Tag: Rupert Murdoch

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Intermission Impossible Theater Theater Feature

Director Of Ink On How to Stage A Show With No Heroes

From left: David Hammonds as Larry Lamb, S.A. Weakley as Sir Alick, and Michael Kinslow as Rupert Murdoch in "Ink." (Credit: Collin Baker)

Rupert Murdoch is 92 and has an unusually active existence in real life — in the last year alone he’s continued wielding power as a media tycoon, has given depositions and will likely testify in the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit against Fox News, he divorced Jerry Hall, he announced his engagement to someone else, and then called it off (apparently due to her religious zealotry). 

And then there’s what’s going on not in real life, particularly the popular HBO series Succession that is based on him and his media empire and family — although the fictionalized account seems to bother the real family quite a lot. Another dramatic work involving him is the play Ink by James Graham, which is closing this weekend at Circuit Playhouse. 

The play is fiction but is based on one of the key events in Murdoch’s ascension in the media world when he acquired a failing newspaper in England in 1969 and turned it into a brash tabloid that broke rules aplenty and set a tone in journalism that we still witness today.  

The story is about how Murdoch hired a friend of his, Larry Lamb, and charged him with beating the circulation numbers of the competition. The result was a crass mix of sensationalistic news reporting, goofy diversions, pictures of scantily-clad women, and low common denominator entertainment. The Sun diminished the practice of journalism and won the circulation war.

Ink is helmed by Warner Crocker, a Chicago-based director who has done plays in Memphis before. He was fascinated by the play and was eager to do the production.

“I’ve read a lot of scripts all my life,” he says. “You read good ones and you read not so good ones, and every now and then you stumble on one you get an opportunity to direct where you go, ‘this is a story I have to tell.’ This was a piece that talks about a moment in time that not only affected what journalism was going to become, but the changes we have experienced in culture, in politics, and just about every facet of our life.”

Crocker says Murdoch “is one of those individuals who, if the planet is still around 200 years from now, they’ll look back and say, he had an influence on everything and changed everything, for better or worse.”

He says that in his discussion with the cast, he likened the story to Frankenstein. “Murdoch in many ways is Dr. Frankenstein and Larry Lamb becomes the monster,” he says. “Graham presents Murdoch as a product of the moment in time who had this idea about change and didn’t necessarily understand the personal consequences of that. He certainly understood the financial consequences, and that’s what he was reaching for.”

When the changes Murdoch set in motion are underway, he finds that it’s not all a thrilling game and that there are terrible downsides. The cocky publisher is forced to reckon with tragedy. “You wouldn’t think of him as a very vulnerable individual,” Crocker says.

But neither is Murdoch a hero. In fact, as Crocker notes, there are no heroes in this play. “We watch them all take this journey together,” he says. “For example, the newsroom staff that you meet in the play come into it and there’s hesitation to begin with, but then they fall in love with the excitement and the romance of creating something new and the success that they’re having.”

It’s thrilling to break the rules and have so much fun, but before long, the staff’s “journalistic morals are challenged by some of the things that their boss is asking them to do to drive circulation. And then decisions have to be made. Do I compromise who I am and what I believe to hang on to this job? Or am I going to move on?”

Key to the effectiveness of the play is the pacing — snappy dialogue, barbed banter, and wisecracks are blended in with newsroom chaos, pressroom drama, slamming of phones, and tales told literally on multiple levels. 

“You have to create a sense of momentum where the show is always going,” Crocker says, “because if you stop and think, give the audience the opportunity to stop and think too much about what they’ve just seen, they’re gonna miss the next beat. It’s history unfolding before your eyes and history doesn’t usually give us a chance these days to pause and think about it. I like to put that on the stage.”

Ink runs April 14th through 16th at Circuit Playhouse. Tickets and info here.

