News Corp

Did Fox News Capitulate To Scientology?

Posted by on June 14, 2009 at 1:30 pm. 6 Comments :

Last April, Fox News entertainment reporter, Roger Friedman, was fired, allegedly because he had acquired and viewed a bootleg copy of 20th Century Fox’s “X-Men Origins: Wolverine.” At the time it appeared a rather harsh sentence considering that Fox has no problem with continuing to employ people who…

  • …joke about assassinating Barack Obama (Liz Trotta).
  • …read Republican Party press releases on the air as if they were actually news (Jon Scott).
  • …express a desire to strangle competing reporters (Bill O’Reilly).
  • …yearn to choke Michael Moore to death (Glenn Beck).

I also wondered whether Fox might have been itching for an excuse to cast Friedman overboard due to his blasphemous praise of Fox nemesis Michael Moore:

On Fahrenheit 9/11: “It turns out to be a really brilliant piece of work, and a film that members of all political parties should see without fail.” He continued, “…a tribute to patriotism, to the American sense of duty – and at the same time an indictment of stupidity and avarice.”

On Sicko: “Filmmaker Michael Moore’s brilliant and uplifting new documentary, ‘Sicko,’ deals with the failings of the U.S. healthcare system, both real and perceived. But this time around, the controversial documentarian seems to be letting the subject matter do the talking, and in the process shows a new maturity.”

Now the New York Daily News is reporting that Friedman is suing Fox News for wrongful termination, and the reason is something I had not anticipated. He is claiming that Rupert Murdoch and News Corp bowed to pressure from Kelly Preston and Tom Cruise who wanted Friedman fired because he had written critically of Scientology. At first, that seems to be a frivolous assertion, but upon further examination it becomes more plausible.

The Scientology organization has a reputation for being fiercely aggressive when it believes that it has been disparaged. And Friedman did indeed write multiple columns that were less than complimentary to Scientology. For example: Television Star Exits Scientology and Will Scientology Celebs Sign ‘Spiritual’ Contract? and Isaac Hayes’ History With Scientology. And there were others that touched on big stars like Will Smith and Tom Cruise.

I can’t pretend to know the truth about Friedman’s claim. Fox may have already had it in for him due to the Wolverine episode or his acclaim for Moore’s movies. All I can say is that, if Scientology really has Fox cowering before it, I wish Bill O’Reilly or Glenn Beck would say something to piss them off. Now that’s entertainment.

Bill O’Reilly Controls The Stock Market, Part II

Posted by on March 11, 2009 at 10:38 pm. NO Comments :

Last June Jed Babbin of the uber-conservative Human Events Magazine wrote a disturbingly ignorant article in which he contended that Bill O’Reilly’s asinine babbling about General Electric may have caused their stock to decline.

Now Paul Bond of the Hollywood Reporter has sunk to the same depths of dumb. Bond has a history of poor analysis and bias that would embarrass the editor of a high school newspaper. In this column he asks: “Could O’Reilly have been a factor in GE’s stock becoming a dim bulb?” Most of the article is a tired rehashing of the war O’Reilly has declared on GE/NBC/Keith Olbermann. But near the end of the piece he gets around to answering his own question:

“Despite the relentless nature of the tirades, there aren’t many on Wall Street who suggest O’Reilly has been the cause of GE’s free-falling stock. In fact, most experts dismiss it as partisan street theater, and they point out that shares of News Corp., parent of O’Reilly’s own network, also have been crushed.”

That would seem to settle it. The article’s headline was just Bond’s sensationalistic ploy that was summarily dismissed by more realistic analysts and experts. Except for the fact that Bond’s bias still manages to emerge as he cites stock performance data that he seems to have made up. He says that this year GE has declined 53% and News Corp only 32%, a 21% difference. Actually GE has only declined 45%, but News Corp dropped 39%, a mere 6% difference. It’s bad enough that he can’t write, but apparently he can’t do math either.

It hardly makes sense to keep comparing GE to News Corp in the first place. News Corp is an almost pure media play, while GE is a conglomerate that has a small media component along with much larger entities engaged in defense contracting, appliances, medical technology, electronics, and finance (which, in case Bond didn’t notice, has been having a very bad year). A better comparison for News Corp would be Disney, Time Warner, and Viacom, all of which outperformed News Corp this year. But that doesn’t stop Bond from drawing a conclusion that teeters on fantasy. In the very last line of his article he says:

“As long as News Corp. keeps outperforming GE, criticism of O’Reilly and his stockpicking prowess will ring hollow.”

All I can say to this is that as long as Bond keeps writing absurd articles that misstate facts and twist reality, allegations of his sanity will ring hollow – much like his pal O’Reilly.

