3 Ways to Boycott Murdoch

Rick Stengel of Media Matters on MSNBC

"When are they going to admit there was no insurrection?" asked Tucker Carlson on Fox News on September 16, 2021.  Another anchor, Laura Ingraham, made similar claims.

Thanks to Nicolle Wallace in her Deadline: White House news hour today on MSNBC for reporting on the cumulative lies spoken on Fox and even printed in today's Wall Street Journal.

She interviewed Rick Stengel of the nonprofit Media Matters on reports that Fox is about to release a "documentary" claiming that the attack on the Capitol and its police officers was a false flag--an action set up by the FBI to make the right look bad. 

Fox is "supporting people who committed the earlier insurrection, and they're motivating people to do another one," says Stengel. 

Even Geraldo Rivera, another Fox anchor, spoke out against lies by Carlson today, calling his words "inflammatory and outrageous and uncorroborated." 

To make matters worse, the Wall Street Journal today published a Trump letter to the editor repeating his false election claims.  

The Fox "documentary" makes the false flag claim that the Jan. 6 insurrection was planned by the FBI to make the right wing look bad.

"There are dozens and dozens of people who are on trial for their crimes in participating in that riot,  " he observes.  "They are testifying about their planning and their actions that day."

"The myth of the great fraud is his platform for 2024 if he runs again, and they promote it because the audience wants to hear and loves it," explained Stengel.

"I think if they aired porn, they'd like that too," replied Wallace, "There are some things that are not suitable to air, that violate norms and standards."

 Can lies like this qualify as speech protected by the First Amendment?

"The one kind of speech that is not protected is speech that leads directly or indirectly to violence," notes Rick Stengel, citing the Brandenburg decision by the Supreme Court in 1955.

Enough summarizing of current lies, whether on heard on Fox News or printed in the Wall Street Journal.

How can we, the people, protest these lies on Fox News and in the Journal, both owned by the Murdoch family?  

"One way that people can protest is to boycott all the products and outlets owned by Rupert Murdoch, which fuel and support Fox News," Stengel says.  Read his call for a boycott on the Media Matters website.  

• Cancel your subscriptions to the Wall Street Journal or anything owned by the Murdochs.
• Don't watch the NFL on Fox Sports
• Don't use the products advertised on Fox Sports or in the WSJ.

"That's the sort of thing that will get Rupert Murdoch's attention," advises Stengel. "There's a very traditional form of protest and boycott that's available to people.  Grassroots public protest is perfectly acceptable and very effective."

Most of us can only boycott Murdoch's media empire partially, though, because his NewsCorp owns so much of what we watch, from Hulu to American Idol.

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Footnote: Both News Corp and the Fox Corporation, News Corp's sister company and successor to the former 21st Century Fox, are owned and controlled by the Murdoch family.

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Of Morons, Choir Boys, and Peril

 

Buy these books for yourself and for your great-grandchildren:

Fear by Bob Woodward.* 

Rage by Bob Woodward.*  

Peril by Bob Woodward* with Robert Costa.  

They document what Trump and right-wing Republicans did to our nation from 2015 through 2021.  They're on my Christmas wish list.

This review in The Guardian explains why we need to read and remember what's in these books.

Written with Robert Costa, another Washington Post reporter, Peril caps a Trump trilogy by one half of the team that took down Richard Nixon. As was the case with Fear and Rage, Peril is meticulously researched. Quotes fly off the page. 

The third book, just out, documents Trump's effort to overthrow the 2020 election, starting long before November, climaxing with the coup attempt on January 6, and continuing today.

It contains lots of behind-the-stage gossip, gleaned through hundreds of interviews.

Here's a tidbit from The Guardian's review:

“Do you know why [former secretary of state Rex] Tillerson was able to say he didn’t call the president a ‘moron’?” the Senate Republican leader [Mitch McConnell] asks.

“Because he called him a ‘fucking moron’.”

By contrast, McConnell has kind words for Biden – a man he is dedicated to rendering a one-term president. America’s cold civil war goes on. Some, sometimes, still send messages across no man’s land.

Buy Peril, the last in the series, now.  Keep it on the shelf you have labeled for your survivors to read: "Keep.  History as it was happening."  

For further proof of the urgency of this trilogy, read On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder.  (See this review.)

Just hope that no future US government puts a ban on these books.

               ~     ~     ~

*Footnote for those who didn't live through the Nixon years:

While a young reporter for The Washington Post in 1972, Woodward teamed up with Carl Bernstein; the two did much of the original news reporting on the Watergate scandal.

As many news analysts have said in 2021, Trump makes Nixon look like a choir boy.