Sunday, July 17, 2011

We Gotta Deal With This Hacking Problem

Here is a very clever bit of progaganda. Fox "News" is owned by Rupert Murdoch, the very guy who owns the now defunct News of the World. That publication's reporters illegally hacked into roughly 5,000 phones in the UK in order to get dirt for publication. So how does Fox "News" present this fact?



They cleverly confuse the viewer of their "news story" by putting the "hacking" at News of the World side-by-side with the fact that the Pentagon has been hacked by unknown outsiders. This creates the impression that both the Pentagon and Rupert Murdoch are victims of hacking! Sure the Pentagon has been. But it was Rupert Murdoch's reporters who were hacking into the phones of innocent victims. The above "news story" claims "we gotta deal with this hacking problem" and leaves the impression that it is News of the World that is the victim of hacking when in fact it was Rupert Murdoch's company that was the perpetrator!

They do two moves:
  1. Present Murdoch as a victim of "piling on" and claim that he "took responsibility" and "acted immediately" to fix the problem. Those are bald-faced lies. He denied responsibility in this scandal which is over a decade old with thousands of victims. Over the years Murdoch has thrown one or two sacrificial lambs in to get the heat off, but when it became clear that his "reporters" had been hacking a dead girl's phone to get "news" for the tabloid and when the mailbox was full deleted messages to make room for more messages to keep the story going (while leaving the parents with the impression that their daughter was alive and updating her mailbox when in fact she was dead). This was just plain cruel, and this is the bit that created widespread revulsion in the UK and has caused these arrests of key managers in the Rupert Murdoch empire.

  2. Present Murdoch as a "victim of hacking" by confusing the hacking of the Pentagon with the hacking by Murdoch employees of roughly 5,000 innocent victim's phones in the UK. This is criminality on a massive scale and Fox "News" pretends it is "old news", of limited interest, and is really "unfair" to Murdoch to blame him for how he runs his companies!
This video is presented on Fox "News" as a "news story" but it is pure propaganda being put out by a sophisticated company hoping to confuse people and get them to misunderstand what has really been happening. A real news organization tries to inform people about the facts. Fox "News" is manipulating the "news" to get their boss, Rupert Murdoch, off the hook for his crimes!

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