By Greg Girkin
This week, to the surprise and (I’m certain) horror of his Fox New employees, Rupert Murdoch came out in support of the fight against global warming. He even called it global warming, and not the right-wing crowds’ neutered term, “climate change.” As an Australian, you’d think the changes that have already taken place in
From the Salon article about his change of heart:
Last week, the media mogul pledged not only to make his News Corp. empire carbon neutral, but to persuade the hundreds of millions of people who watch his TV channels and read his newspapers to join the cause. Messages about climate change will be woven throughout News Corp.'s entertainment content, he said, from movies to books to TV sitcoms, and the issue will have an increasing presence in the company's news coverage, be it in the New York Post or on "Hannity & Colmes." Yes, as Murdoch said in an exclusive interview on his climate plan, even Fox News' right-wing firebrand Sean Hannity can be expected to come around on the issue.
Does this astonish no one but me?
Oh, sure, I’d love to be in the room when those idiots O’Reilly, Hannity, Cavuto, and Gibson are told that they will eat their words in public and support climate change, even if it makes them look like bigger jackasses than they already are (I mean, that’s good comedy). But the astonishing part isn’t that Bill O’Reilly is going to have to take a stance that he’s ridiculed people for having, it’s what this says about the cynical way they manipulate their audience.
Since its inception, Murdoch’s Fox News has howled that the “liberal elite” were slipping liberal messages into everything from music to television commercials. They’ve howled at the indignity of these elites secretly manipulating the public. Unlike the left, Fox is “fair and balanced.” Yet here he is, from that same Salon article:
The more I've looked into it, the more I've been able to see what we can do, not just from an operations standpoint but by subtly introducing [the climate issue] into our content.
Once again, the right proves that when they accuse “lefties” of doing something, it’s because that’s what they’d be doing if they were in charge.
If you’ve ever watched an episode of 24, which features weak liberals opening the country up to attack and strong-man Jack torturing his way to a better tomorrow, you should already have realized he was manipulating his audience for his own political ends. But it takes some real balls to admit it publicly, especially when you run a network that has spent its entire history pointing fingers at everyone else.
Just think what would happen if the head of CBS had said this same thing 6 months ago. Fox News would have gone on a campaign to have him stripped of his citizenship (but only because public execution is impractical). And yet here he is, admitting he uses all his network programming to advance his personal political agenda. Do we hear howls from the left? Do we hear anyone even commenting on it? No, of course not. We hear crickets.
I love the sweet smell of hypocrisy cooling on the kitchen window sill as much as the next guy, but come on!
This is exactly the reason why we used to have limits on media ownership in this country: so that a single person couldn’t use his web of media companies to manipulate the public, stifling dissenting opinions. These days, the laws are hamstrung to the point that this guy can actually brag about using his media holdings to sway public opinion.
Before it’s too late, we’ve got to break up these giant media conglomerates. The experiment has failed. Allowing corporations to absorb networks, TV stations, and newspapers has done exactly what we feared: stifled opinion, misled viewers and readers, and eviscerated the news divisions of every media outlet they absorbed. But do we have the political will in this country to take this step?
Of course we do. As long as Murdoch and others of his ilk decide to get behind it.
I’m not holding my breath.
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