The real scandal behind the Murdoch empire
By
Deirdre Griswold
Published Jul 30, 2011 7:04 AM
The scandal at Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World won’t make the
giant media monopolies any less mouthpieces for the billionaire ruling
class.
Heads will roll — they already have. That’s why executives get paid
so well. They do the dirty work for the real owners of capital and sometimes
get caught. Then it’s off with their heads and another high-paid flunky
gets the job.
For example, Les Hinton, publisher of the Wall Street Journal, and Rebekah
Brooks, head of Murdoch’s British papers, have been forced to resign, and
Brooks has been arrested, but the global Murdoch media empire goes on.
Murdoch’s News Corp. owns not only tabloids like London’s News of
the World (which just closed down), the Sun (London) and the New York Post, but
also the staid Times of London, the Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, Dow
Jones & Co., Far Eastern Economic Review, Fox television channels all over
the world, the National Geographic channel, 20th Century Fox, HarperCollins
publishers, plus literally hundreds of other newspapers and news, entertainment
and business outlets.
Murdoch’s right-wing politics reek in all of them — in some more
openly and crudely, in others more subdued. The question is, why were his lying
flunkies outed this time? How come Murdoch didn’t have enough influence
to cover it all up, as he undoubtedly has done before?
Is this huge scandal really over the greedy and crass behavior of his employees
who, looking for juicy news copy, hacked the cellphone of an abducted teenager
and then deleted messages from her voicemail, thus giving her parents false
hope that the girl was still alive? This seemed to be the issue when the
scandal first broke, but many other revelations followed that compromised
British politicians and police officials.
There are probably several answers to the question of why the scandal has
escalated. They can be boiled down to this: Murdoch has lots of money but he
also has made lots of enemies in his own class of arrogant capitalists. One who
tries to corner the world market, whether it’s in news or in oil, has to
sink a lot of competitors. Murdoch was trying to take over Britain’s most
lucrative satellite television company when the scandal broke.
Bow down to royalty
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, in the Communist Manifesto, described the
executive branch of a capitalist government as “a committee for managing
the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” When the consensus among
the bourgeoisie is that one of their own has overreached himself and wants to
take the whole pie, they expect the state to step in.
What made Murdoch vulnerable? For one thing, his minions had bribed security
guards for Britain’s royal family to sell them the royals’ private
phone numbers so their conversations could be hacked to produce titillating
stories for his tabloids.
The bourgeoisie in Britain like having a monarchy that is considered
sacrosanct. Hundreds of years ago, when they were struggling for political
power, the burghers may have wanted a republic without all the expensive
trappings of majesty, but those days are long gone. The royal family became a
symbol of the British Empire and an untouchable buffer between the masses and
the real ruling class — the capitalist oligarchs.
Thus, they consider the Murdoch machine’s trifling with royalty a danger
to the supposed dignity of the entire ruling establishment. Disrespect and
outright disdain for royalty is rife among the masses, especially the youth.
But the bourgeoisie see Murdoch as a traitor for capitalizing on this.
The resignation of the two highest-ranking officials of Scotland Yard was
another sign that the credibility of the capitalist state itself had been
endangered by the Murdoch gang, whose deep pockets let them flout the law with
impunity.
This is a time when the ruling class relies on the state to force austerity on
the masses. The same kinds of cutbacks and layoffs in the public sector that
are starting to roil workers in the U.S. have been shoved down the
workers’ throats in Britain, despite huge demonstrations and the first
general strike in decades. The bourgeoisie and their politicians need to clean
up the image of the state.
Murdoch takeover bid fails
Another element that undoubtedly fed the desire to bring Murdoch down a peg or
two was News Corp.’s attempt to take over British Sky Broadcasting, the
country’s most lucrative satellite television network. It has more than
10 million paying subscribers, representing 36 percent of all the households in
both Britain and Ireland. The government’s business secretary boasted he
had “declared war” on Murdoch and would find a convenient legal
excuse to block his takeover bid. (New York Times, July 23)
News Corp. already owned 39 percent of BSkyB. James Murdoch, son of Rupert, was
made CEO of BSkyB in 2003. Four years later, despite shareholder objections, he
was moved up to become “non-executive chairman,” replacing his
father. Since the phone-hacking scandal went viral, News Corp.’s takeover
bid has collapsed.
Don’t expect that all this means that the Murdoch media empire is
finished, or that it will tone down its racist, anti-immigrant, misogynist
content. A struggle within the ruling class can get messy, but the real big
shots seldom go to jail or even have to pay more than pin money for their
crimes. Besides, even the most genteel of capitalists need an unscrupulous
media that doesn’t hesitate to dish out right-wing sensationalism to the
public, especially in times of economic crisis.
The real scandal is that billionaires control and manipulate what the people
read and view every day.
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