The Chris Moeller Archives

The Dirty Digger

The most interesting take on Rupert Murdoch and his damaged empire of sleaze comes from his former employee Roger Ebert. The critic's blog post from Tuesday begins with this paragraph: "Mike Royko called Rupert Murdoch The Alien. He landed on the Chicago Sun-Times like a bug-eyed monster from outer space and extruded poisonous slime. I was an eyewitness." It takes off from there.

I think Murdoch's legacy in the United States is a little different than many people say it is. FOX News is blatantly biased, and frankly abhorrent to me, but he didn't invent what he does. FOX's politically-conservative defenders are correct that the television and print news organizations that came before it in the U.S. have not been objective either. Of course, the major players have rarely been liberal either, as much as they have been "Corporatist Democrat" in many cases. That would be strange if we had a liberal media in this country when we don't even have a major liberal political party for a theoretical liberal media to influence and from which to curry favor.

It's impossible for a news organization to be "objective." The job of its journalists, instead, is to be fair. You can't deliver a story from "both sides" when there are, in actually, multiple sides to every story, and when the selection of every story is, itself, an editorial decision about what's important and deserves attention. The success of Murdoch's business model owes to the fact that he has successfully exploited that misunderstanding. Of course CNN is not objective. They just claim to be. Their goal is to be perceived as politically "moderate," and in terms of what they consider a "moderate" to be. In fact, they're terminally "moderate." That's their point of view. If Eliot Spitzer's conservative co-host resigns, as she did earlier this year, Spitzer's gotta go too, because CNN can't have a show on the air hosted by a self-proclaimed liberal. They would be intruding on MSNBC's niche approach at taking on Murdoch's ratings leader.

The main difference between CNN and FOX News, aside from the decibel level, is that FOX News has a larger and more specified segment of the political population that it panders to. They're neither objective nor fair in their presentation of the news, but the utter boldness and audacity of their unfairness, from the beginning, forced the traditional CNN into a defensive posture of doubling-down on their claims of objectivity. Because they don't cop to a point of view, or possess a FOX-like slate of angry on-air personalities, they look toothless in terms of challenging any perceived political authorities, and because their news product actually doesn't challenge political and corporate authority, and therefore isn't very good, they become the "inoffensive" news alternative popular mostly just with airports and hotel bars.

The minute that FOX News confessed to being the tool of a right-wing agenda, the house of cards would start to collapse. The Air America Radio Network made that mistake. The venture failed because it admitted it had a left-wing agenda, and so the establishment political structure and its media competitors didn't have to take it seriously. It could be dismissed as political propaganda. (MSNBC learned from this and that's why it's evening lineup of news opinion programs doesn't promote itself as "liberal" or "progressive," but instead "lean(ing) forward.")

If you listen close, though, Murdoch's operation gives itself away. They advertise themselves famously as "fair and balanced" but they're also there, they say, to be an alternative to a "left-wing" agenda in other media. Well, which is it? Right-wing viewers recognize the proverbial wink and play along with the charade because they like to feel like they're in on a sophisticated plot, and a lot of poor white people, who feel crapped on by life, and who legitimately have no political power, are delusional in believing that if they support the goals of, and become pals with, rich people, those rich people will someday share some of their money with them. It's a method of political exploitation designed to keep rich men rich, and it's been Rupert Murdoch's only professional agenda for almost six decades.

posted by CM @ 12:17 PM