New York Magazin cover, Rupert Murdock of Fox News. New York magazine is not technically a tabloid newspaper. But Michael Wolff is definitely a sensational tabloid style writer: NAJ screen shot

The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson – 

WASHINGTON, D.C. — So I heard on CBS radio while riding around in a large campground near the nation’s capital in a Ford Escape hybrid that Rupert Murdoch announced his retirement from News Corp at the age of 92.

By the time I got back to the media van, every news organization in America already had the story. I was in no hurry to write it up anyway. Better to wait a few days and see what the critics at the New York Times and Washington Post have to say, along with checking out the covers on various tabloids. It would be almost un-American to report on the life and career of a tabloid king like Murdoch without seeing what the other tabloids had to say about him, and what pictures they choose for the cover.

New York magazine is not technically a tabloid newspaper. But Michael Wolff is definitely a sensational tabloid style writer. In his cover story, headlined Breaking Up Is Hard to Do, he details the firing of Tucker Carlson and the headaches it caused Murdoch.

For a media mogul like Rupert, writing about his retirement is tantamount to writing his obituary. Maybe that’s why he decided to retire, to see what people would write about him after his death. Maybe he’s actually dying.

Besides, that would give me enough time to re-read some Hunter Thompson prose, to set the tone for the speed and edge of the writing. I chose this little section from Rolling Stone, an excerpt from Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail in ’72, Thompson’s first and most in-depth attempt to write about American politics all while high on weed and Mexican beer, gin, and enough speed to alter the outcome of six Super Bowls.

When I finally got around to saying something on Facebook, I used the cover of New York magazine and wrote this, with the Dr. of Gonzo Journalism in mind:

“GOODBYE, Good Riddance to Rupert Murdoch – The Australian tabloid king who created Fox News and turned the United States of America into a stinking, ignorant pile of hateful bile.”

It’s true, every word. But he could not have accomplished it alone. He had the help of Roger Ailes, who finally resigned from the Faux news channel in 2016 over allegations of sexual harassment that cost the company a fortune in settled lawsuits, all for undisclosed sums of course. He then unceremoniously died in 2017 of a subdural hematoma caused by a medical condition known as hemophilia, which impairs the ability of the body to produce blood clots. He was 77, and the world is a far better place without him in it, burning in hell, if there is such a place.

If you want to scan a boring, straight version of the Murdoch story, you can check out his Wikipedia page.

But just to summarize the key points, he was born on March 11, 1931 in Australia. After his dad died in 1952, Murdoch took over a small newspaper in Adelaide called The News. Apparently its was somewhat successful, because in the 1950s and ’60s Murdoch acquired a number of newspapers in Australia and New Zealand, then began expanding into the United Kingdom in 1969, taking over a couple of despicable tabloids, News of the World and The Sun.

He made the move to New York City in 1974, just in time for the Watergate Scandal and Richard Nixon’s resignation from the White House. In 1985, he became a naturalized U.S. citizen, giving up his Australian citizenship to satisfy the legal requirement for owning domestic television stations.

He had established a holding company called News Corporation, and in 1985, he acquired Twentieth Century Fox. He took over the book publishing house Harper Collins in 1989, and got a deal when he purchased the conservative Wall Street Journal in 2007 as the Bush Great Recession was causing a depression in the value of newspapers.

News Corporation would come to own more than 800 companies in more than 50 countries, and Murdoch’s net worth was valued at about $21.7 billion, at one time making the Forbes magazine Top 100 as the 71st richest person in the world.

Clearly it pays to lie, cheat and produce sensational, right-wing fake news. (I must be in the wrong business).

In July 2011, Murdoch faced allegations that his companies, including News of the World, had been regularly hacking the phones of celebrities, members of the royal family and other public figures. He faced police and government investigations into bribery and corruption by the British government, and FBI investigations in the U.S. He had already resigned as a director of News International by 2012, and News of the World went bankrupt and then folded.

Over the decades Murdoch’s papers and television channels have been accused of running biased, misleading coverage to support his business and political interests and allies, according to his profile, which strikes me as an understatement.

The New York Times critic James Poniewozik said the polite way to describe the legacy “of a man like Rupert Murdoch” is to leave aside whether his accomplishments were good or bad and “simply focus on how big they were.” It is to eulogize him like Kendall Roy memorializing his father, Logan, in “Succession,” the HBO corporate drama none too slightly based on the Murdochs… Maybe he had “a terrible force,” as Kendall put it, but “he built, and he acted. … He made life happen.”

