What will News Corp’s sceptical editorial team do if Rupert Murdoch changes his stance on climate change, as he well he might? Senior correspondent Barry Everingham reports.
Dick Smith is loyal Australian who didn’t hand over his citizenship to a foreign country to cement his empire. Had he done this we would be well within our rights to ask, as I do to Rupert Murdoch right now — who the hell do you think you are?
A case in point is the behaviour of Rupert’s Australian editors. Dick Smith was so concerned at the editorial staff – and Murdoch’s – brutally unfair treatment of those with the temerity to disagree with the News Corp party line, he wouldn’t get involved in the current “say yes to climate change” debate — which says more about Rupert and his minions than it does about Dick.
Rupert Murdoch’s brain child is Fox “News” — an odious service which sunk to new depths by hiring Sarah Palin as a “commentator”.
This is a woman who, as Governor of Alaska, wanted to charge rape victims for the DNA used to identify their alleged victims.
That the media mogul saw Palin as a credible contender for the presidency of his adopted country is strange indeed.
Rupert can be accused of many things — but not of putting up with fools.
Palin was surprised to learn that the United States originally purchased her state from Russia and at one stage admitted she had never heard of Margaret Thatcher.
When told she was a successful Prime Minister, she immediately demanded that the pair meet.
Palin was unimpressed, or didn’t understand what was meant, when told that Baroness Thatcher was suffering from dementia.
It’s reported she said: “Oh, but she’ll want to see me!”
The deniers at News Limited must surely wonder how they will handle matters if and when Rupert becomes convinced that climate change is a fact of life.
Will the likes of Andrew Bolt say he has been handed new evidence which proves – not that he was wrong – but that he has cause to rethink his previous stance on the issue?
What will be the reaction of the Gillard haters in News Limited’s newsrooms when Rupert finally gets the message about Tony Abbott?
The Murdoch family is an extraordinary group of people — generous to a fault and totally devoid of bullshit.
Anne Kantor, one of Rupert’s sisters, is dedicated to the environment and Geoff Hanbury, the widower of his late sister Helen, is a patron of Greening Australia.
It shows the arrogance and sense of security the deniers must feel if they already knew of the conservation credentials of Anne, her husband Milan Kantor and their children.
I have to make a disclaimer here; I have known Dame Elizabeth Murdoch (or Lady Murdoch as she was then) and the Kantors for many years, as I once, as a young man, boarded at Milan Kantor’s mother’s Melbourne apartment.
I now know many others of that remarkable, close knit and generous family.
And I know how much Dame Elizabeth and her daughters regard and love Rupert, in spite, I would think, of some of his views, which might not be theirs.
