WATCH: A VIDEO FROM HOLLYWOOD TODAY

RUPERT MURDOCH READIES VICTORY DANCE, DOW JONES SURRENDERS
This Deal is NOT Just About the Wall Street Journal

SYDNEY AUSTRALIA, August l: And so the evil empire wins again, as the media mogul critics labeled “the dirty digger” proves once more that most media outlets—whatever their high flying principles and distinguished images— can and will be bought and sold in the globalized marketplace of mammon,

In market terms, it’s all a game of winners and losers and they are always defined in terms of who can spend the most to buy the most, and sometimes the best.

This is the game that Rupert Murdoch has been playing all of his life, and, sadly for many losers, including believers in the high church of journalism, he has proven triumphant again. Since I am in his birthplace, in AusTRAILyer, the land that inflicted him upon the rest of us, I will have to break my blog vow of vacation silence and add my own condolences to my colleagues.

As they say down here, way down under, he’s the “BEST EVER,” when it comes to recognizing that everyone has a price, including the lofty pretentious Bancroft Family, majority owners of the Wall Street Journal, many of whom decried his values while holding out for more buckaroos from Bush Ranger #1.

Of course I could be wrong about this, but I have been following this guy for a long time. See my chapter I, RUPERT in my book The More You Watch The Less You Know for more on his distinguished career.. I have even confronted him twice in person for whatever good that did. By the by, as part of the deal –and for PR purposes–a “special committee” has been set set up to safeguard the Journal’s “integrity.”

Here’s the news before it became officially the news;

Gotcha: Murdoch wins Dow Jones
By Stephen Foley in New York

Rupert Murdoch is poised to get his hands on the biggest prize in his long career in newspapers, after members of The Wall Street Journal’s controlling family abandoned their opposition to his $5bn (£2.5bn) takeover of Dow Jones, its parent company.

The Dow Jones board was meeting last night at the end of a day of wheeler-dealing which persuaded key members of the Bancroft family to change their minds and support a bid for the company. His takeover of the Journal reshapes the media landscape in America, adding the country’s paper of record for the business community into a portfolio of assets that includes the New York Post and the Fox News channel, and a Fox business channel that launches later this year.

The clincher yesterday appeared to be News Corp’s agreement to take on some of the legal costs that Bancroft family trusts have incurred over the four months since he first made his audacious approach.

HOW RUPE DOES IT

Allow me to return to this big breaking boomer after telling you about a smaller story that is clearly related and appears as the leader in this week’s Sydney City Hub under the heading “SUPPORT INDEPENDENT MEDIA”

It is a talk by a local publsher, Laurence Gibbons, which opens with report that Murdoch spent $360 million buying up a chain of local weeklies with a combined circulation of nearly 400,000 copies. “As a result, “Gibbons explains, “News Corp now reaches 90 percent of all Australian households with a free community newspaper. Call it corporate home invasion.”

He goes on to explain that this deal is not about serving the public but rather purchasing real estate transactions because every realtor in the area has agreed to run 75% of their advertising exclusively in his papers in exchange for a “old fashioned kickback.” “Despite the fact that realestate ads are actually paid for by the homeowner and not the real estate agent, the money goes into the real estate agent’s wallet, and then into Murdoch’s coffers. All competitors are cut out.

These practices are not just nefarious he says but has turned Australia into “the most anti-competitive media market in the world.” What this tells us is How Murdoch makes his money and the article goes onto explain how cushy deals with local politicians permits Murdoch Inc exclusivity in distributing other outets while restricting news racks to competitors.

So, what we see is that News Corp is not just about spreading the gospel of Bill O’Reilly but making money, oodles of it, by high pressure tactics leavened with payoffs including a $500,000 distribution contract with the Sydney City Council.

