Don’t Blame Rupert Murdoch

After 168 years of publication, most of which was spent wallowing in tabloid journalism, “News of the World” went out of business because of outright criminality and excessive sleaze. The surprise for me, personally, was the apparent recognition that there can actually be too much sleaze, even in the modern 21st century world. I had thought otherwise.

For the record, I personally loathe FOX News. I listen to NPR and I watch PBS, and I never thought that FOX and PBS were simply right wing and left wing versions of intellectual equivalency, although I’ll grant that FOX and MSNBC are intellectual equals. I also regularly tune to NHK (the Japanese version of BBC) to get news from Asia. FOX news comes up for discussion now because it’s owned by Rupert Murdoch who also, until last Saturday, owned the now-defunct “News of the World.” There’s a huge temptation for liberals like me to jump on Murdoch now that his power seems to have lost a bit of its tarnish, but I think this is being overly simplistic and naive. Murdoch is, and always has been, merely a zookeeper who made sure the lions got their daily dose of red meat, and zookeepers rarely question where the red meat comes from. In the case of “New of the World,” supplying the red meat meant hacking the phones and e-mails of people who had lost loved ones and who were at the depths of their own personal sorrow. The fact that this is despicable journalism may or may not say something about Rupert Murdoch, but it speaks volumes about the people who actually read that tawdry newspaper. And with its history going back 168 years, clearly readers were reveling in trash and sleaze and other people’s grief long before Rupert Murdoch was even born.

What a huge coincidence that this comes in the exact same week when we were treated to televised images of people gathered outside the court house where the Casey Anthony saga was being concluded. I could not, in my wildest imagination, ever see myself joining such a group of rabid blood-nuts to express pleasure or displeasure at a judicial sentence being handed down to somebody I didn’t personally know. Who in their right mind does that? And I confess that when I see a group like that I secretly assume that all of them are FOX News buffs. It’s interesting, though, that Rupert Murdoch probably looks at such a group and sees the same rabid herd mentality that I see. This would explain a lot about FOX News.

Back about the time that “News of the World” began publication, Henry Thoreau said that “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation.” And human nature being what it is, I suppose some people find solace or pleasure when they can read about other people who are even more desperate than themselves. Rupert Murdoch didn’t create that condition. He merely strives to make a dollar by helping it along.

A Bright New Career for Casey Anthony

Casey Anthony gets out of the slammer next week and will, presumably, be looking for a job in a bleak employment market. Meanwhile, Nadya Suleman (a.k.a. the Octomom) appeared last Friday on The Today Show with her brood, and demonstrated for all the television viewers to see that her two-year-old octuplets are completely out of control, and are well on their way to predictable adult lives as deadbeat malefactors. Since 2009, most of the cost of raising the octuplets plus Suleman’s six other fatherless kids has fallen to the taxpayers in the debt-ridden state of California. By her own admission, Suleman has too many kids. Meanwhile California, facing bankruptcy, can no longer afford to support the prolific cash-crop resulting from Suleman’s peculiar life style as an in-vitro breeding machine. And Casey Anthony will need a job. Her primary expertise and work qualification seems to be the willingness to whack a two-year-old kid, and the ability to do it with legal impunity.

I love it when multiple problems can be solved by lumping them together to provide a common solution. So here’s the deal. Casey Anthony needs to move to California and go to work for the state, where she can accomplish a rather drastic budgetary cost-cutting measure. Utilizing her unique and rare skill set, her job would be to move in with Nadya Suleman and cull the herd, so to speak.