AUSTRALIA IS THE WORLD’S FIRST ‘MURDOCHCRACY,’ ACCORDING TO JOHN PILGER
March 14th 2010 03:37
Advocacy journalist John Pilger claims in the New Statesman that Australia is the world’s first “murdochracy.”
He writes, “Rupert Murdoch's overweening power goes unchallenged in Australia, where all the main parties pay fealty to the media baron.”
Pilger begs the question, “What is a murdochracy? It is where the fealty and augmentation of Murdoch's editors and managers are undisguised, an inspiration to his choir on seven continents, where even his competitors sing along and wise politicians heed the Murdochism: ‘What'll it be? A headline a day or a bucket of shit a day?’"
Pilger then explains, “Dominant themes in the Australian murdochracy, sport and celebrity gossip aside, are the promotion of war and jingoism, US foreign policy, Israel and a paternalism towards Aborigines, the world's most impoverished indigenous group, according to the UN. This antiquated cold warring is not entirely due to the Murdoch press, but the agenda is. When the Indonesian tyrant General Suharto was about to be overthrown by his own people, the then editor-in-chief of the Australian, Paul Kelly, led a delegation of editors of most of Australia's principal newspapers to Jakarta. With Kelly at his side, this mass murderer, whom the Australian promoted as a ‘moderate’, accepted the tribute of each.
Murdoch's most unabashed, if entertaining retainer is Greg Sheridan, foreign editor of the Australian. On one his adoring trips to the US, Sheridan wrote: ‘The US is the greatest possible argument for media deregulation. Every morning, I flick between Fox, CNN and MSNBC as I eat my cereal . . . why did it take so long for pay TV to get to Australia?’
Pilger stretches things by claiming Sheridan “was referring, as if instinctively, to his master's company Foxtel. As for terrorism, Sheridan blames ‘Pilgerist Chomskyism’ for ‘ideologically fuelling the followers of Osama Bin Lenin, sorry Laden’.
One of the most effective campaigns in the Australian murdochracy has been the whitewashing of a bloody colonial past, including attacks on the distinguished chronicler of the Aboriginal genocide Henry Reynolds and the former director of the National Museum of Australia Dawn Casey, for having dared to present the truth about indigenous suffering. The late Manning Clark, Australia's great maverick historian, was smeared by Murdoch's Courier-Mail as a red agent, then as a fraud, in much the style that Murdoch's Sunday Times smeared Michael Foot as a Soviet agent.”
And on it goes, segueing into the claim that Murdoch is pursuing world domination.
He writes, “Rupert Murdoch's overweening power goes unchallenged in Australia, where all the main parties pay fealty to the media baron.”
Pilger begs the question, “What is a murdochracy? It is where the fealty and augmentation of Murdoch's editors and managers are undisguised, an inspiration to his choir on seven continents, where even his competitors sing along and wise politicians heed the Murdochism: ‘What'll it be? A headline a day or a bucket of shit a day?’"
Murdoch's most unabashed, if entertaining retainer is Greg Sheridan, foreign editor of the Australian. On one his adoring trips to the US, Sheridan wrote: ‘The US is the greatest possible argument for media deregulation. Every morning, I flick between Fox, CNN and MSNBC as I eat my cereal . . . why did it take so long for pay TV to get to Australia?’
Pilger stretches things by claiming Sheridan “was referring, as if instinctively, to his master's company Foxtel. As for terrorism, Sheridan blames ‘Pilgerist Chomskyism’ for ‘ideologically fuelling the followers of Osama Bin Lenin, sorry Laden’.
And on it goes, segueing into the claim that Murdoch is pursuing world domination.
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