Categories
Art Intermission Impossible Theater Theater Feature

Murdoch’s Legacy: Fast-Paced Ink Delivers at Circuit Playhouse

Michael Kinslow as Rupert Murdoch and David Hammons as Larry Lamb in the Circuit Playhouse production of Ink. (Credit: Collin Baker)

If you think journalism has gone to hell, you won’t get an argument from me. 

I don’t hate it — I still practice it and am grateful for the income — but the idea and execution of the industry has morphed over the decades from town criers to scandalous broadsheets to principled news organizations to scandalous tabloids to mindless aggregators. Print ruled for ages, but then radio and TV came in to further reshape it, but in any medium, journalism ultimately has to give the public what it wants — and will pay for. 

James Graham’s Ink, now playing at Circuit Playhouse, brilliantly describes one of those defining shifts in the newspaper era when, in 1969,  a 38-year-old, pre-tycoon Rupert Murdoch bought a failing British rag. To run The Sun, he hired his friend Larry Lamb away from a competitor and challenged him to boost the numbers to surpass the fusty broadsheet that had long led in circulation in the UK. 

There’s plenty of newsroom energy in the Circuit Playhouse production of Ink. (Credit: Collin Baker)

The play visits all the topics that journalists talk about — newsworthiness, ethics, objectivity — and one of the key insights into the thinking of the new endeavor from Murdoch/Lamb comes in a discussion of the five W’s: who, what, when, where, and why. 

But Lamb challenges the need for that last W: “The only thing worth asking isn’t why — it’s: what’s next?”

That philosophy isn’t deep, but sets the stage for how storytelling in newspapers would be trending along with the clearly understood primary goal of making money. Its duty to inform the public would be done by entertaining and titillating readers, not by crafting thoughtful stories for the civic minded. And The Sun would show how a news organization could shape what was next.

The Circuit staging is helmed by Chicago-based Warner Crocker, who keeps the action snappy whether its dialogue between Murdoch (Michael Kinslow) and Lamb (David Hammonds), or chaotic newsroom scenes with the entire cast throwing newspaper bundles, barking into phones, typing furiously, posing for pictures, cracking wise, and arguing tirelessly.

Graham’s script is crisp and purposeful, propelling the story, revealing the characters, and amping up the stakes. It doesn’t set up Murdoch or Lamb as good guys or bad. They have their dreams and in Act One, you may well find yourself pulling for their audacious enterprise to succeed — they are, after all, trying to stick it to the power structure. Act Two keeps the energy but gets inside the consequences of their newspaper’s brashness. How flippant can you be in a life-or-death situation?

The Circuit cast is solid and the production smartly executed. It’s entertaining from the get-go and stirs up enough issues to provoke discussions long after the final bows.

More than 50 years later, Murdoch is still around and still intent on making money from the news business — hence his multi-billion-dollar company named News Corp. His publishing legacy will include taking bold risks and shaping global news coverage as well as shamelessly pushing lies, agendas, and the lowest common denominator. 

Ink runs through April 16th at Circuit Playhouse. For info and tickets, go to playhouseonthesquare.org.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

American Oligarchs

Photo: Systemniy | Dreamstime.com

Forbes did its first ranking of our country’s richest people in 1981. The top of the list was a shipping magnate named Daniel L. Ludwig with a fortune of more than $2 billion.

I discovered that fact in a thought-provoking New York Times article by Willy Staley about the impact our current crop of multi-billionaires is having on our society.

Adjusted for inflation, that $2 billion would be around $5.8 billion in today’s dollars. That sum made Ludwig the richest man in the United States. Today $5.8 billion would put someone in a seven-way tie for number 182 on the list.

Most people know someone they consider rich. Maybe it is someone with a business they’ll sell for several million dollars when they get ready to retire. Or a professional athlete who makes millions a year. When people talk about “the rich” in terms of the wealth-hoarding oligarchs who control industries and media companies and buy politicians, this isn’t who we’re talking about.

We live in an oligarchy. Most Americans would agree with that fact, and agree it is a problem. From the left to the QAnon folks who believe the world is ruled by ultra-wealthy, demon-worshiping pedophile cannibals yet also insist the rich should have lower taxes and less regulation of their business dealings.

