Grubstakers - Episode 41: Rupert Murdoch feat. Aimee Terese

Episode Date: November 13, 2018

This week on Grubstakers we cover the real crocodile Dundee, the cutest koala and the man who remains down under Rupert Murdoch! He did some terrible things to control all the information old people retain. We're join by Aimee Terese of the Dead Pundit's Society podcast. Follow her on twitter @aimeeterese then follow us on twitter @Grubstakerspod

I Think we disproportionately stop whites too much. I taught those kids lessons on product development and marketing and They taught me what it was like growing up Feeling targeted for your race. I am proud to be gay. I am proud to be a Republican. You know, I went to a tough school in Queens, and they used to beat up the little Jewish boys. You know, I love having the support of real billionaires. Hello, welcome back to Grubstakers, the podcast about billionaires.

Sean P. McCarthy here, joined by... Steve Jeffries. Andy Palmer. And so this week, we're talking about Rupert Murdoch, and we are very excited to have a very special guest joining us from Australia, where it is 5.44 a.m. The co-host of the Dead Pundits Society podcast uh post-grad student amy therese is here hi amy thank you for being here and you can of course find her on twitter at amy therese and uh i'm very excited you're here because first of all i am a big fan of the dead pundit society

um i listened to your interview with adolph reed jr it great. I actually... Sean's second favorite Adolph? I misquoted it. I misquoted your interview with Adolph Reed Jr. in which I revealed that I thought sunspots were actually freckles. And I'm very tired of this podcast that's supposed to be about how smart I am, constantly revealing what an utter dumbass I am. But I'm very excited that you're... And when we contacted you, Emmy, you said you were... You warned us before we brought you on that you were problematic. And so we have only two requests.

Keep your ethnic slurs artful and keep your ableist slurs copious those are uh how we do things over here grubstakers yeah do the uh do the australian ones that our american audience won't know and can't get offended by yeah oh okay yeah sure i Oh, okay. Yeah, sure. I mean, I'll try. I'll do my best. But it's difficult in as much as when you're so just comfortably ableist, it's sort of hard to really recognize what's even problematic anymore, you know? It just comes so naturally to me. So I just really wait for the work loads to identify the slurs. Okay, okay. I don't even know that I'm making them, you know? It just comes so naturally to me. So I just really wait for the work loads to identify the slurs. Okay, okay.

Like, I don't even know that I'm making them, you know? Great, great. That makes you the perfect guest, actually. Yeah. No, you just... Oh, brilliant, brilliant. You'll just advance in your career, and then five years from now,

this recording will be dug up, and you'll be fired. Well, see, my problem is, like, I know a lot of people have, like, concerns about, you know, people digging up pre-woke tweets. I am frankly more concerned that people might dig up woke tweets of mine. I know, yeah. That's really going to fuck up my rep. Your Patreon numbers fall in half. It's like my cost reduction is a bone of feed.

I can't sleep if I've got any of this. It's like representation matters shit. Just every other word you use has an X at the end of it. But so today we're very excited to have Amy Therese joining us because we are talking about the life and times of Rupert Murdoch, arguably the most powerful Australian in all of the world. Just to clarify, he's an American now. Yes. He's been naturalized.

He is a naturalized U.S. citizen. He's your problem, to be sure. Yes. Oh, I forgot to play Amy's intro music, by the way. But back to the subject at hand, Rupert Murdoch, estimated by Forbes worth about $19.1 billion as of November 2018. The Murdoch family controls 39% of the voting shares in News Corp, which is the holding company for all their media properties. Around 17% of the total shares are controlled by the Murdoch family. And you might know, you the listener might know Rupert Murdoch as the founder and acting CEO of Fox News Channel,

the owner of the Wall Street Journal, and for being a professional rape ignorer at all of his media properties. But I just wanted to ask you, Amy, just to kind of start this off, because Rupert Murdoch, as you mentioned, is now a naturalized U.S. citizen, but he was born in Australia. And I just wanted to ask you if you had a general sense of what the Australian public writ large thinks about Rupert Murdoch, and if there's any pride at the fact that someone from your backwards island has managed to take over the government and media in both the United States and United Kingdom. Not sure where exactly to go with that slightly backhanded compliment question. But yeah, basically, I'm ignoring the aspersions cast on my backwards island

i think like for the most part like for all the shit that i give australia there is at least one kind of cultural sensibility in most australians which is kind of a fuck you attitude towards billionaires and towards authority. So I can't say there's any real love lost for Rupert when he departed officially as an Australian. And like his kids are pretty like twerpy and annoying too. So they are but so like broadly speaking i think aussies don't have like a you know a particularly fond not particularly tender-hearted to an old rupert um but he's still got a fucking stranglehold on our media in much the same way as he does in the states in the uk so like we don't need to like this is the beauty of capital right like we don't need to, like, this is the beauty of capital, right? Like, we don't need to like the motherfucker for him to control what we read and think, right?

Like, we, as I always say, like, we don't need to have an, like, affective investment in the guy. Like, we can disrespect him all we want and kind of give him that fuck you dad attitude. But, like, ultimately, he's still got a shit ton of power. Like, he basically makes or breaks governments in Australia on the regular. He was heavily involved in the recent dethroning of Prime Minister Turnbull and a bunch of others in our relentless parliamentary coups over the past 10 years. So, yeah. relentless parliamentary coups over the past 10 years so yeah i think like uh one study from 2011

that i saw said that murdoch's empire controls i think 59 of all newspapers sold in australia so it is like a very significant uh media holdings in all three of the names yeah I actually think it's higher now. They changed media regulation laws slightly and the fact that he owns that percentage of papers sold in Australia also doesn't reflect the regional free weekly publications. Oh, really? Yeah, so there's like, for example live on the northern beaches in sydney and so there's like a a daily newspaper that's free it's called manly daily and i'm pretty sure that's murdoch owned um and it's basically like advertisers supported but it's a propaganda rag like they all are so the fact that it has no cover price and it's not paid for

um doesn't mean that it's not distributed to every house in in the in the region right so like just because he owns that percentage of papers that are um paid for it doesn't actually reflect the breadth of his newspaper distribution. Is it mostly just used to roll up and kill giant spiders, though? No, we keep them as pets. I'm learning a lot. Either or, depending on how many cobwebs are in your brain i suppose um i really enjoy the fact that americans are so scared of australia it's so incredibly like pedestrian and metropolitan

when you're here well like 50 of the stuff that's exported here is you know i mean as you're probably well aware it's just someone walking through the outback being like oh it's it'd kill me if i don't move my finger like because that's what your fucking idiot market wants to see well yeah obviously sorry all i know i mean is every time that i google deadly spiders or deadly snakes is my most direct interaction with your country Because the top 10 are always like half of them in Australia. Sounds like you have a particularly Australian king. Some kind of fetish for Australian snakes.