Now this is just small stuff but illustrative of the way this sleaze mercvhant works. Remember how Murdoch paid off Time Warner to buy access for Fox News in New York, In the end its less about ideology and more about M-O-N-E-Y. After all. Murdoch owned the Village Voice in his hey day and his publishing company publshes Michael Moore.. For Rupert, as always Its about the Benjamins. He’s an equal opportunity exploiter.

WHAT WILL IT MEAN?

Now back to big deal: What will it mean? Rich Hanley, assistant professor of journalism and director of graduate programs in Quinnipiac University’s School of Communications, says, “Murdoch’s purchase holds both great promise and peril for Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal. The promise rests in dragging the company kicking and screaming into the 21st century with a multiple platform approach to gathering and distributing business and financial news, information and analysis. The peril lies in the potential for a descent from traditional journalistic values into sloganeering and similar elements that are not uncommon to News Corp. properties. But Murdoch understands that the value of business news relies entirely on the integrity of the information presented and that any undue influence on coverage will be self-defeating.”

Please read this MoveOn because many of you think this all this is about is putting Fox News Headlines on the Journal’s front page. Not True. This is about getting a credible news service of Rupert’s news Business Channel. Its about global media, not one paper. Its about gaining access to business information and reselling it or using it in other ways. Many in the left don’t get this. :

ERIC ALTERMAN of the Nation sees a silver lining for liberals: As Murdoch destroys the credibility of the Journal’s news reporting, he will also lessen the influence of its rabid-right editorial page. Mmmm…read on.This is superficial

Veteran newsman Sydney Schanberg recalls Rupert Murdoch: If past is prelude, reporters and editors at the Wall Street Journal have reason to worry.

Certainly many readers and editors are worrying, and even begging, pleading for another owner to materialize out of some magic kingdom to save the paper. It won’t happen although the FT (Pearson) and Bloomberg will spend more money competing.

As for Rupert, he’s sanguine:

“I’m a catalyst for change … You can’t be an outsider and be successful over 30 years without leaving a certain amount of scar tissue around the place.”

And scar tissue,there has been. The BBC tells part of the story

In an effort to expand his television interests further in the United States Rupert Murdoch became an American citizen in 1985. Throughout the 80s his Australian listed Media company the News Corporation continued to grow rapidly, acquiring interests in newspapers, magazine, book publishing, television stations, film and more.

The rapid growth of News Corporation and expansion into satellite TV also brought massive loans. During a downturn in the early 90s Murdoch and his media empire had difficulty paying its bills. Many of his American magazine interests were sold to pay off some of the loans and things eventually turned around for Murdoch.

“The world is changing very fast. Big will not beat small anymore. It will be the fast beating the slow.” Rupert Murdoch

LET US REMEMBER

From the Beeb:

“No-one who saw Melvyn Bragg’s dramatic interview with Dennis Potter in 1994 will ever forget it. Potter, who was terminally ill with cancer, yet had lost none of his waspish wit, mused on his life, his work…and his illness.

“I call my cancer Rupert,” he told Bragg. “Because that man Murdoch is the one who, if I had the time (I’ve got too much writing to do)… I would shoot the bugger if I could.
“There is no one person more responsible for the pollution of what was already a fairly polluted press.”

THE BIO

The early days as Wilkkized;

Rupert Murdoch was born on March 11, 1931 in Victoria, Australia, and was reading Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Worcester College, Oxford University, when his father, Keith Murdoch, died in 1952.

Before his death Keith Murdoch had accumulated a great number of shares in newspaper companies, including some representing a controlling interest in News Limited, an Adelaide company publishing an afternoon newspaper called The News. He had appointed an experienced journalist named Rohan Rivett, a childhood friend and mentor of Rupert Murdoch, as editor of The News with the hope that Rupert would enter a career in journalism and that Rivett would assist Rupert in learning the required skills. In his will, Keith Murdoch instructed his trustees that Rupert should begin his career at The News “if they consider him worthy of support.” At that time Rupert had written in Oxford student newspapers and had worked for a number of newspapers in a junior capacity. Some thought he had little interest in journalism though and noted his enthusiasm for gambling and making money.

