By JEREMY PARAYRE

Consider Rupert Murdoch’s empire: According to Business Week, in early 2004, « his satellites deliver TV programs in five continents, all but dominating Britain, Italy, and wide swaths of Asia and the Middle East. He publishes 175 newspapers, including the New York Post and The Times of London. In the U.S., he owns the Twentieth Century Fox Studio, Fox Network, and 35 TV stations that reach more than 40% of the country…His cable channels include fast-growing Fox News, and 19 regional sports channels. In all, as many as one in five American homes at any given time will be tuned into a show News Corp. either produced or delivered. » It seems the 76 year-old Australian born media tycoon controls pretty much everything related to the world of media. This may be one of the reasons why he inspires hatred among the editorial world. But it is more his actions, his words, and his “flip flop” attitude that put him in the position of the “genocidal tyrant” he is known for.

Politicization of the media

In 2003, Rupert Murdoch told a congressional panel that his use of « political influence in our newspapers or television » is « nonsense. » However, his detractors felt the need to show that this is not the case and that Murdoch did and still does mix media and politics.

Just after the Iraq invasion, the New York Times reported, « The war has illuminated anew the exceptional power in the hands of Murdoch, 72, the chairman of News Corp… In the last several months, the editorial policies of almost all his English-language news organizations have hewn very closely to Murdoch’s own stridently hawkish political views, making his voice among the loudest in the Anglophone world in the international debate over the American-led war with Iraq. » The Guardian reported before the war that Murdoch gave « his full backing to war, praising George Bush as acting ‘morally’ and ‘correctly’ and describing Tony Blair as ‘full of guts’ » for his support of the war.

In the same way, in 1976, when he took over The New York Post from Dorothy Schiff, Murdoch assured all that “the political policies (of the Post) will stay unchanged.” Nowadays, the political affiliation of the Post is clear to everybody as the newspaper systematically backs conservative policies. The same went when Murdoch’s News Corp. bought the Wall Street Journal. The media mogul claimed that a “special committee” would maintain the newspaper’s “editorial independence” but then ignored it and removed editor Marcus Brauchli to install a new, more conservative one, Robert James Thomson, former editor of The Times.

In other words, critics accuse Rupert Murdoch of claiming to stay out of partisan politics while making his views quite clear and using his media empire to implement his wishes. A former News Corp. executive told Murdoch « hungered for the kind of influence in the United States that he had in England and Australia » and that meant « part of our political strategy (in the U.S.) was the New York Post and the creation of Fox News and the Weekly Standard (American neoconservative newspaper). » Fox News is another example. It has always promoted itself as a group that values “fair and balanced news” while constantly backing Republican candidates at election time. The most recent examples of political bias being the systematic criticism of Barack Obama’s policies and the hiring of Republican former vice-president candidate Sarah Palin as a contributor.

Murdoch the talker

But, probably, and above all, what gives Murdoch his “devil” image is his flip flop attitude, even in his political opinions, to serve his own (financial) interests, his opponents claim. The most convincing example being the switch operated by The Sun, backing the Tories, then Labour, to finally go back to a conservative support. An article published in The Guardian in October 2009 argues that the British tabloid is just “reflecting its readers’ preference.” It would imply that Murdoch is ready to drop his own beliefs to sell more, saying things and doing others.

As his detractors like to call him, ‘Rupert the talker’ is the one for instance who preaches about the importance of free speech and civil liberties while undermining them with his actions in China, for News Corp.’s sake. Recently, Rupert the talker has dominated the headlines with angry words about Google, Microsoft, Ask.com, and the BBC among others, accusing them of stealing his News Corp. newspaper content. Murdoch said in an interview on Sky News that his company could eventually remove its sites (including those of the Wall Street Journal, the Times of London, the U.K. Sun, the New York Post, News of the World et al.) from Google indexes once it starts charging for additional publications online.“The people who simply just pick up everything and run with it – steal our stories, we say they steal our stories – they just take them,” Murdoch reportedly said. “That’s Google, that’s Microsoft, that’s Ask.com, a whole lot of people … they shouldn’t have had it free all the time, and I think we’ve been asleep,” he said.

But Murdoch does not seem to have confidence in the wisdom of implementing universal pay walls. He has not built them, even though he has been threatening to do so for months. On the Google example, if Murdoch really wanted to withdraw his media sites from the search engine, he would have added to his sites the robots.txt file that prevents Google from adding them to its search database. Moreover, Murdoch said months ago that News Corp. would start charging for its newspapers by June 2010. Now he doubts that the company will hit that mark. Some experts say that, if it were in News Corp.’s economic interests to build an Internet wall around its newspaper properties, Murdoch would have already done it rather than talk about it. It appears that Rupert Murdoch may have threatened Google in order to put himself in a position of a “savior” of the press. But support from other newspapers failed to show. That could explain why he did not go further. If Murdoch withdrew his sites from the giant Google, his media properties would just fall in complete irrelevance as almost nobody would go to these sites and prefer other (free) ones. The best pay-wall candidate in the Murdoch portfolio is the Wall Street Journal, which already charges for access while allowing nonpaying visitors to view some of its content. “If Murdoch were to raise the Journal’s paywall all the way to block Google and Google News completely, it could lose 25 percent of its traffic,” Bill Tancer of Experian Hitwise wrote, and the move « could isolate the Journal from potential new online subscribers. »

Rupert Murdoch defended himself saying « quality journalism » is expensive and « an industry that gives away its content is simply cannibalizing its ability to produce good reporting. » But the reactions, probably not the ones he expected, soon blamed him. Newspapers around the world reminded that he was the one who cut the price of newspapers down in London and later tried to do the same in New York. His detractors also accused him of being willing to give away content when it serves his own financial interests: all of his terrestrial-broadcasting properties are free, that is to say advertising-supported just as the online versions of newspapers are.

And the controversy is likely to go on and on, as Murdoch is said to have plans to sign a deal with a search engine from the second tier, such as Microsoft’s Bing or Ask.com (which he accused, along with Google, of stealing his content), paying him big money for exclusive rights to display results from his newspapers’ sites.

No matter what he does, it seems that Rupert Murdoch is not done with the “devil” image he has in the editorial world.