Are Palin & Bachmann Creations of Scandal-ridden Murdoch Media Empire?


Since 2008, many Americans, myself included, have been stupefied by the rise to political celebrity of two anti-rational, mean-spirited women with nothing going for themselves other than sex appeal.    But now I get it.  The answer in short is Rubert Murdoch.

Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann

Sunday, the media mogul closed the 168 year old British newspaper, "The News of the World,"  in a desperate attempt to contain a scandal that is now threatening to bring down his entire media empire.  In Britain, policemen were bribed for stories.  In search of spicy tidbits that gave it a competitive edge, the newspaper  hacked the voicemail of murdered children, the former Prime Minister, and now, it turns out, even families of 9/11 victim.   



With Murdoch's launch of FOX News 24 hour cable station in 1996, Americans experienced for the first time a type of right-wing ignorance peddling the world had not seen since Joseph Goebbels headed the Ministry of Propaganda in Nazi Germany.    Paul Krugman of the New York Times observed: 

In October 2003, the nonpartisan Program on International Policy Attitudes published a study titled “Misperceptions, the media and the Iraq war.” It found that 60 percent of Americans believed at least one of the following: clear evidence had been found of links between Iraq and Al Qaeda; W.M.D. had been found in Iraq; world public opinion favored the U.S. going to war with Iraq. The prevalence of these misperceptions, however, depended crucially on where people got their news. Only 23 percent of those who got their information mainly from PBS or NPR believed any of these untrue things, but the number was 80 percent among those relying primarily on Fox News. In particular, two-thirds of Fox devotees believed that the U.S. had “found clear evidence in Iraq that Saddam Hussein was working closely with the Al Qaeda terrorist organization.” 

But what does any of this have to do with Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann?  That politicians as cognitively-impaired as these two women could rise to the status of presidential candidates would have defied belief in the days before the advent of FOX News.  But Murdoch is a power broker.  He anoints with political legitimacy and endless news cycles, whomever he chooses to bathe in kleig lights.  The tabloid-mogul's only requirement for women whom he supports to lead the world's only superpower and most important economy is that they spout right-wing bigotry and be photogenic.

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