news and information, real estate advertising, and the interface between right-wing politics and media.
In books, News Corp announced in the week before Easter that it was buying Houghton Mifflin’s Books and Media Segment for about $460 million (after missing out on the purchase of Simon & Schuster late last year). This is expected to take revenues from the company’s Harper Collins book publishing arm to about a third of the company’s total.
A couple of days earlier, News Corp strengthened its position in business media, buying Investor’s Business Daily for about $360 million.
In the same week, the family’s Fox arm seemed to make peace with its major competitor in the right-wing media space by hiring Donald Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara as a paid contributor.
“Welcome to the family, Lara” the network said as it announced the news on its morning show.
Murdoch, the single most dangerous person on this Earth.
Help me out here, please, why aren’t news ^media^ paying AAP for using their news services instead of FB etc paying News.corp when they use AAP and just twist the news a bit(?) to suit their agenda.
What in Jesu’s name do these people intend to do with all this cash. Buy a Planet or something? It is obvious to all us Plebs that they have completely lost focus on living fulfilling lives but just mindlessly accumulate in order to beat Gina to take out the Premiership flag or something … please explain to this silly old coot.
“The natural order of things beyond our control” :-
In our effluent pyramid society we plebs are the blocks at the bottom keeping the interests, and feet, of those above, dry.
We can’t say too much, to do so risks a mouthful of that crap they keep us in – and besides, who cares what we say, let alone think?
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Buy a planet? He ain’t no Elon, who at least is furthering mankind’s knowledge on so many fronts and in doing so providing many tens of thousands of meaningful jobs both in the US and worldwide. Murdoch is a user and grifter in Trump’s ilk, using inherited wealth to gain power and more wealth without contributing at all to, and actually detracting from, the common good. When he eventually goes more people will dance than mourn and with good reason.
Hopefully, the “anecdotall” accounts of long covid responding to the vaccines mentioned here,
https://www.abc.net.au/news/health/2021-03-24/coronavirus-long-covid-could-the-vaccine-cure-it/100023114
will be borne out by further studies.
One would suggest that to understand the objectives and actions of Murdochs’ NewsCorp in the Anglosphere of Australia, UK and US, you also need to understand similar of Koch’s and their mutual quest to promote radical right libertarian socio-economic ideology through networks of think tanks, academic centres etc..
This is where NewsCorp etc. come in by helping inform a retail voter facade coalescing round socio-cultural issues underpinned by one of the following white nationalism, conservatism, libertarianism, evangelical Christianity, cynicism towards science or education and more recently, promotion of conspiracy theories; masking and helping deliver deep seated radical right libertarian socio-economic ideology.
If one wonders how ‘Sky After Dark’ fits this strategy, from the HuffPost ‘What Rupert Murdoch and the Koch Brothers Have In Common‘ Robert Greenwald 14 July 2011:
‘A recent segment of Koch Bros. Exposed examined the intricate right-wing echo chamber the brothers fund in order to propagate policy lies into the mainstream debate. Unsurprisingly, Fox News was a key outlet through which they could accomplish this.’
Codependency with politicians with bit parts in the middle of this production….
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/what-rupert-murdoch-and-t_b_898378