RUPERT MURDOCH'S NEWSCORP AND ROME’S AGENDA
An Interesting Dichotomy
MARGARET THATCHER
10 Q. The three of you, if I can put it in this way,
President RUPERT MURDOCH AND ROMAN CATHOLICISM On the NEWSCORP SCANDAL page of this website there is acceptance of reports that he was born and is a Roman Catholic. This appears to be factually incorrect. It emerged during his testimony before the Leveson Inquiry that he has strong Presbyterian roots, and apparently is still connected to the Presbyterian Church. However, the picture is more complicated. His close association with prominent Roman Catholic opinion makers and causes is well documented, as demonstrated by such Newscorp entities as Fox News Channel TEA PARTY UNITED™, FOX News IS The CATHOLIC NEWS AGENCY. There is no denying the identification of Murdoch's media empire with the rightwing political agenda of the Roman Catholic Church in America. A footnote to an article on the website, NNDB - Tracking the entire world, titled "Rupert Murdoch," subtitled "AKA Keith Rupert Murdoch" quotes an interview with the subject as follows: Asked if there is any truth to recent press describing his newfound piety, Murdoch replies: "No. They say I'm a born again Christian and a Catholic convert and so on. I'm certainly a practicing Christian, I go to church quite a bit but not every Sunday and I tend to go to Catholic church -- because my wife is Catholic, [since divorced] I have not formally converted. And I get increasingly disenchanted with the C of E or Episcopalians as they call themselves here. But no, I'm not intensely religious as I'm sometimes described." Interviewed in 1992. Nicholas Coleridge, Paper Tigers (1993), p. 487. Some further insights into the religious influences on Murdoch's thinking are provided on RadioNational Religion and Ethics Report - "Rupert's Religion" as follows: David McKnight: Well if you study Rupert Murdoch as I’ve done, you soon realise that he has a kind of Calvinist sense of mission. He brings it to everything he does. He’s always been a great believer in newspapers campaigning and really when you look at it, these are political crusades. If you look at what his mass media did around the world after 9/11, they really trumpeted and campaigned and went on a crusade to invade Iraq. There’s been many many crusades in the Murdoch era. I mean probably beginning with a campaign to elect the Whitlam government in Australia in 1972. But then the same style but a different political allegiance, over to Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher where his media really did campaign in the most extraordinary way, particularly for Thatcher. . . . Andrew West: The other thing about Presbyterianism is that running through it is a streak of Puritanism. I mean to what extent is there that in the Murdoch family? David McKnight: Well if we can mix Puritanism with social conservatism yes there is. I mean Rupert Murdoch has always been an opponent, as far as I can tell, of abortion. And it’s very interesting today his favoured candidate in the nomination for the Republican nomination for President, is Rick Santorum who is on record not only as opposing abortion but also opposing birth control. And Rupert said of him he has a ‘great vision for America.’ . . . Andrew West: One of the really great apparent contradictions David is that about 10-15 years ago Rupert Murdoch was given a papal knighthood. How did this reward from the Catholic Church come about? David McKnight: Well of course it’s hard to know. These…there are truths of these kind of things but commentators at the time—and it was 1998—said that he’d been a very generous donor to the Catholic Church. This was almost certainly because of his then wife Anna who was a devout Catholic. I think he gave a considerable amount of money to a cathedral in Chicago and several other things, so I think the knighthood…while Rupert refused knighthoods from the British government he did accept a papal knighthood and I think this was to some degree a quid pro quo. Whatever the true reason(s) for the knighthood from the Roman Catholic Church, there is more than enough proof that in America at least Murdoch and Rome are soulmates, and his propaganda machine moves in lockstep with the Catholic hierarchy. RUPERT MURDOCH AND THE EUROPEAN UNION It came as a shocking revelation from the Leveson Inquiry for this writer, that Rupert Murdoch and Newscorp are and always have been opposed to the European Union, which is a major path of the Papacy towards world domination. Nevertheless in his "libertarian" ideology at least, with its emphasis on limited government and as few rules as possible, he serves Rome's purpose even in the United Kingdom. This is documented in the next section on his identification with "Subsidiarity." RUPERT MURDOCH AND SUBSIDIARITY The website SOURCEWATCH makes the following statement in an article