Filibuster Cartoons
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I’ll admit I initially had little interest in the trials and tribulations of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. The swirls of controversy surrounding the hacking of a dead girl’s cell phone that somehow led to the closure of one of Britain’s oldest newspapers, seemed tragic, admittedly, but also somewhat insular in relevance. I was reminded of a fake newspaper headline from an old editorial cartoon I saw years ago, mocking a similarly high-profile journalism outrage: “Media scandal shocks media! ‘Is this the end of media?’ say media.”
But the more I actually bother to read about Murdoch and company, the more interested I become. The man, Murdoch, is very clearly one of the great figures in the grand history of English communication, and to a considerable extent, the more we learn about him, the more we learn about ourselves.
Though the evil spectre of “media bias” is one of the favorite topics of conversation on both the right and left alike, the concept is rarely explored in anything but the most lazily ideological way. Everything that’s wrong with the news, in short, is usually held to be the fault of a press that’s too deep in the tank for one party over another. Certainly this is how most on the left have come to understand the sins of the Murdoch press, or at least its primary American holdings: FOX, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Post. All are bad because they carry too much water for the Republicans, liberals say. All push an aggressive right-wing message with maddening single-mindedness, gleefully chopping out whatever inconvenient facts and figures are necessary en route.
And perhaps it’s all true, but that sort of bias only gets you so far in today’s world. National Review is vastly more conservatively biased than FOX, for instance, yet it’s not exactly flying off the shelves. Why? Well, ideology unto itself is not terribly interesting. Precious few of us actually vote or watch or buy anything for strictly ideological reasons. When political content is consumed, it’s more often for far less intellectual reasons; the ideology in question is simply seen to address some pressing concern of the now, some nervous anxiety in our guts, not a high-minded principle in our brain. In political parlance, this is what we call “populism” — the philosophy that there is no higher good than the reactionary public’s immediate impulse — and it’s populism far more than conservatism that has served as the rock upon which the Murdoch empire has been built.
A fine editorial in today’s National Post defines the basic agenda of a Murdoch-owned outlet as”defending putatively ‘normal’ tax-payers against various supposed parasites and weirdos, an eclectic and elastic category that includes union members, gays, almost all foreigners, uppity women, and racial minorities.” To this I’d add an equally voracious distrust of most anyone in a position of authority or fame: politicians, judges, academics, movie stars, royals, athletes, and occasionally even suburban lessers such as teachers, principals, and parents as well. The perennial journalistic narrative in either case is always, always an “us versus them” dichotomy, with us always in the right, always outraged, and always the victim. Any traditionally conservative notions of respectful deference to authority or admiration for the material successes of others have no place amongst the Post‘s crude nicknames for leading Congressmen and FOX’s endless Hollywood-bashing.
Any coherently conservative message is further muddled by that other staple of the Murdoch press: titillation. From O’Reilly’s overly dolled-up pundit brigade to his implausibly “reluctant” airing of TV’s most envelope-pushing ads to the Post‘s endless chasing of celebrity cheaters and double entendre-filled headlines, the boundaries of taste always take a backseat to pushing the ribald. (Things are taken even further in England, of course, where the British Sun openly runs pornographic pictures alongside its London-is-going-to-hell editorials.) This is the sort of stuff the salacious public wants to see, after all, and what good capitalist media baron would possibly deny them that privilege?
As I touched on in my recent review of David Courtwright’s No Right Turn, contemporary social conservatism is considerably threatened by a market-driven culture that celebrates individual gratification above practically everything else. This force likewise represents the strongest media bias of all, since media will never be profitable without being broadly in tune with public tastes. So-called “conservative media” is thus forever doomed to its current trashy form for reasons that really have little to do with the supposedly lewd personality of Murdoch himself, or the wickedness of his various underlings.
In a free market society, we’re very much given the sort of junk we ask for, and the reactionary, bawdy populism of the Murdoch estate is apparently the sort of “conservatism” that Americans and Brits feel most comfortable with. Conservatives in either country who have served as stalwart apologists of the FOX/Sun/Post “alternative” model of journalism have some dirty ink on their hands in the wake of the present scandal, having done so little in the past to demand higher standards of output for that which was done in the name of their philosophy — to say nothing of the standards of the supposedly like-minded public who so eagerly consumed it.
July 21st, 2011 at 1:44 am
News Corporation doesn't have anything to do with the Washington Post (or the Washington Times, which is often described as a right-wing mouthpiece). Do you mean the Wall Street Journal?
July 21st, 2011 at 2:06 am
When I was watching one of bloomberg tv's things on Murdoch, Fox News was described as "90% opinion talk shows and 10% news", but people frequently confuse the opinionists for news. Sadly that's what CNN turned into to. They aren't 24 hour news channels anymore they're part-time news. (Remember when MTV stood for Music TV, and hasn't shown music since the 80's?)
