PS TO LAST POST: HOW THE RIGHT CREATES FALSE EQUIVALENCNIES TO DEFLECT SCRUTINY AND CRITICSM

Just in case you didn't get the last post or haven't been following the Rupert Murdoch scandal (or bothered to link to the article and video): one of Murdoch's London tabloids has been hacking into people's phone calls and voice messages for many years.

Meanwhile, the Murdoch media empire (which obviously includes Fox News here as well as The New York Post and The Wall Street Journal etc.) has become a supremely powerful influence on politicians and therefore politics not just in the USA, Great Britain and Australia (Murdoch's original media home) but around the world (including China).

So Murdoch's rightwing views were not only being promoted and defended and justified and etc. but they were being used to frame almost all public discussion of the issues raised by current events and projections about future events. Thus the rightwing position of discrediting global warming or "climate change"—or any human contribution to it—predominated in not just Murdoch's media enterprises, but in his and its influence on powerful politicians and governments etc.

The phone hacking by Murdoch papers—especially London's News of the World—of celebrities phone calls and voice messages, or the royal family's, or politicians opposed to rightwing policies and perspectives, was known for years. What caused the present scandal was the revelation that Murdoch's forces hacked into the voice mails and phone calls of victims of murder. Starting with the bombing victims of the terrorist attacks on London subways and buses, and then a thirteen-year-old girl's voice messages after she had disappeared but before her family or the police knew she had been murdered.

Murdoch's hackers didn't just listen in, when the voice message box of the girl's phone became full, in order to receive more messages to be exploited in the paper The News of the World, the hacker(s) deleted messages already received giving the family the false hope that the girl was alive and the police false expectations as well, hindering their investigation.

The sad news is that it took this to unleash a backlash against Murdoch, not the power of his media empire to influence world leaders—as well as too many easily duped followers of his various newspapers and TV networks—and actual outcomes of future catastrophes (imagine if the Murdoch media empire had promoted the reality of global warming and gotten behind politicians and scientists who have ideas for how to slow it down and/or reverse it and save the planet!).

This hacking, by the way, was paid for by News of the World, and its being exposed has also led to revelations of the Murdoch media empire having members of Scotland Yard and other police organizations on their payroll to supply Murdoch's media with information about the people hacked etc.

So, what we're talking about is Murdoch's underlings, the heads of his various media enterprises, paying people to break the law by hacking into their phones and monitoring calls and messages. Which is where this bizarre conversation on Fox News about hacking comes in. The rightwing spin in this segment is the attempt to make it seem that someone hacking into a corporation's computers in order to find examples of that corporation's lying about its true record etc. is the same as Murdoch's organization paying people to hack into the phones of private citizens to find salacious or gossipy tidbits to feed to their news organizations (or hold against the politicians under their influence—that hasn't been exposed yet) even in the case of murder victims and their families.

It's mind boggling how obviously false the attempted equivalencies between these two kinds of hacking are in this video, and yet you know that the typical Fox News follower will most likely accept it, because they have been trained for years now to accept these kinds of illogical syllogisms that are the basis for almost all rightwing perspectives and propaganda.

I.e. Hacking is bad, especially big corporations getting hacked into. Murdoch's big corporation is involved in a scandal having to do with hacking. Therefore Murdoch's corporation is a victim, like the other corporations mentioned, of hacking which is an evil that should be dealt with.

They do this with pretty much every point in their ideology, especially their current resistance to any taxes on wealthy corporations and individuals. Despite tons of economic statistical evidence that we now have the largest gap between rich and poor of almost any nation (yep, that's right, not just the "advanced" economies but some of the worst in the "developing" world etc.) and that higher taxes on the wealthy have mostly been throughout history part of economic boom times and that cutting taxes on the wealthy had done nothing economically for the rest of us (as I mentioned in yesterday's post, since taxes have been exponentially reduced for the richest among us starting under Reagan, real wages and income for all but the wealthy have either remained stagnant or declined, while that among the wealthiest has risen in the case of corporate CEOs sixty per cent (60%!) and even higher for other rich people!

While job creation in the same times has only gone up significantly under Clinton after he re-established tax raises for the wealthy. Et-endlessly-cetera.

Once again, here's the video that started all these reactions: