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Murdoch remains a dangerous foreign enemy to the U.S. - Read Huff Post "The Murdoch Muscle"

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Hissyspit Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed May-09-07 12:46 AM
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Murdoch remains a dangerous foreign enemy to the U.S. - Read Huff Post "The Murdoch Muscle"
Yes, technically, he is a U.S. citizen - in the 1980s he was made a U.S. citizen by an act of Congress so that he could meet requirements to buy up TV stations - so if you want, call it treason, not in a technical sense, maybe, but definitely in a motivational sense, with his consistent efforts to undermine the best interests and values of the nation in favor of his own wealth and power.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com:80/jayne-lyn-stahl/the-murdoch-muscle_b_47901.html

The Murdoch Muscle
Jayne Lyn Stahl

Before you know it, Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation is going to own the news, and we don't hear a peep from the press, or the mainstream media.

- snip -

For a look at how Murdoch challenges diversity of opinion, one has only to go back to the days when he acquired The Village Voice, some twenty years ago, to see that, while he likes to make money, he also has another agenda. Shortly after his takeover, two of the Voice's most liberal investigative reporters, Joe Conason and Wayne Barrett were let go. Murdoch's battle of the bilge includes, but is not limited to, purging his opposition in ways that would make Stalin envious. While Mr. Barrett was hired back, the message came through, loud and clear; don't mess with Rupert Murdoch. The Murdoch rubric appears to be comply, or perish.

- snip -

Showing his capacity to flex his censor muscle, in the spring of 1998, Murdoch stopped Harper Collins from publishing the memoirs of one-time Hong Kong governor, Chris Patten, because he alleged human rights abuses by Communist China. Murdoch himself sat down with a draft of East and West, Patten's book, and "ordered senior managers at Harper Collins to tone down the criticism of Chinese leadership." (Toronto Star) Clearly, Mr. Murdoch doesn't like it when anybody has something bad to say about his friends in Communist China.

Similarly, a few months later, Murdoch made it clear that he wouldn't want anyone to say anything bad about another friend, Supreme Court Justice, Clarence Thomas. Later that year, Fox Television dropped a television drama based on a book, Strange Justice, by (quell coincidence) two Wall Street Journal reporters that concluded that Anita Hill's allegations against Thomas were accurate. Once again, the News Corp. owner got his hands on the book, and demanded that the TV project be scrapped telling a colleague only that he was friends with Justice Thomas, and that Thomas had been "railroaded" in the court proceedings. And, Murdoch based his decision only on the book; he didn't bother to read the screenplay before stopping the teledrama dead in its tracks. Who cares about divine right of kings when we have divine right of publishers!

- snip -

It isn't just the war the press has gone to sleep on. Who's been busy running the farm when we've been out betting it? If Murdoch prevails in his bid for Dow Jones, he may not just buying the Wall Street Journal, but the 2008 presidential election, as well.

MORE

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canetoad Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed May-09-07 02:08 AM
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1. He is one expat we don't need back.
You're fighting him over there so that we don't have to fight him over here.

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Hissyspit Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed May-09-07 06:09 AM
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3. Well then you have to burn down that Fox Studios attraction in Sydney. n/t
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nadinbrzezinski Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed May-09-07 02:16 AM
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2. He was granted citizenship by an act of congress
let me share the road most of us take....

But he hates ilegals since they want a road to citizenship

We have a name for that: Irony
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seafan Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed May-09-07 08:28 AM
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4. Reagan expedited citizenship through Congress for Murdoch. All part of the big picture.
More on Murdoch's death grip on American media:





Murdoch entered the U.S. media market in the 1970s by purchasing newspapers and magazines, and he also started the supermarket tabloid, The Star. But it was not until the mid-1980s that Murdoch began to make his mark on American television. His purchase of Metromedia's independent television stations from John Kluge in 1985 came on the heels of his acquisition of the 20th Century-Fox studio. Murdoch saw the situation as a rare opportunity to purchase a group of choice television stations in the country's largest markets, thereby ensuring a distribution vehicle for his new studio's programs. The combined moves allowed Murdoch to initiate the most serious effort to establish a fourth broadcast television network since the demise of DuMont in the mid-1950s, and culminated in the establishment of the FOX Broadcasting Company.




As perhaps befits a man with such a great level of power and influence, Murdoch has often found himself at the center of political firestorms. He became widely scorned by labor organizations and pro-labor politicians around the world because of his hardline tactics in battling the British newspaper workers' unions in the mid-1980s. His 1985 purchase of the Metromedia television stations required him to become an American citizen to comply with Federal Communications Commission (FCC) restrictions on foreign ownership of U.S. television stations; many felt he received inordinately preferential treatment by the Reagan administration in expediting the citizenship process. His FOX television network was able to avoid complying with the FCC's Financial Interest and Syndication (FinSyn) rules, first, by airing fewer hours of programming than was required to define FOX as a "network," and later, by receiving a temporary FCC waiver of the rules--an action the other three broadcast networks vigorously opposed. Also, Murdoch was the specific target of a 1988 effort by Senator Edward Kennedy--at the time, a frequent target of Murdoch's Boston Herald newspaper--to revoke another FCC waiver, one that waived cross-ownership restrictions that would have prevented Murdoch from owning both newspapers and television stations in New York and Boston. The end result of Kennedy's efforts was that Murdoch eventually sold the New York Post (he later would receive a new waiver that allowed him to reacquire the struggling paper in 1993), and put Boston's WFXT-TV into an independent trust.



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Hissyspit Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed May-09-07 10:47 AM
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5. .
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