I don't even know if I'd want to see what comes up. I googled that shit. I'm on incognito, don't worry. Are there actually no giant spiders? And it's just like a ploy to keep people out of Australia. There was a Facebook account that said that all of Australia is a hoax and that if you fly to Australia, you're actually flying to South America

and meeting actors pretending that they are Australians. And that all of this was done to cover up a genocide of British prisoners. Yeah, because we wouldn't want the Brits, or the white colonizers to have anything like that on their hands. It's a good thing we covered it up. But so I just wanted to cover up a genocide of white people by denying a genocide of the average. Yeah, Well,

clearly that's what's happening in South Africa at the moment. But so I just wanted to kind of go through a Rupert Murdoch's life briefly, chronologically, because of course we won't have time to get to everything. And then we can talk particularly about the, the phone hacking scandal and the scandal at Fox fox news in the united states and uh amy if at any time you know something that we know we do not know which i'm sure will occur often but you can just jump in and let us know and uh lend your perspective to this as a uh a native australian

and a very educated person unlike all all of us, except for Steve. Yeah, always feel free to tell Sean to shut up. The rest of us appreciate it. And my tyrannical control over this podcast and the sequencing of information. But just to kind of like start with Rupert Murdoch, for listeners who aren't aware, if you're wondering how old money Rupert Murdoch is, his father, his grandfather, and his great-grandparents all have Wikipedia articles

about them. His great-grandparents moved from Scotland to Victoria in the mid-19th century. His great-grandfather and grandfather were Presbyterian ministers. And then his father, Sir Keith Murdoch, was, according to Michael Wolff, at one point the most powerful newspaper publisher in Australia. He was a war correspondent for a paper during World War I. He went to see the Australian troops at Gallipoli

with that turkey shoot of Australians in actual Turkey. But so apparently he went and he saw the troops he went to watch uh ottoman target practice watch the ottomans calibrate their machine guns apparently he went out there and he wrote like some um a very critical report that said hey the british are just getting australian slaughter over here. And then it was like initially censored, but eventually it made its way back to the British government and circulated among government. And then eventually resulted in some people getting fired and these kinds of stuff. So it was kind of like it made his career, so to speak. But so he was a war correspondent in World War One.

But then he comes back and starts setting up a media empire in Australia. He is eventually knighted in 1933. He becomes Sir Keith Murdoch. And just an interesting thing about his life, before we get into Rupert, his papers, his newspapers, gave support to the labor politician Joseph Leons, Joseph Leons, a labor prime minister of Australia. He gave him his support in 1931, but he later regretted it in 1936. And he said, quote, I put him there and I'll put him out. And so it's just kind of interesting where it's like Rupert Murdoch exercises all this control over our politics and our government, but even his own father exercised a similar degree of control over Australian politics in his time. He was the head of propaganda

for the Australian government during World War II for a time, Sir Keith Murdoch was. He eventually had to resign. He was accused of being a Goebbels-like figure in Australia, and then he just went back to his media empire, basically. They hire someone for head of propaganda. Not sure what they were expecting. So he was the chairman of the Herald and the Weekly Times, the Australian papers. And his son, Rupert Murdoch, was born in 1931 in Melbourne, in an extremely privileged upbringing to the most powerful newspaper man in Australia.

And I just wanted to ask you, Amy, from my research, there were three big media families in Australia, the Fairfaxes, the Packers, and the Murdochs. Do you happen to just know anything about those names? Yeah, it's pretty much, to a large extent, still the case. So the Fairfaxes are no longer in control of their particular legacy publications, but they still exist. So I don't know if you guys have heard of The Age or The Sydney Money Herald. They'd probably be two of the largest. I read it every morning.

Yeah, sure you do, sure you do. So they'd probably be two of the largest legacy papers from the Fairfax family originally. But subsequently, a lot of the Fairfax media has been subsumed by or with Channel 9, which is actually predominantly owned by the Packer family. So, like, it's all just incredibly incestuous and, like, pretty much remains in the hands of, like, two families even to this day, like the Packers and the murdochs well it's interesting because like um we've kind of made fun of a forbes magazine gives people a self-made score on a scale of one to ten and they give rupert murdoch a seven out of ten self-made and it's like again he was born to the

most powerful newspaper publisher in uh all of australia and had an enormous amount of capital. Like, his genius strategy, like, was taking London tabloid style and then transferring it to all the papers he was able to buy with the massive amounts of capital he had. So, I mean, it's like... I believe the term you're looking for is creative destruction. That's right. But, yeah, like, I mean like i don't mean to be a total fucking marxist stuff in here but like i don't even recognize the premise of something like

self-made like to me that's an incoherent concept like it doesn't make any fucking sense nobody's self-made even somebody who like bootstraps it from, you know, the bottom of a socioeconomic ladder, like they're fundamentally able to do that because they happen to be not just incredibly hardworking, but also in the right place at the right time. They were able to leverage the right connections. They were helped by the right people. They got, you know, an education that facilitated that.

Like I just, the premise to me is when I reject out of hand, but like even if I didn't, right, the idea that somebody who was born to a fucking newspaper magnet and just like educated at the best private schools and just fucking rolling in dough. It's like, give it a break. It's like Trump with his like, I got a small however many million dollars from my dad.

It's like, bitch, most people can't even get like a home down payment online from their folks. Shut up. Most people are left with debts from their family. Right. Actually, not even, not only is it a coherent theory for Forbes magazine, but they actually have a cardinal scale for it. And Rupert Murdoch is what? He's a 7?

He's a 7 out of 10, yes. My understanding of the phrase self-made man is it's just synonymous with lucky psychopath. Yes. Yes. That's exactly it. with lucky psychopath like yes yes it's I remember I watched it like a little thing on uh Rupert Murdoch yesterday where it was like oh he he just armed with a small newspaper and a dream he took over media and it reminded me of the RNC I don't know if anyone remembers this when they when they have like a little video about the candidate

and they try to make it look like a hardscrabble story. And Donald Trump's was just the most ridiculous one where it's like he only inherited some real estate in Queens, but he dreamed of moving to Manhattan. Just desperate ideology, trying to reaffirm the ideology of self-made.

Just to kind of go through the start chronologically with Rupert Murdoch, he was born in 1931 in Melbourne. As was just mentioned, he attends a prep school. Sorry, can you say that again? Oh, yeah, I'm sorry. No, like where was he born?

Hell yeah. I'm so tired of the bullying that occurs against me on this podcast. Rupert Murdoch was born in Melbourne, Australia. Melbourne? Melbourne, Australia. Melbourne. Melbourne. Melbourne, Australia. Melbourne. Melbourne, Australia. Melbourne. Melbourne. Melbourne.

Melbourne, Australia. No, just like ram the second half of it together. You just don't need to articulate it properly. It's M-E-L-B-N. He was born in Australia. Regardless of how one might pronounce the city Rupert Murdoch was born in. He was born 1931. And Michael Wolff is the journalist who wrote that Fire and Fury book that Trump was all pissed about.

