Fox News: trumpet of Israel's hard right

By PAUL CONANT

Copyright 2003 by Paul Conant.

This article may be reproduced in part or in its entirety without charge.

APRIL 21, 2003--Australian-born media magnate

K. Rupert Murdoch holds a U.S. passport. But the policy of the top-rated Fox News Channel and the rest of his News Corp. is the

unabashed promotion of the militarist agenda--including the long-planned war against Iraq--of hard-right Israelis.

The political orientation of Fox, which terms its coverage unbiased, reflects the policy of the so-called neocons, or neoconservatives, who argue that American (or British or Australian) national interests are very close to the national interests of Israel, as interpreted by the Israeli hard right. The projection of U.S. power is seen by neocons as a way of encouraging democracy in the Islamic world, which assists U.S. interests and those interests, they assert, dovetail with Israel's interests. A number of neocons, once referred to by conservative Patrick Buchanan as Israel's 'amen chorus,' hold high-level positions in the Bush administration.

For example, I. Lewis Libby, the longtime lawyer for pardoned Israeli businessman Marc Rich and long an advocate of war against Iraq,

is Vice President Dick Cheney's national security aide.

Roger Alper, writing in Israel's 'broadly liberal' Haaretz, comments on the simple-mindedness of Fox's Iraq war coverage:

'America's Fox News network has been demonstrating since the start of the war in Iraq an amazing lesson in media hypocrisy. The anchors, reporters and commentators unceasingly emphasize that the war's goal is to free the Iraqi people from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein. The frequency, consistence and passion with which they use this lame excuse, and the fact that nearly no other reasons are mentioned, shows that this is the network's editorial policy.'

Alper notes, 'The American flag lies in the upper left-hand corner of the screen, while the logo accompanying the programming is Operation Iraqi Freedom, the official name given by the Pentagon.' He comments, 'Fox News looks like the propagandistic campaign of systematic disinformation by the Bush administration.'

KNEE-JERK SUPPORT OF ISRAEL

Fox News policy is echoed by the rest of Murdoch's popular media, such as the New York Post and London Sun tabloids. His upper-scale publications, such as the Times of London, are permitted some flexibility, but are unlikely to do much to rock the boat of the Israeli hard right.

Murdoch's association with militant zionism dates at least to the 1960s and his link-up with Jacob Rothschild, the London financier, whose vast assets have gone to support the zionist cause for decades. Rothschild is currently sharing the helm of BSkyB, the British television company, with Murdoch's son, James.

Eric Alterman, writing in the left-leaning Nation, cites Murdoch's Post and influential Weekly Standard magazine, along with top Murdoch writers, 'who can be counted on to support Israel reflexively and without qualification.'

In July 2002, Jason Maoz, editor of the Jewish Press listed John Podhoretz, senior Murdoch editor and writer, among 'Media Friends Top Ten.' Others listed included columnists George F. Will, Cal Thomas and Charles Krauthammer, along with New York Times writers William Safire and A.M. Rosenthal.

Similarly, Americans for a Safe Israel applauded Podhoretz's appointment as the New York Post's editorial page editor, and the American Zionist Information Network lists Podhoretz, a Post writer, under 'reliable columnists.' Other 'reliable columnists' are Will, Safire and Mortimer Zuckerman, owner of the New York Daily News, a Post rival, and of U.S. News and World Report magazine. The zionists list the New York Post under 'reliable U.S. media.'

On Sept. 4, 2001, Sam Kiley quit his job as the Africa correspondent for the Murdoch-owned Times of London, charging that Times editors had repeatedly introduced a pro-Israeli bias into his copy on the Palestinian issue. Kiley attributed the bias to Murdoch's well-known political friendship with Ariel Sharon, current prime minister of Israel. Times editor Peter Stothard denied Kiley's charges.

A summary of Kiley's charges appears in Britain's Guardian but the story on his resignation that Kiley wrote for his current employer, the Evening Standard, was not found in a search of that paper's online archives.

MURDOCH'S POLITICAL FRIENDS

Among groups that have honored Murdoch are the Anti-Defamation League, which gave him its Torch of Liberty award in 1977, soon after he bought the Post from Dorothy Schiff and unleashed his British tabloid style on New Yorkers; the United Jewish Appeal, which reportedly honored him at the behest of his political friend Benjamin Netanyahu, the Likudite Israeli politician; and the American-Israeli Friendship League, headed by Zuckerman, which honored him in June 2001. Murdoch's political friend Sharon was the featured speaker at the affair, according to Seth Lipsky, a Wall Street Journal columnist, who left important details to the imagination of the reader.