Addendum: O’Reilly took to the megaphone to trumpet news that S&P cut GE’s credit rating one step from “AAA” to “AA+”. While O’Reilly announced that as if it were his own victory, he didn’t bother to mention that his employer, News Corp, has a lower credit rating of “BBB”. And what are the odds that he’ll mention that Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway just received the same rating cut that GE did?

Starve The Beast: The Wrath Of The Right

Posted by on March 2, 2009 at 9:45 am. 11 Comments :

We are now a month into the administration of Barack Obama. It’s a month that seems to have been packed with a year’s worth of activity. From the first day in office when Obama issued executive orders permitting more openness with presidential records and Freedom of Information Act requests, to announcements of major policy agendas for an economy on life support and the still soul-sapping wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the White House has been busy, to say the least.

At the same time, they have had to deal with the opposition of an increasingly obstructionist Republican minority and a media that is overtly hostile. Last year, prior to the election, Fox News was already fortifying its right flank. New multimillion dollar contracts were handed out to Roger Ailes, Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly. Hannity’s show shed the dead weight of alleged liberal Alan Colmes. Glenn Beck was brought in to shore up the daytime crowd. Neil Cavuto, a bully who is every bit as obnoxious as O’Reilly poisons the economic news, and he is also managing editor of Murdoch’s Fox Business News. And just this week Bill Sammon, author of a shelf full of bitterly partisan books, was promoted to VP and Washington Editor for the network.

The result is a full court press of some of the dirtiest political assaults ever waged by what is advertised as a “news” network. Fox News is shamelessly pushing a campaign to characterize Obama as a Socialist – a committed opponent of America and its values – from 6:00 am with the crew of Fox & Friends, to after midnight with broadcasts and repeats of their primetime neanderthal shoutcasters. They get their marching orders directly from Rupert Murdoch who last September said that…

“[Obama’s] policy is really very, very naive, old fashioned, 1960’s socialist.”

Even worse, these rightist dissidents come very close to openly advocating acts of violence and armed rebellion. Glenn Beck’s ominously titled “War Room” was an hour long descent into fear mongering that posited nothing short of the decline of western civilization. The upshot of this Terror Hour is that America’s days are numbered, so you had better start stockpiling guns, hoarding food and water, converting your dollars to gold, and barricading your secluded compound in the Wyoming wilderness (move over Ted Kaczynski). And, of course, it’s all Obama’s fault.

Another result of this Apocalyptic programming surge is higher ratings for Fox News. The core primetime schedule on Fox has enjoyed a rare uptick in audience growth. For the past three years, Fox, while number one in total audience, has been the slowest growing network in cable news. CNN and MSNBC produced consistently stronger growth. Particularly MSNBC, which was once a struggling also-ran, but which now challenges Fox’s powerhouses and routinely beats CNN. But the numbers for this February are another story.

Total Day: FNC +29%, MSNBC +17%, CNN +2%.
Primetime: FNC +28%, MSNBC +23%, CNN -30%.

What accounts for the turnaround in Fox’s fortunes? Well, first of all, they are benefiting from their previous slack performance. In other words, they were able to record higher comparative rates of growth because their prior year numbers were held down due to some rather unique circumstances. To understand the current numbers, you need to remember what was going on a year ago.

In February of 2008 the Democratic Party was in the middle of a hotly contested presidential primary. Early in the month it was already apparent that McCain would win his Party’s nomination. Consequently, audiences viewing campaign news were disproportionately composed of Democrats. Amongst the biggest draws were the televised debates. Democratic candidates, you may recall, had forsworn Fox News as a host for their debates. So the two Democratic debates held in February 2008 were carried by CNN and MSNBC, and both drew audiences many times greater than their regularly scheduled programming. Democrats also shunned Fox for other TV appearances and interviews. It had gotten so bad that Chris Wallace, host of Fox News Sunday, made a veiled threat in December of 2007:

“I think the Democrats are damn fools [for] not coming on Fox News.”

We know the problem still existed in March of 2008 because that’s when Wallace debuted his Obama Watch: a clock that would record how long before Obama appeared on Wallace’s show. It was a childish prank on Wallace’s part, but it clearly showed that the Democratic embargo of Fox News was having a real impact. For CNN and MSNBC, who had the guests and the event programming that appealed to the most motivated news consumers, it meant higher ratings. Fox, on the other hand, had depressed numbers because their most loyal audience – Republicans – already had a candidate, so there was no campaign drama to keep them tuned in. Comparing those numbers to February 2009 would, therefore, be favorable to Fox by producing a greater percent difference.