But he also wrote a biography of Rupert Murdoch, which Murdoch cooperated with and then got angry about. It was called The Man Who Owns the News. And just according to Michael Wolff, Rupert Murdoch attends private prep school in Australia. I think he's on the cricket team. According to Wolff, he wasn't very well liked, but he hated sports and authority. And then Wolff just kind of talks about his early life. When he was 19 years old, Rupert Murdoch and his father,

again, the most powerful newspaper man in Australia, they visited the United States, and they met President Harry Truman in the White House and this was right before Rupert Murdoch headed to Oxford University in 1950 so again very privileged upbringing oh he also meets the Pope in Rome along with his father so these kinds of connections that give you a self-made seven out of ten score from Forbes magazine. But one random fact I found from... No, Sean, despite what you might have been taught

in your upbringing, meeting the Pope doesn't make you give you like a magic inroads to success. Was able to leverage his connection with the Pope to influence the JFK government in the United States. I mean, it can get you off historical sex if it's he would utilize his experience with the pope's management of the church to run fox news yeah um but so the random thing that i found from this uh michael wolf book

that i found interesting was during the time ruupert Murdoch was at Oxford, he was a supporter of the British Labour Party and kept a bust of Vladimir Lenin on the mantle in his room. Wait, what? So that's just the kind of thing that happens before you inherit the money. Yeah, I mean, it's not like we'd have any bourgeois brats love. But enough about the Washington, D.C. area DSA.

Did you know that Lennon's dad was rich, too? Shout out to DSA say we love you uh but so according to michael wolf uh rupert murdoch has bad grades at oxford but he's still he's very interested in media at this time um just one random story from murdoch's life uh he takes a summer road trip through eastern europe and greece in a car purchased by his father, which he totals in a car accident in Turkey. This is before 1952, I think 51 or 52. But again, you know, these all kind of hardscrabble upbringings where everyone gets to take a road trip through Europe and then smash their car and have no consequences whatsoever. But so in 1952, Ruperpert murdoch's father dies um and so this is a pretty defining uh point for murdoch's life uh his father leaves him a big stake in a queensland newspaper ltd which uh

owns several papers in australia his mother rupert murdoch's mother ends up selling much of this stake uh in order to like pay off debts and all these things. But essentially, his father dies, leaving Rupert Murdoch in charge of a company called News Ltd., which would today become News Corp., which owned a— In charge of Selfmade Inc. So this company owned, and I'm about to get hammered for pronouncing this uh a paper called adelaide news a-d-e-l-a-i-d-e no you fucking nailed it you nailed it adelaide news all right sweet um this was a 75 000 circulation newspaper and this is kind of like the crown jewel that rupert murdoch starts out with in addition to all of the capital that he inherited. But essentially, he inherits this paper, he becomes the chief executive of it.

But before he does that, he goes to work for the Daily Express in London at 22 years old. And he spends, I think, a year or two there. And it's at the Daily Express in London where he learns the British tabloid style. And this is what he kind of imports to Australia and then perfects upon. The running theme with his newspapers is a focus on scandal and sports, you know, and also naked women. When he buys The Sun in the United Kingdom in the 70s, he tells his editor-in-chief that he, quote, I want a tearaway paper with lots of tits in it, is what Rupert Murdoch said about The Sun. So it is just kind of like the modern tabloid style. According to The Economist, Rupert Murdoch was one of the inventors

or big propagators of this, a lot of which he borrowed from kind of what they were doing in London in the 50s. Wait, this is the same guy whose news organization was riddled with sexist scandals? Shockingly enough. But yeah, I mean, and so this kind of like just brings you up to the 50s.

He inherits his father's paper and he kind of goes on an acquisition spree in Australia. He buys the Sunday Times in Perth, as we were just discussing. In 1956, he buys the Daily Mirror. In 1960, he starts expanding into New Zealand. And again, you know, it's kind of a tabloid style. Focus on sports and scandal is his big innovation. And eventually, he's able to move into the United Kingdom, which is what gives him the capital to form his media empire.

Oh, apparently he launched a national paper, The Australian, in 1964. I was just wondering, Amy, have you ever seen this thing? Have I ever? It's a total fucking propaganda rag. It's a, it's a loss leader. Like, he still runs it at a massive loss. And basically, it's a loss leader like he still runs it at a massive loss um and basically it's just filled with like it's like a conservative make work project basically like it's yeah it's trash like i don't know if you've ever seen any of the like especially scandalous like super blatantly racist australian cartoons that tend to go viral every now and again. Well, no, but I'd like to. Yeah, they're almost certainly always cartoonists from the Australian.

It's, yeah, it's a conservative make-work rag. So remember, listeners, that's at GrubstakersPod on Twitter if you'd like to share them with us. Wait, you know the one that the picture of Serena Williamsiams recently that yeah yeah yeah made the rounds yeah that was from an australian cartoonist man i'm mad that america couldn't be

the most racist cartooning country i mean we're already behind france i mean like i hate to like endorse anything that he says but like like, John Oliver had it exactly right when he said that Australians wear their racism like a comfortable slipper. It is fucking blatant. Like we don't have the same work lottery that y'all have. And I don't know what's better and what's worse to be honest, right? Like just submerging,

like completely racist sensibilities underneath, like, you know, polite fucking euphemisms, like whether that's any better, I'm not sure. But like, we literally have like, like, what are they called? Like the really old school like um like mammy drawings and like um what do they call it like that just yeah just basically the kind of cartoons that you would have expected to find in the early 20th century in the u.s so just like

par for the course in austral 2018. Like, no biggie. And that's Murdoch's story. Well, I like that Australia repealed their carbon tax, right? Yeah, yeah, that had nothing to do with Rupert Murdoch. Everything to, yeah. But it is kind of cute that your country is following us into global warming denial, but like, even if doing the right thing it doesn't matter because we're gonna kill the planet anyways and i mean let's not kid ourselves we're fucking satellites standing in the u.s anyway so maybe global warming is divine punishment for racist cartoons maybe but like we all know that the country's first likely to get submerged not ours yeah

it's kind of a cruel twist of fate i mean if i were to pick divine punishment for racist cartoons it would be uh getting your offices shot up in france jesus it's just me Charlie but uh sorry please please do carry on but Amy you were mentioning that his paper is a loss leader and it is an interesting thing from like various things I read about Rupert Murdoch is essentially like you know like his uh Sky Network and his Fox News and stuff a lot of his television stations kind of fund his newspapers to lose money because he believes uh perhaps correctly that the newspapers by him influence even if they are not necessarily profitable because you know if there's like only three newspapers left and you control one or two of them you have a lot of sway over the editorial direction of newspapers and

he's also just a proponent of the job here in tennessee the extent to which they by him influence i think it like can't be overstated particularly in australia where like although we have sky news like we are not the cable news um station in the way that the states is so like to a huge extent like all of our radio and like early morning television and everything, they're all getting their kind of daily news from the papers. And given that in each capital city, Murdoch would own probably two out of every three major daily papers, it's an extraordinary level of influence yeah and um so and this kind of brings us to in 1968 he expands to the united kingdom and i think like uh i don't know about australia but at least even more than the united states he exercises an

