News Corporation propagandist Chris Mitchell preaches totalitarian political correctness in news media, possibly misunderstanding how much damage he does to the already tattered reputation of the News Corp Murdoch family fiefdom.
Chris Mitchell’s column in the Australian, demanding that even media not under the Murdoch family’s direct control adhere to a blinkered support of Israeli fascism, is an indicator of a far deeper totalitarianism in Australian media than we have already come to expect from News Corp’s deliberately socially and politically divisive culture wars polemics. On endless repeat.
He condemns Chris Hedges and AmyRemeikis as extremists, while patting the ABC’s David Marr on the head for toeing the politically correct Murdoch line on Israel and Gaza: Israel is always right, its critics are always wrong. Evidence and facts be damned.
The column amounts to: ‘How dare Chris Hedges offer a different perspective from ours! And how dare anyone working in media agree with him!! We will determine what is true, objective, and balanced!!! The rest of you either obey or we’ll call you activist lefties. So there.’ It is a childish tirade, and rather worn.
But it did reminded me of some commentary from Gideon Levy about what he calls deeply rooted Israeli values:
The first ... is the value that we are the chosen people. ... The implementation is very simple. If we are the chosen people, who are you to tell us what to do? ... Who is the international community to tell Israel what to do? International law, wonderful thing, it doesn’t apply on us. It applies on any other place on earth, but not on Israel because we are the chosen people. ...
The second very deep-rooted value is obviously the value of “we the victims,” not only the biggest victims, but the only victims around. I know many occupations which were longer than Israeli occupation somewhere, even more brutal even though it’s getting harder and harder to be more brutal than the Israeli occupation. I don’t recall one occupation in which the occupier presents himself as the victim, not only the victim, the only victim. … to quote here the late Golda Meir … she once said that we will never forgive the Arabs for forcing us to kill their children. We are the victims. We are forced to kill their children—poor us. As the victim and the only victim in history, again, it enabled us the rights to do whatever we want and nobody is going to tell us what to do because we are the only victims.
To this there’s a third very deep-rooted value, and this is the very deep belief. Again, everyone will deny it. But if you scratch under the skin of almost every Israeli, you’ll find it there. The Palestinians are not equal human beings like us. They are not like us. They don’t love their children like us. They don’t love life like us. They were born to kill. They are cruel. They are sadists. They have no values. No manners. Look how they kill us.
Who is Gideon Levy? He is an Israeli-born journalist working for the Israeli Haaretz newspaper. The quoted passages above are from a 2019 conference in the USA, but he’s repeated them since. What does all this mean? First, it means that any Jewish lobby group demanding that Israel not be criticized, ever, for any reason, has damaged itself much more than any pro-Palestinian propaganda ever could. Quite likely, Israel’s enemies counted on that outcome in anticipating from Jewish lobby groups globally a tired ideological extremism, tone-deaf to changed circumstances, and to international reactions to Israel’s brutal annihilation of Gaza and its population. Secondly, it means Chris Mitchell’s column is demanding surrender to a totalitarian ideology so odiously repressive that the existence or legitimacy of points of view like Levy’s are simply denied, and even much more moderate conceptions in Australia are to be seen as radical and censurable. That truly is totalitarian. Like Winston Smith working at eliminating any mention of events and people judged to be politically unpalatable by Big Brother and the party.
Oddly, Chris Hedges began the speech he was not permitted to give at the National Press Club of Australia earlier this month, possibly because all of its sponsors also make money from Israel, with a credible description of the practices of most contemporary ‘war correspondents’. That is, most of them sit in bars, drinking and screwing around, waiting for official briefings and announcements rather than going into the field and observing for themselves. In condemning that perspective alone, Chris Mitchell has explicitly stated that actual journalism—investigating a story independently by going into the field and observing—is not a permitted practice at News Corp, and should not be permissible elsewhere either. We should only ever repeat, and be exposed to, official narratives as approved by News Corp political commissars like himself. It is a bizarre demand, because it seeks that we re-make ourselves in the image of the nominal enemy. That we should become just like them. Adopt all their alleged barbarism, extremism, and totalitarianism. Mitchell should reflect on the fact that his intolerance means he is already one of them.
