Fox News Owner Backs Australian Leftist
By Cliff Kincaid
November 26, 2007
Rupert Murdoch, the so-called "conservative" owner of the Fox News Channel, made a dramatic turn to the Left when one of his major Australian newspapers endorsed the liberal pro-United Nations candidate, Kevin Rudd, in the Australian presidential contest.
Rudd is a former diplomat who served in China and speaks Chinese. He pledged to pull Australian combat troops out of Iraq, increase the power of the United Nations in global affairs, and boost relations with Communist China. He was backed by radical labor union activists who have called for anti-American Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez to visit Australia in 2008.
Rudd's Labor Party won the election on Saturday over the Liberal Party (the equivalent of U.S. conservatives) with about 53 percent of the vote. He defeated conservative John Howard, Australia's long-serving Prime Minister, friend of President Bush and the United States, and opponent of the global Islamic terrorist movement.
Some U.S. conservative commentators are saying that Howard's defeat is somehow linked to the negative publicity which resulted from a dirty trick played by some of his supporters, who distributed phony leaflets trying to tie the Labor Party to Islamic militants. But that was a minor event compared to Rudd becoming a national laughingstock when it was disclosed that during a trip to New York City, supposedly to represent Australia at the United Nations, he had gone to the "Scores" strip club and got drunk with the editor of Murdoch's New York Post. This "Kevin Rudd and his Girls, Girls, Girls" video was one of several that mocked his trip to "Scores." Yet, as the Financial Times noted, he shook off this scandal "with ease."
Considered by some the world's most powerful media mogul, Murdoch has frequently been labeled a "conservative" and has defended the Iraq War. But Murdoch's endorsement of Rudd through his newspaper, The Australian, could signal an endorsement of Hillary Clinton in the U.S. presidential contest, and his abandonment of the Republican Party.
As Accuracy in Media has pointed out, Murdoch's "conservatism" is a matter of dispute anyway. His New York Post newspaper endorsed Hillary Clinton for re-election to the Senate over a conservative Republican and Murdoch even hosted a fundraiser for her.
In a major indication that Murdoch may be casting his lot with the Democratic Party in the 2008 elections, Murdoch gave a May 10, 2007, speech on global warming that sounded like it could have come out of the mouth of Al Gore. Murdoch openly declared that he would use his media companies to "change the way the public thinks" about climate change and related issues. Murdoch, who has been a prominent participant in the Clinton Global Initiative, organized by the disgraced former president, announced that his News Corporation was joining the Climate Group, an organization "dedicated to advancing business and government leadership on climate change." Other corporate members include Bloomberg, Google and Virgin.
>> Continued -- Page 1 2 3
| 
