This article is part of a series about a legal threat sent to Crikey by Lachlan Murdoch, over an article Crikey published about the January 6 riots in the US. For the series introduction go here, and for the full series go here.
In the real world, the events in Washington DC on January 6 2021 are seen for what they are — a frightening attempt by a defeated president and his delusional followers to overturn US democracy through a violent invasion of Congress. It was an insurrection, incited by Donald Trump, that cost the lives of both protesters and police and has resulted, to date, in around 900 people being charged in relation to the attack.
But at the Murdoch family’s Fox News, things are very different. On the day itself, the insurrection was repeatedly described as “peaceful”; its “energy” and “positivity” were lauded by Fox personalities. As Trump supporters breached the building, one Fox host said, “This is a huge victory for these protesters. They have disrupted the system in an enormous way!”
As the “peaceful protest” line became increasingly difficult to maintain, Fox News personalities began comparing the insurrection to Black Lives Matter protests. That night, Tucker Carlson blamed a nebulous “them”, not protesters. “Millions of Americans sincerely believe the last election was fake,” he said. “You can dismiss them as crazy, call them conspiracy theorists, kick them off Twitter, that won’t change their minds.” Others claimed left-wing protesters had infiltrated the insurrection and turned it violent.
And ever since, even as the congressional inquiry into the events of that day unearthed the role of Donald Trump earlier this year, detailing planning that went into the event and the chaos and destruction that was caused, Fox’s best and brightest have continued to downplay the insurrection. It was “vandalism”. “Forgettably minor”. The inquiry hearings were an “anti-Trump show trial” and a “sham”.
It’s perhaps understandable that Fox News wants to downplay January 6 2021, given its crucial role in spreading and amplifying Donald Trump’s lies about a stolen election. But rarely has the network seemed so utterly committed to total disinformation as when its presenters have insisted nothing happened that day, and that anything that did happen was the fault not of those who perpetrated the deaths, the violence and the political disruption, but of politicians, of apparently ninja-like “antifa” subversives, of those who ran the protests as a supposed false-flag operation.
To understand the events of January 6 it’s crucial to understand the role of Fox News in spreading and amplifying the Big Lie. To understand the ongoing hold Donald Trump has on the Republican Party, it’s necessary to understand the continuing role of Fox News in feeding lies and propaganda to his supporters. And to understand that role requires understanding those who control Fox News — the Murdoch family.
To suggest that either the Murdochs do not have some responsibility for the events of January 6, or that making that suggestion should be punished in court, is an extraordinary denial of the public interest. Yet that is what Lachlan Murdoch is now pursuing in the Federal Court.
This is a matter of the highest public interest. The stability of the United States, as our most important ally and our security guarantor, is one of our most important strategic assumptions. But that assumption can no longer safely be made, and that is partly the result of the division, polarisation and hatred spread by Fox News: the possibility of widespread political violence, even of civil war, cannot be dismissed. The return to the presidency of Donald Trump — doubtless with the support of Fox News — cannot be dismissed. The election of a Trump-like figure of authoritarian populism like Ron DeSantis cannot be dismissed.
All would be alarming outcomes for Australia, given our lead role in taking on China in our own region. All would undermine our security. All would imperil the assumptions at the heart of our defence policy.
Yet according to Lachlan Murdoch, the role of his family in one of the key disruptive forces in US politics, Fox News, is somehow off limits, beyond public discussion in Australia. It’s never been more important for the toxic impact of Fox News and the malignant role of the Murdochs in public life across the world to be openly debated.
I could not agree more.
An argument that presents the facts in a clear and composed way. This is the exact opposite of what is presented by publications and broadcasters owned by Murdoch.
I don’t get Aussies shrugging off the possibility of the US becoming a theocratic dictatorship as something that’s only an issue for US citizens … love them or hate them, if the US falls, we’ll go down with them
Not necessarily ‘Roberto’ however we have to accept that we live in Asia. It would certainly help our case if Albanese and Marles leave the foreign relations stuff to Penny Wong and DFAT given that they know where are nearest neighbours Iive!!!
Sorry, I meant to say ‘where our repeat our nearest neighbours live” – for a moment I must have thought that I was a member of the Downer dynasty or a schoolmate of Christopher Pyne
Remember when Howard had his photo taken with Barney (W’s pup) on the front page of a US newspaper, as the “man of steel” proving he was W’s lackey.
Australia has been bending over forwards for the US as long as I can remember (70’s onwards)
Australian governments are tied to a very rancid US umbilical cord.