The problem appears to be that News Corp has gotten away with its totalitarian doctrine for so long that no one really remembers how it came about, and why it has destroyed journalism as we knew it before the 1990s. In 1986, Rupert Murdoch owned the Times, Sunday Times, The Sun, Today, and News of the World in the UK. He was a prominent supporter of Margaret Thatcher’s rebranding of F A Hayek’s neoliberalism, most conspicuously executed as enforced ‘austerity’ for the poor, and lavish favours for the rich. One of Thatcher’s most cherished projects was breaking the back of the British coal mining unions. And Murdoch was determined to do the same with the Fleet Street print unions. To that end he built a state-of-the-art facility at Wapping (Borough of Tower Hamlets, London) and locked out union demonstrators for the better part of a year to end the closed-shop power of the printing unions (closed shop means you cannot work if you are not a union member), reducing printing staff to about 700 instead of the almost 7000 under the Fleet Street model. The National Union of Journalists advised its members to join the picket lines, but enough of them did not, allowing Murdoch’s mastheads to continue being printed and distributed. The main printing unions were essentially bankrupted by legal processes arising from the strike, and became obsolete.
At the end of this confrontation, Murdoch was a Thatcherite hero. What came next was a much less public re-definition of journalism in News Corp: progressively subject to ever tighter ideological control, with editors and senior executives ensuring that people employed as journalists understood very clearly how every story was to be presented, meaning some stories about corruption in favoured governments or business circles would never be run, and others required that the ‘facts’ be massaged until they fit Murdoch’s own particular ideological preferences. This was Murdoch’s appropriation of Leninist-Stalinist political correctness, with his own preferred slant. And so it remains, with Chris Mitchell, today, being one of the (‘retired’) senior executives ‘supervising’ that political correctness, arrogantly presuming it to be the sole valid doctrine governing all media output labelled ‘journalism’, and not at all shy about lecturing any who won’t obey this totalitarian regime even if they don’t work for News Corp.
The problem has been that many people working in media were and continue to be intimidated by this conspicuous totalitarianism, moving the Overton Window in news media progressively towards the political far right. By all appearances, Nine Entertainment’s ‘news’ coverage today gets its cues about what to report, and how, from News Corp. Seven West Media has its own, more earthy version of that doctrine. Paramount Networks UK & Australia (Channel 10) is a pale imitation of Nine Entertainment. The ABC is so shell-shocked after being battered continuously by the long Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison Coalition it is too afraid of its own shadow these days to remember what journalism looks like at all. The Guardian and smaller independents may talk a good game, but have also been brow-beaten into the submission of coming to the party on stories about corruption in business and politics only after the damage has been done, and with only desultory attention to the stunning fact the ALP maintains some of the most corrosively punitive measures against the poor and powerless instigated by Murdoch and his Coalition parties, explicitly as punishment for the crime of poverty and political powerlessness.
So, when Mitchell rails against ‘activist’ journalists, he’s projecting his own tendencies. He demands total conformity with the Murdoch doctrine, or he’ll attempt to smear ‘dissidents’ as if they were activists, meaning of course radical left political actors, in the sense now being used in the USA to punish anyone who dares to question the king. This demand for Murdoch’s political correctness is actually what qualifies as the only radical activism in this story, even if it is far right activism. Mitchell condemns the heresy of anyone called a journalist to still conduct critical analysis. He calls that making ‘moral’ judgments. As if ethics were not an integral part of anything properly called journalism. And ethics are most definitely a part of critical analysis. You identify the key narratives being proposed as explanations for events and rhetorics, and then subject them to questions, including: which rhetorics correspond with known facts and which do not; what outright lies or distortions of facts (like conspiracy theories) are being peddled, by whom, and for what purpose; what are the likely self-serving or other motivations of the key rhetoricians; what is conspicuous by its absence in the rhetorics; what is the history of the controversy; and so on. If no ethical judgments are being formed in this process, it’s unlikely there was any analysis. The most informative journalism comes from people who reveal their own biases in the analysis, by making sources and evidence transparent. No unnamed sources, and explicitly revealed yardsticks where they are applied. Not the pretense that no human being touched the story.
