Few executives are as synonymous with their companies as Rupert Murdoch is with his. News Corp, he had said in the past, “for better or worse, is a reflection of my thinking, my character, my values”. Not only does he govern them by fiat, stacking boards with lackeys, consulting little further than his gut, he also has not much life outside the office.

His first real public appearance, after slipping and severely injuring his back on the deck of a yacht at the age of 86, was at the Trump White House’s inaugural state dinner in April, where he was one of the only civilian attendees. (Donald Trump speaks to Murdoch regularly, and calls him “Rupie”; according to Wolff, in return Murdoch thinks Trump is a “fucking idiot”.) Murdoch is close to Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and reportedly pressed him for an invitation. The same month Murdoch hosted a dinner for Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who was visiting the United States. Bin Salman is one of the world’s richest men – he began his tour by booking all 285 rooms at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills – and together he and Murdoch have a net worth roughly equivalent to the gross domestic product of Mongolia. They sparred lightly in a genteel Q&A session, where the sharia-mania of Murdoch’s media properties seemed a long way away, as did premonitions of demise.

In late June, it was announced that Disney had offered $US71.3 billion to buy most of Fox’s entertainment assets – beating Comcast’s previous bid of $US65 billion. In the months of Murdoch’s recuperation, his price had risen by $20 billion, and the bidding wouldn’t stop there.

Within the Murdoch companies, plans for his succession are made on the assumptions of something like immortality. “Don’t you know my dad’s never going to die?” his son Lachlan said once. When a Wall Street Journal editor asked his boss, Robert Thomson, about pre-preparing an obituary for Murdoch (a standard newspaper practice), he was told, “Rupert is not going to die.” “In the event he does?” the editor asked. “Rupert is not going to die,” he was told again. Murdoch had already survived prostate cancer 18 years ago, and a fall from a horse before that. Business-wise, he had shrugged off the UK phone-hacking scandal, the advent of the internet, attempts at regulation, private debt crises, delayed satellite launches. After five decades of writing him off, Murdoch watchers should have been more careful. “Murdoch is someone who seems to have been allowed to grow unchecked, like – you know, like some sort of monster in a science fiction movie, The Blob or something.”

“What does Rupert Murdoch want?” the now deceased Christopher Hitchens asked, 28 years ago. He was already part of the fourth decade of Murdoch observers, and the library trying to answer this question stretches and swells to the present day. Delving into it finds almost spooky continuities. Reading The Australian, I thought “vendetta journalism” seemed a concise, if obvious, description of the paper’s style.

The Murdoch epoch was also supposed to end, or at least begin to end, on July 19, 2011, the self-described “most humble day” of Murdoch’s life. The News man, called before the UK House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee, did his best impression of a human being, a bumbling, forelock-tugging old man with an Anglospheric mongrel accent. He was there to explain the apparent fact that he was running what one MP called a “criminal enterprise”: his newspapers were illegally hacking thousands of people’s phones, alongside bribing police officers and public servants…

Some journalists went to jail, Murdoch’s son James was forced to step down from News International, but the measures to further investigate widespread criminality on Fleet Street never materialised. A cross-party parliamentary committee determined Rupert Murdoch was “not a fit person to exercise the stewardship of a major international company”, but so what? It added to a pile of ineffectual establishment condemnation and naysaying. It was really language aimed at assisting the regulator, Ofcom, but that had never worked in the past either. The secretary for culture and media, Jeremy Hunt, had once been nicknamed “The Minister for Murdoch”.

Rupert Murdoch believes that the press is not as powerful as people think, that it follows the public, not the other way around, and that its influence is overstated. At least, this is his line when talking to a judge. “If these lies are repeated again and again they catch on,” he told Lord Leveson. “But they just aren’t true … We don’t have that sort of power.” He was referring to the power to swing elections. He has been careful to maintain this stance, at least most of the time. Privately he did tell Harold Evans that he was more powerful than the government.

…The words they use – mogul, empire, fiefdom, dynasty, properties – are the language of territorial, even imperial, power, although this transposition between the feudal realm and the financial realm is commonplace. Less common is the response others have to Murdoch. Other formidable people not only respect him but are also afraid of him. They note that his influence is transcontinental, ranging from Australia to the United Kingdom to the United States. It is more lasting than political power: during his career, he has enjoyed access to nine US presidents, nine British prime ministers and nine Australian prime ministers. It is not just his current power but his aggregate power over time that produces velocity.

Kevin Rudd’s former campaign manager Bruce Hawker wrote that News Corp is “easily the most powerful political force in Australia, bigger than the major parties or the combined weight of the unions … I saw how, on a daily basis, the storm of negative stories that emanated from News Corp papers blew our campaign off course.”

In the UK, Murdoch’s tabloids were at one time the most feared political force in the country. This is partly due to their concentration – they are national tabloids, not city-based – and also their supreme nastiness.

There is a temptation to play out counterfactuals and counter-histories. Would Margaret Thatcher have been PM without The Sun? Would the Iraq War have happened without Rupert Murdoch? For a man invested in a lot, he was unusually invested in this disgrace, and in the lead-up to invasion Tony Blair spoke with him almost as often as he spoke with his generals.

David Yelland, the former editor of The Sun, likened his boss’s mindset to a “prism” through which News editors saw the world. “Most Murdoch editors wake up in the morning, switch on the radio, hear that something has happened and think ‘what would Rupert think about this?’ It’s like a mantra inside your head,” he said.

Another Sun editor, the legendary Kelvin MacKenzie, himself was a tyrannical man – Murdoch affectionately called him “my little Hitler” – and along with Paul Dacre, the editor of the Daily Mail, he personified the ugly, hectoring soul of British tabloid journalism. ‘‘Look at you lot, eh?” began a typical MacKenzie pep talk. “Useless load of fuckers, aren’t you, eh? Right load of wankers, eh, eh?” Bullying was so endemic at News’s Wapping compound that The Sun once published a staff member’s phone extension in the paper, inviting readers to abuse him, under the headline “RING HIGGY THE HUMAN SPONGE, HE’LL SOAK IT UP”.

But Murdoch was the biggest bully of all. After a million-pound libel settlement to Elton John, MacKenzie was subjected to 42 minutes of non-stop abuse – “the bollocking of a lifetime”, he called it. Other times it would be more studied psychological disintegration: “You’re losing your touch, Kelvin. Your paper is pathetic. You’re losing your touch, Kelvin.” A favourite Murdoch tactic was silence over the phone, lengthy enough to induce the other person to crack, and over time MacKenzie would learn to keep shtum as well, locking the two in unspoken brinksmanship. Staff joked about the thousands of pounds spent conveying silence over the Atlantic.

