MURDOCH MENDACITY by Michael J Cummings

Rupert Murdoch’s media empire includes the English newspaper the SUN, and 21^st Century FOX. He hopes to add SKY TV to his holding. However, for his commitment to broadcast standards he needs  to receive a “fit and proper” rating from British authorities.  The phone hacking scandals at Murdoch’s News of the World and the sexual harassment saga still simmering at FOX TV and FOX Sports in New York would normally sink such a bid. However, the Conservative governments he has so faithfully served will find a way to approve it. If British Prime Minister May can find a way to govern with the N. I. Democratic Unionist Party surely the slime of Murdoch’s management will not trouble them.

Let me add to this prospect two recent troubling scenarios. The British Crown Prosecution Service charged six including 4 police officials in the 1989 Hillsborough Stadium soccer disaster in which 96 fans were trampled to death. For almost 40 years the police lied to investigators about the handling of the tragedy. The SUN did its part to smear those who died claiming they were drunken hooligans and ridiculing the victims’ families efforts to get the truth. Even PM Thatcher joined the name calling. Thatcher and current PM May were well equipped to handle obstructing investigations into security forces killings having done so brilliantly in Northern Ireland.   The smearing by the SUN in the soccer tragedy was so bad that today their reporters are not allowed in the Liverpool football club and the paper is not sold at their stadium. Indifference to truth and peddling government propaganda are the two marks of the Murdoch brand.

Stateside Murdoch’s New York Post recently played a similar role to the SUN.   In a shabby but subtle piece of propaganda on U-2’s appearance at Met Life Stadium, the author, Hardeep Phull, referred back to a 1987 U-2 concert in America when Bono made an anti-violence appeal to the American supporters of the IRA after performing ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’. His appeal in 1987 was due to a bomb detonation the day before the concert in Enniskillen which killed 11. It was uncharacteristic of the IRA not to have given a warning. As it later turned out, a British Army jamming device actually triggered the explosion. Bono’s pain then and now is understandable. But it is now 20 years after the 1998 Belfast Treaty. How is this pure British propaganda? Two-thirds of the article cited rumors that Irish-Americans threatened Bono. Those rumors were more likely fabricated by the British in the first instance. And Phull should have referenced the 2015 U-2 hit ‘Raised by Wolves’ expressing Bono’s concern for the victims of the 1974 no-warning Dublin Monaghan bombings which killed 33, mostly women and children, and injured 300. It was a British Army production from start to finish and to this day Her Majesty’s government refuses to provide answers to the Irish Government.

Why then this flimsy smear in an American paper 30 years after the tragedy of Enniskillen but without reference to the other far more recent and relevant U-2 song? The British Prime Minister is readying a piece of legislation that would grant amnesty to all British security forces involved in killing in Northern Ireland. The amnesty would be granted no matter how much evidence there was substantiating murder. If adopted it would gut the 1998 peace pact provisions and violate numerous human rights provisions of British/EU law. The wedding between the N. I. based DUP Members of Parliament and the Conservative government insures the bill will pass as long as the Labor Party and Americans don’t kick up a fuss. Sounds like a job for Murdoch and Smear Ltd!!

If he adds SKY TV to his corporate stable you can be assured all of his resources will be put at the disposal of Theresa May’s Conservative government. The New York Post article is just the beginning. Murdoch a “fit and proper” person to run a newspaper or television franchise? He’s not fit to run a kennel.