Abbott must be having a horrible Christmas break. He can’t have missed
that his old buddy, his mentor Rupert has completely dropped him and in
doing so, has given permission for his newspapers to admit that PM
Abbott is a dud. They’re still not yet ready to admit he’s always been a
dud and that they were stupid to support him in the first place (as if
they’ll ever be ready for this sort of atonement), but they’re willing
to go as far as actually reporting his poll numbers, which speak for
themselves, and saying that if only he could get his ‘message’ right,
their neoliberal Tea-Party agenda would be gratefully accepted by the
electorate instead of wholeheartedly rejected. It’s fascinating to watch
an entire news organisation finally coming round to the fact that the
public knows better than they do whether someone is a good PM or not. I
thought the whole definition of ‘news’ was telling us all something we
didn’t know, and being first to the story? Abbott’s incompetence is old
news, and News Ltd coming to this realisation last is really the only
thing you need to know about the incompetence of News Ltd. ‘Oh Abbott’s
polls are bad!’ they all cry in unison! ‘We totally didn’t see that
coming!’.
So what are News Ltd going to do now that their favourite son has
spectacularly failed? If you’ve been paying attention to the number of
puff pieces being written at News Ltd about their chosen successor,
Julie Bishop, you will see that a Libspill is clearly being planned.
As soon as I realised that Julie Bishop was being put forward as the
most likely replacement for Abbott, I realised just how screwed the
Abbott government is. Because if Bishop is deemed as the ‘best
performer’, it shows just how badly the rest of them have performed.
Think about it for a second. What exactly has Bishop done which is so
high performing? Perhaps if the definition of high performing is ‘not
stuffing up as badly as the rest of the Abbott ministry and being
protected by News Ltd so even if you did stuff up the public never heard
about it’, then Bishop has been high performing. But all I’ve seen is
very basic
no-more-competent-than-you’d-expect-of-an-average-politician-statements
from her in response to international tragedies, such as disease,
terrorism and plane crashes, and of course I’ve seen her slashing the
Foreign Aid budget, making Australia the stingiest rich country in the
world, bar none. I can see that News Ltd are clearly happy about this,
but as I’ve said previously, News Ltd’s opinion and the general public’s
opinion do not match and are increasingly at complete odds so News Ltd
being happy about something more than likely works against Bishop in the
long term.
But even more interesting than the claim that Bishop is ‘high
performing’, is News Ltd’s strategy of backing a female Prime Minister,
after systematically mauling our first female Prime Minister, Julia
Gillard, with a sexist, low-life, scum-filled campaign of hateful lies
and misinformation. Just to remind you all, Julia Gillard was the most
successful Prime Minister this country has ever had. You won’t ever see
any such analysis done in News Ltd papers, but this Guardian article has run the figures showing Gillard as the winner.
So keeping this in mind, and keeping News Ltd’s vile anti-Gilllard
campaign in mind, how are News Ltd going to position Bishop, a female,
unmarried, childless ex-South Australian lawyer as PM material, when
they so blatantly positioned Gillard as unfit, whilst appealing to the
scum who read their newspapers, who were only too happy to agree? They
built the anti-female-leader narrative, so how are they going to tear it
down in support for Bishop?
So far, I have seen three strategies at work.
The first is to dress Julie Bishop up in her favourite ridiculously expensive clothes, to do a bit of airbrushing and to photograph her looking relaxed and feminine
as if she doesn’t have a care in the world (or an office, or a desk,
or, for that matter, a job. Notice how male politicians are never
photographed posing as if they’re in a fashion magazine?). It’s also
worth noting at this point that when Gillard posed for a Women’s Weekly
photo shoot in 2007, Bishop was reported as saying:
“I don’t think it’s necessary to get dressed up in
designer clothing and borrow clothing and make-up to grace the cover of
magazines… You’re not a celebrity, you’re an elected representative,
you’re a member of parliament. You’re not Hollywood and I think that
when people overstep that line they miss the whole point of that public
role.”
Clearly Bishop thinks she is Hollywood and is a celebrity and that’s the end of that.
The second strategy to ready Bishop for the position as Australia’s
second female Prime Minister is for her to paint herself as not a
feminist, and not as having benefited from feminism to get where she is.
It was all her, apparently. And women who think they need
feminism to get ahead need to stop complaining and get on with it,
apparently. I feel that Bishop claiming she’s got where she is without
the help of the feminist movement is akin to the captain of a football
team being presented with the Grand Final cup and saying ‘thanks so much
for all the applause. Clearly I played really well and that’s why the
team won. I don’t know what all those other guys on my team were doing,
but without my individual effort, the Grand Final cup would not be mine
today’. Feminists have every right to be offended by Bishop’s suggestion
that their hard fought battles are just a campaign of whinging. And of
course they have every reason to laugh at Bishop, who is one of two
women in Abbott’s cabinet, after being the only one for the first year,
presumably because all the other Liberal women of merit were too busy
complaining instead of being merit selected in a cabinet that is full of
un-merit-worthy men. You’ve got to laugh so you don’t cry!