That started much earlier when Ming the Mendacious, was more than “economical” with the truth stating that the commitment of troops to the Viet Nam Farrago in 1962 was made on the basis of a request from President Ngô Đình Diệm.
Diệm had in fact not asked Australia for help and had clearly tried to dissuade Australia from becoming involved. This was because Diệm was having enough trouble dealing with the US and did not want yet another interloper in Viet Nam.
It took a request created by the Diệm government, at Menzies’ strong insistence, to ensure the commitment to Diệm’s soi disant Republic of South Vietnam.
At Ming’s insistance a Coalition Government then wasted the C of A blood and treasure on an unjust and unwinnable military invasion, as no war was ever declared. This despite the US manufactured “Gulf of Tonkin” incident.
No war was declared by the Parliament of Australia or the Congress of the United States. The US early on referred to it as a “Police Action”.
I understand, but am open to correction, that Australia and New Zealand were the only countries to pay their own way. The others, the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand had all or most of their way paid by the US. That was one reason for the build up of US inflation in the early to late 1970s.
Such was to be an early example in Australia of “The Big Lie” by a Lying Nasty Party Coalition leading to involvement in “non war “ conflict. Followed later by The Lying Rodent© and, not one but two, US military adventures , The Afghan Imbroglio and The Iraq Fiasco.
There was a very brief respite under the Whitlam government…but the kibosh was put on that with the assistance of then GG Kerr, who was not only the Queen’s representative, but part of the Anglo American intelligence establishment.
For Kerr was also a leading light in the Australian Association for Cultural Freedom, described by Jonathan Kwitny of the Wall Street Journal in his book, “The Crimes of Patriots: as “an elite, invitation-only group … exposed in Congress as being founded, funded and generally run by the CIA”. The CIA “paid for Kerr’s travel, built his prestige … Kerr continued to go to the CIA for money”.(1)
Whitlam had enabled a Royal Commission into intelligence agencies, headed by Justice Robert Hope in 1974. In the US, the Watergate scandal and hearings had shown CIA involvement in domestic politics, and a further investigatory committee was established, the Church Committee, to investigate such.
For security agencies, it was clearly war with the elected governments.This RC as well as the actions taken by the CIA itself in regard to Pine Gap which allowed global surveillance and as well domestic Australian surveillance, even allowing it to monitor anti-Viet Nam Farrago and anti US political activity, within Australia was all revealed at the trial of “falcon/snowman” spy Christopher Boyce in 1977(2)
The CIA extended its domestic subversive activities, including the establishment of the Sydney-based Nugan Hand Bank, as a focus for channelling money sourced from drug and arms sales into its campaign of subversion around the world.(3)(4)(5)
It has also been recently revealed that the then chief of CIA Counterintelligence from 1954 to 1975, James Jesus Angleton, in the year before the Dismissal had already wanted to have the Whitlam Government removed from power
This is what Brian Toohey relates in his new publication, SECRET*… he obtained such information from John Walker the CIA chief of station in Australia during the Whitlam years… which is also confirmed… as Angleton said so in an interview with the ABC’s Correspondant’s Report in 1977. In the same interview, Angleton discussed how CIA funding in Australian politics and unions was handle(6)
.
(1)The Crimes of Patriots: A True Tale of Dope, Dirty Money, and the CIA/Jonathan Kwitny W. W. Norton & Company: New York, NY; 1987
ISBN:9780393336658 LC: HG3448.N846 K95 1987
(2)Boyce claims that he began getting misrouted cables from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) discussing the agency’s desire to depose the government of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam in Australia. Boyce claimed the CIA wanted Whitlam removed from office because he wanted to close U.S. military bases in Australia, including the vital Pine Gap secure communications facility, and withdraw Australian troops from Vietnam.
Through the cable traffic Boyce saw that the CIA was involving itself in such a manner, not just with Australia but with other democratic, industrialised allies. Boyce considered going to the press, but believed the media’s earlier disclosure of CIA involvement in the 1973 Chilean coup d’état had not changed anything for the better.
(3)The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade/ Alfred W. McCoy, with Cathleen B. Read and Leonard P. Adams II.
