The Assassination of Rupert Murdoch and the Right Wing
I haven’t written much about the News of the World scandal that is engulfing the Rupert Murdoch empire. I’m not going to waste my breath defending a billionaire; he has more resources than I do to do that, nor do I believe what has happened in the UK matters to his empire over here. British tabloid journalism has always been in the toilet. There’s even a princess in an early grave because of it – or at least partly. The focus on News Corp is like being swarmed by mosquitoes in the woods, killing one, and blaming that one bug for all your bites. . But I do think that the interest sparked on this side of the pond by the phone hacking scandal is pure politics. Janet Daley of the Daily Telegraph agrees:
This has gone way, way beyond phone hacking. It is now about payback. Gordon Brown’s surreal effusion in the House last week may have made it embarrassingly explicit, but the odour of vengeance has been detectable from the start: not just from politicians who have suffered the disfavour of Murdoch’s papers, or the trade unions (and their political allies) who have never forgiven him for Wapping, but from that great edifice of self-regarding, mutually affirming soft-Left orthodoxy which determines the limits of acceptable public discourse – of which the BBC is the indispensable spiritual centre.
Daley believes that the British Left is using the scandal to assassinate a political rival.
There is scarcely any outfit on the Right – be it political party, or media outlet – which demands the outright abolition of a Left-wing voice, as opposed to simply recommending restraint on its dominance (as I am with the BBC). That is because those of us on the Right are inclined to believe that our antagonists on the Left are simply wrong-headed – sometimes well-intentioned, sometimes malevolent but basically just mistaken. Whereas the Left believes that we are evil incarnate. Their demonic view of people who express even mildly Right-of-centre opinions (that lower taxes or less state control might be desirable, for example) would be risible if it were not so pernicious.The Left does not want a debate or an open market in ideas. It wants to extirpate its opponents – to remove them from the field. It actually seems to believe that it is justified in snuffing out any possibility of our arguments reaching the impressionable masses – and bizarrely, it defends this stance in the name of fairness.
This concerns me. If Murdoch owned the New York Times or MSNBC I doubt that Eric Holder would be investigating – especially while he’s too busy stonewalling one of the biggest scandals that I’ve ever seen: Operation Gunrunner/Fast and Furious. Besides, if Murdoch is a key component of the vast right wing conspiracy I’m beholden to, he sucks at it: According to OpenSecrets.org, Donations by News Corp members favor Dems 2-1. Biggest recipient? That paragon of conservative virtue Barbara Boxer.
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