incredible degree over of control over the government in the united kingdom where every prime minister will like have these private meetings with Rupert Murdoch. I think David Cameron like within a day of being sworn in, one of the first people he met with was Rupert Murdoch. Tony Blair would famously, after taking over labor, the Labor Party in the UK would fly to Australia in 1994 to meet directly with Rupert Murdoch and kiss the ring and essentially make peace. And we'll get back to that story later. But so in 1968, Rupert Murdoch buys the News of the World in the United Kingdom, and then he buys The Sun a year later. And it's these kind of

tabloids that give him really the expanded capital to buy his U.S. media empire. And we mentioned already the kind of salacious way that he ran the Sun, but it is just kind of a typical tabloid paper with heavy scandal, heavy sports coverage, lots of nudity. And Rupert Murdoch, he proclaims himself to be generally, you know, the libertarian, you know, a pocketbook libertarian, essentially, where he will sit on like the board of the Cato Institute. He's a lot like the Koch brothers in the sense that he himself will say, oh, I believe in a pathway to citizenship. But his paper, The Sun is like one of the most racist anti-immigration papers in the united kingdom because that's that's what sells the paper you know so it's essentially like his

political beliefs are just whatever makes him money and he has a strong degree of control over the editorial direction of all his media properties we can just kind of uh continue the story uh 68 he buys these papers he's able to really get the capital to move into the united states 1976 he buys the new york post um he moves to new york uh and then uh in uh 19 and then in 1981 he buys the times in london which was like a respected british paper that was having some struggles and importantly in the 80 the 80s, his papers all endorsed Margaret Thatcher. And Thatcher credits this partly with her victory. And as quid pro quo, she relaxes media ownership laws,

which allows him to buy even more media space in the United Kingdom. And I guess we can talk about whopping as well. It's our Burger King segment. They're called Italian, Sean. So basically, throughout the 1980s, he consolidates his media properties, and then what he does is I think he owned four papers

in the United Kingdom, and in 1986, he moves them all to one new printing press where he wants to switch to non-union labor he uh fires 6 000 employees who go on strike as a result and uh then um the uh police uh violently disperse they arrest like more than a thousand people uh throughout these various strikes they of course uh beat the living hell out of uh striking union protesters and interestingly enough this would result in uh murdoch papers having a very close relationship with uh the london police department the metropolitan and he still talks about that

as like one of his big successes was breaking the unions and the um printing presses but so the whopping strike in, there's allegations that also Margaret Thatcher was involved in like helping him break up this union strike. And I just wanted to know if you had any other thoughts on Wapping, because this is a pretty important moment, not only in him essentially breaking the union of his unionized workforce, but also it brings him much closer to the London Metropolitan Police who, of course, would beat up the striking workers demanding

wages from him. I think the extent to which the whopping strike had massive ramifications, not just on the particular unions involved, but the ability of unions across the entire sector.

And it sort of was like a real watershed moment in terms of like, like when he claims that he broke the unions, like he really thoroughly did. Like they were never able to, it was basically on a par with like miners' strikes of the early 80s in terms of the degree of fuckery that it caused and then the inability for the unions to recover thereafter. Yeah, there were parallels drawn frequently between the union strike

or between the whopping and the miners' strike in Great Britain. I also want to say that it's so offensive that they use the traditional mafia tactic of strike-breaking and call it whopping. Margaret Thatcher offered to send the people she had working in Northern Ireland to take care of the strikers. But yeah, no, and so Wapping's pretty interesting. And then there's a very great frontline documentary from 2012, which is about the phone hacking scandal we'll get to in a second.

But they make the point that essentially after Wapping, where these London and British Metropolitan Police had to beat the shit out of these strikers and protected Rupert Murdoch's capital and property and all of that, the Murdoch papers... Wait, so you're saying that the police intervened to protect capital? It was the first occurrence in history. Weird. it was the first occurrence in history of the police protecting the capital assets of an individual um it is funny how like the uh police officers union is the only union that supports brutally assaulting other unions no i don't think you've met the amfu or they're building the builders unions in australia they've got like a little bit of spunk in them in that way oh they're like union turf wars and in australia uh not so much turf wars but more just like they've been so repeatedly slugged by the right that like

a lot of the people at the heads of the i mean look as a lefty i don't really give a fuck like i endorse it but like some of the people in the top of the building unions are like pretty fucking thuggish like it's fine oh yeah honestly like i'm all for i'm all for results and like i'd rather have like slightly thuggish heads of building unions but like it's better than sucking up to management that like they're a bit shady well there's an interesting like thing in the United States with the major builders unions supporting the wall with Mexico. And I think, I'm paraphrasing it, but there's an old joke here.

Builders unions, if they got the contract, they would support bulldozing their mother's graveyard or something. I mean, I think from a union perspective, that would be a fool's errand in terms of supporting the wall. Because we all know full well that fucking Trump doesn't pay his lawyers. I think the other thing with whopping is, like you said, it's knock-on effects for the whole union membership of the UK. So I'm looking up statistics, and during the 90s,

the total union membership declined from about 9 million to about 7 million. Really? In the UK? Yeah. Oh, interesting. You know, I bet the union's got a sweet-ass deal on the Giants stadium. But so, and yes, the other part of it was Wapping, as alleged, I think convincingly,

in this Frontline documentary about the phone hacking scandal, essentially after Wapping, where the police protected his property, the Murdoch media empire set up a very close relationship with the London Metropolitan Police, whereby former retired police officers would become columnists at The Sun or whatever other paper, or former Murdoch people would go on to be PR flacks for the London Metropolitan Police. And this would become most significant during the phone hacking scandal, where the chief of the London Police would go directly to the Guardian offices and warn them not to run their story on the phone hacking scandal.

So I mean, it is just like a very incestuous relationship between government and the media and private capital and all this, as we've mentioned, never having occurred before in history. But I wanted to just kind of continue chronologically and then we can kind of get back to London. Essentially in 1985, as we've mentioned, Rupert Murdoch becomes a naturalized US citizen so that he can buy a television station in the United States.

What he buys is what would become 20th Century Fox from Mark Rich, who we've mentioned on a previous episode. Essentially, he was selling weapons to Iran, and the government is the only, the U.S. government are the only people allowed to sell weapons to Iran. So he was, of course, he was, Mark Rich was indicted,

and essentially they were worried the U.S. government was going to seize control of his ownership stake of 20th Century Fox, so he had to sell at a fire sale price to Rupert Murdoch. Rupert Murdoch, from this deal, gets six television stations, which would become Fox Network,

and they would get early hits with the X-Files and the Simpsons. Rupert Murdoch from this deal gets six television stations, which would become Fox network. And, uh, they would get early hits with the X files and the Simpsons. And then interestingly enough, um, maybe we put it in the end of the episode. There's a speech where Nicole Kidman presents an award to Rupert Murdoch and thanks him for the Simpsons. Because as we all know,

he did the voice of a poo. Um, but yes, thank you for providing the capital for The Simpsons that you inherited from your monster of a father. Yeah, Stephen looked into this a bit. Yeah, I mean, when you say it was a fire sale, some love analysts evaluated Fox, 20th Century Fox, at close to a billion dollars. He ended up acquiring all of it

for about $530 million. Nice. That's how you get a self-made score out of 7 out of 10. That was all him and also the Iran hostage crisis. Many thanks to the U.S. Attorney's Office for your assistance with the purchase of 20th Century Fox.