So some of the good news for Fox was really just a matter of perception. But that’s not the whole story. They are actually having a pretty good year, particularly post-inauguration. All the networks have suffered some falloff from January, but Fox has retained more of their recent gains than have their competitors. I can only offer some informed speculation as to why that would be.

First, Fox has more new programming that may be piquing the interests of their viewers. The new programs include a retooled Hannity, minus Colmes, and Glenn Beck’s Acute Paranoia Revue. Beck has found his home at Fox. His ratings have significantly increased over what he had at HLN, and he has also improved the time period he fills on Fox. As for Hannity, dumping Colmes was obviously popular amongst the Foxian pod people. It’s just that much less non-approved, pseudo-liberal noise they have to sit through.

Secondly, by heating up the aggressive tone, Fox has fashioned a hearth around which despondent conservatives can huddle. In 2006 they suffered the loss of both houses of congress. Now they have lost the presidency as well – and to what they view as an unpatriotic, Muslim, elitist, intent on driving the nation to Socialism in a Toyota hybrid. So now they congregate in the warm red glow of the Fox News logo that provides them the comfort that comes from numbing propaganda and the righteous smiting of perceived enemies.

This doubling down on rancor has had mixed results for Fox. While it endeared them to their base, and those they could frighten into submission, it also cost them dearly on a broader financial scale. The stock of Fox News parent, News Corp, is down 70% for the last 52 weeks. To be sure, the economy, particularly for media companies, was difficult, to put it mildly. But News Corp competitors Time Warner, Disney, and even the Washington Post were only down in the 45-55% range. News Corp suffered its worst loss ever of over $6.4 billion. And going forward, they advised Wall Street that income will decline another 30% for fiscal 2009.

In examining the reasons that Fox would perform so much worse than similar enterprises, one would have to consider the possibility that people have become disgusted with the obvious one-sided manipulation and the non-stop, phony news alerts that are Fox’s shock in trade. But I believe that it would also be fair to conclude that the direct actions taken against Fox News by Democrats last year are at least partially responsible for Fox’s inordinately more severe decline. The ratings disparities year over year document the effect that a sustained campaign of snubbery can produce.

Starve The BeastWith the stepped up efforts of Fox to sling ever more buckets of mud, it is more imperative now than ever that Democrats act affirmatively in their best interests. They must resist the siren call of televised glory and begin to discriminate between those who are fair practitioners of journalism and those who seek only to engage in slander and slime. In two previous installments of my Starve The Beast series (part 1 / part 2), I described how complicity with Fox News is not merely a waste of time, but is demonstrably harmful. This is even more true today, as the evidence above illustrates. The message that Democrats and other progressives must take to heart with all deliberateness and determination is: STAY THE HELL OFF OF FOX NEWS! Since it hurts us when we appear and it hurts them when we don’t, the way forward is crystal clear. It makes absolutely no sense to lay down before lions who are determined to devour you.

Now, I don’t want to approach this from a purely negative standpoint. While constructing a united front in opposition to Fox News is an absolute necessity, there are some positive steps that can be taken as well. Other news organizations must be pressured to present a more balanced picture of current events. And, where possible, true liberal voices must gain access to the televised public square. Media Matters long ago documented the imbalance of conservatives and Republicans on the Sunday news programs. That ideological discrepancy has continued apace since Obama’s inauguration. Now it’s time to do something about it. It’s time to make a case for TV to offer a more equitable representation of liberal views – the views of the majority, the winners.

Political activism has always been shaped in part by access to polling. It is an irreplaceable asset for anyone managing a campaign for a candidate or an issue. Similarly, TV survey data is critical in analyzing media performance and prospects. This data is distinct from conventional polling. Remember, networks don’t care about the public. They care about a subset of the public that is attractive to their customers. And their customers are not viewers – they are advertisers. While there are many sources for political data, there are few for media data – and most of those are press releases from vested corporate interests. There is little that we can do with ratings data that has already been massaged to advantage one particular party.

If progressives want to have some influence on programming, they must be able to anchor their arguments with original research and facts. For this reason, it is no longer enough for sites like Media Matters or Talking Points Memo or Daily Kos or News Corpse to merely document right-wing media abuses. If we want to help shape the editorial direction of the Conventional Media, we have to offer authoritative presentations to map a path to bigger audiences and ratings victories. We need to speak to the needs of the news providers and give them a business case for adopting a truly balanced programming model. To do this we need access to the raw data that is at the heart of television marketing.