“He has said he never interferes with his editors’ editorial decisions,” the correspondent Phillip Knightley said. “Absolutely true, because he is careful to choose editors whose views agree with his.” ..The editors are more “idiosyncratic” at The Australian than anywhere else. It has none of the prestige of The Times or the tradition of The Wall Street Journal, and a cousin-marriage ideological relationship with the Liberal Party. Apart from a handful of talents who might be spirited to the higher echelons of News itself, most Australian senior editorial staff find there is nowhere to go, no other paper to poach them, no organisation (apart from the Liberal Party again) keen for their talents. They are lifers, and express their gratitude with a loyalty that borders on the obsequious.

Did The Australian’s bizarre jihad against wind farms stem from Murdoch’s frequently voiced disdain for them? Hard to prove, and there is no special conspiracy required: the paper’s readers cling to the same topic, perhaps the only time they express concern for native birdlife. Christopher Hitchens wrote that when politicians said they were afraid of Rupert Murdoch what they were really saying was that they were afraid of his readers…

“You tell these bloody politicians whatever they want to hear,” he told his biographer Thomas Kiernan, “and once the deal is done you don’t worry about it. They’re not going to chase after you later if they suddenly decide what you said
 wasn’t
 what they wanted to hear.

He is more patient than politicians, and more cunning. There is something about Murdoch’s insistency that seems to change the conduits of time: he forgives no transgression, while his transgressions are forgiven. Politicians manage to persuade themselves they can use him to their benefit, but find out the hard way who is in charge. Kevin Rudd was so poorly treated by Murdoch’s Australian newspapers that in a recent interview with The Saturday Paper he called News Corp a “cancer” on democracy and suggested it should be the subject of a royal commission……

What unites Murdoch’s “crassmanship” and his business sense is an eye for human weakness. When Murdoch bought the News of the World, for example, he realised that its establishment owners would be reluctant to sell to his competitor, Robert Maxwell, because he was Jewish. Murdoch drank tea from a china set to impress them, and ordered some uncharacteristic champagne. This pantomime display of gentlemanly manners made them sign an agreement they shouldn’t have, and he quickly undermined them.

“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, using their stories in the same way muggers in back alleys use their boots, to kick a victim to pulp. “Monstering”, they call it – a savage and prolonged public attack on a target’s life, often aimed at the most private and sensitive part of their existence, their sexual behaviour, inflicting maximum pain, maximum humiliation.

Perhaps Murdoch’s key innovation as a media proprietor has been permanently welding right-wing politics to sexual prurience. This moral deregulation dates all the way back to The Sun – a “tear-away paper with a lot of tit in it” was his blueprint – where he recognised that a conservative periodical printing Page 3 girls and simultaneously complaining about filth on TV wasn’t a problem but a plus. Breaking this ground didn’t stop him getting a papal knighthood (for those of “blameless character”) years later. This tabloid hypocrisy is now uniform and often noted – if you want to experience its most repellent exemplar, search the paedophilia-obsessed Daily Mail website for the phrase “all grown up” – but Murdoch was the person who cemented it, if not invented it.

This investiture in hypocritical sex immediately captures an audience in an act of exclusion, even collusion. Kelvin MacKenzie once barked at one of his staff, “You just don’t understand the readers, do you, eh? He’s the bloke you see in a pub – a right old fascist, wants to send the wogs back, buy his poxy council house, he’s afraid of the unions, afraid of the Russians, hates the queers, weirdos and drug dealers. He doesn’t want to hear about that stuff .” He is also, it goes without saying, the kind of bloke who is interested in tits and doesn’t mind bandying this interest about in the course of his chronic low-level harassment, under the guise of a “bit of banter”. Media products are also conditioning tools, and Murdoch recognised the potent multiplier effect of feeding xenophobia to a reader with a hard-on.

His targets internationally are the same: nefarious, cosmopolitan and multicultural “elites”.

After the News Corp Australia columnist Andrew Bolt was prosecuted under section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, The Australian mentioned the legislation more than a hundred thousand times in a campaign to have it scrapped…

As Benjamin Law itemised in his Quarterly Essay Moral Panic 101, The Australian’s obsession with the Safe Schools sex-education story ran to 90,000 words across almost 200 stories, an average of a story every two days. The Australian responded to this critique with multiple articles critical of Law.

This monomania extends to the other people The Australian pursues most fanatically as well. Julie Posetti, Yassmin Abdel-Magied, Emma Alberici, Larissa Behrendt, Gillian Triggs… It is not an accident that this treatment centres on women, and The Australian’s commenters, many of whom apparently go on to troll the targets on social media, take a pleasure in the treatment that borders on the masturbatory. This is the Murdoch version of “something decent”.

“The Murdoch-ization of America has never felt so irreversible,” Jonathan Mahler wrote in 2005, in a prescient piece that described how Rupert Murdoch had changed New York City. “On the ashes of the social-democratic city, he built a capitalist utopia where corporate lawyers live in the Soho lofts once occupied by garment workers; where Trump and Diller have replaced Shanker and Gotbaum as icons; where the mayor isn’t just a Republican, he’s a billionaire.” That process has now been repeated across the world, with Donald Trump playing a role grander than even Rupert Murdoch could hope for. Still, Murdoch can hardly complain. Both men share the trait of underestimating the intelligence of the general public, and not going broke…

https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2018/july/1530367200/richard-cooke/endless-reign-rupert-murdoch

eith Rupert Murdoch, born 1931, supported the English Labour Party in 1951. If that meant he wanted to make the world a better place, it lasted for nine years; in 1960 he began to use politicians to make the world a better place for him; editors, however great, were expendable.

The catalysts were Rupert Max Stuart, c.1931-2014, an aboriginal who spoke pidgin Aranda-English, and a corrupt politician, Tom Playford (1896-1981). Playford was Premier of South Australia 1938-65 via a ruthless gerrymander: a vote in the bush was worth two in the city.

There is evidence that Stuart did not leave his darts stall at the Funland Carnival in Ceduna between 2 pm and 4 pm on Saturday 20 December 1958.

It follows that Stuart could not have been three kilometres away between 2.30 pm and 3.30 pm, when Mary Hattam, 9, was raped and murdered in a cave near Thevenard.

The carnival moved east next morning; Stuart stayed in Ceduna and got a job at the Wheat Board. Police, a prosecutor and judges then engaged in a series of travesties of justice.

An Adelaide detective, Sergeant Paul Turner, travelled 775 kilometres west to Ceduna to investigate. Fearing for his life, Stuart signed a “confession” about midnight on Monday, 22 December.

Words such as “The show was situated at the Ceduna Oval” are hardly pidgin, but Turner and five other police later swore that Stuart dictated the confession “word for word.”

Stuart’s trial began on 20 April 1959. Police, prosecutor Roderic Chamberlain, and Stuart’s legal aid lawyer, David O’Sullivan, did not get evidence from the Funland people.