At the time of his death Keith Murdoch was heavily in debt but possessed within a private family trust considerable number of newspaper shares, some of which may have actually belonged to the Herald and Weekly Times. The trustees, in consultation with Keith’s widow and Rupert’s mother, Dame Elisabeth Murdoch, were forced to sell many of the shares and other property in order to repay debt and death duties (government taxes).[1] Elisabeth was able to retain only the family home, Cruden Farm, and the shares in News Limited and its subsidiaries, a Melbourne magazine publishing company named Southdown Press and The Barrier Miner, a newspaper at Broken Hill, New South Wales.

Rupert then returns to Oz and becomes immersed in media…The Wiki-wonderland of background and context has more:

A defining moment in Murdoch’s life was the Stuart case in Adelaide when The News began a campaign to free a young aboriginal carnival worker named Rupert Max Stuart who had been convicted of the murder of a small girl on a beach near Ceduna in the far west of South Australia during Christmas of 1958. Stuart was sentenced to hang. The News was critical of the case and investigated in an attempt to prove Stuart not guilty. This action raised the ire of Premier Thomas Playford, and after numerous deliberating, and even a Royal Commission, Stuart was spared the death penalty.

To neutralize public emotion on the issue of hanging he commuted Stuart’s sentence to life imprisonment and then established a royal commission, conducted by the state’s chief judge and the judge who had passed sentence on Stuart. The outcome was a confirmation of Stuart’s guilt and a recommendation that The News, its editor and its managing director be charged with sedition, a form of treason based on medieval English law. The paper, the editor and Murdoch were each charged on three counts, making nine counts in all.

To fight the nine cases would have bankrupted News Limited. Rupert Murdoch’s only chance of saving the family inheritance was an intercession arranged by Ken May, a political reporter on The News. Playford agreed to meet Murdoch in private. Murdoch pleaded his case on the basis of his youth and inexperience and a claim that Rohan Rivett had exerted influence over him. Playford agreed to have the charges dropped on two conditions: (1) That Rivett be fired from the paper and (2) that The News pay the costs of the royal commission. Unable to face Rivett, Murdoch went to Sydney and wrote a terse one-paragraph letter dismissing his long-time friend.

This humiliating experience gave Rupert Murdoch a taste of the overwhelming power of popularly elected politicians and would shape the future policies of all his newspapers. In 2002 Murdoch financed a motion picture “Black and White” which told a varied version of the Stuart story.

AND WHAT ABOUT THE JOURNAL?

The newspaper that Murdoch is taking over has always been two papers in one, one a corporate news sheet, the other a right wing pulpit.i World Net Daily explained this by in 2002 by pointing out that even though the editor was on the right, the news operation was in the middle. Again this is a corrective to those among us who see the world only in partisan, Republican-Democrat terms:

Yes, and this is how the myth of the conservative Wall Street Journal survives. Bartley may have "editor" as his title, but he has virtually no say in news coverage nor role in setting the news agenda at the paper. That falls to Steiger. Bartley controls the opinion side of the paper – the editorial pages – and is otherwise a figurehead for the paper.
In fact, Bartley and Steiger work in separate parts of the Journal's Manhattan building (temporarily vacated because of damage suffered from the World Trade Center attacks). At most papers, editorial and news editors work together in the same newsroom. Yet Bartley and his crew of conservative, free-market editorial writers are in one department, and Steiger and his crew of supposedly "objective" news reporters are in another.

And they despise each other.

According to former Journal staffers, Steiger's reporters commonly refer to Bartley's writers as "Nazis" or, more charitably, "kookie right-wingers," and won't have anything to do with them. The two departments are so separate that former Journal Executive Editor Norman Pearlstine, a Clinton Democrat and one-time managing editor, didn't even have security access to the editorial-page offices.