Finally, the last strategy to prepare Bishop for a leadership
challenge is for News Ltd to claim that she is nothing like Gillard, and
so should never be compared. Please look away now if you don’t feel
like being angry for at least the next month over the following
statement that was made in this Courier Mail Julie Bishop-fan-mail-puff-piece. Or do what I do and try to turn your anger into productive rage:
‘Dignified yet determined, Ms Bishop has succeeded
where Julia Gillard failed, by showing that women can perform at the
highest levels of political office without either hiding behind their
gender or sacrificing their femininity. A passionate advocate of women,
Ms Bishop believes in merit-based promotion, and her own hard work is
now reaping rewards, both on the international stage and in domestic
polls. And the damage done by Ms Gillard to the public perception of
women in leadership roles is slowly being healed as voters regain
confidence that a female politician can deliver’.
So this is the campaign and it’s well underway. There’s no sign yet as to how News Ltd with deal with Bishop’s embarrassing past of plagiarism, or her seedy career as a lawyer fighting against asbestos victims, and apparently once asking
‘why workers should be entitled to jump court queues just because they
were dying’. But we will watch and see as News Ltd comes up with new
techniques of dishonesty to repel any criticism of their
new-found-favourite candidate. And of course, it will be fascinating to
see how such a leadership spill could possibly be orchestrated without
use of the words ‘blood’ and ‘stab’ littered throughout the reportage.
No doubt that’s the last piece of the puzzle that needs to be worked out
before we wake up to find Abbott gone, and PM
anti-feminist-pro-Armani-asbestos-Julie in his place.
A similar change in Australia in 2016 will surely follow now that our Labor Party has seen the result of giving Rupert the gift of an unprecedented monopoly that he has maintained for several years.
Nobody should ever have more than one vote in a genuine democracy,
less one as shifty as Murdoch, who can move his readers around like
pawns on a chessboard.
A British reporter, Nick Davies spent seven years investigating and writing about Rupert's activities in England from sources within News International (as it was called then) and from police and politicians and oither people who had been burned by the Murdoch newspapers.
His new book, Hack Attack, refers to the once noble and respectable British newspaper News of the World,
which once employed Winston Churchill as a correspondent during an
early period of his life when he was out of politics and seeking an
income as a writer.
It was the News of the World that brought an opportunistic
and ecstatic Rupert hurrying to England after borrowing half a million
Australian dollars from the Commonwealth Bank — and adding in the value
of companies he had already acquired in Australia, he was able to close
the deal.
I was still working for Rupert when he came back from his English
triumph, grumbling about some of the TV and radio interviewers who had
mocked him. Over lunch, he told me proudly what he had achieved, how he
had sealed the triumph and how he would soon exercise a strategem that
would give him full control.
It was the beginning of his worldwide expansion into a virtual international monopoly of news and entertainment.
The irony is that the News of the World – once Britain's
pride, but later just a Sunday muck-raiser with a fondness for
paedophile parsons and politicians who used prostitutes – was
the investment that brought Rupert down. Its misdeeds forced the closure
of an historic paper with a weekend circulation greater than all the
newspapers in Australia combined.
Nick Davies is a journalist of long experience and an example of the
highest professional standards. His record accords with the Washington Post's Bob Woodward, who has said that
“All good work is done in defiance of management.”
Davies is an example of a good reporter prepared to research his
story over a period of seven years before writing it. His account of
events in the editorial room at the News of the World reveals a house of horrors.
Each one of them is characterised in Davies' book. They were all
rivals, all devoted to their own methods of gathering sensational
invasions of personal privacy, whether royalty, politics or any form of
sexual deviation was exposed to get a byline and a nod from a superiors.
Occasionally, the stories were cleverly invented — subjects offered
huge amounts of money they never received. Rivalry was the name of the
game. Getting the story was the prize. How they got their stories was by
extraodinary, underhand and often illegal methods.
The papers engaged phone hacking experts at huge salaries. They
worked outside the newrooms, often in their own homes, collecting phone
conversations to pass on to the paper and then to the public. Phone
hacking was illegal, but that didn't stop them if they knew the tricks.
One team was handed money to buy drugs for celebrities so they could
gather material for the social pages, then edited by Coulson. One
reporter, Sean Hoare,
used his expenses to coax a story from a famous actress. Coulson took
over the story and instead of publishing it took the actress on a
European holiday and shared her bed.
Rupert Murdoch made Rebekah Brooks the editor of the News of the World. Coulson became her deputy and her temporary lover.