Historically, we’ve generally avoided using the word “oligarch” to describe America’s ultra-rich. That changed as the war in Ukraine caused condemnation of Russian oligarchs, and people noticed how men here like Jeff Bezos, Charles Koch, Elon Musk, Rupert Murdoch, and Peter Thiel perfectly fit the definition as well.

They didn’t become oligarchs through hard work. No one does. They needed a lot of family wealth and connections before they ever worked a day in their lives. A large pile of money easily turns into a larger pile of money. Our tax laws have been rewritten over the past 40 years to help bigger and bigger piles of money shift to be possessed by an increasingly small number of people.

Any attempt to rein in our billionaires gets denounced as socialism, but we have had capitalism with much higher taxation of the ultra-rich. That is how we created a large middle-class in this country, which didn’t exist before the New Deal and has been steadily losing ground since the early ’80s when the Forbes list was topped by a guy with $2 billion.

The beauty of a high tax rate for top earners was that it didn’t even require government to redistribute wealth. Anything you make over your first $500,000 in annual income will be taxed at 90 percent? Might as well spend those additional profits on hiring more people and giving them more pay and better benefits and working conditions. If inflation means there is too much money chasing too few goods, worry about the people who have more money than they know what to do with, not the people who are struggling.

I don’t envy our oligarchs. They don’t seem to be leading happy lives. When I think of people who seem genuinely happy, to me, they are people who seem grateful they have enough, not people who always want more. We’ve created a society where most people feel like they need more, whether they have nothing or everything. The result has been skyrocketing rates of depression, suicide, addiction, and overdoses.

Oligarchs are natural enemies of democracy. A clear majority of Americans want things like universal health insurance. Our ruling class doesn’t want that, and has made sure we don’t get it. Universal health insurance allows normal people to leave big companies to start their own businesses.

Unfortunately the elite have mastered the reverse psychology of telling people, “Here is what the elite don’t want you to think …” They control both sides of the argument. They tell people “the elite” are teachers, professors, beat journalists, and scientists. They get to frame corporate media like CNN as “the left” and the far-right as the alternative. They love giving money to centrist Democrats. They can always count on them to advance right-wing economics when Democrats are in power, while giving Republicans a chance to say, “Look what the radical socialists are doing to you.”

Our oligarchs don’t want young people learning about the amount of racism embedded in our society since our country’s founding. Racism was and still is a valuable tool for keeping poor white workers in their place. The Old South was a terrible place for white workers. But racism was so effective that impoverished white Southerners got duped into dying for plantation owners in the Civil War. Men who never owned an inch of land were willing to waste their lives to protect the fortunes of aristocrats who looked down on them. So don’t be surprised that someone buried in debt today will take five minutes to dash out a tweet in defense of whichever billionaire is currently masquerading as their champion against the elite.

Craig David Meek is a Memphis writer, barbecue connoisseur, and the author of Memphis Barbecue: A Succulent History of Smoke, Sauce & Soul.

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Trump’s Lost Weekend

CREDIT: Eva Rinaldi

Imagine being the head of Fox News and realizing every day when you wake up that you, Rupert Murdoch, are the most powerful man on earth, that you set the agenda for the world’s greatest super-power — the United States of America. Oh sure, President Trump is the titular head of the country, but it’s patently obvious that Fox News is where Trump gets his policy ideas. And it’s Fox News that literally shapes his world-view.

Trump often seemingly watches Fox News from morning to night, live-tweeting statements made by its hosts and guests within minutes of their being broadcast. Last weekend, the president went on a 50-tweet bender — 20 tweets on Saturday; 30 on Sunday — much of it directly lifted from Fox talking heads in real time.

Eva Rinaldi

Rupert Murdoch

He began his Saturday by tweeting clips of Lou “Natic” Dobbs, who called Trump’s veto of Congress’ vote to stop his “national emergency” declaration “stirring.” He then tweeted Fox News hosts’ statements bashing his own Justice Department; he ranted about Hillary Clinton; he tweeted about a Fox story on a Massachusetts sheriff who praised him.