So who amongst the lefty netroots will step forward and subscribe to Nielsen Media Research broadcast and cable data? I’m going to rule out News Corpse because I can’t afford it. But I do have 14 years of experience in media research and would be willing to help produce analyses and presentations. Just as progressive authors and bloggers offer informed advice to advance political goals, we need to be able to make a persuasive, market-based case for the sort of programming reform that we want to see. We need to be able to show the networks that it is in their interest, financially and ethically, to develop programming that is honest and in keeping with the principles of an engaged and probing press. We need to be able to counter the false impressions relentlessly pushed by faux news enterprises that tout themselves as the popular voice of the nation. It seems that a day does not go by that Bill O’Reilly doesn’t boast about his ratings. The funny thing is that he also condemns the source of those ratings with the delusional paranoia that only he can muster:

“The bottom line on this is there may be some big-time cheating going on in the ratings system, and we hope the feds will investigate. Any fraud in the television rating system affects all Americans.”

So O’Reilly thinks that the system he so proudly cites for affirmation of his massive popularity, is also engaging in big-time cheating for the benefit of his foes. If he’s right, and Nielsen data is not to be trusted when they report that his competition is catching up, than why should we trust it when it reports his success. In truth, the only cheating going on is on the part of the self-promoting networks and the egomaniacal personalities they employ. It is their selective and misleading interpretations that are distorting the reality of viewer behavior.

Suffice it to say that we would be in a much better position to dispute the spin that’s being peddled if we had access to unfiltered Nielsen data. We could mine that data to develop solutions and strategies to present to news programmers. Then we may begin to have some influence over news programming, personalities, and content.

This is as important an endeavor for progressives as the strategies we promote for politicians. I would argue that it’s more important. Especially in a media environment where prominent news enterprises are openly fomenting a near-militaristic antagonism to our representatives and our values.

The Fox News Conservative Book Promotion Channel

Posted by on February 3, 2009 at 2:42 am. 3 Comments :

Anyone who watches Fox News with any frequency is painfully aware that it is little more than a marketplace for rightist propaganda and rancor. But lately, I noticed another kind of hucksterism that is rampant on the network. Several of their regular anchors and contributors are identified as authors in the graphics at the bottom of the screen. This happens often enough that I began to wonder just how widespread this practice of co-promotion of TV and publishing was. As it turns out, it is pretty damn widespread. If you were to populate your library with books by Fox News personalities, you would have to purchase all of these – to start:

Bill O’Reilly
A Bold Fresh Piece of Humanity
Culture Warrior
The O’Reilly Factor
Kids Are Americans Too
The O’Reilly Factor for Kids
Who’s Looking Out for You?
The No Spin Zone

Dick Morris
Fleeced
Outrage
Rewriting History
Power Plays: Win or Lose
Because He Could
Off with Their Heads
Condi vs. Hillary: The Next Great Presidential Race

Michele Malkin
Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Gone Wild
In Defense of Internment
Invasion

Mike Straka
Grrr! Celebrities Are Ruining Our Country

Sean Hannity
Deliver Us from Evil
Let Freedom Ring

Glenn Beck
The Christmas Sweater
An Inconvenient Book
The Real America

John Gibson
The War on Christmas
Hating America
In Defense of Religion

Laura Ingraham
Power to the People
Shut Up and Sing
The Hillary Trap

Major Garrett
The Enduring Revolution: The Inside Story of the Republican Ascendancy and Why It Will Continue
The 15 Biggest Lies in Politics

Ann Coulter
Guilty
Slander
Godless
Treason
If Democrats Had Any Brains, They’d Be Republicans
How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must)
High Crimes and Misdemeanors

Bernie Goldberg
A Slobbering Love Affair
Crazies to the Left of Me, Wimps to the Right
110 People Who Are Screwing Up America
Bias
Arrogance

James Rosen
The Strong Man

Greta Van Susteren
My Turn at the Bully Pulpit

Updated to add:
Fox News Washington, D.C., deputy managing editor, Bill Sammon
At Any Cost: How Al Gore Tried to Steal the Election
Fighting Back: The War on Terrorism from Inside the White House
Misunderestimated: The President Battles Terrorism, Media Bias and the Bush Haters
Strategery: How George W. Bush Is Defeating Terrorists, Outwitting Democrats, and Confounding the Mainstream Media.
The Evangelical President: George Bush’s Struggle to Spread a Moral Democracy Throughout the World

This a wholly unprecedented marketing partnership between a so-called news organization and a right-wing political crusade. The books being plugged by the Fox spokesmodels are hardcore partisan tracts that all reflect the same regressive ideology. They have implemented a campaign that blankets their airwaves with pitches for published opinion pieces that are mostly dishonest, manipulative, and overtly hostile.