The trial judge, Geoffrey Reed, improperly let Chamberlain improperly tell the jury that Stuart’s refusal to give evidence showed he was guilty. The jury convicted Stuart on 24 April; Reed sentenced him to be hanged 28 days later, on 22 May. (Appeal courts are wrong nearly half the time; they were wrong in 100% of Stuart’s appeals.) .

Fr Tom Dixon MSC had worked in the Aranda country in central Australia and was to stay with Stuart on the night before the execution. Dixon read the “confession” and realised it was a concoction. He got a second opinion from Professor T.G. H. (Ted) Strehlow, an authority on the Aranda language.

Strehlow swore an affidavit on 18 May, 1959 that Stuart could not have dictated the “confession”. That led to another appeal. (At one of the appeals, Chief Justice Sir Mellis Napier said it was “utter rubbish” to say police would intimidate a suspect.)

Inglis wrote: “Stuart would almost certainly have been hanged on August 4 had Farrell not gone to Adelaide .”

Farrell told Dixon he should appeal to the court of public opinion. Dixon approached Rohan Rivett, editor of The News, an organ left to Murdoch by his father in 1952. Rivett bankrolled Dixon’s search for the carnival people.

Dixon set off with a News reporter, Jack Clark, on 25 July 1959. They found the Carnival people at Atherton in north Queensland. Proprietor Norman Gieseman told Dixon he didn’t think he could help; all he knew was that Stuart had confessed. Unprompted, he said “the only time we saw him was from two to four” that day.

Gieseman, his wife Edna and Betty Hopes made statutory declarations to that effect. Hopes had been on the skittles in the same tent with Stuart. She said: “Max did not leave the stall all the time and he was in full view of me.”

Forced to hold a Royal Commission, Playford improperly invited Reed and Napier to sit on the inquiry, and they improperly accepted. The fix was in; denunciations of the appointments came from the President of the Bar Association of India, former UK Prime Minister Clem Atlee, and famed English jurist Lord (Norman) Birkett.

The Commissioners sat briefly on 10 August 1959 and adjourned. A Bill to abolish capital punishment was introduced by a Labor politician, Don Dunstan, on 12 August.

A Royal Commission, properly conducted, tries to find the truth, and hence is supposed to dispense with the adversary system’s six rules which conceal evidence. Historian Ken Inglis noted in The Stuart Case (1961) that in general Napier et al “did adhere to the rules”.

The inquiry resumed on 17 August 1959. Stuart’s counsel, Jack Shand, of Sydney, walked out three days later. Murdoch, who had been a sub-editor at The Daily Express, wrote an accurate splash in The News:

Mr Shand, Q.C., indicts Sir Mellis Napier
‘THESE COMMISSIONERS CANNOT DO THE JOB’

Continuing local and international outrage forced Playford to commute Stuart’s sentence to life in prison on 5 October 1959.

The Commissioners reported on 3 December 1959. Wrong again, they said the verdict against Stuart was wholly justified, and there was no need for a new trial. Result: the evidence of the Giesemans and Betty Hopes was never put to a jury.

On 19 January1960, Playford laid a number of absurd criminal charges against News Ltd and Rivett. One, seditious libel, was next door to treason; the judge had a discretion to imprison those found guilty for an unlimited period.

The libel trial began in March 1960 and ran for 10 days. The jury threw out all charges except one. Playford and Murdoch eventually made a deal: Playford would drop the last charge if the News stopped going on about Stuart. The go-between was a News political reporter, Ken May.

The last libel charge was withdrawn on 6 June 1960. That seems to have been Murdoch’s watershed: politicians could be used to his advantage. He dismissed Rivett later that month; I don’t know whether that was part of the deal.

Max Stuart was forgotten. No one visited him until 1968, but he was cheerful and intelligent; he learned how to speak and write English, play the guitar, and paint watercolours.

• * *

Murdoch bought newspapers from 1956. Some made money; some didn’t, e.g. Australian Fashion News, He bought it for $25,000, about $186,000 today, but it had few advertisements.

The giant brain of Noela Whitton, as she later became, devised a way to encourage Flinders Lane rag traders to take enough ads to enable Murdoch to sell AFN for $75,000, about $558,000 today.

Murdoch started a Monday-Saturday paper, The Australian, on 14 July 1964. It was costly to fly batches round the country in aeroplanes; to make him some money, he sent a Fleet Street genius, Stanley Cecil (Sol) Chandler (1911-68), to Melbourne Truth late in 1965. Noela had a hand in getting me a job at Truth in January 1966.

Chandler’s formula for Truth was an ultra-hard spine of fact, all the insignificant details he could get, and an outer wrapping of sex, but the circulation did not rise.

Sol said: “You can’t beat sex in high places.” In June 1966, reporter Dave Stephens had a piece about two society ladies who left their husbands and went off to breed bulls. The ladies gave the bulls nice names.

In the next eight months, Sol did something possibly unparalleled since Defoe invented modern journalism on 10 February 1704: he increased Truth’s circulation from 220,000 to 400,000. A television reporter asked him if was ashamed of the role played by sex. He replied: “I understand it’s here to stay.”

Chandler said: “The oldest rule of journalism, and the most forgotten, is to tell the customers what is really going on.” Truth was thus unique in Melbourne; the Age, the Sun and the Herald even refused to report what happened at the hanging of Ronald Ryan. That left it to Truth (and me); see netk.net/Whitton/Amazing19.

• * *
  Truth got a Walkley Award for National Journalism for my 1967 series, Life on the Pension, and should have got another for Richard L’Estrange’s May 1967 report on the cover-up, by Prime Minister Bob Menzies, of how a drunk captain of the Voyager, Duncan Stevens, turned the wrong way and killed himself and 81 of his sailors in a collision with the Melbourne. An organ which can do what L’Estrange did has no reason to apologise to anyone for anything.

When Harold Holt disappeared in December 1967, Sol revealed that the new Prime Minister, John Gorton, was a thief: he and his wife had held a board meeting to cut his late father’s mistress out of his will. Murdoch dismissed Sol. Eight months later, Murdoch got Gorton’s permission to take money, including the profits of Truth, out of Australia to buy The News of the World.

(Forty-three years later, News of the World employees were found to have bribed police and hacked telephones. Advertising was seriously affected; Murdoch closed The News of the World on 7 July 2011. A UK parliamentary select committee reported on 1 May 2012 that Murdoch “exhibited wilful blindness to what was going on in his companies and publications” and was “not a fit person to exercise the stewardship of a major international company”.)

In 1968, Miss Penny, an elderly English lady whose real name was Isabel Roads, became the first person to visit Max Stuart in Yatala prison.

