Hell of a week — and the heat is on us

This week it’s been all about Donald Trump and Rupert Murdoch. You can read our coverage here, here and here, a powerful piece by Stephen Long. As well, Nicole Chvastek took a sceptical look at National Party types bearing gifts this election. Don’t get fooled again.

If Rupert Murdoch is ever given to self-reflection, this week might give him serious pause. He has the unique distinction of burning down two houses. On a personal level, his family has been blown apart by his desire to play favourites with his children by attempting to install elder son Lachlan as head of his media properties. And on a political level, his man Trump has emerged as the vicious dictator he always promised to be, burning US democracy to the ground and acting for all the world as an agent of Russia. 

Murdoch looked mighty pleased sitting in the Oval Office last week as Trump showered the 93-year-old mogul with praise before the world’s media. No-one should ever forget that Murdoch’s Fox News enabled the return of Trump when it spread Trump’s 2020 stolen election lie. It was forced to pay more than a billion dollars to Dominion voting systems for defamation. Big deal. Now it’s the No. 1 cable network in the US again. Is there any line Trump can cross before he loses Murdoch’s support?

Party time at the Oz

Back home, Murdoch’s national broadsheet The Australian has been celebrating the Trump-Musk war on “woke America” and one-time loyal allies in Europe — all of it in line with Rupert’s view that he is the lone conservative media voice standing against the progressive tide.

It is a pity to see a once-towering figure in Australian journalism, Paul Kelly, now minimising the impact of Trump’s outrages. As the US president declared himself above the law and cosied up to war criminal Vladimir Putin, Kelly saw this as being the fault of America’s political progressives, whose “relentless progressive agenda” had refuelled “Trump’s remarkable revival”. 

Kelly reduced Trump’s various alarming dictatorial actions to being no more than a bit of “overreach”, comparable with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s “blunder” with the Voice referendum.

“The lesson of politics is that every new government is prone to overreach and empowers its opponents — this was Joe Biden’s fatal mistake, it was Anthony Albanese’s blunder with the Voice and the question is surely relevant fo Donald Trump.”

As false equivalences go this is hard to beat. If Kelly truly believes that giving pardons to the mob that stormed the Capitol on January 6 — while going after any prosecutor who worked on the case — is in the same league as holding a referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament, we really are in trouble.

Where — and how — does this all end?  

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