So where is the other side in this debate? Of course there are no anchors or hosts that lean even modestly left on the “fair and balanced” network. But even amongst their pseudo-liberal commentators like Kirsten Powers, Bob Beckel, or the recently departed Alan Colmes, you would be hard pressed to turn up a handful of literary works. Even so, I have never seen any of their limited line advertised on the air. Conversely, grousers like O’Reilly hawk their books on every broadcast. And you’ll find that appearances from the Coulters and Goldbergs increase coincident with the release of each new product. As for the other networks, there are a few authors scattered about, like Lou Dobbs, but the shelf space they would consume would be a mere fraction of the Fox Book Club.

The truly astonishing thing about all of this is that anyone would want to read (or watch) any of these pathetic characters to begin with. They represent a collection of the world’s most ill informed, logic deprived, truth averse losers in modern media. Bernie Goldberg, the fired CBS alum, is an unrepentant propagandist who writes books about media bias. Well, I guess he should know. Major Garrett, Fox’s White House correspondent, presciently penned a tome with the subtitle of “The Inside Story of the Republican Ascendancy and Why It Will Continue.” That was published just prior to the Democratic takeover of Congress in 2006, followed up in 2008 with additional congressional gains and an historic White House victory. Good call, Major

But my favorite is the Clown Prince of Fox, Dick Morris. His 2006 book, “Condi vs. Hillary,” predicts the prospects for the commencing presidential election. Here is a sample of his astute analysis from the introduction to the book:

[T]here is no doubt that Hillary Clinton is on a virtually uncontested trajectory to win the Democratic nomination and, very likely, the 2008 presidential election. She has no serious opposition in her party […]

The stakes are high. In 2008, no ordinary white male Republican candidate will do. Forget Bill Frist, George Allen, and George Pataki. Hillary would easily beat any of them. Rudy Giuliani and John McCain? Either of them could probably win, but neither will ever be nominated by the Republican Party.

So Morris got the Democratic nominee wrong. He got the Republican nominee wrong. And the Republican who Morris said could win if he were nominated actually lost. It is on the strength of this sort of analysis that Morris gets asked back to provide additional insights.

The truth is, it doesn’t matter on Fox (or almost any of the TV news nets) if you’re wrong. The only thing that matters is that you faithfully regurgitate the conservative dogma and talking points. If you do, then you will have a job for life, and your books, web sites, and other media spew will become part of the marketing machine that props up conservatism. It’s an elegantly parasitic relationship. TV exposure begets propaganda which begets book deals which begets TV exposure which begets propaganda, ad infinitum.

And at the center of it all is Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., a vertically integrated media empire that channels disinformation throughout it’s layers of television, radio, newspapers, magazine and book publishers, and the Internet. This complex web of entanglements insures multimedia distribution of the right wing’s political philosophy. Each props up the other to produce an architecture of lies in support of their lust for power and their Utopian dream for social Darwinism. Goebbels would have been proud.

The Wall Street Journal After A Year With Murdoch

Posted by on December 13, 2008 at 2:30 pm. NO Comments :

It was one year ago today that the Dow Jones Company, parent of the Wall Street Journal, agreed to be acquired by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. That transaction marked another step in the shrinking universe of media ownership. Specifically, it was the consumption of a revered publishing institution by a voracious international megalopoly. So what did the Bancroft family and other shareholders get for their greedy acquiescence to the power-mad mogul?

One year ago, the $60.00 per share offer from News Corp was about a 67% premium over Dow Jones’ then current price. Anyone who immediately liquidated their holdings following the transaction (which no one did) would have made a nice profit. Everyone else just watched as their fortunes shriveled up. The parent of Fox News has declined 60% in the past year. That means that the $5 billion dollars spent on Dow Jones has a current value of $2 billion. That’s not a particularly impressive performance.

As for Murdoch’s financial fate, rather than adding a $5 billion asset to his empire, his company’s market cap declined $32 billion – that’s more than six times what he spent on Dow Jones.

Now it would be easy to blame this all on the economic collapse, and certainly that plays a significant part. The only problem is that News Corp fell further than any of its competitors.

Company % Decline
News Corp 60
New York Times 55
Washington Post 50
Time Warner 44
Dow Jones Index 35
Disney 29

From a financial perspective, it doesn’t appear that the folks at Dow Jones made a particularly sound decision. While it’s impossible to say where these investments would be had News Corp not come along, it seems that they would have done no worse than the rest of the field. The difference is that they would still have their independence. They would not have had their publisher replaced by a Murdoch loyalist from England. And they would not have been ordered to shorten their stories and shift their focus from business to general news so that Murdoch could taunt his enemies at the New York Times (which he is also now rumored to fancy).

