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Journalism--dead, gone--murdered by media monopolies, his the foremost of these malevolent media "empires." Journalists reduced to being whores for the corporate/war profiteer viewpoint. The "news" reduced to corporate propaganda, or to drivel, evidently laced with an arsenic of blackmail.
What is the right of free speech worth if a couple of multi-billionaires own and control all the means of communication? Ordinary people have no free speech rights. There is no real debate about anything. Alternative views are "black-holed" or marginalized, or mocked.
Democracy depends upon free speech for everybody.
Thomas Jefferson was so adamant about the importance of "free speech for everybody" that he proposed government funding of newspapers with no control of content, so that business interests and the rich would not control news and opinion. Anybody and everybody should be able to print newspapers and other news/opinion formats (broadsides, etc.)--print being the only means of mass communication in those days. He was for decentralized government and states' rights, yet he felt that "free speech" and its ESSENTIAL function in a democracy were of overriding importance and should be subsidized--for the very purpose of preventing a 'Rupert Murdoch'--billioniare control of information--from ever happening!
We have watched this destruction of our democracy--from the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine (TV/radio required to provide fair political coverage and public service) to the gobbling up of newspapers, TV/radio stations and other news/opinion outlets by congolomerates--over the last several decades, since the Reagan era.
It's true that the Internet has thrown a large monkey wrench into this corpo-fascist propaganda machine that some call "the mainstream media." But it has yet to fulfill its potential as a full-on alternative "free speech" format that could create a well-informed, empowered population, and many downsides have developed, including the ability of corporations, war profiteers, governments and the super-rich to PAY FOR web sites, bloggers and other operatives as a standard item in their well-funded P.R./propaganda machines. Murdoch buying up Huffington Post is just one example of the many downsides.
The Internet, as a safety net for democracy, does not have the brainwashing power of TV which is broadcast into--and often blaring within--virtually every home in the world. TV is standard equipment in homes, worldwide. Computers are not. TV's can induce passivity and disempowerment--especially if that is the goal of the broadcasters. Seeking information and expressing oneself on the Internet are active, rather than passive, and can be empowering. But there are grave social gaps between TV--with the less educated, less affluent dependent on TV for news/opinion--and the Internet--with the better educated and more affluent now having a potential information/empowerment tool that is independent of the corpo-fascist news monopolies.
Another downside is corporate efforts to take over the Internet, in a structural way, and to drastically reduce, confine and control it, as a propaganda tool (the "net neutrality" issue). The educated/affluent who have led the campaign to keep the Internet open have barely succeeded in doing so, and, like all other resources that corporations are looting or commandeering, they have endless financial wherewithal to sustain their assault over the long term.
Corporations live forever, gobbling up more and more property, wealth and power as they go, and have outlasted every citizen effort to control them and to stop their war against democracy, including citizen efforts to save the environment and the planet itself, to end corporate pollution, to require decent wages, benefits and worker safety, to require equitable taxation, to prevent banksterism, war and war profiteering, to protect "the commons," to provide public services, to provide free public education to all, to provide pensions for the elderly, and on and on. So it is likely that the Internet will eventually be controlled by people like Murdoch. This is especially true considering the state of our own democracy, here in the USA, where Internet infrastructure and rules are controlled. We have seen one, private, far rightwing-connected corporation--ES&S, which bought out Diebold--take control of 80% of the voting systems in the U.S., using 'TRADE SECRET' programming code with virtually no audit/recount controls. If that can happen here--if, indeed, that can happen here without most people knowing it and certainly without most people understanding the implications of it--then the Internet, too, can be easily lost.
So I am not exaggerating when I say that Murdoch is the death of journalism, free speech rights and democracy itself. If Thomas Jefferson could be brought back to life, he would be wondrous and approving at our having elected a black president,--it was Jefferson, after all, who tried to include the end of slavery in the Declaration of Independence (and was overruled)--but he would be appalled at the fact that no one can verify that Obama won the 2008 election, and that almost nobody even knows that that and every other election in this country, over the last decade, has not been verified--and in half the states, cannot be verified--and that we rely, instead, on the 'TRADE SECRET' results fed to us by a private corporation.
As for the state of public access to news, information, opinion and means of expression--after being amazed at TV, radio, telephones and the Internet, as technologies--Jefferson would be even more appalled at our stupidity at permitting private corporations to control all broadcasting into our homes!
Tabloids wouldn't surprise him. He was the victim of tabloids back then. But private, monopolistic control of the means of the communication would stagger him. "How could you let this happen," he would ask, "After we went to so much trouble to give you a free and open society?"
Spying wouldn't surprise him. He probably employed spies himself (as president) and they were certainly employed against him. But an out-of-control media conglomerate like Murdoch's--controlling and bribing the police at the highest levels, controlling and bribing politicians at the highest level, and gobbling up one media venue after another in the USA and around the world, and palming off a rancid organization like Faux News on the American public--would no doubt make him despair that we had entirely lost the democracy that our Founders risked their lives for. They would have been hanged, forthwith, if they had been caught and the British had won. Many did die for us--for the future, for the new dream of democracy. If he felt charitable, he might say that Murdoch is George III's revenge--for he was a witty man, Jefferson. But though it might take the sting out of it all, it is truly our own fault that we are being looted and controlled by exceedingly undemocratic powers. Jefferson & co. gave us the tools to prevent this from happening and we permitted each and every one of them to be taken away from us, with hardly a murmur.
Murdoch didn't murder journalism and democracy all by himself. Others helped. And "we the people" did our part, by doing nothing.
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