Murdoch CEO Labels Bloggers “Political Extremists”
This is pretty rich coming from the company behind Fox News. (So sorry that the message has been taken out of your hands – can we get you a tissue?) Recently, Murdoch’s media empire has begun staking out territory in the online domain as well with their acquisitions of MySpace and YouTube, and apparently now he’s decided to step into the fray as an opinion maker, leading the charge against alternative media and the ‘blogosphere’. We’ll likely be hearing that all bloggers are white supremacists or some similar rubbish before too long, and Joe Six Pack will probably believe it, too. So heads up.
Flashback: Should linking be illegal? | Fredericton police arrest well-known N.B. blogger on legislature grounds | Chinese Learn Limits of Online Freedom as the Filter Tightens | Italian Judge: Blogs are Illegal | Human rights body to consider Internet speech regulation | Blogger arrests hit record high
Paul Joseph Watson, PrisonPlanet.com
July 1, 2009
A stinging attack by John Hartigan, the CEO of Rupert Murdoch’s News Limited, labels bloggers and alternative media outlets as “political extremists”. Hartigan implies that bloggers should be jailed as they are in oppressive police states like China and Burma.
In a speech to the National Press Club, Hartigan savagely dismissed blogs as, “Something of such little intellectual value as to be barely discernible from massive ignorance.”
“Bloggers don’t go to jail for their work. They simply aren’t held accountable like real reporters….It could be said the blogosphere is all eyeballs and no insights,” barked Hartigan.
“In the blogosphere, of course, the mainstream media is always found wanting. It really is time this myth was blown apart.”
“Blogs, and a large number of comment sites, specialise in political extremism and personal vilification. Radical sweeping statements without evidence are common.”
Hartigan doesn’t seem to grasp the fact that the mainstream media is always found wanting because they habitually lie about news events and spin stories to suit the demands of their corporate owners. This is the very reason why blogs and alternative media outlets have become so popular and have eaten into the mainstream media’s audience share, because people are sick of being treated like idiots, sick of being lied to, and are desperately in search of the truth.
Indeed, Hartigan’s boss Rupert Murdoch confessed to the fact that his media empire tried to shape public opinion to support the war in Iraq In other words, Murdoch’s many prominent news outlets wantonly put out propaganda supporting the manufactured case for invasion. Murdoch admitted to this while lamenting the corporate media’s “loss of power” to alternative media and Internet blogs, seemingly unaware of the fact that the two are directly connected.
When the people know that the corporate media is deliberately lying to them about Niger yellowcake and weapons of mass destruction, they are going to seek alternative avenues of information. The fact that the corporate media habitually lies is a manifestly provable reality, not a “myth” as Hartigan ludicrously claims.
In addition, while mainstream media routinely uses anonymous sources and little more than bluster and hot air to back up their stories, blogs provide links to almost every claim they make so readers can research the source evidence for themselves. This is the opposite from Hartigan’s claim that blogs make “radical sweeping statements without evidence.” Indeed, this phrase perfectly characterizes tactics employed by the mass media on a daily basis.
The corporate media monopoly has terminal cancer and they are losing their power to blogs and alternative media, which is why people like Hartigan are so angry and also why the establishment is aggressively moving to phase out the old Internet altogether and replace it with “Internet 2,” a highly regulated and controlled electronic Berlin wall, where alternative voices will be silenced and giant corporate propaganda organs will dominate once again.
As blogger Darryl Mason writes today, “John Hartigan is full of shit. Bloggers have gone to jail for their work, and to protect their sources, in North Korea, Iran, Egypt, the list of countries persecuting bloggers grows longer by the week. And the CEO of Australia’s biggest news corporation doesn’t know this?”
The jailing of bloggers for speaking too much truth is obviously not the kind of news that John Hartigan, a Rupert Murdoch CEO, is interested in. How could he not know about those jailing and prosecutions.
Remember those words. “Political extremism”.
You will hear that call more and more as the major news corporations scale up their war against independent media, and bloggers.
The source of the establishment’s move to claim that bloggers and alternative media outlets are “extremists” or at worst “terrorists,” as we first reported in September 2006, was a White House strategy document that the government had been following since 9/11.
In a September 5, 2006 speech President George W. Bush referred to the document as “an unclassified version of the strategy we’ve been pursuing since September the 11th, 2001,” that takes into account, “the changing nature of this enemy.”
The strategy paper on how to ‘win the war on terror’ cites “conspiracies” as one of the wellsprings of terrorism and threatens to “address” and “diminish” the problems they are causing the government in fulfilling their agenda.
This notion then reappeared in a March 2009 Homeland Security document entitled “Domestic Extremism Lexicon,” in which the “alternative media” is listed alongside other radical extremist groups with the implication that people who disagree with the mass media’s version of events are potential domestic terrorists.
According to World Net Daily, the DHS document was almost immediately rescinded, but the groups listed alongside Neo-Nazis, Aryan prison gangs and black power extremists again prove that the federal government is targeting American citizens who are merely knowledgeable about their rights and up on current issues as potential domestic terrorists to be treated as a “threat” to law enforcement.
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July 4th, 2009 at 2:43 am
The Media Can Legally Lie
Akre and Wilson sued the Fox station and on August 18, 2000, a Florida jury unanimously decided that Akre was wrongfully fired by Fox Television when she refused to broadcast (in the jury’s words) “a false, distorted or slanted story” about the widespread use of BGH in dairy cows. They further maintained that she deserved protection under Florida’s whistle blower law. Akre was awarded a $425,000 settlement. Inexplicably, however, the court decided that Steve Wilson, her partner in the case, was ruled not wronged by the same actions taken by FOX.
FOX appealed the case, and on February 14, 2003 the Florida Second District Court of Appeals unanimously overturned the settlement awarded to Akre. The Court held that Akre’s threat to report the station’s actions to the FCC did not deserve protection under Florida’s whistle blower statute, because Florida’s whistle blower law states that an employer must violate an adopted “law, rule, or regulation.” In a stunningly narrow interpretation of FCC rules, the Florida Appeals court claimed that the FCC policy against falsification of the news does not rise to the level of a “law, rule, or regulation,” it was simply a “policy.” Therefore, it is up to the station whether or not it wants to report honestly.
During their appeal, FOX asserted that there are no written rules against distorting news in the media. They argued that, under the First Amendment, broadcasters have the right to lie or deliberately distort news reports on public airwaves. Fox attorneys did not dispute Akre’s claim that they pressured her to broadcast a false story, they simply maintained that it was their right to do so. After the appeal verdict WTVT general manager Bob Linger commented, “It’s vindication for WTVT, and we’re very pleased… It’s the case we’ve been making for two years. She never had a legal claim.
Doesn’t Murdoch own fox ??
July 6th, 2009 at 12:39 pm
Murdoch does own fox. He is not against politial extreme or false statements –he is against others making instead of him or his orginizations. He is a very sick individual, very arrogant and and blind to his own ego. Such ‘people’ consider ‘the masses’ as merely units of consumption who have no right to speak out on anything. As for Hartigan he is a puppet and Murdoch’s personal ‘yes man’. He is not even worth mentioning. His ‘outrage’ is allowed only insofar as his Master Murdoch gives him the green light to go ahead.
When you look at Murcoch and Hartigan you are staring into the eyes of true evil. Only death will humble their ranting against regualar people who want to blog and be heard.
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