Murdoch’s business prowess is widely exaggerated. His New York Post has lost money for the past decade – the whole time he has owned it. And his celebrated purchase of MySpace when it was the unchallenged leader in social networking, hasn’t really worked out so well. MySpace is now second to a surging Facebook. Fox News itself is consistently the slowest growing news network on cable TV.

The biggest advantage for a Dow Jones tie in with News Corp was the potential for a television platform. The Wall Street Journal badly missed out by allowing CNBC and Bloomberg to run away with that market. Murdoch of course has his new Fox Business Network, but due to contractual commitments with CNBC, he is not permitted to use the DJ assets. And by the time those contracts expire, the dismally low-rated FBN may be history.

So…all in all, Dow Jones probably would have been better off if they had left well enough alone. They lost some prominent and experienced talent when Murdoch took over. And although he is moving slowly, so as not to spook his staff and subscribers, we can still expect him to put his personal stamp on the enterprise by dumbing down the content to reach a broader market. That’s been his M.O. throughout his entire career and there are no signs that he is abandoning his affection for tabloid sensationalism and rightist propaganda.

Does Rupert Murdoch Despise Bill O’Reilly?

Posted by on November 28, 2008 at 1:00 pm. 6 Comments :

The question of Rupert Murdoch’s relationship with his top-rated TV blowhard, Bill O’Reilly, has come up before. Now, courtesy of Michael Calderone at Politico, an excerpt from Michael Wolff’s upcoming biography of Murdoch is asserting that:

“It is not just Murdoch (and everybody else at News Corp.’s highest levels) who absolutely despises Bill O’Reilly, the bullying, mean-spirited, and hugely successful evening commentator, but Roger Ailes himself who loathes him. Success, however, has cemented everyone to each other.”

If Murdoch and Ailes “absolutely despise” O’Reilly, I can only hope they come to despise me as much. The apparent reward for such hatred is endless fawning, copious perks, and a brand new multimillion dollar contract renewal. But I wouldn’t get too excited. Wolff provides very little support for his conclusion, and what he does provide is weak and contradicted by past comments and behavior.

Wolff suggests that Murdoch’s purchase of Dow Jones, publisher of the Wall Street Journal, was in part to distance himself from the tenor of Fox News. Though why he thinks that the famously conservative newspaper is a departure from the obvious partiality of Fox is a mystery. Wolff seems to think that Murdoch finds the more sedate bias of the Journal preferable to the loudmouth variety at Fox. However, he doesn’t consider the more likely scenario that Murdoch will turn up the volume at the Journal. He has already said publicly that wants the Journal to publish shorter, punchier stories, with less business and more general news. And Wolff, at least in this excerpt, doesn’t consider that a major factor in purchasing the Journal was to beef up resources for Murdoch’s recently launched Fox Business Network.

Politico’s Calderone curiously opines that Murdoch’s political views are “difficult to pin down.” In support of this he cites Murdoch’s backing for Thatcher, Reagan, Blair, Koch, and McCain. That seems pretty easy to pin down to me. They are all notable conservatives with the exception of Tony Blair, who started out as a progressive Labour Party leader, but ended up as a Bush lapdog. And rumors have it that Murdoch and Blair made a pact early on that if Blair did not interfere with Murdoch’s business aspirations, Murdoch would see to it that News Corp. enterprises (including the London Times, the Sun, and the Sky News satellite network) would stand behind Blair.

As further evidence of Murdoch’s squishy liberalism, the article cites the New York Post’s endorsement of Obama over Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary. But the endorsement from the Post reads like an outright condemnation. Here are some highlights from the Post’s column endorsing Obama:

  • “…an untried candidate, to be sure…”
  • “Obama is not without flaws.”
  • “For all his charisma and his eloquence, the rookie senator sorely lacks seasoning…”
  • “Regarding national security, his worldview is beyond naive…”
  • “His all-things-to-all-people approach to complicated domestic issues also arouses scant confidence”
  • “…he is not Team Clinton…That counts for a very great deal.”
  • “…we don’t agree much with Obama on substantive issues.”

With friends like that, who needs enemas? The Post eventually endorsed McCain in the general election. And unlike the Obama endorsement, it was enthusiastic and complimentary.

I don’t for minute believe that Murdoch has become disenchanted with O’Reilly or Fox News. His views are as consistent as ever. In September he lashed out at Obama saying that he is a naive, 60’s style Socialist, and that his administration would worsen inflation, ruin America’s relationships with other nations, and drive companies to leave the country. All achievements for which George W. Bush can already claim credit.

Shallow analysis like that of Wolff and Politico has been asserted before. In the end, Murdoch is who he has always been: an irredeemably conservative corporatist, consumed with lust for money and power. As long as O’Reilly contributes to those goals, Murdoch’s love for him will endure.

