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.
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