Suffolk Closeup: Media scourge on Rupert Murdoch

He’s a huge force in media in this region and the world. And in this region, he could have been an even bigger player. Just four years ago, Rupert Murdoch came inches away from acquiring Newsday, Long Island’s only daily newspaper. In 2008, he moved to buy Newsday for $580 million but at the last minute he was edged out by Cablevision.

Mr. Murdoch would have added Newsday to his New York-based Wall Street Journal (which he’s pushing to have displace the New York Times as the leading U.S. newspaper), the New York Post and TV properties in New York that include both WNYW Channel 5, WWOR Channel 9 and his Fox News Channel.

He has also bought up community weeklies in the western portion of Long Island, in Brooklyn and Queens, including the 16-newspaper Times-Ledger and 11-paper Courier-Life groups. He has not been able to gobble up media in eastern or central Long Island — not yet.

He is not the sort of person one wants to control media here or anywhere.

As a committee of the British Parliament has just concluded, Mr. Murdoch is “not a fit person to exercise the stewardship of a major international company.” That came in its extensive report about phone-hacking and bribery of public officials in the U.K. by Mr. Murdoch’s umbrella media entity, New York-based News Corporation. The unethical and deceitful “culture” of the corporation has “permeated from the top,” according to the committee.

Mr. Murdoch’s central purpose in amassing a media empire has been to promote his arch right-wing agenda. His mission in media is politics. “Fair and balanced,” his Fox News Channel proclaims itself — cynically. The complete opposite is true. There have been other outrageous media barons like William Randolph Hearst.  The famous film, “Citizen Kane,” is about Hearst’s megalomania.

But Murdoch has operated in the U.K., the U.S., indeed the world over as what William Shawcross in his biography, “Murdoch,” describes as “an international Citizen Kane, with influence beyond imagining.”

“At Murdoch’s media companies,” notes Kerwin Swint in his book, “Dark Genius,” “his operations are often used for expressly political purposes.” For example, the “New York Post is not profitable in a financial sense for Murdoch, but it has been invaluable to him as a battering ram for political causes and vendettas … He has skillfully used his media properties to advance political agendas, and conversely, has used those political assets to advance his media properties.”

Mr. Murdoch has made a travesty of what journalism is supposed to be about. And he has institutionalized this on a global scale.

In the U.K., he took what was the distinguished paper of record of the English-speaking world, The Times of London, and degraded it, making it not a watchdog of power — what the press should be — but an instrument to aid those in power whom he favors. Consider what he has done, with his obsession for titillation and sensation, to the New York Post.

Tim Rutten of the Los Angeles Times writes: “The seeds of Murdoch’s British newspapers’ abuse of trust and power were sown in a media culture whose essentials — salacious celebrity coverage, gossip, overt partisanship — have infiltrated our own under his influence. The meltdown in London ought to be a wake-up call.”

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (citizensforethics.org) is calling on the Federal Communications Commission to revoke Mr. Murdoch’s ownership of TV stations in the U.S. “Under U.S. law,” it notes, “broadcast frequencies may be used only by people of good ‘character.’” When the regulatory structure for radio and TV in the U.S. was created, it was reasoned that the airwaves are a limited public resource and so standards had to be set to limit who could own a station. Under the Federal Communications Act, if owners are guilty of a felony, an anti-trust violation, a fraudulent statement to a governmental entity, discrimination, among other things, they can lose their license.

It also requires that only U.S. citizens hold a majority interest in a station — the reason why Murdoch, an Australian, switched to being an American citizen in 1985 as he sought to build a media empire based in the U.S. He might comply with the law on U.S. citizenry, but, as the British investigation has documented, his “good character” is something else.

With now 800 media properties in more than 50 countries, he has become an international media scourge. Fortunately, his reach on Long Island has, so far, not been all he’s wanted.