Rupert Murdoch has bought a small winery in California, where he is wandering the vines and considering his future, writes Rodney E. Lever.
Rupert Murdoch is not a man to give up power easily. He still has his Napoleonic dreams.
He has bought a small winery in California, his current hobby, where he can wander through the ripening vines considering his future.
His eye must be on South-East Asia now. For everybody is saying that this is where the immediate future now exists on this planet of greed, corruption and where getting revoltingly rich is called “success”.
The British Empire is gone and Great Britain is no longer “great” — just another island across the water from Europe, where the union of nations has become a union of strained relations.
He has lost his chance to gain control of the British cable TV network BSkyB and may soon be told that he is an “unsuitable person” and forced to relinquish even his existing eight percent holding in the giant television operation he created and still wants to own outright (fat chance now).
In America, his licence to operate his Fox News network is in jeopardy as the daily accounts of the London trials of his army of phone hackers and rogue reporters reach American eyes and ears to shock them with the alleged criminal behaviour of Murdoch’s editors and journalists in England.
President Obama or Congress might decide that he is not a fit and proper person to own a major TV news service. Or if a future Republican president replaced Obama, Murdoch’s reputation might be so damaged by ongoing investigations by the U.S. Department of Justice that the GOP would be forced to dump him too.
Another Democrat president, like Hillary Clinton or the war hero John Kerry, would almost certainly prefer not to have him around.
In the meantime, the Sun King likes to spread his views of the world around in barely literate Twitter contributions to his half-million followers (so long as nobody can reply to them).
As he wanders among his grape vines in California, Murdoch must wonder if Tony Abbott in Australia might double-cross him, just as Gough Whitlam did back in 1972, accepting his electoral support, but giving him no say in government.
Like Whitlam, Abbott might be grateful that Murdoch put him in power, but consider him too much of a liability to be allowed to own the ABC or the Asia-Pacific-based Australia Network.
But then again, Rupert is a master of the double-cross himself.
When Hawke and Keating gave him the opportunity of owning all the major print media in Australia, Murdoch turned it upon them and gave his support to John Howard and the LNP for the next ten years, and when Kevin Rudd and Labor took power, Murdoch did all he could to bring Labor undone again.
Central to Murdoch’s thinking has always been his family, but after divorcing their mothers and marrying Wendi, the family made no secret of their displeasure. Lachlan has had only modest results in business; Elisabeth prefers to hob-nob with the aristocracy and glitterati in Surrey; James has disappeared to somewhere in Germany running a branch of the BSkyB network and keeping undercover while the hacking trials grind his former employees into mincemeat.
Nevertheless, Rupert’s eye is still looking out for the next opportunity.
Somewhere, somehow, something will happen to give him a future — in Australia, or India, or somewhere else; perhaps South-East Asia? The Chinese, of course, have already chucked him out by ignoring his TV services.
In March he will be 84 years old and still looking for that internal something that drives him on and on. Will he ever find it again? Who knows?
You can follow Rodney on Twitter @RodneyELever.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
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