Investigation requested into Murdoch’s media monopoly in Australia
Sydney, Australia, Oct 19 (efe-epa).- Hundreds of thousands of Australians supported a campaign promoted by former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd asking parliament to investigate the media monopoly of mogul Rupert Murdoch, who controls 70 percent of the country’s newspapers.
News Corp, founded by Murdoch, owns hundreds of local newspapers in Australia, as well as newspapers such as The Australian, the tabloid Daily Telegraph or the pay-TV channel Sky News, a situation Rudd has called a “cancer for democracy.”
“No other Western democracy has the level of monopoly of written media that Rupert Murdoch has obtained in Australia,” the former Labor president, who ruled the country from 2007 to 2010 and a few months in 2013, said Monday in a Sydney Morning Herald opinion piece.
The petition, open for signatures until Nov. 4, calls for an investigation of the Australian media scene as a whole, but highlights Murdoch’s media empire, which has numerous right-wing and conservative commentators opposing measures against the climate crisis, among other issues.
The mogul’s son, James Murdoch, resigned this year from the News Corp board, due to “disagreements over certain editorial content published by the company’s media and other strategic decisions,” according to himself.
Murdoch’s media has become famous for headlines such as the one that, during the 2013 election campaign won by conservative Tony Abbott, featured Rudd with the headline “Kick this mob,” or scandals such as the 2017 publication of defamatory content against actor Geoffrey Rush, falsely accused of sexual harassment.
Murdoch’s media empire also extends to countries such as the United States, through media such as the Fox television network, the Wall Street Journal, and The New York Post, and the United Kingdom, with The Sun and The Times newspapers.
Murdoch’s News of the World publication in the United Kingdom became the center of a scandal of illegal wiretapping of celebrities, politicians and members of British royalty and had to close in 2011. EFE-EPA
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