Posted on 08/01/2011 9:26:44 AM PDT by presidio9
Monday, MTV celebrates its 30th birthday while Fox News continues to glance as lightly as possible at the Rupert Murdoch hacking scandal presently boiling in London, where so much wrong has taken place.
Corruption swirled up from Murdoch's many media properties to Scotland Yard and even higher, to elected officials in the United Kingdom.
Much as MTV has remade music, Murdoch has done the same with the news media. But as far as Murdoch is concerned, there is nothing at all to celebrate.
With MTV, music became a slave to advertisement - after all, a music video is just a glorified commercial. MTV's audience was adolescent and given to swooning before cheap thrills, simplemindedness, sentimentality, childish resentment of authority and a steady fare of misogyny and minstrelsy.
Perhaps its biggest coup was the diversity that eventually broke the unwritten but much adhered-to rules of cultural segregation. This was first done with Michael Jackson, but went beyond him to the canned hostility of hip-hop and, today, the gargoyle minstrelsy of Lil Wayne. With pure, crass commercialism, it seems to have mortally wounded the centuries-old American dragon of bigotry.
Murdoch was also obsessed with selling a product, which we can now see was a particular agenda dominated by hatred of government regulation and a constant battle against taxing the most wealthy, which can be easily understood now that his massive corporation has shown amazing dexterity with tax havens and evading what it blatantly owes to the American people.
As mountains of dirt continue to fall on Murdoch's weary pate, we are beginning to see what a challenge to public trust has resulted from his companies' amoral actions.
In his perverted version of the contemporary world, Murdoch deformed news reporting with his model of success in MTV-like fashion. As his money began to steadily amass, his sense of reality became as distorted as that of any criminal personality. His arrogance has sent him stepping into an empty elevator shaft.
London's News of the World was quickly closed down when it got too hot in the kitchen, but our Fox News continues as little more than a Punch and Judy version of propaganda dominated by factoids, not actual truth. Its appeal is the same as that of MTV, and for the same reason: Everything is made to seem much simpler than it actually is.
P.T. Barnum is supposed to have said that one would never lose money by underestimating the intelligence of the American public. The Murdoch empire clearly agreed with that premise. No one can dispute how inarguably successful it has been at proving Barnum's point about this country.
But the hounds are loudly baying across the swamps. Reader Supported News just ran a blistering piece called "Pay Your Taxes, Murdoch," while my former Village Voice colleague Wayne Barrett wrote a whopper of an exposé about, among other things, a highly problematic $10 million settlement by Fox News. Both offer findings that might encourage the feds to look a lot more closely at Murdoch's outlets in America.
Yogi Berra could have been talking about Rupert Murdoch when he famously said, "It ain't over till it's over."
There it is. May we all live to see Rupert Murdoch have to deal with the truth. It will be a virginal experience.
They wish
A Murdoch owner newspaper screws up and we’re all going to hell.
lol
The left is constantly pushing these hysterical conservative boogey man narratives...it’s really pathetic.
And when the NYT and WAPO release top secret information which harm directly the our national security despite a specific request from the WH not to do it, somehow that’s ok?
b.s.
you can be sure that there are hackers working for the msm and the government without the knowledge of their masters.
FNC will never be driven off the air. Even if Murdoch sells his interest in it it doesn’t mean there won’t be plenty of people to buy it, It is after all a money making machine.
Are they trying to say that MTV is more IMPORTANT to CULTURE than Fox News??
The LAME STREAM MEDIA (LSM) wishes that it would be true, but FNC is MORE INPORTANT then MTV would ever be!! Of course, I'm proud to say that I NEVER watched MTV!!
Only the LSM wishes FNC would never get organized. They would love to see the LIBERALS (and Socialists and Marxists) running the USA instead of the PEOPLE and the TEA PARTY!!!
Whats MTV?
Well hell, I guess we all should have went for the throat of CBS’s CEO, Les Moonves, when Dan Rather attempted to change the outcome of the freakin’ 2004 general election.
Or... maybe at least we could have expected the lefties to be consistent and denounce Julian Assange’s (wiki-leak) treasonous actions last year.
But no-o-o-o, neither happened. Double standards be damned...
John Stossel is actually a libertarian, not a liberal. It's easy to get the two political philosophies confused.
I will submit to the MSM that FOX leans conservative when they accept that it is the counterbalance to CNN, not MSNBC. MSNBC does not lean. It is unabashed liberal propaganda in primetime. Pick a recent major political news story: the budget, gay marriage, Wisconsin, Weinergate, Libya, etc. MSNBC will have an out an proud far left liberal host discussing the issue with a moderate liberal, a liberal, and someone to the left of the host (this in itself and achievement when the host is Rev. Al Sharpton, Ed Rendell, or Mr. Rachael Maddow). FOX News will have a Conservative host discussing with one of several respected liberal contributors in addition to its conservative contributors. Usually a liberal guest with particular familiarity with the issue also gets an invitation. In this format, FOX is pretty much the ideological mirror image of CNN, and MSNBC is way out on its own with no viewers.
If it was so easy and so well known how to hack peoples voice mail..then you can be sure that more reporters than just News of the World were doing it. You can also be sure that the police and intelligence service were trying it also.
I recall he was very anti-rap.
Still a big lib...
Smokes from the same hookah as Skip Gates and Tooth Cornel...but to be fair to him...he occasionally says something smart and has attached fellow black excesses
What a damning article it’s almost as if Murdoch’s transgressions are as bad as the New York Times, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, etc.
LOL
Why aren't CNN news and NBC news as culpable as Fox News then?
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