Despite all the outrage that preceded it, Rupert Murdoch's purchase of the Wall Street Journal was inevitable. After all, he's a "media czar" and czars don't take "no" for an answer. Indeed, if one studies the behavior of successful corporate czars from the old school of Michael Eisner, Jack Welch and Ken Lay to the new school of Murdoch, one sees the sort of sociopathic behavior often attributed to the date rapist.
They push and push until their victims, exhausted, give in to the inevitable. They are not in the business to be loved; they want power. Such behavior was cited as long ago as Machiavelli's 1513 classic The Prince, updated by Harold Lasswell in his 1930 treatise Psychopathology and Politics, and, more recently, in The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, a 2004 book that inspired the chilling documentary The Corporation, by Joel Bakan, Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott.
In other words, you didn't imagine it. Murdoch's power grab was inevitable, for he is the czar and we are the peasants. He began pushing in his native Australia in the 1960s, pushed into Great Britain in the 1970s and began his push for America in the 1980s (to facilitate his ambitions, he became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1985). And, now that his right wing date rape of the corporate media is complete, perhaps the most amazing thing is how the right wing is still not satisfied.
Fact: The right wing power brokers own the media; own the executive, legislative and judicial branches of the federal government; own most state houses, the banking, real estate, financial and defense industries, the satellite system, the airwaves. All we've got are a few blogs and many more feet on the ground—or, as Jim Morrison so succinctly put it back in the day: "They've got the guns, but we've got the numbers."
Still, Murdoch is an especially divisive figure, more so than some of the others cited above. This is because he is so upfront about his political agenda. The Fox News Channel is Rupert Murdoch. So is Fox News Radio. It is his world view, his voice, his anger and bitterness. Bill O'Reilly is Rupert Murdoch. So are Brit Hume, Sean Hannity, John Gibson and regular Fox "guest" Ann Coulter. Every time they say something that fuels the hate machine, Murdoch smiles. They are pleasing their master, the czar.
If you want to get a sense of how divisive Murdoch is, check out the Wikipedia entry for Fox News Channel. By the third sentence, I had a disquieting sense I was reading propaganda. Prior to this, I'd generally admired Wikipedia, the free, all-volunteer online encyclopedia, though entries vary greatly in quality. But the entry on Fox News Channel is garbage, start to finish. I suspected that the person who wrote the entry must be a Fox hireling masquerading as a well-meaning volunteer. I clicked the "Discussion" link at the top of the page. Sure enough, like turning over a rock in the woods, there was the raging voice of Murdoch's world. A heavyweight boxing match was going on behind the entry's placid façade, a fight to the death among a group of Wikipedians that, at last count, ran to 36 pages, 10 times the length of the entry itself.
The long and short of it is that the Wikipedia entry is worthless and damages whatever credibility the Internet encyclopedia may have accrued. It is symptomatic of the damage done to credible journalism by Fox News. While everyone knows Fox News is anything but what its motto proclaims—fair and balanced—other networks have felt duty-bound to emulate it. Turn on CNN and MSNBC some time. Turn on Katie Couric some time. Turn on any of the morning chat shows or the Sunday gasbag news programs.
America's corporate media now speaks with one voice: Rupert Murdoch's.