But so, and just kind of like closing out the story and bringing us mostly up to the present, 1989, Rupert Murdoch buys HarperCollins. He starts the satellite network B-Sky-B in 1990. He makes a big bet on Premier League Soccer. It's a U.K. and I guess Australian satellite network as well. And he would this very year be thwarted in his attempt to buy out complete control of it. Instead, he's just currently the largest stakeholder. But we'll kind of get into the phone hacking scandal prevents him from taking over all of it. In 1996, he launches Fox News, which we'll talk about in a second.

In 2005, he famously buys MySpace for $580 million. He sells it for $35 million in 2011. It was more of a gift to Roger Ailes. He spent $50 million more on MySpace than he did Fox. That's crazy. It, of course, buys the Wall Street Journal in 2007. Mostly brings us up to the present. But I wanted to just talk about the two big kind of scandals

are the phone hacking and Fox News, and then we can see what else is left to cover. What happened in the United Kingdom, throughout the 2000s, perhaps even into the late 90s, reporters at Murdoch Papers, in order to get gossip, were hacking into the voicemails of basically everyone significant in the country. And this came to light the first time when prince william they ran a story about him uh hurting his knee that was only possible to know if you listen to his voicemails so of course the only reason just like left a voicemail on like a friend's phone it was like ah my knee got a little naked didn't it and then they ran that as a story but it was never released to the public because it got fine and so uh as always happens um basically this might have never come out except for they did

it to a member of the royal family you gotta know your limits yeah um but so and this is kind of like where the close connection with the uh lond comes in. Also, by the way, I highly recommend the Frontline documentary, mostly for interview segments like this when they're talking about Murdoch. He's a pretty rounded guy. I mean, compared to a lot of people watching this documentary, he'll be a lot more rounded than they are sitting there grinding their teeth and gnashing away. A lot of our listeners just self-consciously stopped grinding their teeth.

But so just to kind of go through the phone hacking scandal quickly, as we mentioned, they were hacking into the voicemails. One labor MP got Rebecca Brooks, the head of one of Murdoch's papers, to admit that they were paying police officers in the United Kingdom for information and other purposes back in 2003 at a parliamentary hearing, which was, of course, illegal. And in response, the Murdoch papers outed him as being gay and then smeared him in the press for years afterwards. And then the close connection with the police comes in because the Prince William story, essentially the police conduct like a,

what do you want to call it? A coverup investigation where they say there were only eight victims of this when there were like more than a thousand of phone hacking. It included a like 13 year old girl who had been murdered. Millie Dowler. And they took her, they listened to her voicemails and then may have deleted a couple of them on her phone interfering with an active missing person slash murder investigation yes and they were also hacking the voicemails of

a murder the family members of murdered brit British soldiers and all this other stuff. And eventually, like in 2011, this kind of comes to a head after The Guardian and The New York Times write about it. And as a result, he is not able to buy BSkyB, all his controlling shares. And they would also try to intimidate journalists and um uh politicians who were trying to look into this including tom watson who was a labor mp um apparently he was being followed by member or by like private investigators hired by news corp and then uh eventually police officers police officers yeah eventually like they finally like were able to get Murdoch's son to.

Well, they got Murdoch to testify before Parliament and Murdoch's son. And I think Watson got his revenge with this interaction with his son. You're familiar with the word mafia? Yes, Mr. Watson. Mr. Murdoch, you must be the first mafia boss in history. You didn't know he was running a criminal enterprise. Mr. Watson, please. I think that's inappropriate.

I think it's just the best, like, soggy, like, that's not polite. Please stop. But Amy, was the phone hacking scandal, was that a big deal in Australia at all? Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

It was covered like pretty relentlessly here. It was like covered live and yeah, pretty ongoing. I remember like being a fucking nerd that I am sitting and watching like hours and hours of it at the time. What was it, like 2011, 2012? Yeah, 2011, 2012 was when it really broke. Yeah, yeah, I'm a total night owl. so i remember like in the middle of the night watching significant portions of it i mean it's like it's in my mind the biggest highlight was when he copped a pie in the face and when oh yes like

full tiger mom jumped in front he was at a parliamentary hearing in the united kingdom and some protester tried to pie him in the face and his then wife wendy dang murdoch uh deflected yeah but it turns out she was cocking him with um tony blair yes that's the great ending to the Tony Blair story. Fully. Which, like, so... No, if you want to talk self-made, I reckon Wendy Deng. Self-made is all fuck. She's been grifting away, like, around a whole bunch of octogenarians. Oh, yeah.

It's brilliant. Yeah, someone... What was it? One of us... I think it was Yogi or Stephen found that, like, now she's kind of, like, hooking up with Putin or something. Yeah. There was a story that she's with Putin, Tony Blair, Rupert Murdoch.

But just like she's a hustler. She's a hustler. Good on her. I'll be releasing a Twitter thread about the game theory of that. We can tie her to the hacking of the election. But yeah, just like. By the way, Tonyir is the definition of a fake friend yes well yeah just to give the tony blair story quickly because i find this fascinating as we mentioned um the uh murdoch papers supported margaret thatcher's conservatives they were uh attributed to the victory of john major i think in 1992 over

labor's neil kinnick because they had like i think the sun had a headline like will the last person attribute it to the victory of John Major, I think in 1992, over Labor's Neil Kinnock, because they had like, I think the Sun had a headline like, will the last person to leave Britain if Labor wins turn out the lights or something like that. And so basically, the Murdoch papers were extremely hostile to the Labor government in the United Kingdom. So 1994, Tony Blair flies to Australia and meets with Rupert Murdoch privately to kiss the ring. He, of course, becomes a much more pro-business Labour government, you know, neoliberal,

Clintonian, centrism, whatever you want. I mean, that was the moment when sort of the third way was really in shape and sort of represented a fundamental, you know, it was like the shift from old Labour to new Labour. Like, sort of analogous to sort of the triangulation of Clinton as well. Right.

And so the Murdoch papers, the Murdoch media empire endorsed Tony Blair after this 1994 pilgrimage. He, of course, becomes the prime minister. And Tony Blair and Rupert Murdoch strike up a friendship to the point where Tony Blair actually becomes the godfather to one of his two daughters with his third wife Wendy Dang. And then Rupert Murdoch and Wendy Dang divorce in 2013 after allegations that she had an

affair with Tony Blair. And I like in my head the idea that Tony Blair was actually a good labor man all along because he just set up this long con to cuck a billionaire and make a class statement supporting the war in iraq that was all part of it he's like assuring jeremy corbin like no this is all part i have to do this like a 40-year plan in a way i I helped you, didn't I? But yes, Tony Blair would famously, allegedly, cock Rupert Murdoch. But I did just want to mention, it is pretty impressive that we were talking about the coverage

of this phone hacking scandal with so much of the Australian media controlled by Rupert Murdoch. And I just wanted the drop about the Fox News. So essentially, like one Stuart Varney is another hack Fox business host. He's one of the worst. He's so hardcore. Right.