Then he got into some mild criticism of his media mind-melders, going after Fox for canning “Judge” Jeanine Pirro, Trump’s wacko late-night cheerleader. “Bring back @JudgeJeaninePirro,” the president demanded, adding, “The Radical Left Democrats, working closely with their beloved partner, the Fake News Media, is using every trick in the book to SILENCE a majority of our Country.”

Quite a morning. But Trump was just warming up. Former Watergate prosecutor Ken Starr appeared on Fox and claimed that the late Senator John McCain had a “dark stain” on his career because he released the Steele Dossier to U.S. intelligence services. On cue, minutes later, Trump tweeted that “dark stain” quote, adding that “last in his class” McCain had “far worse stains.”

Nevermind that McCain wasn’t last in his class or that, after being given such a document, turning it over to intelligence services was the right thing to do — or that he was a wounded combat pilot and war hero who died of cancer six months ago. Nevermind decency, common sense, graciousness, or any semblance of mature adult behavior. We’re way past any of that with this president.

Trump finished his Saturday by threatening to sic the FCC on Saturday Night Live for making fun of him. It’s unclear if the president knew it was a rerun.

Sunday, it was more of the same — raw, unhinged id. The president rage-tweeted about the Democrats trying to steal the 2016 election “at the ballot box.” Then he spouted some more Hillary bashing, and ranted some more about the FAKE NEWS MEDIA. He ended the day in a frenzy, retweeting 15 supportive tweets from sources that included a Pizzagate conspiracy theorist, a QAnon cult believer, and a guy who claimed the New Zealand mosque massacre was a false-flag operation to limit gun rights.

This is not normal. These are the ravings of a mentally unstable man. If your grandfather spent his weekend doing what the president of the United States just did, you’d get him help. Or maybe try to move him into assisted living.

The leader of the free world, who has a country to run, after all, spent all his waking hours for two days watching television and tweeting about it. The mind boggles. How does it happen? Is he all alone in his room? Does no one think to go in and interrupt him or divert him or tell him he’s being foolish? Where’s his wife? His daughter? His chief of staff? The president of the United States is bouncing off walls, locked in a television trance, spewing nonsense and conspiracy theories like a crazy man, and nobody does anything about it? In his last days as president, a drunken Richard Nixon went around the White House talking to presidential portraits. That was bad. This is next-level stuff.

Unfortunately, it looks like we are stuck with this madness for the foreseeable future. The president’s cabinet is filled with unqualified hacks, lobbyists, and grifters. The vice president is a mewling sycophant. Republican leaders seem committed to remaining inalterably linked to the president, no matter how loony he gets. His base has become a cult, supporting their hero no matter what he does or says.

At this point, our only hope for getting out of this appears to be Robert Mueller. Or maybe Rupert Murdoch.

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Opinion Viewpoint

Murdoch’s Legacy

Back in 1983, then-Representative Pat Schroeder (D-Colo.) was fixing eggs for her kids when she looked down and got an idea about President Ronald Reagan. She called him “Teflon-coated” because nothing bad stuck to him. The same could be said about Rupert Murdoch. He’s the Teflon mogul.

Richard Cohen

This year, Fox News, which Murdoch controls, signed Bill O’Reilly to a $25 million-a-year contract, even though the company knew that O’Reilly had recently settled a sexual harassment claim for $32 million. That tidy sum was just the latest of O’Reilly’s sexual harassment settlements, the grand total being about $45 million.

Not only was 21st Century Fox aware of the settlements, it even helped O’Reilly come up with some of the money and included, in the new contract, that he would be fired if new allegations arose.

Not too long before, Fox News forced out its president, Roger Ailes, who also, it turned out, was a serial sexual harasser. In sum, Murdoch presided over a smarmy frat house where sexual harassment was rampant, and, for the longest time and through Herculean effort, the network managed to look away.