The News of the World was the biggest selling weekend newspaper in the world. It sold around three and a half million copies a week.
Murdoch switched Brooks to the Sun and Coulson became editor of the News of the World, driving a $70,000, 165 mph Porsche Boxter.
But dreadful things were going on in the backgound, at the same time
that the phone hacking was in operation. Huge cash bribes were being
used to dig up dirt on prominent people, not through hacking, but by
spying, stalking, and gathering and publishing gossip, whether true or
not.
Prostitutes were tricked with promises of huge cash sums for
revealing details of their client's sexual predilections. Often the
payment turned out to be less than they got from the client and, of
course, they had no recourse.
Sex orgies were happening inside the paper while the paper was
reporting scandalous wild parties elsewhere — exposing the behaviour of
prominent people while equally revolting events were occurring in their
own newsroom.
Davies broke the hacking story first in July 2009, after collecting
information from a multitude of sources, while Murdoch, with his forced
grin, was pretending it was one rogue reporter.
Lord Brian Leveson was appointed to investigate all British newspapers. He was not investigating Murdoch personally.
When the hacking cases were before the courts, the most prominent
defendent was the charming Rebekah Brooks, the newspaper's editor. The court found that she knew nothing about anything.
With his eighty-fifth birthday coming in March, Rupert Murdoch is
thrashing around in the United States trying to find other ways to
retain his empire, acquiring investments from real estate advertising,
internet startups, television entertainment and news, movies,
well-established book publishing companies, as well as his New York Post, a useful source of influence in New York politics.
In America, he has had far more failures than successes over the years and is heading in the same way in Britain and Australia.
News Corp’s siege coverage built on a ‘take-no-prisoners’ culture
AUST gets wake-call with Sydney terror. Only Daily Telegraph
caught the bloody outcome at 2.00 am. Congrats.— Rupert Murdoch
(@rupertmurdoch) December 15, 2014 In one brutally insensitive tweet,
Rupert…
There are ways for the media to cover stories such as the Sydney siege without committing gross ethical violations. AAP/Joel Carrett
AUST gets wake-call with Sydney terror. Only Daily Telegraph caught the bloody outcome at 2.00 am. Congrats.
In one brutally insensitive tweet, Rupert Murdoch told the world
everything it ever needed to know about the central tenet of the News
Corp culture: nothing matters except the story.
It is a culture in which the ends justify the means.
It is a culture that celebrates cruel vulgarity, infamously exemplified by the headline “Gotcha”
in the London Sun when, during the Falklands War, the British forces
sank the Argentine warship the General Belgrano, with the loss of 368
lives. In Stick It Up Your Punter!,
their account of life on The Sun, Peter Chippindale and Chris Horrie
wrote that although even the editor, the egregious Kelvin MacKenzie, had
second thoughts about the heading, Murdoch said:
I rather like it.
This is a culture that ultimately leads to the kind of criminality exposed in the phone-hacking scandal that engulfed
the British branch of Murdoch’s empire in 2011. It is a culture that
says if that’s what it takes to get the story or sell a newspaper, let’s
do it.
In the case of the Lindt Café siege, it is a culture that permitted
the publishing of the faces of hostages as they were forced at gunpoint
to hold up the gunman’s black flag in the café window. There was a
strong news case for showing them holding up the flag but no case for
showing their faces.
These are images that are likely to haunt those hostages all their
lives. The risk of doing harm should have been obvious. The disregarding
of that risk is unjustifiable and unforgivable.
It is a culture that permits the publication of a door-stop photo of
the father and husband of Katrina Dawson, who died at the gunman’s
hands. They are leaving the hospital where Dawson died. The photo is
clearly taken against the husband’s wishes: he is covering his face with
his hand. The father’s face is a mask of shock. The intrusion on their
grief is another unforgivable act.
There are ways to cover these stories without committing these gross
ethical violations, and much of the other media showed how to do it.
Channel Nine’s graphic live footage of the final police assault, and
other television footage of hostages dashing from the scene, were vivid
and immensely strong pieces of news reporting. ABC TV’s careful
pixelating of faces of hostages in footage taken during the siege was
another example of good ethical decision-making.
However, the newspapers – and not just News Corp’s but Fairfax’s too
– seemed to think that material posted by the hostages on Facebook was
simply public property to be exploited for media purposes.
This is a clear violation of a foundational privacy principle that
says material supplied for one purpose shall not be used for another
purpose without the provider’s consent. Many people – young people in
particular – post material on Facebook for the purpose of sharing it
with their friends. They do not anticipate that it will be used by the
media in whatever context or for whatever purpose the media thinks fit.
The focus of this article has been on News Corp because the
connection between its performance and Murdoch’s tweet is the principal
point of argument. However, that is not to say News Corp coverage was
all bad, nor that others were blameless.