I mean, it's just like an irritating thing about this country where people like assume they hear a British accent and assume that somebody has anything intelligent to say but uh there's a really a priceless moment uh on fox where uh stuart varney is interviewing rupert murdoch and asks him about the phone hacking scandal all around the country and certainly here in new york is that the news of the world a news corporation newspaper in britain i'm not i'm not talking about that issue at all today. I'm sorry. Okay. No worries, Mr. Chairman.

That's fine with me. I'm sorry. So that's the hard-hitting journalism of Stuart Varney holding his boss's feet to the fire. In a minute, I want to... Sounded almost like a malice then. Sorry, Mr. Chairman. I'm sorry, Chairman.

In a second, I want to talk like murdoch's pivot to education uh that i got from this other um this wall street journal interview that is just a master class in kissing your boss's ass like it just how deferential these guys are to rupert murdoch whenever he's interviewed on his own station is just, it's a thing to behold. Right. And so the long and short of the phone hacking scandal is that Rupert Murdoch has to issue like two public apologies in his papers where he goes, we're so sorry. This is never going to happen again. We're going to make all these changes.

Lol. Yeah, right. And some minor people people including Rebecca Brooks go to jail Lachlan well and like to be fair like I don't think

she was minor she was like very much as right hand man right but yeah I mean like in all seriousness

like the like they like she was very well rewarded for taking the hit. Right.

I think she went right back to the paper after getting out of prison. Yeah, absolutely. How long was she in? It was less than a year, I think. I don't know exactly how long she did. Because she actually admitted to a felony during the proceeding. Right. Accepting paying bribes to the police.

I think I have that right here. How long was she in prison? I think she wound up spending a few months behind bars in the end. I hope she came out with some bomb-ass tats. Like a black teardrop.

Yeah, she's part of a gang now, actually. She's like super buff. Okay, here's the paid police thing. Oh no, I'm sorry. She was charged, but she was actually cleared. She was charged in 2012, but in 2014 she was cleared of all charges. Do either of your newspapers ever use private detectives,

ever bug, or pay the police? We have paid the police for information in the past. And that was at a parliamentary hearing in 2003, which was, again, admitting to a felony, paying police officers, and eight years before the phone hacking scandal. And then the other great thing is, like, the guy who was with her there, I think her editor,

was essentially, like, trying to clarify... Yeah, he was, like, there at the hearing, and he like trying to clear yeah he was like there at the hearing and he was trying to clarify no but we only do it in a legal way which there's no legal way to pay police officers um but yeah so the long and short of this is oh and also there's allegations that murdoch's son uh lachlan murdoch lied to parliament about this phone hacking so um that's highly inappropriate, I think. Right. But essentially, their media empire is not

broken up. Ultimately, there's what's called the Levison Inquiry in the United Kingdom. And then David Cameron, again, very close relationship with Rupert Murdoch, promises that there will be a Levison Inquiry Part part two which is

supposed to explore the relationship between journalists and the police in the United Kingdom and that was as of this year shut down by Theresa May so there will not be a Levinson inquiry part two I'm sure she had a good reason

but yeah and so essentially they're chastised, but things kind of continue as normal without any real major disruptions, except they're not able to buy out their controlling share of BSkyB, which they probably otherwise would have been able to do. Oh. But now. Yeah. But I guess we can talk a bit about the

Fox News scandal and then just kind of wrap up. So turns out Roger Ailes who was put in charge of Fox News. Do you know when he was, Stephen? Well, Fox News was founded in 1996. I believe

Ailes was the... He was there from the job pipeline. Yeah, yeah. And he was a former Nixon guy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. See you. And he was, he was a former Nixon guy and apparently a well-known sex hound. Apparently. And there's a documentary coming out about him in December. And someone in like one of the previews said,

described him as like someone who had this attitude. Like if you want to play with the big boys, you have to sleep with the big boys. Which I feel like he stole from what i said to sean when he approached me about this podcast um so yeah the the news story really like broke when gretchen carlson from fox and friends um allegedly she uh was being harassed by steve ducey and uh spoke out about him uh which is i i find it interesting because steve ducey is probably the dumbest person on television who works without a script and i just get the idea that like when she first started to try to like report him people were like no no no he's just we don't want to look ableist he just does that um and so uh basically roger ailes um he started reprisals against her he

would say that um well this would work out better if we started a sexual relationship uh he demoted her to an afternoon show and eventually fired her. And what really, that would have just been a kind of one-off thing. But then Megyn Kelly also spoke out against Ailes. Hero. Yeah. I'm guessing his sexual advances ruined her Dutch Christmas blackface Santa party. But that took down Ailes. And one of the most fun things to watch on YouTube,

you can just see these clips of the most smug BBC reporters cornering Roger Ailes and asking him about it in Manhattan. It's so clear how much the BBC and The Guardian hate Roger Ailes, and they just have the best schadenfreude. And so... Great pronunciation. Danke schön. Did you learn that word in Melbourne?

It's probably... I mean... Oh, yeah, go ahead. I mean, you guys know I'm prone to fasting a bit of a side diet. oh yeah go ahead i mean you guys know i'm prone to um fasting a bit of a side diet anything me too related i think it's probably worth mentioning that like greta van slusteren and megan kelly they're no fucking heroes and they're not whistleblowers like they waited until such a time as that fat old toad was about to croak. They'd garnered as much money as they could from the network,

and they were pretty much ready to jump ship anyway. But, Amy, did you see that report Megyn Kelly did about the new Black Panther Party blocking the polls and intimidating people when Obama was being re-elected? She saved a lot of lives right okay of course yeah I feel like she was um really obviously a lot of unfair aspersions were cast on her in the wake of her very reasonable questions just this past Halloween but um leaving that injustice aside i i just think that it's

worth mentioning like they were more than happy to leverage fox news to enhance their own careers and turn a blind eye to everything that was going on there like be thoroughly complicit in all of it for as long as it was working for them and once it no longer worked for them and when it became more amenable for them to speak out about what had been going on there they then like did an about face and sort of came out as these kind of you know whistleblowing heroes like they weren't fucking heroes they worked there for like you know that shit had been going on for over two decades right and they hadn't seen fit to say anything because it was not useful to them um and i just think that like i have very little time for that and very little respect for that like i don't think that they're any form of whistleblowing heroes like had the chips fallen slightly differently had ale still been

powerful had like the degree of like egregious payouts towards some of the biggest like rapey creeps like for instance like someone like bill o'reilly i think at a certain point it paid out more than 40 million dollars in in settlements like it was at the point where like it was reaching a tipping point and that's when they sort of come out like come off it you know what I mean like they had enough of a media presence and enough of a commanding authority that had they come out ten years earlier they could have really prevented pretty egregious abuses of power. And I think when it comes to media networks like those ones,

