A Legacy of Poison: Notes on Rupert Murdoch's Retirement

One of the most destructive men of the modern era is walking away. Let us never forget what he's done.

This morning 92 year old Rupert Murdoch announced his intention to transition to “Chairman Emeritus” at Fox Corporation and News Corp, the behemoths that control large swathes of what passes for “news” and “entertainment.” After announcing his son Lachlan would succeed him, Murdoch continued with his patented brand of knowingly peddling conspiracy theories and misinformation for his own benefit, leveling a finger at “the media” in “cahoots” with elites and “peddling narratives rather than pursuing the truth.”

We should expect nothing less from Murdoch. In his seven decades of cooking, twisting, and ultimately mortally wounding the truth, he has pioneered a new era of projection and weaponized lying. Fox News (one of the most destructive and consequential innovations of the 20th century) was hatched in 1996 with the expressed and intended purpose of working in cahoots with elites within the billionaire class and the Republican Party. Peddling political narratives was the strategy.

But that is Murdoch’s legacy. A final push to cannibalize the last remnants of local and objective journalism in order to construct the type of hulking apparatus for propaganda purposes that only George Orwell could have dreamed of. All of it in order to present a bastardize version of reality that better suited Murdoch and his allies in the wealth class’s bottom lines.

With Fox News, antisemitic conspiracy theories were laundered just enough to conceal the most unpalatable characteristics and then broadcast twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Over time they would sell an illegal war in Iraq and a “crusade” that killed over a million human beings and made the world safer for corporations to continue gorging themselves with profits. They helped steal a presidential election, became a bullhorn for a donor-controlled Tea Party Movement, midwifed the Trump Presidency, mainstreamed white genocide fears, undermined civil liberties and individual rights, supported an authoritarian movement that could still destroy democracy, helped forward an anti-expert and anti-science agenda that could cause almost incalculable suffering, and a whole lot more.

It’s almost impossible to overstate the destruction and suffering Murdoch has wrought.

But when considering what he has done, what his destroyer of a corporation will continue to do, and, more importantly, how we can solve our slate of crises, we have to dig deeper and move beyond the cut-and-paste biographies you won’t be able to avoid here soon.

And to do all that, we must dig deeper and examine the forces that made Murdoch’s rise possible and helped him along the way.