Somewhat in the same vein, Murdoch did not know that reporters at one of his British newspapers, the News of the World, were hacking into the phones of newsworthy people. Murdoch, a newspaperman to his bones, apparently never wondered where the scoops came from. One of the hacked phones belonged to a murdered school girl. This was too much even for Fleet Street, but Murdoch, three monkeys in one, apparently never saw, heard, or said anything.

Murdoch’s lifelong passion has been newspapers, but his real power base is Fox News. The network is to Republicans what the Daily Worker was to American communists — the only trusted news source. With the possible exception of the way the once isolationist Chicago Tribune dominated the Midwest, there has never been anything like it.

In the most recent presidential campaign, fully 40 percent of Trump voters said their main source of news was Fox News. Just 8 percent of them relied primarily on CNN — enough, nevertheless, to send Donald Trump baying at the moon about fake news. These figures are not only bad news for Fox News’ competitor, but they are also bad news for the Republican Party.

Fox News has been a force in converting the party of Lincoln into the party of Trump. The network’s allegiance to Trump approaches mindless adoration. It once had the occasional nighttime skeptic, notably Megyn Kelly, but she is gone. In her stead has come Laura Ingraham, who spoke for Trump at the convention, and an even-more abrasive Tucker Carlson. As for the dominant Sean Hannity, he apparently so fears Breitbart News that he went soft on Republican Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore, who is accused of sexual misconduct with a 14-year-old girl when he was 32. (Even Trump withheld judgment.)

Moore has become the GOP’s litmus test. The refusal or hesitancy to denounce him is a consequence of where Murdoch’s Fox News has led the party. The GOP has gone so far to the right that it is about to veer off a cliff. The Fox News audience is old, white, and in a cane-stomping rage at the way America is going. It believes in the media mendacity that Trump proclaims and Fox News incessantly echoes. Aside from Fox News, it will trust only similar sources.

But look. Look, in fact, at Virginia. In that state’s recent election, the repudiation of Trump was beyond argument. Non-whites went Democratic in a big way. So did the more affluent suburbs, young people, and women. What’s left for the GOP is rural, less educated, less affluent, and, to be charitable, less young. On the back of any envelope, it’s a bad business plan.

Rupert Murdoch and Donald Trump have long been friends. Murdoch has occasional access to the Oval Office, where he advises Trump — the amoral leading the immoral. Trump is 71; Murdoch is 86, and the median age of a prime-time Fox News viewer is 68. Anyone can see where this is going. The grim reaper has become a Democratic poll watcher.

Murdoch came to the United States from Australia to fulfill his gargantuan ambitions. He bought New York magazine by deceiving his friend Clay Felker. He buckled to China and booted the BBC from his Asian TV network. He has undoubtedly realized his ambitions but will be remembered not for what he built, but for what he destroyed — American political comity and a sensible Republican Party. No amount of Teflon can change that.

Richard Cohen writes for the Washington Post Writers Group.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

Dick and Liz Cheney

The last time Liz and Dick created this much fuss in the press, it was on the set of Cleopatra, back in the 1950s. I wish I were speaking of Richard Burton and Liz Taylor, but unfortunately, I’m referring to former Vice President “Deadeye” Dick Cheney and his mind-melded daughter, Fox News contributor and failed Senate candidate, Liz Cheney.

The Cheneys “co-authored” an editorial in the Rupert Murdoch owned Wall Street Journal called “The Collapsing Obama Doctrine,” in which they stated, “rarely has a U.S. President been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many.” I don’t often read the WSJ since I lost my money in the Bush Recession, but when I read that particular sentence, I had to lean back in my chair and take a few deep breaths at the deaf, dumb, and blind hypocrisy of the head designer and chief promoter of the Iraq War.

