Murdoch Press Bigotry Hypocrisy

The right-leaning part of the Fourth Estate is in full cry over allegations of anti-Semitism within the Labour Party, and no part of that body is more vehement in its condemnation than the inmates of the Baby Shard bunker, UK headquarters of the Murdoch empire. Nobody can accuse them of being soft on anti-Semitism. The problem is that the bloke who runs the whole show is not free of it himself.

Today, the Sun’s website carries a variety of articles berating Labour over the self-destructive antics of Ken Livingstone, and making more general claims about Labour and anti-Semitism. Readers are told “Sorry? No Ken do! Livingstone refuses to apologise 20 times over Hitler comments as Labour plunges deeper into crisis”, and Stephen Pollard, not Labour’s greatest fan, is given a platform to tell “Fringe pals of Jeremy Corbyn 'are the reason anti-Semitism has found a home in the Labour Party’”.

There is also the highly creative “Don’t come Jez! Corbyn told to stay away by Welsh Labour after Ken Livingstone ‘anti-semitism’ row”. As Sir Sean nearly said, I think we got the point. The Murdoch doggies are equally clear over at the allegedly upmarket Sunday Times, which has the prominent headline “Israel: Labour in denial over anti-Semitism … Livingstone refuses to apologise over Hitler remark”.

And that’s all very well, but when it comes to anti-Semitism and other forms of racist bigotry, the Murdoch mafiosi are standing in an extremely draughty glasshouse. Moreover, it is Creepy Uncle Rupe himself who has been systematically going the rounds smashing the windows. Rupert Murdoch is, to no surprise, a product of his past in upper-middle-class, highly privileged Australia. And heck, does it show.

Rupe has his own Twitter feed, which he operates personally. This is in many ways A Very Good Thing: there is no spin, no sanitising of the message. We see the real tycoon and read his thoughts directly. The problem comes when he blurts out “Moses film attacked on Twitter for all white cast. Since when are Egyptans not white? All I know are”.

To the sound of News Corp PRs opening the upper floor windows and leaping to an early death, he continued “Everybody attacks last Tweet. Of course Egyptians are Middle Eastern, but far from black. They treated blacks as slaves”. He’d have gone down a treat in Apartheid-era South Africa. It got worse: “Okay, there are many shades of color. Nothing racist about that, so calm down!” And then there was his attitude to Jews.

“Why is Jewish owned press so consistently anti-Israel in every crisis?” he ranted back in 2012, before the backlash caused him to, for once, apologise. That’s the kind of casual anti-Semitism that his papers are now attributing to the Labour Party. This may have been yet another crude attempt to kick Arthur Sulzberger, publisher of the New York Times, who was in fact raised as an Episcopalian Christian. Which just makes it worse.

And that’s before the Sun’s attitude to Muslims gets considered. The Murdoch press loves to accuse others of bigotry. But their organisation is riddled with it - from top to bottom.