titled "K. Rupert Murdoch": Murdoch told William Shawcross, who authored a biography of Murdoch, that he considers himself a libertarian. "What does libertarian mean? As much individual responsibility as possible, as little government as possible, as few rules as possible. But I'm not saying it should be taken to the absolute limit." The following observation and a curious comparison is made in a CATHOLICA.COM.AU Editorial Commentary titled "The trouble with Rupert": So what is Murdoch's great skill? As argued two paragraphs ago, Murdoch's great skill is not going to be found in his management styles nor his personal sincerity and integrity. We think Murdoch's great skill is in an uncanny ability to "read the mind" of the average citizen. Murdoch understands what is called the "lizard brain" or "reptile brain" cravings of the ordinary person whose main interests in life centre around "eating, roots and leaves". Page 3 "tits and bums" sell newspapers by the tens of millions. The ordinary person is not interested in the lengthy philosophical and theological conversations we have in places like Catholica — their attention span is limited to about the 140 characters allowed in a tweet. They crave entertainment and distraction far more than they crave information and enlightenment. Rupert Murdoch really does understand the mentality of the average Jo and Sally Blo in the suburbs in any of the major countries of the Western world. Rupert understands how to feed their needs for "entertainment and distraction" in ways that attract massive readership numbers, or massive electronic media audiences, and through that, massive advertising revenues. The question is: is that good for the overall health of human civilisation? Is there a question of "balance" involved here? In many ways it might be compared to the philosophy of Joseph Ratzinger who said back in 1979: "The Christian believer is a simple person: bishops should protect the faith of these little people against the power of intellectuals." (Allen,130)[1] Rupert plays the same game in the secular sphere of society. And he has become without peer at doing it. Just as Pope Ratzinger seems to believe that if the "ordinary person" wants miracles, weeping statues and simple devotions and pieties he will deliver it to them; Rupert has worked out if all the average citizen craves in life is celebrity and sporting star gossip, tits and bums titillation, political scandal, and acres of massage parlour and dating advertisements he'll deliver it to them by the truckload and denuded forest. It's a great way to make money. One cannot help but note that here is an excellent description of the science of propaganda distracting minds from the serious issues of life - Pope Benedict XVI subscribes to it, and Rupert Murdoch practises it. In the paragraphs immediately preceding the above quotation, the Catholica Editorial Commentary states: Listening to the evidence last night I couldn't help thinking how much Murdoch's style seems almost to be taken from the very Catholic notion of "subsidiarity" — allowing people to take responsibility at the lowest level as possible in an organisation. Murdoch's management style is very much a "subsidiarity" management style. While this quotation is applied to Murdoch's management style, it is an undoubted fact that his political ideology as quoted in the SOURCEWATCH article above is precisely in harmony with the Roman Catholic principle of "subsidiarity." Here may be the greatest affinity between him and the Roman Catholic agenda, and a reason why the Papacy may tolerate the vociferous opposition of the Murdoch empire to the European Union. After all, Rome has Europe under control both in terms of demographics and the very advanced stage of the Union. Moreover, the Papacy is inflexible in its relentless drive towards world domination; but there is flexibility in its inflexibility as pointed out in this website's essay titled SUBSIDIARITY - THE PRINCIPLE AND ITS IMPLEMENTATION. This website seeks to draw attention to the danger of entrapment by the religious power of which the Bible states: "And I saw one of his heads as it were wounded to death; and his deadly wound was healed: and all the world wondered [followed] after the beast" (Rev. 13:3.) When one surveys the broad range of snares set by Satan in the political as well as the spriritual realm, and the exclusive focus of some Seventh-day Adventists on Sunday legislation - others on the Trinity dogma, while ignoring the climactic, earth-shaking, events occuring in the political realm, these words spoken by Jesus Christ seem to be an appropriate prescription: ". . .these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone" (Luke 11:42.) Professing Christians can receive the Mark of the Beast as well by falling prey to the Papacy's political agenda as by willingly submitting to Roman Catholic theology. |