All hail Rupert! Destroyer of the West

Yesterday Leith dismantled the Herald Sun’s negative gearing lies but the paper went much further, from The Guardian:

Newsagents should refuse to sell Wednesday’s Daily Telegraph – which has a fictional front page featuring a Bill Shorten-led government – because it is pure political propaganda, according to the Australian Newsagency Blog.

Victorian newsagent and software businessman Mark Fletcher, who runs the popular industry blog, condemned the unusual front page, saying it had nothing to do with the news and was not journalism. If his two newsagencies were in New South Wales, he would not sell it, he said.

“There are no facts in this piece,” Fletcher said. “This game by News Corp is considered more important than key stories of the day, news stories. It is typical for a selfish publisher that runs its agenda ahead of reporting the news, reporting the facts.”

The Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid dated Wednesday’s page one 5 July 2019 and showed the Labor leader celebrating his “first 100 days” in power, a terrible period with “workers laid off, record tax rates, rents hit new high”.

Written by the paper’s national political editor, Sharri Markson, the article attempts to portray a dystopia under Labor including a $17bn injection for the Gonski funding package and marriage equality law passed – policies many would see as positive.

“A chuffed Bill Shorten celebrated his first 100 days in power yesterday, marking the milestone with a rousing party at ACTU headquarters,” Markson wrote.

Such baldly partisan publishing has been a key theme for the Murdoch Press for 15 years now. Pretty much since the advent of the internet, Murdoch papers and TV globally have led the charge into media fragmentation, seeking to occupy and dominate conservative readerships across the Western world.

It has succeeded as a business strategy. But it has also done something else. It has turned a once proud conservative tradition – derived from the thinking of Adam Smith, John Locke and Edmund Burke – into unrecognisable apologists for oligarchy.

There is no way to record the impact of this devolution upon culture. But one can see it every time one reads the paper. Go read The Australian of the late eighties with its ideals for capitalism, creative destruction and markets versus today’s patina of rent seeking policy at every turn.

Rupert has been a great innovator. Inventor of fake news, purveyor of populist titillation, pumper of ideological fog and wrecker of civic values.

More to the point, the ceaseless themes of Islamophobia; hatred of liberals; a war on climate change mitigation and the conflation of private ownership with functional markets has set the scene for the degradation of the West and supported:

• the US withdrawal from trade and liberal hegemony in the Pacific while Communist China fills its boots;
• the UK withdrawal from an EU that is pushing towards an ex-British economic and political unity that despots of the past could only have dreamed of, and
• the disintegration of the Australian Liberal Party into an anti-science troglodyte and corporate lap dog.

The problem is not that Rupert has succeeded in dumbing down the wider public. It is that he has gutted conservatism itself, turning it from admirable Whiggish traditions towards a giant corporate vampire sucking rents from the public good wherever it presents itself.

All hail Rupert! Destroyer of the West.