Rupert Murdoch, the naturalized U.S media mogul and owner of right-wing outlets like Fox News and The New York Post, is the most vile man in America.
While he cavorts with supermodels like his fourth wife, Jerry Hall, and hangs out with Mick Jagger in the tony Hamptons, the onslaught of fake news and misinformation fulminating from his media empire, News Corp., is killing hundreds of thousands of Americans.
Murdoch is the man behind the curtain of a decaying bog, covered in moss and pond scum, overrun by a disgusting array of insects that swarm the fetid corpses of hundreds of thousands of COVID-19 victims.
It’s the kind of scene you’d expect to see in a Tim Burton movie. But it’s real, fomented nightly by Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Tucker Carlson, Jeanine Pirro, Maria Bartiromo and other Fox News talking heads.
The media empire he founded–purportedly to present a “conservative view” of events–long ago went off the tracks and is the biggest threat to American democracy since Hitler and Stalin.
But Murdoch is even worse. He’s the enemy within, the Fifth Column. He’s not out to attack democracy, just undermine and subvert it around the world.
Murdoch is like Osama Bin Laden only his weapon is misinformation, not hijacked airliners.
Bin Laden’s goal was to destroy America using terror. Murdoch has the same goal. Only, he uses news anchors to do his dirty work.
Bin Laden never flew a plane and Murdoch never did a newscast. One wore an Arabic thawb, the other wears custom-made suits. Yet, they are both inextricably tied to the blistering decay of normalcy our country’s suffered the past two-plus decades.
He is the mastermind of a network designed to destroy the fabric, confidence and soul of our democracy. The damage done from this one-two punch of anti-American vermin will take generations to recover from.
The catastrophe of the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol insurrection “could not have occurred without the hatred, division and madness Murdoch’s media have promoted for years within the United States and beyond,” according to former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, who knows Murdoch well.
During Trump’s four years in office, Fox News “was like that of a state-owned broadcaster in a dictatorship: flattering the great leader, supporting his friends, denouncing his enemies, covering up his failures,” Turnbull recently wrote in an Australian magazine.
“Murdoch did not directly dispatch the mob as Trump did, but his media, more than any other, amplified the narratives of hatred, division and denial that made the mob possible.”
Murdoch began building his media empire in the ’50s and ’60s, following the death of his father. His formula was simple– print the most salacious, scandal-ridden gossip his reporters could dig up.
Later he moved to the United Kingdom and in 1974, Murdoch landed in New York City to begin building his media empire here. Two years later, he established a foothold. He bought the failing, low-brow tabloid New York Post.
Murdoch became a naturalized American citizen in 1986 so he could expand his empire beyond newspapers into television, which led to the launch of the Fox Television Network.
Far from lauding his entrepreneurship, the billionaire media mogul should have his citizenship revoked, and he should be deported immediately to Australia, or anywhere else that will take him.
The Chairman of Fox Corp. is probably more responsible for the current irreparable social and political divide we’re experiencing as a nation than all other humans on earth, combined.
Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, Alex Jones and a host of fellow travelers, like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz, are all manifestations of his twisted, foreign world view, which is antithetical to American democracy.
Hannity, Ingraham, Carlson, Pirro, Bartiromo have been his acolytes, exacerbating America’s deep social and racial divisions and supporting Trump’s exploitation of them at every turn.
Only this week, Carlson traveled to Hungary to laud the avowedly fascist dictator Viktor Orban. Carlson sees Orban’s authoritarian, race-based regime as a model for the United States.
“If you care about Western civilization and democracy and families, and the ferocious assault on all three of those things by the leaders of our global institutions, you should know what is happening here right now,” Carlson gushed to his Fox News viewers.
Even hard-right Americans, who claim to support the U.S. Constitution, should be repulsed by Carlson’s sycophancy.
Many of Murdoch’s papers and television channels have been accused of biased and misleading coverage over the years to support his business interests and political allies, but Fox News has devolved into something far worse than cronyism and nepotism.
On its own, it has been the source of more scandals, harassment allegations, misogyny, homophobia, racism and straight-up lies than any other network in American history. And it shows.
When Russia interfered in the 2016 election, the Kremlin’s goal was to foment division between Americans, mostly on racial lines, and to undermine trust in the US electoral system.
Donald Trump is a threat to democracy on par with dictators past and present. (Photo: NYI Collage)
“Those objectives have been achieved, spectacularly, but it’s hard to give the Russians much credit for it,” Turnbull writes.
“The heavy lifting was done by Americans — Murdoch above all, followed by other right-wing media and of course the craziness on Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms favored by the lunatic right, like Parler and Gab.”
Our nation is in the throes of a “War on Facts,” dangerously divided at a point not seen since the Civil War, and 90% of the reason we’re here is because of Murdoch.
There’ve always been “evil billionaires” – the Carnegies, the Hearsts–but there’s never been one who’s profited off the destruction of the very country that welcomed him with open arms the way Murdoch has.
Every single cent the Murdoch family makes off the advertisers, who shamelessly pedal their products on this despicable purveyor of racist rants and untruths, takes us one step farther down the rabbit hole.
Case in point are Ingraham, Carlson, and other talking heads. They betrayed every principle of decency and decorum by mocking, trashing and lambasting the officers who testified about their life-altering experiences on January 6th. To call the commentators “cockroaches” would be an insult to cockroaches.
The disconnect between the hideous nature of Murdoch’s personality and his gleeful circle of social friends is sickening.
Seeing Jagger, one of my musical heroes, happily partying at Murdoch’s home last week, nearly caused me to projectile vomit.
A lifetime of respect for the legendary singer was lost in an instant.
Maybe you can say, well, “Jagger really hates Murdoch;” maybe you can say, “It was his son’s wedding, what do you expect him to do?”
But for a celebrity of Jagger’s status/notoriety to know that his photo would be plastered on every tabloid site, including Fox News, and to not release any kind of statement denouncing the man, or at least offering some explanation, leaves me to believe Jagger thought it was no big deal.
You could even say he has Sympathy for The Devil. (Jagger’s publicists didn’t respond to a request for comment, nor did Yahoo Music)
To make matters worse, Fox News’ success with hard-right, over 45-viewers, has spawned competitors like OANN and Newsmax. Both go even deeper into the cesspool of misinformation and right-wing media manipulation.
How far do we let these merchants of lies stray? Where do we draw the line?
Murdoch turned 90 in March, yet shows few signs of slowing down. He married Hall, a mere 25 years younger, in 2016. He has two sons standing in the wings, Lachlan, and James. Whether the sins of the father will be borne by the sons remains to be seen.
Beyond that, and probably more importantly, when are we going to hold the companies accountable that continue to spend millions of dollars in adverting and prop up these deplorable networks? The Toyotas, the Overstocks, The Home Depots and others.
After all, as Eddie Murphy once said, “The best way to hurt rich people is by turning them into poor people.”
And while that may never happen to the Murdoch family, a nationwide boycott of a dozen of Fox News’ most loyal companies and advertisers might get the ball rolling.