We’ve got used to a lot of the nastier Murdoch tricks in the past forty years and no longer remark on them. One is the publishing of only ugly pictures of the left-of-centre politicians in his cross-hairs. Mike Rann scored four handsome pictures in twenty-three years, three after he announced his departure from the premiership, one when he and Sasha became engaged. He was once allowed a campaign column and the picture above it looked like one taken in mid-sneeze.
This goes back as far as Whitlam after the Dismissal in 1975 being photographed as he was about to blink or in an ugly sneer. You will find the same treatment, the same visual swindle, applied to Murdoch’s particular enemies Prince Charles, Ted Kennedy and Neil Kinnock. Obama he was more subtle with. He would be filmed in an over-the-shoulder-from-behind-shot that made him look both hunchbacked and simian, and with lighting and backgrounds that emphasised his dark complexion and flat nose.
Fox News worked overtime with Obama, calling him at different times a predatory homosexual, a crooked Chicago machine politician, a disengaged academic, a man who ‘palled around’ with terrorists (a new Murdoch verb that suggested co-conspiracy in basements), a crazed Christian fundamentalist, a racist, an unreformed Muslim who took his oath on the Koran, a passport-forger not born in America and therefore President illegally, a man who paid a known ‘terrorist’, Bill Ayres, to write his autobiography for him, a secret Socialist, an enemy of Israel, an ally if Bin Laden, and so on. In one pre-election interview O’Reilly shouted at him so much it had to be released in five-minute segments lest the audience think his bullying unfair.
When Obama won the White House, Fox News helped invent the Tea Party, paying millions a year each to its proselytisers Hannity, Huckabee, Beck, O’Reilly and Palin and giving limitless time on air to Bachmann, Santorum, Paul, Rove and Perry, and applauded their tactic of rejecting everything he put before them, including every single clause of a Health Bill that, for instance, meant children could not be denied treatment for having had a ‘pre-existing condition’ and would not therefore automatically die. They started calling him a ‘one-term President’ very early, comparing him to Jimmy Carter, and alleging his plan to close down Guantanamo meant American prisons would suffer nuclear attack; this in spite of Sirhan Sirhan, the Palestinian terrorist who murdered Robert Kennedy, having been locked up in an ordinary Californian prison that went unbombed for forty years. They hired black commentators to denounce Obama, who initially had no black enemies, and began to chip away at his credibility. In two years, the number of those who thought him a Muslim born in Kenya had quadrupled, and those who thought him a rabid ‘European-style Socialist’ sextupled. Because they repeated their programmes around the clock, they got to a lot of shift-workers and early-risers, many of whom believed their contention that Obama planned ‘death-panels’ who would ‘pull the plug on granma’ as part of his wicked European-style health scheme. It was not there to heal you but to kill you.
One of the more skilful things the Murdochists did was to interfere with public political debates. The Democratic candidate’s head would be very small in the frame, the Republican’s very big, thus giving him larger authority. The Democrat’s microphone would be softer, and his face seen more in profile than the Republican’s, whose eyes would engage the audience. This is best seen in the Edwards-Cheney debate of 2004. Some of course they could not manipulate, but those they could they worked wonders on. SkyNews had free rein of only one of the three TV debates with Brown, Clegg and Cameron and it is worth looking at for a particular trick that was used again in the SkyNews ‘debates’ between Abbott and Gillard a few weeks later.
The trick was this. Every time Brown was doing well, speaking with authoritative eloquence and getting up a head of steam, giving a good performance, the image would change to a wide shot of fifty or sixty people in the audience looking bored, and hold on it for twenty or thirty seconds, and thus deprive the Prime Minister of authority and momentum. Hearing the debate that night on radio you would think Brown won; but looking at Murdoch’s warmed-over images of widespread audience boredom — an invited audience of course, one SkyNews could rely on — you would get the opposite impression. Thus Brown SEEMED to lose the second debate, but as it turned out was still ahead, and it took the Murdoch bugged fabrication Bigotgate to defeat him.
MORE TO COME
Name:
Recent Comments