The coverage of the Lindt Café siege is as a strong a candidate as we
have seen in recent years for the Australian Press Council to conduct
an investigation into the performance of the newspapers generally, and
for the Australian Communications and Media Authority to use its own-motion powers to do the same in respect of radio and television.
The mixed quality of the media performance was illustrated by the responses to it
by the NSW Police Commissioner, Andrew Scipione, and the chair of the
Australian Press Council, Professor Julian Disney. Scipione publicly
thanked the media for acting responsibly in the way they covered the
siege:
For you to act the way you did, to be responsible, all I can say is “thank you”.
Much of the coverage has been excellent and has not
hesitated to tell painful truths when necessary. But there have been
some deeply regrettable errors and exaggerations, spreading dangerous
misinformation without any reasonable basis. This type of material can
be a serious risk to public safety, as well as causing an unjustified
level of fear and distrust across the community.
It was a general statement of assessment, and did not make specific allegations against any particular media outlet.
However, it provoked a response from News Corp broadsheet The Australian, which has been running a campaign to undermine Disney in his last year as chair of the Press Council.
In a front-page story, it accused Disney of “triggering concerns” –
by whom, one wonders – about “whether his organisation has abandoned the
rules of procedural fairness”.
The basis for this accusation was that Disney had spoken without
hearing the media’s side of the story. The weakness in this argument is
that Disney was not making a finding against a specific newspaper, but
making a general statement about the performance of the newspapers as a
whole.
However, the motive for the story became clear in its last paragraph.
There, The Australian quoted its own editor-in-chief, Chris Mitchell,
as saying Disney:
… has just dealt the Press Council out of any future complaints about the role of the media during this week’s events.
This was clearly meant as a shot across the bow of the Press Council.
In the event that the Press Council does decide to hear complaints
about the coverage of the siege, it is reasonable to suppose that News
Corp will challenge its fitness to do so. This may not thwart any such
inquiry, but it might make it more difficult to accomplish, especially
if News Corp decided not to co-operate on the grounds of apprehended
bias.
This brings us finally to another aspect of the News Corp culture: every critic is an enemy, and we take no prisoners
Rupert Murdoch has ruthlessly bulldozed Tony Abbott into
slashing government funding for the ABC, Australia's most abundant
source of generally accurate and fair news reporting, entertainment and
general interest for nearly a hundred years.
Murdoch was following in the footsteps of his father, Sir Keith Murdoch,
who tried for many years to bully former Prime Minister Robert Menzies
into doing the same thing — selling and commercialising the ABC. But
Menzies knew how important the ABC was to Australians, particularly in
the years of the wars with Germany and Japan. He knew its importance and
popularity in Australia and any attempt to commercialise it would be
fatal to his or any other government.
No other source in Australia could possibly provide the level of
services of the ABC offered both in wartime and peacetime. Links with
the BBC in London produced such events as the Normandy invasion in real
time broadcasting. In peacetime, the ABC was the first choice for
international cricket and the Olympic Games.
Keith Murdoch had to be satisfied with one licence to operate a
commercial radio station in Melbourne and, later, two television station
licences — one in Melbourne and another in Brisbane.
But the Murdochs, father and son, were greedy as always. For two
generations they have wanted everything: to control all the news as they
chose in their own way and to publish it and gain the political power
that came with it, and to make vast sums of money through advertising.
Rupert Murdoch's Foxtel in Australia and Fox News in the U.S. are carrying on the family tradition, with Rupert's two sons hanging on to take over at the appropriate time.
Foxtel uses our taxes – yours and mine – to provide services snitched
from the ABC free of charge to present it on the Foxtel service. It has
been revealed that it costs the ABC – and therefore taxpayers – $6 million a year for the privilege of broadcasting its content on Foxtel.
For Rupert, the news and information and entertainment services come
from his 21st Century Fox, not only to fund American TV, but to also
support the money-losing side of his publishing empire in Australia and
the United States.
In England, his papers still make a profit, but their future
operations may lie in the hands of an incoming Labor government when the continuing police investigations are concluded. Also at risk are his huge TV investments in the UK and Europe.
In the U.S. his future is governed by the continuing investigations
being carried out by Scotland Yard and the FBI as they continue
collecting evidence into who paid the bribes to secure favors from
government officials.
In the meantime and for a foreseeable future, Rupert's U.S. Fox TV operates mainly by a cable network spanning most of the American states.
As long as Murdoch is allowed to use the U.S. cable system he will be
able to continue and expand. Cable operators pay fees to Murdoch's Fox
for the services provided while the cable system itself is in the final
control of the U.S. government through the Federal Communications Commission.
The worst result would be a conviction that would have enormous consequences for his companies and his shareholders.
