The News Corp propaganda machine has recently come under fire — from without and, crucially, from within. First, a junior producer on Sky News wrote about the “crisis of conscience” that forced her to quit after the Christchurch massacre, given that Sky promotes and legitimises the white supremacist ideology that drove the shooter. Then veteran journalist Tony Koch unloaded on the “unbalanced rubbish” published by The Australian and its “predictable, weak, unresearched and juvenile” columnists. Excellent reporter Rick Morton was recorded giving his honest assessment of his employer: “People will tell you going back a decade it used to be a very great paper, and in many ways it still is, but some of the craziness has been dialled up. … It is a moral quandary that I have wrestled with for the entire seven years I’ve been at the Oz. Am I lending credibility to a horrible machine?” And Richard Cooke wrote a blistering, must-read critique of the “political propaganda entity”, concluding, “as the entity is constituted now, my answer is yes – Australia would be a better country without News. Of course it would be. Either it changes, or we do.”
14 May 2019