The political philosophy of Murdoch, who is rather private about his ethnic heritage, is well captured by a talk he gave to the American Jewish Congress in April 1982 in support of Britain's Falklands war decision. According to a biographer, William Shawcross, Murdoch told the audience that the Falklands war had parallels in the Mideast. The issue, he said, was democracy versus dictatorship. Hence, the case for supporting Britain was the same as the case for supporting Israel.

In an April 7, 2003, New York Times story, Murdoch tells reporter David D. Kirkpatrick that his main responsibility is to shareholders. So, if a paper is not performing, it might be necessary for Murdoch to look at its political tone. 'If you have an editor who wants to be a great hero and go against the public will and lose all the readers, the shareholders are going to blame the chief executive.'

The chief executive's media empire was saved from bankruptcy in 1991 by Citigroup, which enforced some harsh cuts, including the forced sale or closing of the bulk of Murdoch's U.S. newspaper and magazine holdings. He had never been able to get his British-Australian style print journalism to turn a profit in the United States. But, the resilient impresario held onto Fox screen and broadcast assets, and engineered a financial comeback.

ENGAGING CHINESE COMMUNISM

In the process, Murdoch regained control of the New York Post, after having been forced to sell it during a cross-ownership dispute. The Post has never turned a profit for News Corp., but gives Murdoch a coveted New York newspaper presence and also gives the hard-right Israeli lobby an important voice in national politics.

Yet, his critics charge, Murdoch is not always the unflinching conservative. They argue that the Chinese communists have found that Murdoch's conservatism is flexible when his financial interests are at stake. Jonathan Mirsky, another ex-correspondent for the Times of London, asserted that Murdoch and his executive son James were 'in bed with the reds,' having bent over backward to mollify China's communist leaders. A 1998 Time magazine report on the controversy over the decision of HarperCollins UK to forgo publishing the memoirs of Hong Kong's last British governor, Chris Patten, says that Murdoch never wanted to publish the book and had disagreed with Patten, an anticommunist, on views expressed. Critics asserted that the Murdochs were appeasing communists in hopes of garnering a share of the vast Chinese market for News Corp.'s television interests.

In a similar vein, a Wall Street Journal editorial features editor monitored the New York Post's coverage of China's seizure of a U.S. reconnaisance plane, and found it wanting. Tunku Varadarajan, writing in the Free Republic of April 9, 2001, noted that the coverage in the normally boisterous tabloid was excessively tame and appeared to be in line with Murdoch's business interests in China.

(The 72-year-old Murdoch's China connections are highlighted by his marriage to Wendy Deng, 32, whom he met at his Hong Kong television firm. The couple resides in Los Angeles, home of Murdoch's 20th Century Fox film studios, with their children. It is Murdoch's third marriage.)

The influence of the Israeli hard right at Fox News is well illustrated by Fox's Special Report with Brit Hume, which regularly uses Podhoretz, William Kristol and Fred Barnes as political commentators. Kristol is the editor of Murdoch's Weekly Standard magazine, which preaches the neocon line of an aggressive policy of promoting Israeli 'democracy' and limiting Islamic authoritarianism. Podhoretz and Kristol, using Murdoch's money, founded the magazine in 1995 and regularly write for it, as do Barnes, Hume and former Rothschild banker Irwin M. Stelzer.

A Weekly Standard editorial of Nov. 16, 1998, entitled 'How to attack Iraq,' urged using an enclave in southern Iraq as a springboard for Iraqi opposition forces.

NO 9/11 EVIDENCE NECESSARY

The signature of Kristol, head of the Project for a New American Century think tank, is featured prominently in a letter of Sept. 20, 2001 to Bush, calling on the United States to wage war against Saddam 'even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack' of Sept. 11.

The writers asserted, 'Israel has been and remains America's staunchest ally against international terrorism, especially in the Middle East. The United States should fully support its fellow democracy in its fight against terrorism. We should insist that the Palestinian Authority put a stop to terrorism emanating from territories under its control and imprison those planning terrorist attacks against Israel. Until the Palestinian Authority moves against terrorism, the United States should provide it no further assistance.'