New York, NY: Harper & Row:1972
ISBN:0060129018 LC: HV5822.H4 M33 1972
(4)Cocaine politics : drugs, armies, and the CIA in Central America: Peter Dale Scott ; Jonathan Marshall
Berkeley : University of California Press, c1991
ISBN: 0520073126 LC: HV 5840 .C45 S36 1991
(5)Whiteout : the CIA, drugs and the press Alexander Cockburn ; Jeffrey St. Clair
Paperback ed., London ; New York : Verso, 1999
ISBN:1859841392 LC: HV 5825 .C59 1999
(4)Killing Hope: US and CIA Interventions since WWII/ William Blum/2004
Common Courage Press;MNE.USA: ISBN: 9781567512526
LC: JK468.I6 B59
(6)SECRET The Making of Australia’s Security State/Brian Toohey
Melbourne University Press. 2019
ISBN 9780522872804 LC:JQ4029.S4 T66 2019
grâce à LA, LC, wikipedia, WorldCat et al.
And beyond as well, eg Myanmar
Apparently Lachlan is not too keen to have the family under the spotlight. Funny because I’ve had years of having news of the Murdoch family rammed down my throat. Flying to Australia for the latest extravagant wedding. What Sarah is wearing. How Lachlan is like his father. Which world politician Rupert is meeting on some tropical island. Like they are our Royal Family or something. As an Australian I am deeply embarrassed by them – the glitz, the power and their alarming political influence.
What drives a family to champion such chaotic division and hate in American society? I guess there’s a profit motive, but what else?
Money does not always confer power but power inevitably accumulates money.
Unelected political power.
Do you think Papa M. made it in the US without the support of Big Money? How much of Big Money is Old Money? How much of Old Money was built on slavery? The Ms aren’t the mouthpiece of Big Money, they are the fog horn. They Are the distraction.
Example.
Draw a line from prohibition and drug laws in the 1920s, that benefits big pharma and big chemicals through to racial make up of prison populations mostly for drug related crime, through to privatised prisons run by big money, through to low paid prison work forces that produce goods for big money.
nothing to see here, especially not on Fux news.
crikey would do well to team up with Louis Theroux.
The escalation of the US war on drugs had (and still has) a clear political purpose:
John Ehrlichman, Richard Nixon’s domestic policy chief, has explained: “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people … You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities … We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
As you write, Billy, the US prison-industrial complex now joins their military industrial complex as a pillar of their economy.
And then one of our justifications for attacking China is the forced labour camps full of Uyghurs, all while the US has by far the highest incarceration rate in the world, and yet still lauding itself as the ‘Land of the Free’. What a joke.
It was in fact much more with the support of the Reagan Administration as Marshall Wilson, set out
For there is is a picture in the Reagan presidential library of President Reagan meeting with publisher Rupert Murdoch, U.S. Information Agency Director Charles Wick, lawyer Roy Cohn, who was also The Trumps‘s lawyer and taught much of his own chicanery and nastiness and Cohn’s law partner Thomas Bolan in the Oval Office on Jan. 18, 1983.
Murdoch then came on side with the Reagan administration and so was then able to rapidly become a US citizen in 1985.
“His media assets were critical to the Reagan administration’s ‘public perception’ program aimed at winning support for an aggressive policy of ‘regime change’ in Central America.
This operation was led by the CIA, with a senior operative running the campaign alongside the National Security Council’s (NSC) Lt-Col Oliver North from a building not far from the White House.
North hit the headlines after it was revealed he had been involved in the illegal sale of weapons to Iran and that some of the profits were channeled to support guerilla fighters (the Contras) acting as US proxies to remove the socialist regime in Nicaragua.
Journalist Robert Parry and Peter Kornbluh, an information analyst with the National Security Archive, were among the first to reveal how Reagan created what amounted to America’s first peacetime propaganda ministry.
“The president and his men realised from the start that to oust the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, they would need to neutralise the public opposition to US intervention in the Third World,” they reported in 1988.
“To win this war at home the White House created a sophisticated apparatus that mixed propaganda with intimidation, consciously misleading the American people and at times trampling on the right to dissent.”
Murdoch’s role was confirmed in subsequent reports by Parry whose investigative website consortiumnews published details of meetings between Murdoch and Reagan in the White House.
The first, on 18 February 1983, was arranged by Murdoch’s lawyer Roy Cohn who counted Donald Trump among his clients. Also in attendance was America’s propaganda tsar Charles Wick, director of the US Information Agency (USIA), who was keen for the administration to invest in satellite technology to counter Soviet propaganda.’
These are extracts from an article by Marshall Wilson, concerning how Murdoch came to be able to wield so much political power in the US.
Which first appeared in John Menadue’s Pearls and Irritations 30 July 2021
https://youtu.be/XUhbDZ4jwCQ. The ol whiskey sierra