Kelvin Mckenzie and the Murdoch press pretending to support ordinary people against the establishment is a joke

Kelvin McKenzie had a very amusing piece on the Guardian’s ‘Comment is Free’ website. While I have to admire his chutzpah in putting it to such a hostile audience his claims about Murdoch and his media empire are as much hot air as usual.

He claims

‘In the two decades he[Murdoch] has owned the channel [Sky], not one editor or journalist has suggested that he has interfered or even made suggestions about news coverage.’

Why would he need to when he can pick people like you, whose political views are his own exactly like his own as editors? (i.e spread hatred of immigrants, the unemployed and foreigners, plus talking up whichever of the two main parties he has a deal on further media deregulation and targeting the one he’s not currently made a deal with)

He then launches into an advert for Sky TV.

‘Sky is the giant of television. Sure it has the football but it has so much more. Even a cultural philistine like me finds myself drawn to Sky Arts, National Geographic and the History Channel. All have unexpected gems that you cannot find anywhere else.’

It’s hard to understand why the Guardian is giving Sky free advertising space here.

Kelvin then starts praising Murdoch’s supposed services to reducing unemployment in the UK.

‘Thank God for the Rupert Murdochs of this world. I wish there were hundreds more in our country. Unemployment would be wiped out at a stroke.’

Not sure what his evidence for that is. Murdoch backed Thatcher from the start. In opposition the Conservatives put out an election poster showing a dole queue with the words ‘Britain isn’t working’. At that point unemployment was over 2 million. By three years into Thatcher’s first term in office (helped there by the support of Murdoch and his Sun newspaper) unemployment was over 3 million. That doesn’t seem like a great job if you’re judging by results.

 If everyone was like Murdoch we’d certainly have no tax base at all due to his companies managing to pay almost nothing in tax on their vast profits and would go bankrupt like Greece.

His companies used tax avoidance to pay no net taxes at all in the UK in the 1990s  (no-one found this out till 1999). News Corporation recently paid $77mn in taxes to one Australian regional government after claiming for 7 years that it hadn’t been avoiding taxes.

I’ll grant that Murdoch’s firms do certainly provide employment for some dodgy ‘private investigators’ like Glenn Mulcaire, who has suddenly done a massive u-turn on his belief that no-one has any right to privacy, now that it affects him, asking reporters to respect his family’s privacy

McKenzie has more praise for Rupert

‘Why has Rupert a monopoly? Simple: nobody else had the guts, the nerve or the stunning management skill to take on the establishment.’

Allying himself with the leaders of the two main political parties alternately and getting his papers to tell people to vote for the one he currently has a deal on deregulation of media ownership with is “taking on the establishment”.

David Cameron and his other Bullingdon Club boys aren’t the establishment? Few people have been as close to "the establishment" as Rupert Murdoch and Kelvin McKenzie.

There’s also his media empire’s use of phone hacking and unusually long ranged mikes to target anyone who goes up against them.

Finally Kelvin says

‘Sky is not Fox News and I have my doubts that in leftwing, socialist, clapped-out Britain, the latter would work commercially or audiencewise.’

It wouldn’t work because it’s blatant propaganda and has had shows by people like Glenn Beck claiming Obama is racist against white people; and has edited out the applause from News reports on his speeches.

That’s apart from the fact that the last time the UK had a government that could be described as socialist was the Atlee government in 1945-1950.

I wonder what Kelvin might have said about a left wing or even vaguely liberal person saying Britain is “clapped out”. I’m guessing the phrase “Brit bashing” would be involved.

There is no public interest involved in publishing gossip about sex – only money grubbing and distracting from real issues

Whatever Fred Goodwin's faults, the whole world does not have a right to hear every detail of his private life, or anyone else's

I'm not an admirer of the job Fred Goodwin did as head of the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), but who he had an affair with is none of anyone's business except maybe his wife.

There's a ludicrous idea in Britain, promoted by tabloid hacks who profit from it, that if someone is famous, a politician, or was in a high paid job the entire world has the moral right to know about every detail of their private lives. They don't. There's no public interest involved, because 'public interest' does not mean 'anything some of the public are interested in knowing - including gossip about peoples' private lives', it means something that affects the public's interests - i.e which would harm them if they don't know it and/or benefit them if they did.

