Wednesday November 12, 2014
Monstering, Murdoch Style
“But above all, the fear is generated by the people he [Rupert Murdoch] hires to work for him. ‘He loves thugs,’ as one of his senior executives puts it. Roger Ailes at Fox TV; Kelvin MacKenzie at the Sun; Col Allan at the New York Post; Sam Chisholm at Sky TV: they all came out of the same box, marked ‘bully’. And when Murdoch’s men bully, their victims really feel it. All these members of the power elite have seen what Murdoch’s news outlets can do ...
”They all saw what happened to the former Labour minister Clare Short. Several times she criticised the Sun’s use of topless women to sell the paper and found herself denounced to millions as ‘killjoy Clare … fat … jealous … ugly … Short on looks … Short on brains’. At various points, the paper offered readers free car stickers (‘Stop Crazy Clare’); sent half-naked women to her home; and ran a beauty contest to ask their readers whether they would prefer to see her face or the back of a bus. Separately, the News of the World ran two bogus stories suggesting she was involved with pornography; tried to buy old photographs of her as a twenty-year-old in a nightdress; and published a smear story which attempted to link her to a West Indian gangster ...“
-- from ”Hack Attack: The Inside Story of How the Truth Caught Up with Rupert Murdoch," by Nick Davies. This chapter on Rupert Murdoch is unsurprising but still awful.
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