“But the polite way is exactly the wrong way to assess Mr. Murdoch,” he writes, since he “achieved nothing the polite way. His style and his work were direct and blunt.”

“Rupert Murdoch’s empire used passion and grievance as fuel and turned it into money and power,” he writes. “His tabloids ran on the idea of publishing for readers as they were, not according to some platonic ideal of how one wished them to be. That meant pinups and prize giveaways and blaring scandal headlines.”

Another way to put it is that he gave people the glorified circus they seemed to want, not the news and information they needed. Need v. Want is an age old debate in American journalism. The big money has always been on the side of want. To their way of thinking, “need” is for “pussies” you should be able to “grab” anytime and anywhere you “want.”

In evolutionary terms, these are the “cheaters,” the ones for whom the selfish gene trumps and squeezes every ounce of altruism out of the human equation. It doesn’t matter to these selfish cheaters whether democracy or the rest of the human race survives or not. What matters is that they get to party on their lavish yachts and private, country club golf courses, while everybody else rides through life in a cheap, plastic canoe — if that.

Over years and decades, Poniewozik continues in his analysis on deadline, Murdoch’s properties shifted their definition of “elite” away from people with more money than you and toward people with more perceived cultural capital than you, “something that would be essential to nationalist politics in the 21st century and Fox’s dominance.” (He did all this while living the life of a jet-setting billionaire, fooling people much like Don the Con Trump, not to mention Democrat Joe Manchin of West Virginia.)

Rupert Murdoch with Donal Trump: NAJ screen shot

Where news programs once sought to project stability and gravitas, Fox “had flash and energy. It had the tone and political attitude of conservative talk radio and the rah-rah spirit of TV sports (as well as the blinding graphics).”

Which is one reason I tend to think that American football has an oversized negative impact on the culture. Give me the marching band any day, and why don’t they air the half time show like they used to, before everyone got addicted to “talk?” Does anyone really need the first half stats at half time? Couldn’t you wait until the next day to read them in the newspaper (online)?

Yes, Fox branded itself “Fair and Balanced,” implying that other outlets were unfair and unbalanced, Poniewozik says, but that was not really “it.” They stole that idea from Rush Limbaugh, who used it too, and claimed the press and media was all “liberal,” and would say authoritatively on the air, “I am the other side!”

“We Report, You Decide,” Fox blared at first, eventually abandoning the slogan after it became obvious even to its own audience it was a lie. It was a successful attempt to redefine “objective” journalism away from its roots in science and objectivity. It worked, driven by the capitalist machine behind it. In every sense, it was a stoned-cold bit of right-wing propaganda for uneducated viewers too confused by reading news or listening to educational public television (PBS) or public radio, NPR.

What they called “liberal” was actually based on the ideals of a “liberal democracy,” a half-way intelligent collection of content based on an accurate reporting of the facts, or at least accurate enough on deadline, “the first draft of history.” This record, of course, became critical for historians on which to base their own more in-depth analysis of the times. At the highest levels, this was designed for people with a college education, although mass circulation dailies operated on an eighth grade reading level to reach a mass audience.

A college education was something most Americans used to strive for.

Not anymore. Now the conventional wisdom is that college will turn you into a “liberal” (read socialist, communist, or “commie”). Real Christians must now abandon the merciful teachings of their savior Jesus, and adopt the warrior Jesus myth.

Warrior Jesus, no more mercy: NAJ screen shot

Back in the 1970s and ’80s, boring conservatives like George Will of the Washington Post and ABC News would tell his audience that he assumed they had read the New York Times before watching the Sunday morning talk shows like “Meet the Press” on NBC and “Face the Nation” on CBS.

Not anymore. Those shows are now doing their best to try to emulate Fox, trying to appeal to the lowest common denominator in the mass public. Let’s call that these days a fifth grade level of understanding. It’s not even eighth grade anymore.

But it would take a college education to read the Times and the Post. While the Associated Press wire service and many chain newspapers across the country were written on an eighth grade reading level, many people would not or could not even read that. Conservative talk radio became the primary news source for people who would not read newspapers or could not understand them.