Hilarious Update: Kara Swisher at All Things Digital has dredged up a laughably appropriate example of Michael Wolff’s deficiency of insight. In 1998 Wolff said:

“I think the myth of the Internet is that it is going to come into everybody’s home.”

Good call, Mikey.

News Corp Suffers 30% Decline In Income

Posted by on November 6, 2008 at 3:43 pm. 2 Comments :

In its quarterly earnings report released yesterday, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation reported a net income decline of 30 percent:

“Fiscal 2009 profit will drop in the ‘low to mid teens’ in percentage terms, New York-based News Corp. said on a conference call yesterday after U.S. markets closed, citing falling advertising sales and the stronger dollar. The company previously forecast a gain of 4 percent to 6 percent.”

This drop needs to viewed in the context of a broader Wall Street sell off. However, News Corp, parent of Fox News, is significantly under-performing the stock market indexes. For the past 52 weeks, News Corps’ stock price is down 63 percent, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average is off only 36 percent. [Ironic Note: Dow Jones is also owned by News Corp]

News Corp is also under-performing its competitors. CNN parent Time Warner is down 48 percent and NBC/MSNBC parent General Electric is off 54 percent. The fact that News Corp is faring so much worse than its nemesis GE must be gnawing away at folks like Bill O’Reilly, who frequently cites GE’s stock woes as evidence that NBC/MSNBC is evil and unpopular. Now that Keith Olberman and Rachel Maddow have lifted MSNBC’s ratings above his own, will O’Reilly now concede that Fox News is even more evil and less popular?

In the conference call for the earnings release, Murdoch indicated that…

“The revised guidance is a clear reflection of the fiscal environment. We expect that to continue through fiscal 2009.”

Even though Murdoch had previously predicted a prolonged downturn, he is still managing to blame it on Barack Obama. A few days ago he said that Obama’s policies were “crazy” and would be “a real setback.” Since he is on record as far back as May 2008, with his view that we are in for 18 difficult months, it’s hard to figure how he lays these hardships on Obama who won’t even take office until next January.

In addition to the bad earnings news, Murdoch announced that there will be severe job cuts at News Corp. These cuts will occur even as new multimillion dollar contracts have been given to O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and Glenn Beck. At least some of Murdoch’s employees will have a little job security. However, none of them will have a holiday party this December as financial constraints have resulted in the party’s cancellation.

Season’s Greetings Rupert, et al.

Obama “Lit Into” Ailes At Secret Meeting With Murdoch

Posted by on September 2, 2008 at 3:27 pm. 1 Comments :

Michael Wolff, contributing editor at Vanity Fair, is preparing to release an authorized biography of News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch. The book, appropriately titled “The Man Who Owns The News,” will be out some time between December and February, depending on what source you believe, and the author was given significant access to his subject. In advance of publication Wolff has written an article describing his encounters with the Media Mephistopheles that includes an account of a secret meeting with a reluctant Barack Obama.

“Obama…was snubbing Murdoch. Every time he reached out (Murdoch executives tried to get the Kennedys to help smooth the way to an introduction), nothing. The Fox stain was on Murdoch.”

“It wasn’t until early in the summer that Obama relented and a secret courtesy meeting was arranged. The meeting began with Murdoch sitting down, knee to knee with Obama, at the Waldorf-Astoria.”

This version of events is somewhat curious in that Obama had begun appearing on Fox News as early as January of 2008, six months prior to this meeting. I was highly critical at the time of Obama’s guest shot on “Fox & Friends,” probably the second worst booking he could have made after “The O’Reilly Factor” (on which he has still, so far, declined to appear [Update below]). After an inconsequential chat with Murdoch, Roger Ailes took his place before Obama, and that’s when the fireworks began:

“Obama lit into Ailes. He said that he didn’t want to waste his time talking to Ailes if Fox was just going to continue to abuse him and his wife, that Fox had relentlessly portrayed him as suspicious, foreign, fearsome – just short of a terrorist.”

Ailes, unruffled, said it might not have been this way if Obama had more willingly come on the air instead of so often giving Fox the back of his hand.

A tentative truce, which may or may not have vast historical significance, was at that moment agreed upon.

From the exchange as related here, Obama forthrightly expressed the precise reasons that he was disinclined to show Fox News any respect. But as I noted above, he was not uniformly able to maintain his will power to say “no” to Fox.