In 1969, Murdoch told the editor-in-chief of his Australian papers, Neal Travis (1940-2002) to tell Truth to stop writing about abortion. Travis, who was editor of Truth after Chandler, did not pass the message on; he knew we had our sights on police who extorted bribes from abortionists, backyard and front.

Truth got another Walkley Award for my December 1969 report, WE PAID OFF THE COPS. (See netk.net.au/Whiton/Amazing18.asp.) Detectives Jack Matthews, Jack Ford, and Marty Jacobsen went to prison. In a later speech, Murdoch said the report showed the value of tabloid journalism.

Roderic Chamberlain became Chairman of the Parole Board in 1970. He made it clear that Max Stuart would never get parole.

I was sent from Truth to Murdoch’s short-lived Sydney organ, The Sunday Australian, in I971. Another reporter, Don Hogg, gave me Inglis’s The Stuart Case. After 12 years, another inquiry seemed overdue, but the editors were not interested.

I took leave and drove with Noela to Adelaide in January 1972. Hugh Hudson, Minister for Education in Don Dunstan’s Labor Government, arranged for us to have the first-ever interview with Stuart.

Noela, who later wrote for The New York Times, had lots of empathy; I asked her to conduct the interview. This from Tom Dixon’s The Wizard of Alice (1987):

briefed her : “This is a most violent man. He king-hit a bloke the other day and he threatened to kill another bloke. We are dealing with a violent man; I wouldn’t let him near a woman.” … She signed the visitors’ book, passed through C Division into another area where she saw a “cage” and “twenty sharp-eyed men looked at her “with surprise”. She entered cubicle number two. She found it hard to communicate across the thick wall of glass with the “shy black man, silent like the caged ones, cap in hand waiting for some sign from her”. So she stood up and put her face up to the glass close to his and talked with him for about an hour. Their voices were heard through the grill above their heads. After some introductory chatter about “Bergoo, the gluey porridge, they talked about Edna Gieseman, about sister with the five kids who had not written to him for nine years, his mother and father and Miss Penny. Then Noela got down to the nitty-gritty of her real reasons for coming. “Did you kill that little girl, Mary Hattam.” “Nuh but I got a rough idea who did.” “… How did you feel when you were going to be hanged.” “Scared. I just scared all the time.” “ … Did you ever tell anyone that you did kill Mary Hattam?” “No.” “I heard a story you told some warders in Adelaide?” “I never told any warders in Adelaide. I never told anyone.” “Do you think about God, that he will help you?” “Bit hard to say if he’ll help me.” “Do you have any message for anyone?” “You can tell Mr Strehlow I am thinking of him. He was my friend. My grandfather nearly brought him up. And Father Dixon, you can tell him the same …” Noela considered Stuart to be the great survivor. “That’s the incredible thing about Max. There aren’t many men who survive the hangman seven times and now he’s survived within the prison system.” She found him gentle and intelligent and with a delightful sense of humour. She rang me on her return to Sydney and then paid me a visit to pass on Stuart’s message, telling me how impressed she was with the man, especially his “capacity to survive unmarked by prison life, his sense of joy and interior balance”.

• * *

Noela and I interviewed Strehlow and others. My mistake was not to speak to Chamberlain; had I done so, Stuart might have been released sooner.

When I rang Playford, he asked me to ask Ken May, now Murdoch’s chairman in Sydney, to give him a call.

Noela and I came back via Melbourne and looked up our Truth chums, Richard L’Estrange and editor Don Busmer. They said if The Sunday Australian was not interested in something on Stuart, they were.

Back in Sydney in January 1972, I told Ken May that Playford wanted a call. May told The Sunday Australian editor, Bruce Rothwell, to publish nothing from me about Stuart. Rothwell told me this but, perhaps on May’s instructions, also told me to put in a bill for expenses, which I calculated to be $306. L’Estrange told me that Busmer was also instructed not to print anything from me on Stuart.

That left it up to Noela. She first contacted Tom Farrell, now in management at The Sydney Morning Herald, but he was cautious about taking something from someone who was not a regular newspaper reporter. Noela then tried an acquaintance, Frank Devine, at Reader’s Digest. He told her to try again when she got Stuart out of prison.

Finally, in August 1972, Noela got her account of the case and her interview with Stuart published in The Digger, an alternative journal run by Phillip Frazer, Bruce Hanford and others. The title honoured Murdoch; he was called The Dirty Digger in England.

Noela sent Max Stuart half her fee from The Digger. He asked Miss Penny to use the money to have a medal inscribed Noela on one side and Max on the other.

The Digger’s circulation was minuscule, but Noela arranged for her report to be put on the News Editor’s desk at every major Australian newspaper. As an exercise, the Melbourne Herald sent two cadets, Jenni Brown and Pam Graham, to Adelaide to see what they could learn about the Stuart case.

The girls interviewed Roderic Chamberlain. He told them: “I would have pulled the lever myself. He is nothing but an animal.” The Herald was not quick, but it got there. When it finally published Chamberlain’s words in April 1973, he was forced to absent himself from the Parole Board’s hearing of Stuart’s case.

That enabled the Dunstan government to parole Stuart in October 1973. He wrote to Miss Penny: “A very big thanks to God and to NW. I thank her and her old man for what they did for me.”

Police continued to harass Stuart. For several years he was in and out of Yatala, but he blossomed in 1985 when Senator (as he now is) Patrick Dodson, chairman of the Central Land Council, gave him a job in Alice Springs.

Max Stuart passed on the wide knowledge of Aboriginal law and tradition he had received from his grandfather; became an Arrernte elder ( HERE ) ; and was active in Aboriginal affairs, including the Lhere Artepe native title organisation..

As chairman of the Central Land Council 1998-2001, Stuart formally welcomed Her Majesty to Alice Springs in 2000 and made her a presentation. He was cultural director of the Yeperenye Federation Festival in 2001. He died on 21 November 2014.

Footnotes:

Murdoch’s marriage to Wendy Deng is said to have eventually cost him US$3billion. Our 1984 wedding in the Australian Embassy in Paris cost rather less. Gough Whitlam, Ambassador to UNESCO, picked us up in the Embassy Roller. Noela asked the great man if he spoke French. He said: “Un peu.” The Ambassador to France, Peter Curtis, performed the ceremony and supplied the bubbly. Whitlam was best man; Margaret Whitlam Matron of Honour. The eight of us went to a restaurant near Notre Dame, La Tour d’Argent, where the numbered pressed duck is almost obligatory. The bill, about AU$500, was all the wedding cost us. If Tom Playford was corrupt, Donald Trump is said to be barking mad. Does a fox bark? Murdoch endorsed Trump as next President in April 2016. That raised a question: How will Donnie make the world a better place for Rupie?

https://tasmaniantimes.com/2016/06/rupert-murdoch-our-part-in-his-evil-upfall/

It is a shame that anybody purchased his publications.

roughbarked said:

It is a shame that anybody purchased his publications.