Signers include conservative Christian ideologues Gary Bauer and Jeffrey Bell (Murdoch owns Zondervan, a publisher of Christian study bibles). Other signers are President Reagan's UN envoy Jeane Kirkpatrick, identified by journalist Jeet Heer as a onetime member of the Social Democrats, a Trotskyist-linked fringe party; Richard N. Perle, the controversial Pentagon adviser; Frank Gaffney, head of the Council for Security Policy, a militant Israeli activist group; Krauthammer, the columnist; and Norman Podhoretz and his wife Midge Decter, who helped shaped the neocon movement as editors of the American Jewish Committee's Commentary magazine. John Podhoretz is Decter's son.

On June 14, 2002, Murdoch writer Podhoretz participated in a discussion titled 'Hebrew nationalists: why the U.S. supports Israel' at the Hoover Institution, where he and Norman Podhoretz hold key posts, and is quoted: 'The best thing, the way that peace will be assured in the Middle East is a regime change in Iraq and a defeat of al Qaeda.'

RUMSFELD'S 1998 WAR CRY

A letter of Jan. 26, 1998, likewise urged President Clinton to invade Iraq, citing inspection problems, uncertainty over weapons of mass destruction, and reputed difficulties of a policy of containment. The letter charged that Clinton was 'crippled by a misguided insistence on unanimity in the Security Council.'

Signers included Donald H. Rumsfeld, the current defense secretary; Paul D. Wolfowitz, now number two man at the Pentagon; Perle, who resigned under a cloud as head of the Defense Policy Board; former CIA Director R. James Woolsey who serves on the Defense Policy Board; John R. Bolton, a State Department official; Kristol; and Elliott Abrams, a convicted Irancontra conspirator who is now a key National Security Council aide with zealous pro-Sharon views. Abrams, identified by Heer as a onetime member of the Trotskyist-tied Social Democrats, served with Perle on the staff of the late conservative Sen. Henry M. Jackson.

An April 11, 2002, memo from Kristol to White House officials rebukes unnamed senior aides for seeming to 'launch a campaign against Ariel Sharon's national unity government.'

In May 2002, Kristol told the Washington Post's Dana Milbank that National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice had 'moved over to our side' and away from the proteges of Brent Scowcroft, the former national security adviser and top aide to Bush's father who had opposed the Iraq attack. 'Our side' included such Murdoch-tied neocons as Libby and Eric S. Edelman, a Cheney aide named ambassador to Turkey.

Murdoch's top neocons:

* John Podhoretz. Fox News Channel contributor. Twice-weekly columnist for the New York Post. Weekly columnist for National Review Online (which is conservative but not specifically neoconservative). Contributing editor to the Weekly Standard. Consulting editor at ReganBooks, an imprint of the Murdoch-owned HarperCollins. Podhoretz left his editorial post at the Weekly Standard in 1997 to take over as editorial page director of the Post. Later he became the paper's arts and features editor, before becoming a full-time columnist.

Podhoretz has worked at Time magazine, the Washington Times, Insight magazine and U.S. News and World Report. He was a speechwriter for President Reagan and a special assistant to 'drug czar William Bennett.'

* William Kristol. Like John Podhoretz, Kristol is the son of an editor of a magazine that helped launch the neocons, sometimes identified as Judeo-cons. Kristol's father, Irving, for years edited The Public Interest, according to several writers, as an outgrowth of his Trotskyism, a form of communism in deadly struggle with Stalinism. (Alliances of Trotskyists and conservative anti-communists date to before the McCarthy years. Jeet Heer of Canada's National Post writes of Trotskyist influence in the White House.) He is chairman of the Project for a New American Century, which identifies hard-right Israeli goals as close to U.S. goals.

Kristol's pull is demonstrated by the $100,000 he received as a member of Enron's Advisory Board before Enron exploded, says Andrew Sullivan of the Daily Dish.

Before founding the Weekly Standard, Kristol led the Project for the Republican Future 'where he helped shape the strategy that produced the 1994 congressional victory.' Previously, he served as chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle during the first Bush administration and to Reagan's education secretary, William Bennett.

* Irwin M. Stelzer. Known as Murdoch's deal-maker and political go-between, Stelzer is reported to have easy access to British Prime Minister Tony Blair, whom Murdoch applauded for defying Labor Party and public sentiment and pressing forward on the Iraq war initiative.