However, it is Ailes’ response that is striking in its arrogance. By suggesting that Obama’s standoffish position with regard to Fox resulted in the rancidly slanderous coverage, Ailes is in effect blaming Obama for the dirty work for which Ailes himself is responsible. He is also admitting that the coverage was as predominately negative as Obama contended. That, of course, validates Obama’s decision to stay away from the network in the first place. And perhaps worse than any of that, Ailes is implying that he orchestrated the bad press as revenge for Obama not accepting Fox’s invitations to be abused on their air. Ailes has thus confessed that he believes that it is appropriate for a journalist to bash public figures who don’t obey a demand to appear. This is a position that Bill O’Reilly himself articulated when he threatened Democrats that, “If you dodge us, it is at your peril.” Fox is to journalism what Capone was to the beverage industry.

Elsewhere in the article, Wolff offers some insight into what he believes is an evolving Murdoch who may not be as enamored with either Ailes or O’Reilly as he once was.

“Fox has been his alter ego. For a long time he was in love with the Fox chief, Roger Ailes, because he was even more Murdoch than Murdoch. And yet now the embarrassment can’t be missed-he mumbles even more than usual when called on to justify it; he barely pretends to hide the way he feels about Bill O’Reilly.”

This allegedly stormy forecast for these media titans echoes a report last June in Gawker that queried whether Murdoch was about to fire Ailes. I struck down that theory at the time, and I stand by my position. But perhaps things are not so rosy as I thought. Perhaps Murdoch is evolving in ways I cannot imagine. When Wolff asked Murdoch for advice on who to vote for in November, he elicited this response from Murdoch:

“He paused, considered, nodded his head slowly: ‘Obama – he’ll sell more papers.'”

I guess Murdoch is getting both softer and greedier with age.

Update: Just a few hours after this posting, O’Reilly announced that Obama will appear on his show this coming Thursday. Here is my analysis of this development.

Murdoch Stalking Newsday

Posted by on April 23, 2008 at 2:48 pm. 1 Comments :

Rupert Murdoch is on the prowl again and the editors, employees and readers of Long Island’s Newsday had better pay attention. The News Corp. chief has announced that his ravenous appetite for world media dominance is far from satisfied.

“Media mogul Rupert Murdoch has been calling key state and local officials to say he is close to a deal to buy Newsday and that he looks forward to working with them.”

Murdoch already owns the New York Post, the Wall Street Journal, and two TV stations in the New York market, along with the Fox News Channel, and the Fox Business Network. The $580 million acquisition of Newsday would allow him to further tighten his grip on the biggest media market in the country. Murdoch hopes that by adding Newsday to his empire he might be able to reduce the debt he takes on from the Post, which has lost money for as long as he’s owned it. This would sharpen his aim at his real target, the New York Times, which he has previously vowed to bury.

As for the Newsday staff and customers, they need to be aware of what lay in store if Murdoch is successful. Despite having promised not to meddle in the editorial affairs of the Wall Street Journal as a condition for his purchasing it, his will cannot be denied.

“Marcus W. Brauchli will step down as the top-ranking editor of The Wall Street Journal after less than a year in the job, four people briefed on the matter said on Monday, just four months after Rupert Murdoch took control of the paper.”

As with most of the rest of Murdoch’s properties, Newsday would likely take on his world view. However, Newsday’s fate is not a foregone conclusion. Mort Zuckerman, who owns the New York Daily News, is reportedly preparing his own bid. This may be less because of his desire to own Newsday than his need to keep Murdoch from owning it. Whatever the reason, it may be time to start rooting for Zuckerman.

Microsoft, News Corp, and Yahoo, Oh My

Posted by on February 13, 2008 at 3:21 pm. NO Comments :

The armies of consolidation are on the march. Last week, Microsoft made a surprise $44 billion bid for Yahoo. Microsoft is desperately trying to shore up its exposed Internet flank, which Google is battering brutally. Snatching up Yahoo would go a long way toward putting Microsoft back in the online game.

Enter News Corporation. Rupert Murdoch is now reportedly offering a deal that allows Yahoo to remain mostly independent. He would trade Fox Interactive Media for a 20% stake in the new and improved Yahoo. FIM is significant property. It includes Myspace, Photobucket, games giants IGN and GameSpy, AmericanIdol.com, and the MyFox internet platform for the News Corp-owned television station group.

I’m not sure which of these is better (or worse, to put a negative spin on it). Murdoch is, of course, pure evil. But his proposal would leave Yahoo independent and in control of some of the biggest destinations on the web. And all it would cost them is a 20% chunk of the company. Microsoft is a serial monopolist in its own right, and their deal would consume Yahoo whole. On the other hand, they aren’t Murdoch.

Ultimately the problem’s roots go back to the hyper-consolidation that has created an environment where all parties believe that they have to become gargantuan just to be able to compete and survive. In this matter, there don’t seem to be any good options.