There is only one daily in Hobart. And I would like to occasionally get some local news. Truth is that not only is it a Rupert rag but it also doesn’t report local news. The news is prepared in Adelaide and Hobart is run on a skeleton crew.

Also as one of my insiders tells me. Rupert won’t allow the printing of local stories unless it means money. The news should be outrageous or the someone should be paying advertising costs.

roughbarked said:

It is a shame that anybody purchased his publications.

Plus he was the villain in Tomorrow Never Dies

Cymek said:

roughbarked said:

It is a shame that anybody purchased his publications.

Plus he was the villain in Tomorrow Never Dies

Except that guy was techsavvy. I think RM is a bit techphobic these days because he needs people to use Foxtel and buy his damn papers.

dv said:

Cymek said:

roughbarked said:

It is a shame that anybody purchased his publications.

Plus he was the villain in Tomorrow Never Dies

Except that guy was techsavvy. I think RM is a bit techphobic these days because he needs people to use Foxtel and buy his damn papers.

I wonder if he hold on information has been weakened since the Internet, much harder to control if not impossible all those alternate viewpoints

News International phone hacking scandal

News International phone hacking scandal

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_International_phone_hacking_scandal

The News International phone-hacking scandal was a controversy involving the now defunct News of the World and other British newspapers published by News International, a subsidiary of News Corporation. Employees of the newspaper were accused of engaging in phone hacking, police bribery, and exercising improper influence in the pursuit of stories. Whilst investigations conducted from 2005 to 2007 appeared to show that the paper’s phone hacking activities were limited to celebrities, politicians, and members of the British Royal Family, in July 2011 it was revealed that the phones of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler, relatives of deceased British soldiers, and victims of the 7 July 2005 London bombings had also been hacked. The resulting public outcry against News Corporation and its owner Rupert Murdoch led to several high-profile resignations, including that of Murdoch as News Corporation director, Murdoch’s son James as executive chairman, Dow Jones chief executive Les Hinton, News International legal manager Tom Crone, and chief executive Rebekah Brooks. The commissioner of London’s Metropolitan Police Service (MPS), Sir Paul Stephenson, also resigned. Advertiser boycotts led to the closure of the News of the World on 10 July 2011, after 168 years of publication. Public pressure shortly forced News Corporation to cancel its proposed takeover of the British satellite broadcaster BSkyB.

The prime minister David Cameron announced on 6 July 2011 that a public inquiry, known as the Leveson Inquiry, would look into phone hacking and police bribery by the News of the World, consider the wider culture and ethics of the British newspaper industry and that the Press Complaints Commission would be replaced “entirely”. A number of arrests and convictions followed, most notably of the former News of the World managing editor Andy Coulson.

Murdoch and his son, James, were summoned to give evidence at the Leveson Inquiry. Over the course of his testimony, Rupert Murdoch admitted that a cover-up had taken place within the News of the World to hide the scope of the phone hacking. On 1 May 2012, a parliamentary select committee report concluded that Murdoch “exhibited wilful blindness to what was going on in his companies and publications” and stated that he was “not a fit person to exercise the stewardship of a major international company”. On 3 July 2013, Channel 4 News broadcast a secret tape in which Murdoch dismissively claims that investigators were “totally incompetent” and acted over “next to nothing” and excuses his papers’ actions as “part of the culture of Fleet Street”.

more…

List of assets owned by News Corp

Tau.Neutrino said:

List of assets owned by News Corp

At least he’s mortal and will die one day

Cymek said:

Tau.Neutrino said:

List of assets owned by News Corp

At least he’s mortal and will die one day

ref

Tau.Neutrino said:

List of assets owned by News Corp

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genie_Energy

dv said:

Cymek said:

Tau.Neutrino said:

List of assets owned by News Corp

At least he’s mortal and will die one day

ref

Did you ever hear the tragedy of Darth Plageius the wise?

Cymek said:

Tau.Neutrino said:

List of assets owned by News Corp

At least he’s mortal and will die one day

During Lachlan’s time in Australia he also established some of his own political connections. Said to be even more conservative than his father, Lachlan gravitated to that side of politics. His wife, Sarah, launched Tony Abbott’s autobiography, Battlelines, in 2009. When Abbott’s prime ministerial career came to an abrupt end in 2015, Lachlan was among the 20 close friends (almost half of them were from News Corp) who honoured him at the Australia Club in Sydney.

Over the past month the Australian has taken up the cudgels in defence of the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation, a project that includes Abbott and John Howard on its board.

According to the Australian’s former editor Chris Mitchell, Lachlan is politically further to the right than Abbott.

In his autobiography Making Headlines, he recounts that Lachlan backed the execution of two of the Bali Nine on drug trafficking charges, and he had seen Abbott’s compassion as misplaced.

“As with his views on gun control in the United States, Lachlan’s conservatism is more vigorous than that of any Australian politician, Abbott included, and usually to the right of his father’s views,” he wrote.

Like his father, Lachlan is said to be a climate change sceptic, though there is little he has said publicly on the subject.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/sep/24/the-lachlan-ascendancy-is-news-corp-heading-for-a-cultural-change

Ian said:

Cymek said:

Tau.Neutrino said:

List of assets owned by News Corp

At least he’s mortal and will die one day

During Lachlan’s time in Australia he also established some of his own political connections. Said to be even more conservative than his father, Lachlan gravitated to that side of politics. His wife, Sarah, launched Tony Abbott’s autobiography, Battlelines, in 2009. When Abbott’s prime ministerial career came to an abrupt end in 2015, Lachlan was among the 20 close friends (almost half of them were from News Corp) who honoured him at the Australia Club in Sydney.

Over the past month the Australian has taken up the cudgels in defence of the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation, a project that includes Abbott and John Howard on its board.

According to the Australian’s former editor Chris Mitchell, Lachlan is politically further to the right than Abbott.

In his autobiography Making Headlines, he recounts that Lachlan backed the execution of two of the Bali Nine on drug trafficking charges, and he had seen Abbott’s compassion as misplaced.

“As with his views on gun control in the United States, Lachlan’s conservatism is more vigorous than that of any Australian politician, Abbott included, and usually to the right of his father’s views,” he wrote.

Like his father, Lachlan is said to be a climate change sceptic, though there is little he has said publicly on the subject.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/sep/24/the-lachlan-ascendancy-is-news-corp-heading-for-a-cultural-change

The Conservatives handbook, must have a section, no original thought, act spineless, step on the poor and downtrodden

Ian said:

Few executives are as synonymous with their companies as Rupert Murdoch is with his. News Corp, he had said in the past, “for better or worse, is a reflection of my thinking, my character, my values”. Not only does he govern them by fiat, stacking boards with lackeys, consulting little further than his gut, he also has not much life outside the office.

