[THS] John Pilger: Welcome To The World`s First Murdochracy

[Peter Webster]

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24955.htm

Welcome To The World’s First Murdochracy

By John Pilger

March 10, 2010 "Information Clearing House" -- -- Adelaide is Australia’s festival city.
Its arts festival is currently in swing. Polite debate, aesthetics and high-octane wine
are putting the world to rights. With one exception. Adelaide is where Rupert
Murdoch began his empire. The voracious trail starts here. No statue stands; his is a
spectral presence, controlling the only daily newspaper, even the printing presses.
Across Australia, he owns almost 70 per cent of the capital city press and the only
national newspaper, and Sky Television, and much else. Welcome to the world’s first
murdochracy.

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?”

While the veracity of this celebrated remark is sometimes disputed, its spirit is not.
Stricken with pneumonia, the former prime minister John Howard dragged himself
out of bed to pay obeisance to the man to whom he owed many empty buckets. His
successor, Kevin Rudd, scurried to an obligatory audience with Murdoch in New York
prior to his election. This is standard across the planet. Before he took power, Tony
Blair was flown to an island off Queensland to stand at the blue Newscorp lectern
and pledge Thatcherism and media de-regulation to the jowled figure nodding in the
front row. The next day, the Sun lauded Blair as one who “has vision [and] speaks
our language on morality and family life”.

Murdoch knows that little separates the main political parties in Australia, Britain and
America. He plays the man. In 1972, he backed Australia’s Gough Whitlam who
revealed a radical reformer, even threatening to expose America’s spy bases. A
furious Murdoch swung his newspapers against Whitlam with stories so outrageously
skewed that rebellious journalists on The Australian burned their newspaper in the
street. That has never been repeated.

Dominant themes in the Australian murdochracy, sport and celebrity gossip aside, are
the promotion of war and jingoism, American foreign policy, Israel and a paternalism
toward Aborigines, the world’s most impoverished indigenous people, according to
the UN. This antiquated cold warring is not due entirely to the Murdoch press, of
course, but the agenda is. When the Indonesian tyrant General Suharto was about to
be overthrown by his own people, the editor-in-chief of The Australian Paul Kelly led
a delegation to of editors of most of Australia’s principal newspapers to Jakarta. With
Kelly at his side, the mass murderer, whom the Murdoch papers 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 United States, home of Murdoch
HQ, 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? 
” He was referring, as if
instinctively, to his master’s pay TV 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 a series of attacks on the
distinguished chronicler of the Aboriginal genocide, Professor Henry Reynolds, and
the director of the National Museum of Australia, Dawn Casey, for having dared to
present the truth about indigenous suffering. Australia’s great maverick historian, the
late Manning Clark, was smeared by Murdoch’s Courier-Mail as a Red agent, then as
a fraud, in much the style that Murdoch’s London Sunday Times smeared the Labour
MP Michael Foot as a Soviet agent.

Something similar awaits those who question the manipulation of the remembrance
of Australia’s blood sacrifice for imperialism, old and new. Aimed at the young, a
maudlin “new patriotism” reaches an annual climax on April 25, the anniversary of
the first world war disaster at Gallipoli known as Anzac Day. The message is
undisguised militarism promoting the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Thus, Prime
Minister Rudd says, absurdly, that the military is Australia’s highest calling.

Such false flags are flown constantly for Israel, which sees a stream of Australian
journalists sponsored and paid for by Zionist groups. The result is apologetic
reporting of murderous actions that evokes the great appeasers like Geoffrey
Dawson, editor of The Times in the 1930s. The debate about state war crimes has all
but bypassed Australia. That a former and current British prime minister have been
summoned before the Chilcot enquiry in London is viewed with bemusement as
nothing like it would happen here. Yet John Howard, who also invaded Iraq, holds
something of a record for having claimed 30 times in one speech that he knew
Saddam Hussein had a “massive programme” of weapons of mass destruction.

The national broadcaster, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, has long been
intimidated by the Murdoch press in the obsessive manner of the campaign waged
against the BBC. Funded directly by governments, the ABC has none of the nominal
independence and protection of Britain’s system of a TV licence fee as the resource
for public broadcasting. Last year, HarperCollins, owned by Murdoch, was awarded a
lucrative “partnership” with the ABC’s publishing arm, ABC Books.

In 1983, there were 50 major corporations dominating the world’s media. By 2002,
this had been reduced to nine. Rupert Murdoch says that eventually there will be
three, including his own. If we accept this, media and information control will be the
same, and we shall all be citizens of a murdochracy.

www.johnpilger.com