The Murdoch doctrine on analysis has long been obvious: ‘Strengstens Verboten!’ at News Corp itself, whose employees must obey Murdoch doctrine. The word, like some others about good journalism, is reserved for hypocritical rhetorical polemics trashing enemies for not being ‘objective’ or ‘balanced’. Surprisingly easy arguments to make, with few targets denying the slander, possibly because you’d have to explain the dishonesty of the terminology itself. Within journalism, as in other disciplines, objectivity is a cheap lie. No human being is capable of it, and even saying you are objective is the subjective position that you are objective against a yardstick that can only have been subjectively designed. Here’s a simple test: for there to be objectivity, it needs to be an idealized, absolute standard, like the divine, or something similarly absolute and beyond or above the merely human. But such standards are only ever set by humans in the first place. And journalism is only ever practised by humans, meaning to be objective they would have to act as if they were themselves divine or more than human. It is an absurd proposition. Moreover, there isn’t a single ‘objective’ voice in News Corp itself. The bias is so obvious it isn’t seriously denied by anyone any more.
That leaves ‘balanced’. Nominally this is supposed to mean that you don’t favour one political side over others. At News Corp it has come to mean displacing any notion of credible voices by following the Steve Bannon strategy of flooding the media ‘zone’ with the ‘shit’ of rhetorics from lunatics, conspiracy theorists, and mentally ill people, while excluding unfavoured political views and acknowledged domain experts. To call such coverage ‘balanced’ is evidence of contempt for one’s audience, and leaves question marks about the mental health of the people confecting this kind of coverage and then calling it ‘balanced’. In reality, journalistic balance is the selection of credible sources, however many or few there might be, and to subject even them to analysis, all based on the professional practice of journalism, which must be independent from editorial control to be called journalism at all. Whenever it is not independent, it is actually just editorializing. And in a manner eminently suited to the completely dehumanized nature of AI verbiage. Along the lines News Corp uses to generate ‘local news’ pieces. If already there, why not also in national and state news and editorials? News Corp content is all quite repetitive and predictable. It could easily be generated from a trained engine citing a news feed for ‘facts’ and then applying and endlessly recycling the same rhetorics that might have been original in the 1990s. Who would notice the difference? Did Chris Mitchell actually write his own editorial, or did he just get paid to have his name put to some artificially generated gibberish that ‘sounds like him’?
At the end, then, can we recognize any journalism as it was practised in the 1980s in today’s media landscape? A valid topic for some postgraduate research. My gut feel is ‘no’. I trained and worked as a journalist, and I can see nothing of the fourth estate values in today’s media. It’s almost always politically partisan, and in some really dumb ways. By dumb, I mean both that people calling themselves journalists are mostly ignorant and lazy, and assume their audience is more ignorant, and lazier. But in that landscape, News Corp represents a fixed given: it repeats, endlessly, the limited, often contradictory words approved by Chairman Murdoch. And that makes News Corp content almost always unashamedly dishonest, serving only the interests of the Murdoch family.
Perhaps Chris Mitchell hasn’t realized it yet, but News Corp’s complicity in election lies in the USA, and the failed insurrection, and similar attempts in Australia, have severely damaged its credibility. So much so that when it takes a side in a political debate, it may actually encourage people to attach more credibility to the opposing voices. Reputation is a fickle thing. I’m pretty sure the Fox News MAGA pandering today will harm it tomorrow, when even the most die-hard MAGA voters come to realize everything is more expensive because their king lied to them, and did all his courtiers, including a compliant corporate media.
If Chris Mitchell were to reflect on this a little more carefully, he would recognize a similar moment has already occurred in Australia. All the best efforts of News Corp propagandists, including him, could not fend off the worst Coalition defeat in living memory. News Corp’s Coalition support was just not seen as credible by a large proportion of voters who would have preferred a Coalition government to a Labor win, if only they could have trusted its leadership and policies. Or News Corp’s misrepresentation of them.
And Mitchell should reflect, too, on the damage he’s doing to a reputation already in tatters when the much lauded Trump peace plan turns into just so much hot air, and Israel finally runs out of friends immune to the kind of public pressure that doesn’t come from a billionaire or a megacorp.
[Image credit: Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator, sourced online without copyright statement limiting public use.]
