US election is an opportunity for a reckoning with Rupert Murdoch and his media empire

Former Australian defence and energy secretary Paul Barratt had a pithy two-word response to someone on Twitter who wondered last year why the United States, United Kingdom and Australia all found themselves “with lunatics and/or shysters” at the helm. “Rupert Murdoch,” he wrote.

“His media has a divisive effect on Australian politics because it takes extreme positions,” Barratt tells me in a subsequent phone interview. “You more or less can’t have a sensible position because middle-of the-road views get ridiculed and screamed down. Discussions get personal. People are vilified.”  

The focus on the Australian-American media magnate’s sprawling empire has, most recently, been prompted by Murdoch’s own son, James, who broke with the family, resigned from News Corporation’s board and accused the organisation of knowingly spouting falsehoods on public health and climate change, disguised as news.

“A contest of ideas shouldn’t be used to legitimise disinformation,” he told The New York Times. “I think at great news organisations, the mission really should be to introduce fact to disperse doubt – not to sow doubt, to obscure fact.”

As the anglophonic world comes to a crossroads on 3 November with the US presidential elections, which could thwart or embolden the type of angry right-wing politics Murdoch media outlets propagate, the family and its properties are drawing intense, unremitting and perhaps punitive public scrutiny. If Joe Biden takes the White House and Democrats seize control of Congress, a reckoning for the Murdoch empire could be high on the agenda. Hearings could examine the connections between the Trump administration and Murdoch’s media outlets, while a formal investigation could probe News Corporation’s role in promoting myths and outright lies about the coronavirus pandemic that may have undermined public health.

In Australia, where Murdoch began his venture in the 1950s after inheriting a small newspaper in Adelaide from his father, hundreds of thousands of people recently signed a petition demanding the government launch an investigation into the toxic impact of the company on the country’s political landscape.

In the US, where Murdoch’s flagship television news channel Fox News regularly broadcasts potentially dangerous coronavirus misinformation and often serves as a propaganda arm of the Donald Trump administration, senior figures like former labour secretary Robert Reich are urging people to speak out against the network and boycott its advertisers.  

In the UK, the Murdoch operation appears to be making hires ahead of the possible launch of a right-wing television channel to challenge the BBC, causing alarm that it will be used to promote climate-change denial.  

Halting the Murdochs’ advance is not about constraining free speech. The Murdochs are free to pay Tucker Carlson or any loudmouth however much they want to spew hatred on any street corner or beer hall that will allow it. No one will stop them. But as Barratt points out, the Murdoch playbook is less about using the media to inform, entertain or even eke out profits and more about using it to build power. “He has built up such a media empire that politicians are afraid of him,” he says.  

The Murdoch playbook has unfolded similarly in every anglophone country. He typically buys or builds up a quality broadsheet that gives his company gravitas and makes credible journalists want to work for him. In the UK, it’s The Times. In the US, it’s The Wall Street Journal. In Australia, it’s The Australian, celebrated when it launched as the country’s first national paper. “He’s been clever enough to hire high-quality writers doing real journalism and commentary,” says Barratt.  

But at the same time, he also has a  tabloid newspapers. In Australia, that’s The Telegraph in Sydney and Melbourne’s Herald-Sun. In the US, it’s The New York Post, which was accused last week of laundering a story labeled a “Russian disinformation operation” about Joseph Biden’s son. In the UK, it’s The Sun and was The News of the World, until the phone hacking scandal in which a number of people were charged with breaking into people’s voice messages to obtain grist for sensational stories.  

The prestige titles “give him a licence to run whatever editorial line he wanted” in the tabloids, or even increasingly mixed in with the “quality” material on the pages of the broadsheets, says Barratt. “He could conduct a war on climate change, and people buy his newspapers to get the quality stuff,” he explains. “I can tell within five minutes of talking to someone whether their daily newspaper is The Australian or the Fairfax newspapers like The Sydney Morning Herald.”

In recent years, the Australian papers have become less profitable and “more politically aggressive, with some adopting the shrill, cartoonish and openly-partisan approach of British ‘red top’ tabloids,” writes Melbourne scholar Sally Young.  

The Murdochs used the power of the newspapers to bulldoze regulators into letting them buy up television and radio properties, setting up near monopoly-like domination of the media. 

In Australia, 70 per cent of the media is owned by the Murdoch family. Its flagship television station Sky News runs fairly neutral news programming during the day. But it descends into what many Australians describe as “Sky after dark,” in the evening, when it shifts into talk shows hosted by rightwing loudmouths. “It’s all rightwing conspiracy theories and ‘climate change is a hoax’,” says Barratt.  

In the US, Fox News hosts like Carlson, Trump confidante Sean Hannity, and rightwing operative Laura Ingraham take to the airwaves at night. Polls in the US consistently show that those who get their news from Fox exist in a completely different reality than those who cull information from a variety of sources.  

The Australian government, despite rules in place, has been very reluctant to try to rein in Sky’s abuses, in part because officials are too afraid to take on the family. “The Murdochs are very powerful and politically influential,” says Barratt. “They give donations to Australian politicians.”

The US also has rules governing broadcast media. But as Reich points out, no one at the Federal Communications Commission under Trump is going to punish Fox for spewing rightwing propaganda and lies that benefit his administration. But even Democratic Party presidents have been reluctant to use the force of the federal government to impose constraints on a company that purports to be in the media business.  

Both the coronavirus pandemic and the more existentially threatening climate crisis show the dangers of giving one family with an extremist agenda so much power, however. It is shocking that the Murdochs survived the 2011 phone-hacking scandal relatively unscathed and unbowed. If the tides turn in the upcoming US election, it could be an opportunity for a reckoning, and to impose a measure of civic responsibility on the organisation that has resisted it.