two of the leading news anchors there in terms of women are not going to be the ones who are faced with the most egregious sex abuses on a daily basis, right? It would have been interns and other journalists coming up through the ranks there that were copying that rapey shit from all the men in that place and women like Greta Van Susteren and Megyn Kelly stayed quiet the whole fucking time right so like I just I don't have a great deal of time for them sort of coming out when it becomes expedient to do so but they were happy to stay fucking quiet when it suited you know now amy it sounds like if i'm interpreting this

correctly you're not clap emoji believing clap emoji women clap emoji um i guess what I'm saying is like, I'm an apologist, y'all. Why aren't you centering millionaires? Seriously, I just think that like, we need to be really clear about like, the political incentives in play and like the contradictions that are operative in anything like this. Like the idea of believing all women is fucking obscene

in much the same way as believing all men is obscene like we need to be adults like put your fucking big boy pants on and like actually assess the situation at hand like we don't need like thought terminating cliches to help us understand a pretty complex world right like you need the intersectional intersectional analysis of events right so you have lots of wealthy white women who are benefiting from the keeping their mouths shut about the abuses of a lot of other people within the fox news family oh yeah within a reactionary propaganda network and so and that has radicalized a generation of baby boomers. Sorry, I'm a little bit triggered by the word intersectional.

I'm triggered by your not respecting clap emojis. Pardon? I'm triggered by your lack of respect for the clap emojis I used. That's supposed to end all conversations. Well, I feel like as a um per se woman you should probably be elevating my voice instead of questioning me damn it well i'm sorry andy we gotta fire you from the podcast she has you beat on the identity spectrum wait so i've been kicking this it's true i've been kicking this in my head amy because you just mentioned uh so you've mentioned on your podcast that you're uh half lebanese right

yeah and you're half white australian is that correct yeah i guess like i don't yeah are you familiar are you familiar with uh millennial comedian dan Ninen. Is that like, I feel like maybe he's a Gen Xer. But that could just be me being a Ruthless Cynic. I'm sure he's a millennial. He has a bit where he says I'm half Japanese,

half Indian, so I get my sushi at the 7-Eleven. And I realize if you need an opener, you could say I am half white Australian, half Lebanese. So I get my shrimp on the barbie from waltzing with Bashir. Yeah, that's a bit exhausting, mate. Just if you need an opener.

You know what? I regret thinking about this all week and yogi's gonna cut this also also fyi um speaking of americans and australian cultural cringe um we actually you know how like hogan says put another shrimp on the barbie hilariously um we don't use the term shrimp it doesn't mean anything here oh is it prawns pardon is it yeah prawns yeah yeah good to know shrimp was like totally tailored to the american market which is why it's fucking hilarious when americans say it's also like yeah that like sounds american to us well it's a good thing uh andy brought up dan nine in because i was worried this week we

didn't have any jokes that we stole from chapo that chapo stole from comtown come on i get my shrimp on the barbie from waltzing with basheer that was a good one actually um but so i guess to just kind of like uh close out the fox news thing um it was of course, reported to death. Roger Ailes had a reputation for sexual harassment going back to the 1970s, which you really have to have a serious reputation to get called for sexual harassment in the 1970s. But so and then he had a network of, you know, spying on employees at Fox News. They had a network of payoffsoffs both Roger Ailes and Bill

O'Reilly and Rupert Murdoch essentially knew what was going on but ignored it because these people were making him money but I guess if there's nothing else on that I just have some random gossip from the Michael Wolff book I can share with you guys and then we can close out I've got I've got one thing so uh Murdoch has um from that this is just kind of an odd thing on like his current career trajectory is he in the Wall Street Journal interview with the suck-up guy he was talking about his pivot to education and so I found these like two audio clips that I thought were pretty interesting here's the first one really worrying what's happened over the last 50 years. It was only about amongst the white population. The rich got richer, whereas the 80% is really gone, it's

terrible. It's gone from 5% to 40% single mothers. They don't see the chance to break through. And the answer is not, I think, just to say, look, you've got to flatten the rich. The answer is education. People have got to get through a good high school education to start with. Then they're on their own. So what's great about that is that he acknowledges the inequality problem, but his answer is exactly the same as Obama's, which is just like, we've got to improve education.

And so now here he is talking about his education programs. So wait, he wants us to teach sexual harassment victims how to code? Yeah, yeah. And here's him talking about his education program, Amplify. Sorry, sorry, can I just subject to your use of victims? We like to call them survivors. I will self-criticize. feel like we've really like hashtag survivors in stem we could totally get that going we'll be canceling sean um okay and here he is talking about his education program amplify uh and how much he cares about the education program it's criminal what we're doing today this generation we are not educating them as well as the

previous generation. This Amplify, what we're doing, it's going to be all electronic. It's a really new way to work with teachers. We help teachers tremendously, but we're putting classes, we're developing classes K through 12, which will all be animated on a tablet or iPad-like device. Completely electronic curriculum. Absolutely. Yes, absolutely. I guess we've spent the best part of another $100,000 or $200,000. And we will spend, continue to spend at that rate for three or four years until we get sufficient acceptance through enough school systems. And it will turn profitable and potentially very profitable.

He's saving the world. Yeah, and we'll talk more about charter schools and that, but it's just so funny that he's talking about how the real problem is lack of education, and then it turns out to just be another way to make money for Rupert Murdoch. Yeah, my favorite. I think one of the fascinating things with people like him,

and to a large extent also a a shithead like bill gates and even to some degree like some of your like i guess you know long story short like the our overlords are fucking idiots like i think to a really enormous extent like um i think he believes his own bullshit right so he looks around and he sees the world becoming, like he acknowledges the growing inequality, but just the fundamental inability to assess that through any form of structural lens, right? Like it comes down to we must be failing at education because the ticket upwards is purely one of like being sufficiently educated right like there

couldn't be any other blockades there couldn't be any other structural factors like it's because obviously education is the way by which like class mobility is enacted um if class mobility is becoming semi-non-existent like we must not be educating properly it's just like this complete like hermeneutic circle by which like you know that like if you i don't know like i find it fascinating in as much as like i i genuinely believe at a certain point like certainly weaponized motivated reasoning but like i genuinely think some of these fucking idiots are higher on their own supply it's like you know when um greenspan came before the senate hearings and sort of you know following the financial um crisis just sort of said like

oh i've had my worldview shaken a little bit it's just like you motherfucker like you actually believed all that iron rad crap didn't you yeah i i do think to a certain extent like because they live in these bizarre little bubbles and they genuinely don't interact with reality like it really does take something kind of grotesque or gargantuan to shake it because they don't like they don't have their silly ideas run up against reality in the way that the rest of us do. Like, I don't know. Maybe that's wishful thinking on my part, but, hey, who knows?

I like the idea of Rupert Murdoch's charter schools teaching students what to do when you inherit the most powerful media empire in Australia. Easily replicatable success. But just... I was just going to say something. He's only a 7 out of 10, so he may not be able to help all of the kids get there, but certainly 7 out of 10.