I know Republicans, independents and Democrats who are members of unions who would listen to that in their cars on the way to and from work. I’ve seen them try to listen to NPR, and watched the confused look on their faces. I even tried to get my mother to listen to news on NPR a few years ago. She couldn’t handle it for more than a few seconds. It was just too confusing, causing the brain to contort. You have to pick up on this stuff when you are young, and keep up with it over time to acclimate to the narrative.

Armed with this knowledge, I interviewed an Auburn historian named Wayne Flynt a long time ago, and wrote this story to explain it.

Why Do Working Class People Vote Against Their Economic Interests?

Why do you think most rank and file union workers voted for Trump? Yes, the leadership, especially in Blue states, are Democrats. But not the rank and file workers. Why do you think the United Autoworkers union is on strike now, even as their companies were literally saved from bankruptcy by a Democratic president, Barack Obama, and this president, Joe Biden, has gone out of his way to help and appeal to union workers?

I would argue this is not the time. I used to have union sponsors. That all changed about the time Trump came along.

In the early days of Facebook, when I tried to point out that unions by their very nature are “socialist” organizations, there to fight for better wages and working conditions for workers against the corporate bosses, and that politically they should be on the side of Democrats and not voting against their own self interest, they replied that they put god first, the well being of their families second, and the good of the country third. Never mind voting for a woman, or an African American. Not gonna happen.

So being against abortion was more important than feeding their own children, or working to live in a democracy, not an authoritarian dictatorship. For many of them, who went along with Trump’s fake stolen election line after November, 2020, the election was stolen not in reality by the official vote count. Those Black women in Atlanta who played a major role in defeating Trump and electing Biden, in their view, were involved in “stealing the election” because to Trump and his MAGA ilk, they should not have been allowed the right to vote in the first place. According to the original Constitution, they were only three-fifths of a “person” with no right to vote.

That’s apparently what Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas means by “original intent” of the Constitution — even though it would mean he did not have the right to vote, and certainly not the right to sit on the highest court in the land. Some people seem more than willing to allow themselves to be fooled even by logic that would force them back into chains on a plantation.

Only today’s plantations are the tech companies in Silicon Valley, where armies of hacker-programmers type code to create Artificial Intelligence bots, to try to tell us all what we should “like” on social media platforms. Make no mistake about it. The research is not just based on what people actually “like.” They show you only the things they think you should like, and that does not include intelligent content for educated or educating viewers.

And it certainly does not include accurate, independent news from educated news reporters. We must be relegated to the scrap heap of history, so the new tech billionaires can get away with fooling people the same way Murdoch and Trump fooled them. What matters is clicking on the products they sell from those with the resources to buy all the ads.

Rupert and Roger Ailes learned from Rush about appealing to the uneducated masses. And big, corporate advertisers know that those people are easily manipulated, so they gravitated to advertising on the conservative channels.

To illustrate, one of my pot smoking hippie friends from the 1970s who played guitar in rock bands became not only a big fan of Rush in the late 1980s and later a loyal fan of Fox News, he literately cut his hair like Rush and started wearing cheap suits that looked like the expensive ones Rush wore.

The last time I saw him, he was working in a guitar store in Trussville, Alabama and selling insurance, and driving the exact same Crimson-colored Ford pickup truck advertised on TV by University of Alabama football coach Nick Saban. After trying to talk him into letting me use a picture of us together in the 1970s in my memoir, Jump On The Bus: Make Democracy Work Again, I noticed the truck in the parking lot.

So I popped my head back into the store, and asked: “Is that your truck?”

He said yes, of course. I knew it was his.

“Well,” I said, “that just goes to show you that advertising works.” I laughed as I walked back to the camper van. It’s not all that funny in retrospect. It’s sad that the world has come to this.

“But that’s the way it is,” to borrow a line from Walter Cronkite on CBS News back in the day.

My friend was obviously a humongous Alabama football fan, although the closest he ever got to a college classroom was Bryant-Denny Stadium.

When Trump came along and decided to run for president, talk radio and Fox News made the ideal platforms.

Trump famously once said: “The day I realized it can be smart to be shallow was, for me, a deep experience.” He learned it in dealing with professional wrestling, where nothing is at it seems. It’s all just “Show Business.”

How Wrestle­ Mania Trumped Intelligence in U.S. Politics

Murdoch learned the same lesson publishing sensational tabloids. In their view, there was no such thing as “truth.” It’s all an illusion.

“All the world’s a stage,” to borrow a line from Shakespeare and use it in a negative way.

