2 Comments

1. 

   The Rupert Murdoch who has privately jetted back into the country of his birth is a pathetic shadow of the individual I knew so well half a century ago. Holding court at his country estate outside Canberra, he has seen an opportunity to put Tony Abbott in his pocket just as he did with another Tony in England when it suited him. Rupert learned many years ago that there were some politicians he could bend to his will and some he couldn’t.

   Tom Playford in South Australia nearly ended Rupert’s career as a media magnate back in the late 1950s, even before it had started. A decade later however he had cultivated a mutually useful relationship with Black Jack McEwen which helped in his early ventures in the UK. He did the same with Margaret Thatcher and finally launched himself on the world, falling into the arms of Ronald Reagan.

   At 79 (he is just nineteen months older than me) he still possesses the confidence, charm and the slick brain that brought him so far along the way to enormous wealth and a degree of influence that made him a force to be reckoned with everywhere he went. To see him in the flesh, however, comes as a shock, his face sagging with deep, dark rivulets of worry lines that reflect a lifetime of chasing the rainbow.

   For sixty years he has been driven by a narcissistic force not even fully understood by any of those occasional similarly-driven individuals who come along to make their mark in history and leave nothing behind except wreckage and a legend soon to be forgotten.

   Now his empire is beginning to crumble and he is charging around the world trying to save it, selling off some assets, closing down others. All but a few of his newspapers are losing money and influence, his corporation kept afloat by the money coming in from pay-TV and from the annual blockbuster movie his Fox studio manages to turn out. The rest is in crisis.

   He is hated and obstructed in America and EU, has been blindsided and robbed in India, derided in China and mostly forgotten in Australia until he makes his occasional fly-in to bark orders at his loyal troops.

   He has two great ambitions now: For 60 years he has tried to destroy the ABC (the government-owned Australian Broadcasting Corporation). The concept of a free government media service to the public has always enraged him, particularly when it performs far better than its commercial rivals. The Rudd government’s initiatives on digital TV and the new broadband network are threats to his pay-TV interests here. This is why his papers and his networks will try to get Tony Abbott’s fragmented Liberal rabble elected to prevent another term for Labor.

   Any who remember Rupert’s brutal, personal campaign against the Whitlam government in the 1970s will know just how dirty this fight will be.

   Comment by reveldor — February 21, 2010 @ 5:33 am

2. 

   Well said reveldor. The world will be a better place when Murdoch finally buys heaven.

   Comment by Peter — February 22, 2010 @ 1:42 am

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