Even Fox News’ Megyn Kelly seemed incredulous during an interview on a network that’s usually obsequious to Liz and her dad. When Cheney was asked if the same question might be directed at him after such previous statements as “we would be regarded as liberators in Iraq,” and “the insurgency is in its last throes,” he replied without a trace of shame: “We inherited a situation where there was no doubt in anybody’s mind about the extent of Saddam’s involvement with weapons of mass destruction. We did the right thing.”

No doubt in anybody’s mind? There was doubt in everybody’s mind who could see through Dick Cheney’s master plan to march this country into an unnecessary war. Now that American troops are gone and Iraq is dissolving into chaos, Cheney, along with his personal bad seed, is trying to deflect blame everyplace but where it belongs: in his bloody hands.

He lashed out against fellow Republican Rand Paul for stating that trying to blame Obama for the Iraq disaster was misdirected, and blasted Bill Clinton for whatever reason he could come up with. The Cheneys contended, “On a trip to the Middle East … we heard a constant refrain in capitals from the Persian Gulf to Israel: ‘Can you explain why your president is doing this? … Why is he so blithely sacrificing the hard-fought gains you secured in Iraq?’ Liz and Dick continued, “Mr. Obama … abandoned Iraq, and we are watching American defeat snatched from the jaws of victory.”

One shabby, lazy, old journalistic trick when you wish to forward an opinion but can’t get anyone to speak on the record is to write, “Some people say,” or, “It has been stated in certain quarters.” This allows you to imply defamatory quotes made toward your intended target without actually quoting anyone. It says as much about the Cheneys’ deception as it does about how corrupt the Wall Street Journal‘s editorial department has become under the ownership of NewsCorp.

Does anyone who was awake for the past six years believe that the Bush administration handed Obama a victory in Iraq? This evil war has cost 4,500 American lives, trillions of dollars, and untold hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilian casualties, yet Cheney still considers it “the right thing to do”? The WSJ “take your daughter to work day” editorial continues: “Despite the threat to America unfolding across the Middle East, aided by his abandonment of Iraq, he (Obama) has announced he intends to follow the same policy in Afghanistan.”

If memory serves, Obama won election and reelection on the pledge that he would put an end to the Bush wars. In Cheney’s eyes, victory in Iraq means a pliable puppet government and a permanent U.S. military presence to safeguard the oilfields that were supposed to pay for his misbegotten war. Cheney declares, “Al qaeda and its affiliates are resurgent and they present a security threat not seen since the Cold War,” with the same assurance that he proclaimed, “Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.”  

Many pundits on the right still take Cheney seriously, but he’s lost Glen Beck. On his radio show, the cherubic prophet of the apocalypse proclaimed: “Liberals said, ‘We shouldn’t get involved, we shouldn’t nation build.’ They said we couldn’t force freedom on people … You are right, Liberals, you were right.”

Fox News gave the Cheneys a second joint interview, perhaps to assuage hurt feelings caused by Megyn Kelly, only this time it was to announce the formation of The Alliance for a Strong America, a grassroots organization founded, according to Liz, “because we know America’s security depends upon our ability to reverse President Obama’s policies.” While Liz dressed in all black, Dick sported a white cowboy hat and an oilskin vest, causing them to appear more like American Gothic than Roy Rogers and Dale Evans. All that was missing was the pitchfork.

Speaking from Wyoming, where Liz steamrolled her own sister while cozying up to the ultra-right in her losing Senate bid, the new Cheney “alliance” looked more like an attempt to shore-up Liz’s rabid-conservative bona fides for another run for Congress. Cheney claimed the group’s purpose is “to restore America’s power and preeminence” in the world. “President Obama has repeatedly misled the American people about the attacks in Benghazi and the true nature of the threat we face.”

Oh. I get it now. Benghazi. This is about fund-raising for the next election. “Benghazi” is like catnip for right wing pussies, and I mean that strictly in the “fat cat” political contributor sense of the word. But when it comes to Liz Cheney’s credibility, this silly drama can’t come close to matching a Shakespearean production co-starring Liz and Dick that I would much prefer seeing: The Taming of the Shrew.