All this coverage of peoples' sex lives is just a distraction from the real issues - and anyone who thinks the banking crisis was just down to who was running the banks at the time and their personal failings simply doesn't understand the problem.

The problem is deregulation, which results in any executive of a company that doesn't only look to how they can maximise profits this quarter (whatever the long term risks or losses) being replaced by someone who will - or being put out of business, or being taken over by a company that will.

Unless the banks and other firms are regulated properly – which will also require closing down the tax havens that allow enough secrecy to make regulation impossible - this will happen again and again and again.

The money grubbers like Rupert Murdoch, former Sun editor Kelvin Mackenzie and the bin raking ‘private detectives’ the Murdoch empire hire, like Glenn Mulcaire, pretend that they are upholding moral values, serving the public interest and exposing hypocrisy. No-one could be greater hypocrites than they are, as they peddle gossip to make money, distracting attention from real issues such as how much tax (if any) billionaires, newspaper editors like Kelvin Mackenzie and big firms like News International pay in the UK.

Kelvin Mackenzie

In fact we know Murdoch’s News International used (legal) tax avoidance to avoid paying any net tax whatsoever in the UK between 1989 and 1999.

We also know that in addition to being involved in buying information obtained by illegal illegal phone hacking, Murdoch’s papers have also paid police for information on peoples’ private lives. Rebekah Wade (now Brooks) slipped up in 2003 by admitting as (then) editor of the Sun that the paper paid police for information on celebrities which it then published. Brooks is now Chief Executive of News International (the UK subsidiary of Murdoch's News Corp).

We also know MacKenzie and the Sun have often printed outright lies based on rumours, such as their stories about Elton John having had sex with underage rent boys and removing the voice boxes of his guard dogs. John Pilger wrote of one headline in The Sun under Mackenzie referring to Australian aborigines as ‘The Abos – brutal and dangerous’.

In fact MacKenzie has sunk so low so many times in his hate-mongering, lies and gossip about others that he really has no moral high ground from which to criticise other people.

There are some real private investigators who investigate the serious issues by looking at the business and political frauds committed by some of the most powerful people, political parties, governments, criminals and companies. These are people who risk vilification and sometimes death to give people the truth – people like John Pilger, Greg Palast, Robert Fisk, Peter Maass, the late Veronica Guerin and Shane Bauer (currently being held as a highly unlikely ‘US spy’ by Iran’s government.) Kelvin Mackenzie and his associates are a joke compared to them, a sad travesty of what real investigative journalists and editors should be.

Some of the other things you will never see raised in most tabloids are the vast rip-off of taxpayers and the NHS through PFI and PPP contracts, which make taxpayers pay more for cut services; the double subsidy they’re paying to privatised rail companies (above inflation fare rises plus government subsidy), the subsidy to the nuclear industry and the subsidies to arms manufacturer British Aerospace; and tax havens used to avoid paying income and corporation tax, pushing up taxes for the majority.

These are all cases of the majority subsidising the very richest on a scale that makes the expenses scandal look like a baby pissing into the Atlantic. Instead the tabloids will tell you that your money is being “stolen” by the unemployed, even though there have never been enough jobs for everyone in booms or recessions, that “immigrants” are “stealing” it (even though many are fleeing death by starvation, lack of medical care or being tortured or shot – and benefits paid to them are well below the amount paid to citizens) , or that trade unions are. Then they’ll tell you who shagged who (or who some false rumour says shagged who) – and sadly many people are taken for mugs, while Murdoch and friends play them for every penny they’ve got.

I remember as a teenager in 1986 seeing a Sun front page with the headline ‘Freddie Starr ate my hamster’. Not long afterwards Reagan bombed Tripoli in Libya, with Prime Minister Thatcher giving the planes permission to refuel in Britain without even informing parliament never mind having a vote on it. The raid killed a small girl among others. There was a tiny column on this in The Sun that day with a picture of a plane on one side of the page covering this story in two sentences. That sums up the methods of Kelvin Mackenzie and those like him – blind people with bullshit to distract them from the real issues.