Fact is, the Journal's news and editorial departments are as politically polarized as North and South Korea. The result is "schizophrenic" coverage, said University of Texas journalism professor Marvin Olasky.

SOCIALIST MOLE AT THE WSJ

Even more fascinating is that for many years, one of the WSJ’s best reporters A. Kent MacDougall was an open socialist while Alexander Cockburn wrote regular commentaries. Investigative reporter John Kwitny was on the left too.

There was even an academic paper written about the Socialist at the WSJ:

Using the case study approach to examine an important aspect of the news paradigm (the objectivity of the journalist), this paper examines the case of A. Kent MacDougall, a former reporter for the “Wall Street Journal” and the “Los Angeles Times” who revealed that he was a socialist and often wrote for radical publications while employed at the “Journal.” The paper argues that the controversy within the journalistic community over this revelation helps shed light on unwritten paradigmatic assumptions, particularly regarding objectivity. It examines the repair process that was engaged in to handle the threats created for the paradigm by reviewing the commentary that was generated by the reporter’s actions and analysing the strategies through which the paradigmatic assumptions and routines were reaffirmed and strengthened.

When the right wing press “exposed” MacDougall (and before he wrote an insightful book about his experiences)he noted:

”This proved too much for touchy, defensive Dow Jones executives. Whereas a Wall Street Journal spokesman had told the New York Post before the Human Events article appeared that “no one cared” that I had used the Journal to “spread his socialist ideology,” a week after its publication Dow Jones issued a statement that “we are offended and outraged that a former Wall Street Journal reporter now claims he tried to pursue a hidden ideological agenda within the pages of Journal.” The statement not only accepted AIM’s line that I had an ideological agenda (rather than simply seizing occasional opportunities to introduce Journal readers to radical ideas), but smacked of appeasement. As the Columbia Journalism Review later editorialized, “The Journal’s own hidden agenda appeared to be covering its own rear, for it knew it would soon be under attack.”

Finally, if the future of journalism is our real concern, read this:

The Media Can Legally Lie

Florida Appeals Court Orders Akre-Wilson Must Pay Trial Costs of $24.3 Billion to Fox Television; Couple Warns Journalists of Danger to Free Speech and Whistle Blower Protection

“In February 2003, a Florida Court of Appeals unanimously agreed with an assertion by FOX News that there is no rule against distorting or falsifying the news in the United States.”

Fox News wins in court -

FINALLY:

Let’s never only focus on capital. Here’s a labor story of interest.

I came to Austrailia through Fiji on Air Pacific. I later met a local doctor on my flight who told me about this story that I later found on line. Lets hope that these nurses did well.

Fiji’s nurses strike in defiance of military junta

WSNS: Fiji Nursing Association (FNA) members went on strike on July 25 to oppose a 5 percent pay cut and the axing of jobs by the lowering of the retirement age from 60 to 55 across the public sector. The nurses’ union leadership was compelled to call the strike despite concerted threats from the country’s military regime and the capitulation of most other public sector unions to the junta’s dictates.

The 1,676 nurses left only a skeleton staff to cater for emergencies. The nurses want the full restoration of the 5 percent pay cut. That the strike has occurred at all expresses widespread hostility to the junta’s austerity measures, which have placed the brunt of the nation’s economic crisis on the backs of working people.

Nurses are part of the country’s working poor and the pay cut is having a devastating impact on their already straitened living standards. In the 17 years to 2004, 65 percent of Fiji’s nurses, including many senior staff, left the country to get a better job abroad.

Good Luck Nurses!

And good luck to all of us as the market plummets again thanks to the subprime crisis that I have been covering and warning against along with many others.I just heard Australian TV News use the term “contagion” in a report on another market drop. I wrote about that two weeks ago. See my weekly credit and loan bulletin on stopthesqueeze.org for more.

Back in the USSA on August 8.

Now back to vacating—even as the dollar goes into the toilet. Thank you Mr. Bush….

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