Trust me, I harbor no illusions about the impact of my commentaries. Hell, even family members can’t be bothered to stop tweeting or TikToking long enough to read them. And, even if President Trump succeeds in banning their TikTok app, I’m sure they will find another diversion (like scrolling videos of laughing babies or talking pets) that is more worthy of their screen time.
Apropos of TikTok, if you’ve seen comedian Sarah Cooper’s videos mimicking the word salads Trump tosses every day, you know why he wants to ban it. She’s just the latest to get under his thin skin. And yes, this big man has shown time and again that he is small enough to use the awesome power of the US government just to avenge any slight, no matter how petty.
Indeed, this is why I suspect Trump is now pissed at his butt boy, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham. Because Graham dared to tweet this obvious solution to Trump’s pretend concerns about TikTok posing risks to national security:
What’s the right answer? Have an American company like Microsoft take over TikTok. Win-win.
Keeps competition alive and data out of the hands of the Chinese Communist Party.
— Lindsey Graham (@Lindsey GrahamSC) August 1, 2020
Mind you, when Trump first tweeted in a tiff about banning TikTok, he knew full well that Microsoft was already in the final stage of sealing a deal to buy it. Graham knew too. Therefore, even when he was doing the right thing, Graham was just covering Trump’s ass. Never mind that Trump was too stupid to realize it or too arrogant to appreciate it, or both.
But I digress …
The point is that there are times when, in the course of human events, things make me go, hmmmm. Such a thing occurred on Saturday.
For context, here is an excerpt from “Murdochs and the Culture of Misogyny and Racism They Lord Over at Fox News,” which I published just days ago (July 22):
_________
I have written many commentaries effectively ridiculing the culture at Fox News as a cross between those dramatized in The Stepford Wives and Peyton Place. … But this is about Fox News, and its culture of sexual harassment that continues to defy the #MeToo movement. …
Fox News showed no intent to stop cultivating predatory men. Nothing betrayed this quite like the way it continued propagating the lies and hijinks of Donald J. Trump. Its lack of repentance provoked me to denounce corporate titans for fraternizing with Fox Corporation titan Rupert Murdoch, instead of ostracizing him like a Trumpian Goebbels.
_______
Given that, imagine my surprise and delight when I read this:
James Murdoch, the younger son of media mogul Rupert Murdoch, has resigned from the board of News Corporation citing ‘disagreements over editorial content’. …
Murdoch’s departure from News Corp would, our correspondent says, appear to grant even more influence to his brother Lachlan who is generally thought to share his father’s more conservative views.
(BBC, August 1, 2020)
Granted, he was already being written … out. This, after his brother Lachlan so clearly outplayed James in the Shakespearean succession drama their father Rupert scripted. I refer you to my commentary excerpted above for more on their King Lear-like play.
That’s why this denouement smacks a little of James saying, “I quit,” before Rupert could say, “You’re fired.”
Still, there’s no denying that disagreement over editorial content affected James’s performance in the succession play and his decision now to exit stage left. After all, he has spent much of the past four years not only denouncing the way Fox News propagates Trump’s propaganda, but also decrying the way Rupert and Lachlan
- champion every conspiracy, most notably the birther one that questioned Obama’s presidency; and
- deny any fact, most notably the climate-change fires that ravaged their Australian homeland.
In fact, there seems absolutely nothing Rupert and Lachlan would not tolerate, so long as it furthers their bottom line.
So I get why James decided the time had finally come to treat Fox News Corps like a pariah. I only hope his resignation gives other titans the courage to do the same.
That said, I don’t believe in coincidences. Therefore, I’ll take a little credit even if uncanny timing is the only link between my July-22 commentary and James’s “shock resignation” – as the admittedly sensational London Daily Mail headlined its report.
Related commentaries:
good bad ugly… Fox News culture… Australia burning…