Steve Benen in Washington Monthly details the route of a deliberate lie made by Betsy McCaughey in a Bloomberg OpEd to national attention. Oh, yes, it is a lie and from her to Rush to Drudge to Fox it grew in stature and stupidity of wrongness. The piece is interesting but I'm not going to detail it here because what is germane is that it is a lie and bruited about by Fox for the benefit of the right wing and big pharma.
The first question that should occur to anyone about the spread of lies by media is who gains and then why is it in the offenders' interests. That Rupert Murdoch is a right wing jerk is known, but why is it so important to his network to promote Republicans? You have to stop and remember that the economy is important to any business and larger ones have more to lose and a harder time recovering. There is more to the blatant boosterism than ownership's ideology.
To get to where we are in this discussion you have to know that the US government regulates the airwaves because they are held to be owned by the public, as a limited public resource and to be used for the benefit of the US public. The broadcast spectrum in the US belongs to the American public and is leased to private enterprise. Now one of the factors involved in the US ownership of the airwaves is the consideration that foreign control of them is counter to that idea. When NewsCorp showed up in the US Rupe wasn't a citizen and the corporation was foreign controlled, a real not in the rules situation for use of more than a very limited amount of spectrum. Yes, this was a known right wing organization from its editorial policies world wide, but the US market was out in any meaningful way.
Now, if you are a world wide businessman with right wing sensibilities and you can't get into the biggest market there is, what do you do? Well, what you do is make yourself a friend to the political establishment and Rupe got his waiver of the damn rules from GHW Bush. You can thank the Republicans, as Rupe does, for the very existence of NewsCorp in the US as a meaningful business. Understand the depth of the debt owed to Republicans by Rupe and the entire operations of NewsCorp - world wide. The world's largest market by exponential factors became his playground. It is doubtful that any business in the world owes more to a single Party than NewsCorp, though Blackwater and Haliburton have something in that arena, but penny ante in scale.
The next time somebody asks you to take FauxNews seriously on a political issue you can quite truthfully and with a straight face ask them why you should take a Republican creation seriously.
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