I believe the line was "Fair and balanced. Yes the news pieces were fair and balanced. But most of the airtime is opinion pieces." The BBTV segment can be found at http://www.bloomberg.com/video/71807016/ if you're in a country that can see it. Otherwise just watch the Live channel on the weekend, they tend to air all the game changers stuff when the markets are closed. The piece is actually rather insightful to how little Murdoch cares for the workers at the bottom of his media empire.
Fox news is available on Shaw cable, I don't subscribe to it. The business analysists I've been watching have pretty much said that News corp should be broken up since the papers lose money.
July 21st, 2011 at 3:42 am
Though the sleaziness of Hooters waitresses on Fox and Friends does not directly aid values that can be described as conservative, it does sell to many who self-identify as conservative. I also want to stress the point that the left has no real interest in the sleaze either, that because the sleaze limits conservative ideological bias (though may aid strategically), it's not automatically liberal bias. I'm not implying you, JJ, view it that way, your thought seems clear and sensible to me, but I've seen accusations like this before, and it seems unfair.
The Murdochtopus is one of my favorite things you'e drawn, it's really beautiful in how terrifying it is. Is there some video game influence in this? I see him having high HP, not so strong direct attack but slowly poisons. Fox and "Everything Else" can be targeted too, and at least one has the ability to heal, or revive a dead tentacle.
July 21st, 2011 at 4:18 am
List of News Corp publishing properties: http://www.newscorp.com/operations/publishing.htm...
I was especially interested to discover that he owns the Dow Jones information service.
July 21st, 2011 at 4:42 am
A more complete list: http://www.cjr.org/resources/index.php?c=newscorp
July 21st, 2011 at 10:28 am
I never thought about giving it a name, but Murdochtopus is brilliant! I was actually thinking a bit about Octomann and King Kalamari whilst drawing it.
July 21st, 2011 at 1:56 pm
Final Fantasy VI (III for SNES) had a monster with four Tentacles that performed similarly to how you describe.
I second your love of the Murdochtopus, though. I never quite understood how FOX News and the programming on FOX could be run by the same company when they are so opposite in their morals. (I seemed to get the impression from J.J.'s commentary that the average social conservative is a fan of both FOX News and the trashy programming of FOX… as a social conservative myself, I find it more frequent that they would like neither.)
July 21st, 2011 at 1:58 pm
I never realized how Fox was Murdoch's outlier. Strange to say the least…that said, the WSJ and the Times are still really highbrow papers, unlike the Sun, and are much less populist than them and Fox. You may want to alter the octopus a bit.
July 21st, 2011 at 2:40 pm
"because the sleaze limits conservative ideological bias"
It might be inconsistent with a conservative in the sense of the word many conservatives use it, but what an effective way to foment political judgmentalism than to dig up nasty stories about people's private lives and then act horrified about the (now) public behaviour of these celebrities, how better to create an atmosphere of fear than to keep victims of crime in the news by manipulating them by accessing and deleting voicemail messages.
And how many politicians have been swayed by the thought that Murdoch has something on them?
The arrogant "I should be able to do what I like" attitude Murdoch's empire has promoted is a nasty patriarchal conservatism found amongst many (supposed) progressives as well as the hard-right. It isn't the only flavour of conservatism by any means, but Murdoch is by no means the only media mogul who works that way.
July 21st, 2011 at 3:13 pm
It's not like this is anything new. Newscorp might of hacked but they didn't outright lie like some people did about Bush's service record and the sort. The hacking is wrong but it is being completely blow out of size. Whoever did it, put them on trial. The rest of the company has nothing to do with it.
Actually this is the board of Newscorp using this to shove Murdoch aside because they want to close down the newspaper which are making little money and some are actually losing money. So they want to spinoff all the newspapers to another sector of the company and keep them independent of the TV and internet media. This is typical corporate politics. As Rahm Emmanuel said "never let a good crises go to waste". I wouldn't be surprised if Newscorp comes out stronger from this.
July 22nd, 2011 at 5:53 am
I thought about this a little more today, and if Murdochtopus is a boss in a journalism RPG, that RPG's Bustersword would have to be called the "Hearst's Donut." Or the "Edward Arm Arrow." Maybe "Pulitzverizer" if we're not feeling silly enough already.
July 22nd, 2011 at 4:38 pm
Well, it's a repetitive statistic that more "socially conservative" areas is also where you find the more frequent purchases of pornography and such.
Not to say that all social conservatives are hypocrites, but it does seem to be a bit of a trend. Delight in sleaze and sex is kind of a human nature thing, and it stands out when someone yells about wanting to see it banned, then indulges.
July 26th, 2011 at 3:01 pm
Personally, I just like that the Fox puppet is holding an American *and* a Texas flag.
Nice touch :)