The Murdoch ‘newspapers’ look so favourably on the Federal Coalition, that it makes you wonder what is going on. They have such right wing nut jobs as Greg Sheridan, Nick Cater, Jennifer Oriel, Judith Sloan, Andrew Bolt, Piers Akerman, Sharri Markson, Janet Albrechtsen and Miranda Devine. These people are so far to the right, they make people like Malcolm Turnbull and Christopher Pyne look normal, which is no mean feat. On Twitter, Miranda Devine has even been known to retweet neofascist drivel. A number of these people have been staunch defenders of the Catholic Church, to the extent that they vehemently opposed the setting up of the Child Abuse Royal Commission, like Paul Kelly did1. Some wags even refer to the Weekend Australian newspaper as the Catholic Weekly, in reference to a real weekly aimed at Catholics; this is presumably in reference to the significant number of supporters of the Catholic Church among the staff writers.
The reason the Murdoch staffers look so favourably upon the government is because that is what Rupert Murdoch wants. He is such a venal, corrupt, ubercapitalist, that he is completely unconcerned about what constitutes news or even what is true. The worst perpetrators of this sort of lying have been Fox News in the United States. That is why it has received the epithet ‘Faux News’. It has put out so many false stories, it would be difficult to select a single example. However, one does stand out as so obviously bullshit, that it is inexplicable how any journalist with a modicum of self-respect would put it across as news. This story stated that a visit by President Obama to India would be costing $200 million per day, and that 3000 people would be travelling with him, while it would be accompanied by a fleet of 34 warships including an aircraft carrier. These were all lies. Murdoch doesn’t care. All he is about is maximising his profits and decreasing his taxable income; this is, in part, why the countries in which he has significant media influence, all have programs to decrease corporate taxation, and allow offshoring of profits. This is all part of the development of kleptocracies in these nations2.
I believe that the sort of drivel put about by Murdoch hacks should not be called journalism; to do so would be an insult to real journalists. One of the nouns floating around twitter at present, which seems entirely appropriate for this faux journalism, is ‘rupertage’, its practitioners ‘ruperters’, and their method ‘ruperting’. These should go into the Oxford English Dictionary, because they cover a travesty currently lacking appropriate nouns and verbs.
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