Stelzer, according to published reports, headed Enron's advisory board while serving as managing director of the investment banking firm Rothschild Inc., a post he no longer holds.

(The neocons owe a great deal to the political acumen of Bush's chief political adviser, Karl Rove, a Texan who was once among the biggest holders of Enron stock among White House aides, according to BBC News. Rove's influence put top GOP strategist Ralph Reed, formerly executive director of the Christian Coalition, on Enron's payroll, the BBC reported.)

Stelzer, whose main interest is business regulation, is a columnist for the Sunday Times, published in London, and the Courier Mail, an Australian paper, both Murdoch-owned. He is also a contributing editor to the Weekly Standard and is a member of the publications committee of The Public Interest.

Stelzer, a former economics professor, is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. Prior to joining Hudson in 1998, he was at the American Enterprise Institute, home of a number of neocons, some of whom are now Bush administration officials.

* Fred Barnes. Joined Fox News in 1996 as a political commentator and contributor after a 10-year stint as senior editor and White House correspondent for the 'liberal' New Republic, where he served under owner-editor Martin Peretz, who took it over from Michael Straight, the anti-McCarthy writer who in 1979 was exposed as having been a soviet spy. Since 1974 Peretz has used the magazine to promote Israel's cause and was one of the signers of the Sept. 20, 2001, letter urging Bush to topple Saddam.

From 1988 to 1998 Barnes was a regular panelist on the McLaughlin Group public affairs program. Aside from his work for Murdoch, he is a news correspondent for PBS.

* Brit Hume. Since 1996, Hume has been the managing editor and chief Washington correspondent for Fox News. His political program, 'Special Report with Brit Hume,' regularly hosts Murdoch neocons and tends to favor the GOP. As managing editor, Hume is responsible for Fox's highly skewed pro-neocon news spin. Hume also writes for the Weekly Standard.

FOX SPY STORY STIFLED

However, Hume, who began his career as a newspaperman and went on to spend 23 years with ABC News, on occasion has permitted his reporters to defy the pro-Israeli tone.

In December 2001, Fox's Carl Cameron reported that federal authorities were investigating what appeared to be a ring of Israeli spies who evidently had foreknowledge of the Sept. 11 attacks, though Cameron cautioned that the Israelis were not known to be implicated in the attacks. A number of the suspected agents, he said, were active in the Israeli military, while others worked for an Israeli communications company, Amdocs Ltd., that handled virtually all directory assistance and billing data for U.S. phone users. U.S. security officials were concerned that Israeli intelligence was using this data, Cameron reported.

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*Cryptome's copy of the Cameron transcripts [scroll down].

*Christopher Ketcham's detailed Salon article on 'the Israeli art student mystery' pulls together various threads of this bizarre story, including the discovery that some of the 'art students' resided for a while in Hollywood, Fla., near the residence of 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta.

*A copy of a March 27, 2001, 'Drug Enforcement Administration report' [scroll down] on the art students is found at Cryptome.org.

*The ABC News program, 20/20, reported that five young Israelis arrested after filming the trade center disaster were strongly suspected of being Israeli intelligence agents. There were official denials that the Israelis had foreknowledge of the event.

*Activist reporter John Sugg's stories on the 'art students' are found here and here. *The Jewish Forward's Marc Perelman reported on the 'art student' mystery and on the Israelis arrested on Sept. 11, 2001.

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The Forward, a Jewish periodical, reported that Jewish groups were planning to contact Fox executives privately over the reports, which were seen as fueling anti-semitism. Fox hastily pulled the Cameron transcripts off its web site and other media outfits pulled discussions of the report from their web sites.

Murdoch in the 1980s employed Patrick Buchanan as a Post columnist. But, after a stint as a Reagan press aide, Buchanan moved to CNN, where he has been highly critical of the neocon Israeli lobby.

A neocon letter-signer and ex-AEI vice president is Bolton, now Bush's undersecretary of state for arms control and security affairs. Bolton's special assistant is David Wurmser, who helped write a 1996 manifesto for Israel's hard right Likud Party that included a call to topple Saddam and weaken anti-Israel power in Syria and Iran. Wurmser was assisted in that policy paper by Douglas J. Feith, now deputy secretary of defense for policy, and Perle, who--despite suspicions of ethics problems--remains a member of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, though he resigned the chairmanship. Perle is a top manager at Hollinger International, a media conglomerate run by Conrad Black, who like Murdoch congratulated Blair for defying opinion and holding to a war objective. Black owns the Jerusalem Post, London's Daily Telegraph and Chicago's Sun-Times, which Black obtained after Murdoch's unsuccessful tenure.