His first real public appearance, after slipping and severely injuring his back on the deck of a yacht at the age of 86, was at the Trump White House’s inaugural state dinner in April, where he was one of the only civilian attendees. (Donald Trump speaks to Murdoch regularly, and calls him “Rupie”; according to Wolff, in return Murdoch thinks Trump is a “fucking idiot”.) Murdoch is close to Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and reportedly pressed him for an invitation. The same month Murdoch hosted a dinner for Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who was visiting the United States. Bin Salman is one of the world’s richest men – he began his tour by booking all 285 rooms at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills – and together he and Murdoch have a net worth roughly equivalent to the gross domestic product of Mongolia. They sparred lightly in a genteel Q&A session, where the sharia-mania of Murdoch’s media properties seemed a long way away, as did premonitions of demise.

In late June, it was announced that Disney had offered $US71.3 billion to buy most of Fox’s entertainment assets – beating Comcast’s previous bid of $US65 billion. In the months of Murdoch’s recuperation, his price had risen by $20 billion, and the bidding wouldn’t stop there.

Within the Murdoch companies, plans for his succession are made on the assumptions of something like immortality. “Don’t you know my dad’s never going to die?” his son Lachlan said once. When a Wall Street Journal editor asked his boss, Robert Thomson, about pre-preparing an obituary for Murdoch (a standard newspaper practice), he was told, “Rupert is not going to die.” “In the event he does?” the editor asked. “Rupert is not going to die,” he was told again. Murdoch had already survived prostate cancer 18 years ago, and a fall from a horse before that. Business-wise, he had shrugged off the UK phone-hacking scandal, the advent of the internet, attempts at regulation, private debt crises, delayed satellite launches. After five decades of writing him off, Murdoch watchers should have been more careful. “Murdoch is someone who seems to have been allowed to grow unchecked, like – you know, like some sort of monster in a science fiction movie, The Blob or something.”

“What does Rupert Murdoch want?” the now deceased Christopher Hitchens asked, 28 years ago. He was already part of the fourth decade of Murdoch observers, and the library trying to answer this question stretches and swells to the present day. Delving into it finds almost spooky continuities. Reading The Australian, I thought “vendetta journalism” seemed a concise, if obvious, description of the paper’s style.

The Murdoch epoch was also supposed to end, or at least begin to end, on July 19, 2011, the self-described “most humble day” of Murdoch’s life. The News man, called before the UK House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee, did his best impression of a human being, a bumbling, forelock-tugging old man with an Anglospheric mongrel accent. He was there to explain the apparent fact that he was running what one MP called a “criminal enterprise”: his newspapers were illegally hacking thousands of people’s phones, alongside bribing police officers and public servants…

Some journalists went to jail, Murdoch’s son James was forced to step down from News International, but the measures to further investigate widespread criminality on Fleet Street never materialised. A cross-party parliamentary committee determined Rupert Murdoch was “not a fit person to exercise the stewardship of a major international company”, but so what? It added to a pile of ineffectual establishment condemnation and naysaying. It was really language aimed at assisting the regulator, Ofcom, but that had never worked in the past either. The secretary for culture and media, Jeremy Hunt, had once been nicknamed “The Minister for Murdoch”.

Rupert Murdoch believes that the press is not as powerful as people think, that it follows the public, not the other way around, and that its influence is overstated. At least, this is his line when talking to a judge. “If these lies are repeated again and again they catch on,” he told Lord Leveson. “But they just aren’t true … We don’t have that sort of power.” He was referring to the power to swing elections. He has been careful to maintain this stance, at least most of the time. Privately he did tell Harold Evans that he was more powerful than the government.

…The words they use – mogul, empire, fiefdom, dynasty, properties – are the language of territorial, even imperial, power, although this transposition between the feudal realm and the financial realm is commonplace. Less common is the response others have to Murdoch. Other formidable people not only respect him but are also afraid of him. They note that his influence is transcontinental, ranging from Australia to the United Kingdom to the United States. It is more lasting than political power: during his career, he has enjoyed access to nine US presidents, nine British prime ministers and nine Australian prime ministers. It is not just his current power but his aggregate power over time that produces velocity.

Kevin Rudd’s former campaign manager Bruce Hawker wrote that News Corp is “easily the most powerful political force in Australia, bigger than the major parties or the combined weight of the unions … I saw how, on a daily basis, the storm of negative stories that emanated from News Corp papers blew our campaign off course.”

In the UK, Murdoch’s tabloids were at one time the most feared political force in the country. This is partly due to their concentration – they are national tabloids, not city-based – and also their supreme nastiness.

There is a temptation to play out counterfactuals and counter-histories. Would Margaret Thatcher have been PM without The Sun? Would the Iraq War have happened without Rupert Murdoch? For a man invested in a lot, he was unusually invested in this disgrace, and in the lead-up to invasion Tony Blair spoke with him almost as often as he spoke with his generals.

David Yelland, the former editor of The Sun, likened his boss’s mindset to a “prism” through which News editors saw the world. “Most Murdoch editors wake up in the morning, switch on the radio, hear that something has happened and think ‘what would Rupert think about this?’ It’s like a mantra inside your head,” he said.

Another Sun editor, the legendary Kelvin MacKenzie, himself was a tyrannical man – Murdoch affectionately called him “my little Hitler” – and along with Paul Dacre, the editor of the Daily Mail, he personified the ugly, hectoring soul of British tabloid journalism. ‘‘Look at you lot, eh?” began a typical MacKenzie pep talk. “Useless load of fuckers, aren’t you, eh? Right load of wankers, eh, eh?” Bullying was so endemic at News’s Wapping compound that The Sun once published a staff member’s phone extension in the paper, inviting readers to abuse him, under the headline “RING HIGGY THE HUMAN SPONGE, HE’LL SOAK IT UP”.

But Murdoch was the biggest bully of all. After a million-pound libel settlement to Elton John, MacKenzie was subjected to 42 minutes of non-stop abuse – “the bollocking of a lifetime”, he called it. Other times it would be more studied psychological disintegration: “You’re losing your touch, Kelvin. Your paper is pathetic. You’re losing your touch, Kelvin.” A favourite Murdoch tactic was silence over the phone, lengthy enough to induce the other person to crack, and over time MacKenzie would learn to keep shtum as well, locking the two in unspoken brinksmanship. Staff joked about the thousands of pounds spent conveying silence over the Atlantic.