While Murdoch went all in with Trump at first, riding the ratings gravy train, eventually even he came to hold Trump in contempt after the 2020 election and the events of Jan. 6, 2021. And after it cost him $787.5 million to settle a defamation lawsuit for the coverage of stolen-election lies. After the ratings dropped and advertisers fled for the exits, it was costing him way too much money to keep the faux news show going.

So he fired the last of his stars, Tucker Carlson. And now he’s retired.

As they always say in show business, “the show must go on.”

Rupert Murdoch after he announced his engagement to Ann Lesley Smith, less than a year after finalizing his divorce from model Jerry Hall: NAJ screen shot

But it will now have to go on with one of Murdoch’s sons in charge.

Lachlan Murdoch, 52, will take over as the chairman of News Corp and remain Fox’s executive chair and CEO, which oversees the Wall Street Journal as well as other print and digital media properties, including Wired magazine and now even National Geographic. Murdoch bought out the National Geographic Society, which used to operate as a non-profit. They just laid off the last of the staff writers, and most of the actual photographers are long gone. I guess they will use faked images and chatGPT copy from now on. No bothersome union writers to worry about.

It remains to be seen whether the Rush-Fox-Trump-MAGA phenomenon will continue indefinitely. It’s certainly not going to be stopped by Elon Musk at X (Twitter) or Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, Facebook, Instagram or Threads, or China’s TikTok.

As long as the masses are willing to go along with banning books, and buy into the line that an education is not needed, there will be a large and growing audience of dumbass Confederate rednecks willing to go along with the show put on by those who would be authoritarian, fascist dictators. And they will scream “freedom” like Mel Gibson as William Wallace in “Braveheart,” as their heads roll off the chopping block onto the ground.

What’s Coming

We will see in November, 2024, whether there are enough college educated people in America willing to go to war for the soul of the country and “fight like hell” to keep it a democracy. I do not believe the Limbaugh-Murdoch-Trump crowd makes up a majority of the electorate in the United States. They are a vocal minority. But they get way more than their fair share of media coverage, and seem willing to lie unmercifully on social media and in the faces of their own family members who disagree.

I believe we will know more by next summer, and I do not believe the picture will remain the same as the one depicted on cable TeeVee talk shows today. But you never know. This white nationalist rightward tilt is going on all over the world. And with most of the corporate money on their side, it will be a struggle to keep enough people fired up to continue beating them at the ballot box.

One can only hope, and continue to dream of a better world where we don’t have to deal on a daily basis with all the goddamned stupid lies.

Now, it’s Friday night as I write this, and clearly time for a strong drink. Cheers, and drinks for my friends. Maybe we will get through this together. Or apart, we will watch it all fall apart and crumble into a full blown hellscape of a world, where no problem can be solved. A world of chaos and anarchy. Vladimir Putin’s world. Steve Bannon’s world. Trump World.

Hellscape 2020: A New American Journal graphic by Walter Simon [Art Market Place]

As one of our readers on Facebook put it, it’s like the movie “Groundhog Day” every year.

If Trump were a character in Game of Thrones, and I were facing him across the table, I would sick the wolf dogs on him. Then send him to rot in the dungeon until his McDonalds and golf fat barely cover his bones. Then I would sick the rats on him, and run a live video on all channels of him being eaten alive by the most vile creature in the hearts of men.

So whatever you do, don’t put me in charge. I would throw Giuliani, Bannon and a few others in there with him, including Murdoch.

For the sake of all our futures, please work as hard as you can to keep electing reasonable Democrats. Maybe we can work our way past this thought plague we’re all living through. I honestly don’t know if there is a future for us or not in this country or on this planet.

But if you will keep reading and helping to fund it somehow, we will keep covering it honestly. If I had a prayer, this would be it. Because without you, I am surely fucking doomed. And the truth is, if I am fucked, chances are you are too — unless you have enough money to flee whatever hellscape comes. And you have a plan for escape. Why do you think I travel around in a media camper van ready to run on short notice?

More Food for Thought

Democracy Needs Moderated Forums, Not Hate-Filled Free-For-Alls

Revealed: The Republicans’ Three-Step Plan for Corporate Fascism

America Needs a Defense Bill That Puts Freedom Over Fascism

Big Problems Require Big Solutions: How to Save Democracy and the Planet

The Price of Liberty is Eternal Vigilance: How Authoritarian Leaders Mutilate Reality, History and Culture

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