Murdoch fallout to hurt Israel?
I have largely ignored the growing scandal involving wiretapping allegations against employees of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp in England. Perhaps, I shouldn't ignore it. Despite the fact that News Corp is partly owned by the Saudi royal family, it owns some of the most pro-Israel mainstream media outlets, including the Wall Street Journal and Fox News Corp. Will Israel lose a strongly pro-Israel voice as a result of Murdoch's troubles? Israel's supporters in the English-speaking world say there is cause for concern. Murdoch’s sudden massive reversal of fortune -- with 10 top former staffers and executives under arrest in Britain for hacking into the phones of public figures and a murdered schoolgirl, and paying off the police and journalists -- has supporters of Israel worried that a diminished Murdoch presence may mute the strongly pro-Israel voice of many of the publications he owns.Read the whole thing.
“His publications and media have proven to be fairer on the issue of Israel than the rest of the media,” said Malcolm Hoenlein, the executive vice-chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. “I hope that won’t be impacted.”
Murdoch’s huge stable encompasses broadsheets such as The Wall Street Journal, the Times of London and The Australian, as well as tabloids, most notably The Sun in Britain and the New York Post. It also includes the influential Fox News Channel in the United States and a 39 percent stake in British Sky Broadcasting, or BSkyB, a satellite broadcaster. Murdoch founded the neoconservative flagship The Weekly Standard in 1995, and sold it last year.
Jewish leaders said that Murdoch’s view of Israel’s dealings with the Palestinians and with its Arab neighbors seemed both knowledgeable and sensitive to the Jewish state’s self-perception as beleaguered and isolated.
“My own perspective is simple: We live in a world where there is an ongoing war against the Jews,” Murdoch said last October at an Anti-Defamation League dinner in his honor. “When Americans think of anti-Semitism, we tend to think of the vulgar caricatures and attacks of the first part of the 20th century. Now it seems that the most virulent strains come from the left. Often this new anti-Semitism dresses itself up as legitimate disagreement with Israel."
Murdoch, 80, has visited Israel multiple times and met with many of its leaders. In 2009 he was honored by the American Jewish Committee.
“In the West, we are used to thinking that Israel cannot survive without the help of Europe and the United States,” he said at the AJC event. “Tonight I say to you, maybe we should start wondering whether we in Europe and the United States can survive if we allow the terrorists to succeed in Israel. “
Curiously, there's a line in the story that Murdoch had Fox force Glenn Beck out due to discomfort in the Jewish community over Beck's attacks on Kapo George Soros. If that's true, it's a bit surprising, given that the last paragraph I quoted from the story could have been written by Beck.
Regardless, it would be a tremendous loss for Israel's cause if Murdoch were to be forced out of the media business. Let's hope it doesn't happen.
Labels: Fox News, Glenn Beck, News Corp, Rupert Murdoch, Wall Street Journal
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 9:27 AM
3 Comments:
It's pretty evident that Soros is behind this attack on the Murdoch media empire. He has been salivating over the prospect of such an event for a long time. A few months back, he gave his favorite media front group, Media Matters, a prodigious sum of money to hire snoopers and defamers to bring down Fox News.
There was no reason for Murdoch to decimate "News of the World". Something stinks on ice - as Beck would say.
Glenn had been losing audience share and consolidating his own production team and production company. There are historical problems with his bete-noirs, including the meme that Obama was a sock puppet for a sinister cabal of fringe leftist radicals financed by Soros. It isn't that there weren't dots to connect but they've sometimes been conducted, um, imaginatively.
StWD - If the dots are not connected, then I'd like to hear the objectors such as yourself address the content instead of continually sliming the messengers. Fox has just been a messenger. People ignored (if not actively tried to delete the dots) all these marcuse marxist caliphate dots. The left refuses to address content and points of fact. I hate to see the non-left just go along with that because it is too much trouble to actually promulgate info.
The first thing that went through my mind (and it is still there) is wondering how this has become a way to be used by the left to try to shut up Fox and the WSJ, etc. when the actions that have been publicized that GOOGLE is doing all over the world are far far more deatheating than News Corp's tabloid scroungers. Remember picking up non-photo info on street view, overthrowing the govt of Egypt, etc etc. That's ok?
We have marxist selective law application going on here and I for one doubt that I will be resident in the in-group of cows who will be favored in such dictatorships.
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