We all know how this awful week began. For Rupert Murdoch, one of his prized investments — Sarah Palin — had become the subject of heated debate. Murdoch’s News Corp publishes her ghost-written books and Palin works for News Corp’s Fox News as a contributor. While a team of doctors in Tucson heroically scrambled to save the life of Representative Gabrielle Giffords, a team of spin doctors at Fox News scrambled to save the political life of Sarah Palin. At this point, I defer to an excellent piece written by Glynnis MacNicol of The Business Insider:
It is clear that Palin spent the last few days testing the waters and leaving the heavy lifting of the defending her to the folks at Fox News, most notably Glenn Beck.
As Ms. MacNicol explained, Palin returned to her Facebook page on January 12:
In equally typical fashion, Palin offered little introspection into her role in the political dialogue of the past year and laid the blame directly at the feet of the media, whom she accused of “blood libel.”
As MacNicol and many other commentators pointed out, this choice of words exemplified yet another classic Palin mistake. Palin’s gaffe drew criticism from the Anti-Defamation League and it gave her critics yet another opportunity to emphasize that Palin has been in over her head with her attempts to establish a national leadership identity. The Hill quoted what Representative James Clyburn had to say about Palin’s latest misstep:
“You know, Sarah Palin just can’t seem to get it, on any front. I think she’s an attractive person, she is articulate,” Clyburn said on the Bill Press radio show. “But I think intellectually, she seems not to be able to understand what’s going on here.”
While Rupert Murdoch’s investment in Sarah Palin was obviously deteriorating and becoming an embarrassment for his Fox News organization, things were headed in a more catastrophic direction in his Australian homeland. The intense flooding that had been ongoing for the past several weeks was being attributed to climate change. A report from Reuters began with this statement:
Climate change has likely intensified the monsoon rains that have triggered record floods in Australia’s Queensland state, scientists said on Wednesday, with several months of heavy rain and storms still to come.
Although Murdoch now personally admits that climate change poses a serious environmental threat, his News Corp subsidiaries have an established track record of denying that any such threat exists.
An article from the Treehugger website provided details about how badly conditions had deteriorated in Queensland:
When 75% of Queensland is disaster declared due to flooding, that is a huge area, roughly equivalent to two Texas’s or the entirety of South Africa. On the 31st of December Reuters was saying flood water was “covering an area bigger than France and Germany combined, inundating 22 towns and stranding 200,000 people.” This is a continually unfolding natural disaster, of which the financial bill alone was projected to reach $5 billion AUD, and that was before the flash flooding of the past day or so.
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Australia is a rich, industrialised ‘First World’ country. But it’s third most populous state, Queensland, is currently coping with floods which have already decimated food crops, livestock, road and rail infrastructure, mining and so on. The impacts of which will flow on (pardon the pun) to effect most every Australian. Already some particular fruits have all but disappeared from commercial markets.
If all that weren’t bad enough, what must have been the most chilling news for Rupert Murdoch came from Julian Assange of Wikileaks. Ian Burrell of The Independent provided this report:
A year that has begun badly for Rupert Murdoch grew a little worse yesterday after the founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, claimed to be in possession of secret documents damaging to the media mogul and his News Corp empire.
Mr Assange told John Pilger in the New Statesman he had withheld a cache of confidential US government cables and files relating to Mr Murdoch’s business as “insurance”. He has claimed that his life is in danger if he is extradited to Sweden to face allegations of sexual assault.
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Mr Assange indicated that he had paperwork which could be hurtful to News Corp. “There are 504 US embassy cables on one broadcasting organisation and there are cables on Murdoch and News Corp.”
Assange does lots of talking about documents he is holding as “insurance”. Nevertheless, many commentators have mentioned the possibility all this boasting could amount to nothing more than a bluffing strategy.
In addition to discussing the Wikileaks threat, the Independent article provided us with the perspective of a former Murdoch associate on the possibility that Rupert might not be too happy with the way things are going at Fox News:
In a further broadside yesterday, one of Mr Murdoch’s former henchmen, Andrew Neil, publicly questioned whether the world’s most powerful media figure retained his grip over his organisation.
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“My own view is [Fox] is out of control,” Neil told Richard Bacon yesterday on BBC Radio 5 Live. “I think Rupert Murdoch has lost control of it. I know from sources he’s not happy with a lot that appears on it and I think he’s lost over the Glenn Becks and the O’Reillys,” said Mr Neil.
“[Murdoch] is uncomfortable with Glenn Beck and various other positions they take and some of the things they say.” Neil, who fell out with Mr Murdoch in the early Nineties, claimed he had “very good sources at the heart of News Corp”.
If there is any truth to Andrew Neil’s revelations, it will be very interesting to see if Mr. Murdoch makes any changes at Fox News, due to his reported concerns. Either way, 2011 could turn out to be a very important year for Rupert Murdoch.