Wurmser, while director of Middle East Affairs at AEI in October 2001, wrote an article for the Weekly Standard called 'The Saudi Connection,' which linked Saudi Arabia to terrorism.

The Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, a major neocon think tank, lists Feith among those who have served on its board of advisers. Others listed are Cheney, Bolton, Perle and Woolsey.

The related neocon group, the Center for Security Policy, lists Woolsey and Sen. John Kyl* as co-chairs of its national security advisory council, which includes Perle as an adviser. Kyl is an Arizona Republican who backed Netanyahu's 1996 campaign.

Others affiliated with the center are Rep. Christopher Cox of California, Rep. John Shadegg of Arizona, Sen. Tim Hutchinson of Arkansas and Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas. All are Republicans.

Murdoch has a well-known ease of access to various high-level politicians, such as Sharon and Blair, and, with the opening of a 40-million-pound printing plant in Ireland, Irish Premier Bertie Ahern, who hosted a Bush-Blair meeting on the future of Iraq, is also duly cautious of Murdoch's power. Murdoch's Sunday Times and racy Sun publish Irish editions. Yet, published reports suggest that Murdoch has had trouble maintaining the Sun's circulation at a profitable level.

However, Murdoch's main media aim is to extend his global TV reach. News Corp. owns Britain's BSkyB televsion, America's Fox stations, Asia's Star TV, which boasts 120 million weekly viewers. He has recently put in a successful bid for the DirecTV satellite operation.

Murdoch runs a tangled skein of offshore accounting schemes in order to keep corporate taxes low and in order to take advantage of accounting methods that might be frowned upon in New York or London, it has been reported.

An Israeli subsidiary, News Datacom Research Ltd., in 1998 was assessed 15 million shekels after being investigated for tax fraud.

Murdoch testified on behalf of fellow media owners S.I. Newhouse Jr. and Donald E. Newhouse at their federal tax trial. The government sued the brothers for $1.3 billion after they offered to pay $247 million in taxes from the estate of their father Samuel I., who died in 1979. In 1990, the Newhouses agreed to pay an additional $46 million following a favorable ruling by the tax judge. Though the court viewed Murdoch's testimony on his appraisal of Newhouse holdings as irrelevant, the political effect of the publishers' alliance was incalculable.

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*A previous version of this report contained an error in which Kyl was associated with a data mining discussion. Conant apologizes for that error.

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'The Strategist and the Philosopher' (Truthout translation of Le Monde article on neocons)
'The Most Biased Name in News' by Seth Ackerman (Extra!)
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs targets Weekly Standard
Tom Hayden on the neocons (ZNet)
'The Rise of the Judeo-Cons' by Kenneth R. Weinstein (Azure: Ideas for the Jewish nation)
'The Weird Men Behind George W. Bush's War' by Michael Lind (New Statesman)
'Origins of Regime Change in Iraq' by Joseph Cirincione (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace)
'This War is Brought to You by...' by Pepe Escobar (Asia Times Online)
'The Men from JINSA and CSP' by Jason Vest (The Nation)
Neocons urge Bush to treat Arafat as a terrorist
'Doing the Right-Wing Shuffle' by Eric Alterman (Salon)
'Carving Up the New Iraq' by Neil Mackay (Sunday Herald, Scotland)
Marc Rich's media protectors (Paul Conant)
The power of the Israel lobby (San Francisco Chronicle)
Conant to Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press
Background on Richard N. Perle (PR Watch); many useful links
'U.S. Iraq policy for dummies' by Bernard Weiner (The Crisis Papers)
Cryptome's copy of a March 27, 2001, report on 'Israeli art students'
'The China syndrome' by Paul Krugman (N.Y. Times column on Murdochian practices)
'Selective intelligence' by Seymour M. Hersh (New Yorker)
The Christian zionist lobby , a report by Donald E. Wagner (Center for Middle Eastern Studies, North Park University)
The Rothschild-Murdoch connection, Margareta Pagano, eFinancialNews