“He has said he never interferes with his editors’ editorial decisions,” the correspondent Phillip Knightley said. “Absolutely true, because he is careful to choose editors whose views agree with his.” ..The editors are more “idiosyncratic” at The Australian than anywhere else. It has none of the prestige of The Times or the tradition of The Wall Street Journal, and a cousin-marriage ideological relationship with the Liberal Party. Apart from a handful of talents who might be spirited to the higher echelons of News itself, most Australian senior editorial staff find there is nowhere to go, no other paper to poach them, no organisation (apart from the Liberal Party again) keen for their talents. They are lifers, and express their gratitude with a loyalty that borders on the obsequious.

Did The Australian’s bizarre jihad against wind farms stem from Murdoch’s frequently voiced disdain for them? Hard to prove, and there is no special conspiracy required: the paper’s readers cling to the same topic, perhaps the only time they express concern for native birdlife. Christopher Hitchens wrote that when politicians said they were afraid of Rupert Murdoch what they were really saying was that they were afraid of his readers…

“You tell these bloody politicians whatever they want to hear,” he told his biographer Thomas Kiernan, “and once the deal is done you don’t worry about it. They’re not going to chase after you later if they suddenly decide what you said
 wasn’t
 what they wanted to hear.

He is more patient than politicians, and more cunning. There is something about Murdoch’s insistency that seems to change the conduits of time: he forgives no transgression, while his transgressions are forgiven. Politicians manage to persuade themselves they can use him to their benefit, but find out the hard way who is in charge. Kevin Rudd was so poorly treated by Murdoch’s Australian newspapers that in a recent interview with The Saturday Paper he called News Corp a “cancer” on democracy and suggested it should be the subject of a royal commission……

What unites Murdoch’s “crassmanship” and his business sense is an eye for human weakness. When Murdoch bought the News of the World, for example, he realised that its establishment owners would be reluctant to sell to his competitor, Robert Maxwell, because he was Jewish. Murdoch drank tea from a china set to impress them, and ordered some uncharacteristic champagne. This pantomime display of gentlemanly manners made them sign an agreement they shouldn’t have, and he quickly undermined them.

“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, using their stories in the same way muggers in back alleys use their boots, to kick a victim to pulp. “Monstering”, they call it – a savage and prolonged public attack on a target’s life, often aimed at the most private and sensitive part of their existence, their sexual behaviour, inflicting maximum pain, maximum humiliation.

Perhaps Murdoch’s key innovation as a media proprietor has been permanently welding right-wing politics to sexual prurience. This moral deregulation dates all the way back to The Sun – a “tear-away paper with a lot of tit in it” was his blueprint – where he recognised that a conservative periodical printing Page 3 girls and simultaneously complaining about filth on TV wasn’t a problem but a plus. Breaking this ground didn’t stop him getting a papal knighthood (for those of “blameless character”) years later. This tabloid hypocrisy is now uniform and often noted – if you want to experience its most repellent exemplar, search the paedophilia-obsessed Daily Mail website for the phrase “all grown up” – but Murdoch was the person who cemented it, if not invented it.

This investiture in hypocritical sex immediately captures an audience in an act of exclusion, even collusion. Kelvin MacKenzie once barked at one of his staff, “You just don’t understand the readers, do you, eh? He’s the bloke you see in a pub – a right old fascist, wants to send the wogs back, buy his poxy council house, he’s afraid of the unions, afraid of the Russians, hates the queers, weirdos and drug dealers. He doesn’t want to hear about that stuff .” He is also, it goes without saying, the kind of bloke who is interested in tits and doesn’t mind bandying this interest about in the course of his chronic low-level harassment, under the guise of a “bit of banter”. Media products are also conditioning tools, and Murdoch recognised the potent multiplier effect of feeding xenophobia to a reader with a hard-on.

His targets internationally are the same: nefarious, cosmopolitan and multicultural “elites”.

After the News Corp Australia columnist Andrew Bolt was prosecuted under section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, The Australian mentioned the legislation more than a hundred thousand times in a campaign to have it scrapped…

As Benjamin Law itemised in his Quarterly Essay Moral Panic 101, The Australian’s obsession with the Safe Schools sex-education story ran to 90,000 words across almost 200 stories, an average of a story every two days. The Australian responded to this critique with multiple articles critical of Law.

This monomania extends to the other people The Australian pursues most fanatically as well. Julie Posetti, Yassmin Abdel-Magied, Emma Alberici, Larissa Behrendt, Gillian Triggs… It is not an accident that this treatment centres on women, and The Australian’s commenters, many of whom apparently go on to troll the targets on social media, take a pleasure in the treatment that borders on the masturbatory. This is the Murdoch version of “something decent”.

“The Murdoch-ization of America has never felt so irreversible,” Jonathan Mahler wrote in 2005, in a prescient piece that described how Rupert Murdoch had changed New York City. “On the ashes of the social-democratic city, he built a capitalist utopia where corporate lawyers live in the Soho lofts once occupied by garment workers; where Trump and Diller have replaced Shanker and Gotbaum as icons; where the mayor isn’t just a Republican, he’s a billionaire.” That process has now been repeated across the world, with Donald Trump playing a role grander than even Rupert Murdoch could hope for. Still, Murdoch can hardly complain. Both men share the trait of underestimating the intelligence of the general public, and not going broke…

https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2018/july/1530367200/richard-cooke/endless-reign-rupert-murdoch

And he’s done even more good things than that, he introduced the Page Three Puppies, he is a ‘progressive’ in so many areas.

Cymek said:

Ian said:

Cymek said:

At least he’s mortal and will die one day

During Lachlan’s time in Australia he also established some of his own political connections. Said to be even more conservative than his father, Lachlan gravitated to that side of politics. His wife, Sarah, launched Tony Abbott’s autobiography, Battlelines, in 2009. When Abbott’s prime ministerial career came to an abrupt end in 2015, Lachlan was among the 20 close friends (almost half of them were from News Corp) who honoured him at the Australia Club in Sydney.

Over the past month the Australian has taken up the cudgels in defence of the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation, a project that includes Abbott and John Howard on its board.

According to the Australian’s former editor Chris Mitchell, Lachlan is politically further to the right than Abbott.

In his autobiography Making Headlines, he recounts that Lachlan backed the execution of two of the Bali Nine on drug trafficking charges, and he had seen Abbott’s compassion as misplaced.

“As with his views on gun control in the United States, Lachlan’s conservatism is more vigorous than that of any Australian politician, Abbott included, and usually to the right of his father’s views,” he wrote.

Like his father, Lachlan is said to be a climate change sceptic, though there is little he has said publicly on the subject.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/sep/24/the-lachlan-ascendancy-is-news-corp-heading-for-a-cultural-change

The Conservatives handbook, must have a section, no original thought, act spineless, step on the poor and downtrodden

Keep women in the kitchen section

Support the church section

How to be an expert Liar section

How to be a sexist and racist section

How to set up unnecessary companies and riff off people

How to be a climate change denier to support big business interests section

How to be arrogant, ignorant and greedy section

How to work against the interest of humanity section

How to fuck up the World section

How to control governments section

How to dumb down the population section

How to steal other countries resources section

How to own as many companies as possible section

….

