By Michael P. Riccards

With the retirement of Rupert Murdoch, one of the worst abusers of the free press has given us a new breath of free air. No one individual has so debased the English-speaking press in this nation and in his native Australia, Great Britain and a score of other sites. 

His formula was clear. He took respectable papers like the Times of London, the New York Post and the Sun and turned them into flashy garbage bins aimed at stoking the animosities and hatreds and added them to create stories of interest interspersed with corn-fed voluptuous models and endless an stream of gossip. Then he even angered usually mild people, claiming that there was a plot to destroy Christmas.

In addition to his papers sludge, he acquired television networks and formed unholy alliances with the worst sorts of politicians. 

Murdoch sought not to encourage the best we have, he wanted no Gladstones or Franklin Roosevelts. He fed the masses what they wanted and where they were not angry enough, he would create false stories and false prophets.

More than any other man he was responsible for the constitutional crisis the United States is going through. He pushed Trump to the forefront and then walked away from him. 

I have often felt that Murdoch played a great role in debasing us because he didn’t share the American and British notions of fair play and decency. Maybe that has something to do with starting out in the media business in Australia. His loss of nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars to Dominion Voting is just a sign of how far the media has dropped from the Sullivan standards.

Why should the First Amendment protect such an abusive set of institutions? In any case, his absence is not a great loss but is hopefully a sign of a new a new generation that will respect elections and decency in the next Murdoch generation.

Michael P. Riccards, a former college president, is the author of 30 books, including a two-volume history of the presidency, The Ferocious Engine of Democracy, and the recently published Woodrow Wilson as Commander-in-Chief. Riccards wrote this article for the Jandoli Institute.

Categories: Jandoli Institute, Media, Michael Riccards, Politics