Just some random gossip from these Michael Wolff biography, and then we can close out. Our listeners and everyone here might find this interesting. He tells, Rupert Murdoch tells Michael Wolff he is, quote, too busy to have friends. He's kind of a loner workaholic who just doesn't really have close relationships.

Yeah, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. That's just like calling yourself an incel. Like, no, I mean vol-cel. Like, there's no vol-cel. It's's in cell do you know what i mean like you don't choose not to have friends you just don't have friends like you can try to make it some voluntaristic thing if you want but like no one's buying it you just don't have friends you're a sociopath that's it amy you might have thought you received hate mail in the past but

now that you have insulted the vol cell community that is no vol cell they're all in cells we direct all asexuals yes i'm putting the vol cells under erasure um just continuing from this michael wolf biography if you're wondering why rupert murdoch's face is so droopy it's because he had a botched facelift in the 1980s really yeah um he's a little insecure about that uh but yeah he's also like fucking 100 years old yes uh he dyes his own hair in the sink apparently i don't know if he stopped doing that but yes he was dyes his own hair and then um just one more thing i wanted to share with all of you uh Michael Wolff quotes Rupert Murdoch in London, I think in the 70s or 80s, telling a joke.

So would you like to hear a street joke that Rupert Murdoch thinks is funny? Only pass the N word. So Rupert Murdoch says, quote, what's the difference between a fridge and a puffter? What's the difference? When you pull the meat out of the fridge, it doesn't fart. What's a puffter. What's the difference? When you pull the meat out of the fridge, it doesn't fart.

What's a puffter? So somehow this man would go on to run a network with endemic sexual harassment. But yes. Couldn't have seen it coming. Is puffter used in Australia or is that just a United Kingdom slur or term? Pufter?

Yeah, pufter. Why are you saying pufter? It's pufter. But yes, yeah, I mean like... I could not hear the difference. 2018, we've kind of moved past that sort of thing. But yeah, I mean that was a term that broadly would have made sense. I'm so mad at that person.

Only 40s kids will get that. 40s Australian kids. I'm so mad at that person. Only 40s kids will get that. 40s Australian kids. I'm so mad at that person in Melbourne who taught me how to pronounce that word. And then just another thing, News Corp, in addition to like most other major companies, engages in heavy tax dodging. They have subsidiaries in the Bahamas,

Cayman Islands, Channel Islands, Virgin Islands. Their annual tax bill since 1986 has been about 7% of profits. Yeah, they've been paying negative tax in Australia for a number of years. They're completely

fucking our political system, but they're getting, they're literally getting money from the tax office to do so. Like they would jig it that far. It's amazing. Yes. And, but they're giving back because one other thing we didn't mention from the phone hacking scandal was, it was alleged that the Sun, among other Murdoch properties, had a system, had a complicated system set up for providing bribes and kickbacks to both politicians and police officers.

So they're giving back to the political system in the sense that they are giving capital directly to members of the political system. But of course, we weren't able to get to everything, but I think we've covered the broad swaths of Rupert Murdoch's life. But Amy, do you have any closing thoughts on Mr. Murdoch, his legacy, everything we've discussed today? Not so much like specifically Murdoch related, but certainly related to kind of the impression that kind of right-thinking Australians have of him. So when I was in year 12, I was doing like an English module,

and our teacher had us watch Outfoxed. I don't know if you guys have seen that. I watched that when I was a like an English module and our teacher had us watch Outfoxed. I don't know if you guys have seen that. I watched that when I was a young lib. Yeah. Like this was probably what, like it would have been like 15 years ago now. Is this like Foxcatcher? Like, pardon? Is it like Foxcatcher?

I haven't seen Foxcatcher, but I suspect they're like vaguely similar, just kind of looking at what a disaster Fox News is. No? Maybe. A wrestler gets murdered. Sorry. Go on. We're going to use the fact that Andy is problematic as an excuse to fire him for constantly derailing the podcast.

There's no Trump. Anyway, I just remember I thought I was a fucking edgelord in year 12 because I had this, what I thought was a really great sticker that I had on my backpack. And it said, like, I guess, you know, in the States, they're referring to Trump as like the first post-truth politician, all that shit. But we've kind of considered Murdoch papers to be fundamentally states they're referring to trump as like the first post-truth politician all that shit but um

we've kind of considered murdoch papers to be fundamentally post-truth like for a couple of decades i had this sticker on my backpack that was i thought it was super edgy and it said like is that the truth or did you read it in the daily teller there was another one there was another one that was even better. Are you ready for it? Is that the truth or is your news limited? I'm just

imagining you reading about the repeal of the carbon tax and being like, but didn't they see my sticker? Just to clarify, the carbon tax was repealed a solid decade after I finished school but yeah totally not enough people

saw your sticker pardon I said not enough people saw your sticker yeah definitely expressionism is politics like get more badges what are they called pins get more pins and just make your voice heard

and sell those pins for seven dollars what are they called? Pins. Get more pins. And just make your voice heard. And sell those pins for $7 and work at the Washington, D.C. DSA. It's a sheltered workshop. There's no need to be so unkind. Yeah. All right. Well, we will see which of Murdoch's grossly incompetent children take over his media empire, or if any activist shareholders manage to thwart that, but likely, you know, Lachlan Peterson or whoever will take over that media empire. elections. We're not able to declare a winner yet because both Arizona

and Florida, the results are still outstanding. If both of them break Republicans... Does Montana come in? Yes, the Democrats won Montana. John Tester will be returning. Nice! Don't test the tester. Yes. Still holding out on that green wave. Yes, the

green wave did not materialize for Andy, but 2020 we will see. 2020 green wave. But we'll follow up. Dream big. Dream big. We'll follow up on that next week. Unfortunately, Indiana Congress Senator Joe Donnelly will no longer be in the Senate to protect people

and keep their prescription drug prices to only increasing 30% per year. So we lost a champion for seniors everywhere. But I guess were there any other thoughts on Rupert Murdoch before we get out of here? No? No. All right. Amy, what would you like to plug and say to the people?

And again, thank you so much for being with us. Yeah, thanks a ton. You've lent us a great perspective and done it with a heroic time zone differences. So we are so appreciative for what you did. Yeah. No job. It's my pleasure.

Thank you for having me. All right. And people can find you on Twitter, Amy Therese, the dead pundits society podcast, always enjoyable. Anything else to mention before we go? That's about it.

All right. Thank you, Amy. Thank you for listening. We'll be back next week, and we will finally reveal who was correct about the Senate. And with that, I'm Yogi Poyol. I'm Andy Palmer. I'm Sean McCarthy. Steve Jeffers.

All right. Thank you, Amy. Thank you for listening so no other human being in the world has been able to touch the lives of as many people as Rupert Murdoch

whether it is pure entertainment like the Simpsons one of my favorite shows or serious information like the Times of London or anywhere in between, Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation is providing the cutting content

which today gives us so many choices. And as we have heard many times this evening, communication is the key to making our world a better place and nobody knows how to communicate more effectively on such a huge scale than Rupert.