Tau.Neutrino said:

Cymek said:

Ian said:

During Lachlan’s time in Australia he also established some of his own political connections. Said to be even more conservative than his father, Lachlan gravitated to that side of politics. His wife, Sarah, launched Tony Abbott’s autobiography, Battlelines, in 2009. When Abbott’s prime ministerial career came to an abrupt end in 2015, Lachlan was among the 20 close friends (almost half of them were from News Corp) who honoured him at the Australia Club in Sydney.

Over the past month the Australian has taken up the cudgels in defence of the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation, a project that includes Abbott and John Howard on its board.

According to the Australian’s former editor Chris Mitchell, Lachlan is politically further to the right than Abbott.

In his autobiography Making Headlines, he recounts that Lachlan backed the execution of two of the Bali Nine on drug trafficking charges, and he had seen Abbott’s compassion as misplaced.

“As with his views on gun control in the United States, Lachlan’s conservatism is more vigorous than that of any Australian politician, Abbott included, and usually to the right of his father’s views,” he wrote.

Like his father, Lachlan is said to be a climate change sceptic, though there is little he has said publicly on the subject.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/sep/24/the-lachlan-ascendancy-is-news-corp-heading-for-a-cultural-change

The Conservatives handbook, must have a section, no original thought, act spineless, step on the poor and downtrodden

Keep women in the kitchen section

Support the church section

How to be an expert Liar section

How to be a sexist and racist section

How to set up unnecessary companies and riff off people

How to be a climate change denier to support big business interests section

How to be arrogant, ignorant and greedy section

How to work against the interest of humanity section

How to fuck up the World section

How to control governments section

How to dumb down the population section

How to steal other countries resources section

How to own as many companies as possible section

….

Conservatives in Western nations have the characteristics of dictators, no freedom except my own and my buddies

He tapped my phone to steal my secrets but I fooled him and wrapped myself in alfoil and it stopped

Cymek said:

Tau.Neutrino said:

Cymek said:

The Conservatives handbook, must have a section, no original thought, act spineless, step on the poor and downtrodden

Keep women in the kitchen section

Support the church section

How to be an expert Liar section

How to be a sexist and racist section

How to set up unnecessary companies and riff off people

How to be a climate change denier to support big business interests section

How to be arrogant, ignorant and greedy section

How to work against the interest of humanity section

How to fuck up the World section

How to control governments section

How to dumb down the population section

How to steal other countries resources section

How to own as many companies as possible section

….

Conservatives in Western nations have the characteristics of dictators, no freedom except my own and my buddies

yep,

How to look after myself and my buddies section with an intro by Clive Palmer

with other chapters including

How to not talk about human rights and refer to it instead as political correctness

How to bully people and get your own way

How to insult people, intimidate and put down people on mass media

How to avoid questions on the media

How to talk over women

How to hide money offshore

How to avoid tax

How to get rich quick

and many others

Zarkov said:

He tapped my phone to steal my secrets but I fooled him and wrapped myself in alfoil and it stopped

how long did you bake for

dv said:

Zarkov said:

He tapped my phone to steal my secrets but I fooled him and wrapped myself in alfoil and it stopped

how long did you bake for

Still am, baked most of the time

Zarkov said:

dv said:

Zarkov said:

He tapped my phone to steal my secrets but I fooled him and wrapped myself in alfoil and it stopped

how long did you bake for

Still am, baked most of the time

Well, half anyway.

and a chapter on

how to abuse people rights

Tamb said:

Zarkov said:

dv said:

how long did you bake for

Still am, baked most of the time

Well, half anyway.

8-D

Zarkov said:

He tapped my phone to steal my secrets but I fooled him and wrapped myself in alfoil and it stopped

and it was?

roughbarked said:

Zarkov said:

He tapped my phone to steal my secrets but I fooled him and wrapped myself in alfoil and it stopped

and it was?

The secret ?
Ah good try government stooge

Zarkov said:

roughbarked said:

Zarkov said:

He tapped my phone to steal my secrets but I fooled him and wrapped myself in alfoil and it stopped

and it was?

The secret ?
Ah good try government stooge

No. The it that stopped. what was it?

roughbarked said:

Zarkov said:

roughbarked said:

and it was?

The secret ?
Ah good try government stooge

No. The it that stopped. what was it?

The phone tapping stopped

Zarkov said:

roughbarked said:

Zarkov said:

The secret ?
Ah good try government stooge

No. The it that stopped. what was it?

The phone tapping stopped

So all you needed to know was that they knew you were watching them. Had nothing to do with anything else.

roughbarked said:

Zarkov said:

roughbarked said:

No. The it that stopped. what was it?

The phone tapping stopped

So all you needed to know was that they knew you were watching them. Had nothing to do with anything else.

I wasn’t watching them, just trying to stop them spying on me, I could hear them whispering in the background when I made calls and sending me spam emails to try and fool me into giving them computer access, once I wrapped myself in alfoil all this stopped.

Zarkov said:

roughbarked said:

Zarkov said:

The phone tapping stopped

So all you needed to know was that they knew you were watching them. Had nothing to do with anything else.

I wasn’t watching them, just trying to stop them spying on me, I could hear them whispering in the background when I made calls and sending me spam emails to try and fool me into giving them computer access, once I wrapped myself in alfoil all this stopped.

I dunno, I manage to stop them spying on me and manage to save my alfoil for real things like spud baked in residual coals.

roughbarked said:

Zarkov said:

roughbarked said:

So all you needed to know was that they knew you were watching them. Had nothing to do with anything else.

I wasn’t watching them, just trying to stop them spying on me, I could hear them whispering in the background when I made calls and sending me spam emails to try and fool me into giving them computer access, once I wrapped myself in alfoil all this stopped.

I dunno, I manage to stop them spying on me and manage to save my alfoil for real things like spud baked in residual coals.

I was naked when I did it so I did wrap meat and two vege

U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders
16 January at 11:20 ·

What role has Fox News played in this Trump shutdown?

https://www.facebook.com/senatorsanders/videos/2305441526355479/?t=87

Recently on Pay TV a six part program called Press. It is eerily familiar to what has been written in this thread. Worth a look when it appears on free to air. Will be on ABC or more likely SBS. May also need to be programmed for post election for obvious reasons.

bucolic3401 said:

Recently on Pay TV a six part program called Press. It is eerily familiar to what has been written in this thread. Worth a look when it appears on free to air. Will be on ABC or more likely SBS. May also need to be programmed for post election for obvious reasons.

Paisno, spika da inglese?

Sheesh.Paisano.

Haha, thanks – I used this article in an essay I wrote.