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https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/jul/01/andrew-dodd-matthew-ricketson-getting-murdoch-book-bullying-factory>
"In 2009, David Nutt, a professor of pharmacology who had served as the chief
drugs adviser to the British Labour government, remarked at a public discussion
about legalising drugs that alcohol was a serious social problem, more so than
psychedelic drugs.
Soon after, he received a call from a reporter for the
Sun, then the UK’s
most prolific tabloid newspaper. The reporter asked: “What would you say if I
told you we are going to do an exposé on your children’s drugs and drinking
habits tomorrow?”
Nutt’s response, he tells the authors of a new book on the tactics and culture
of the Rupert Murdoch media empire, was: “Well, I’d say you were a despicable
piece of shit.”
Under the headline “Off his Nutt”, the
Sun published photographs taken from
his children’s Facebook pages which showed his son Steve smoking a roll-up,
another son Johnny “prancing NAKED in the snow in Sweden”, and his daughter,
Lydia, holding a bottle of spirits “uploaded two years before she turned 18”.
Nutt complained to the UK regulator, the book recounts, but it was several
weeks before the photos were taken down.
In
Getting Murdoched, Australian journalism academics and former employees at
The Australian newspaper Andrew Dodd and Matthew Ricketson claim personal
attacks like this are part of a pattern in the 95-year-old Murdoch’s sprawling
global media empire, which today operates under News Corp and Fox Corporation.
“As former reporters we get that good journalism and editorial abuse share many
of the same characteristics. For example, good journalism requires lots of
persistence. Bullying entails too much of it,” they write. And while they say
that “of course good journalism has been published and broadcast in News
outlets”, they argue that in many cases a line has been crossed.
“Murdoched”, a term Dodd and Ricketson coin for the book, means to be
“editorially attacked when one’s ideas or deeds do not accord with the media
proprietor’s programs or publications”.
The book examines “murdoching” across the US, the UK and Australia, including
dozens of interviews with prominent people and ordinary citizens about the way
they were treated in newspapers, such as the
Sun and the
New York Post, and
cable television network
Fox News.
Dedicated to “the bullied”, the book focuses squarely on Murdoch’s “way of
doing journalism”, Dodd and Ricketson write. The techniques include unleashing
a torrent of articles against particular targets “contesting even the tiniest
of points, so as to wipe the critic’s original ideas from everyone’s mind”.
Another is to attack the critic personally, “pitilessly and repeatedly”. When
all else fails, “murdoching” is “simply continuing to assert something as true
as if no one has ever shown it was false”, they write.
“Murdoch perverted the fourth estate function of journalism,” Dodd and
Ricketson write. “Instead of it being a way to hold power to account, Murdoch
saw it as a means of holding individuals to account, especially those who held
views contrary to his own.”
The consequences, they argue, are severe: these tactics have a chilling effect
on democracy and seriously harm those who are targeted. And across the US, the
UK and Australia, the three markets where Murdoch’s outlets are dominant, they
write, the techniques employed by the company’s journalists are similar."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
