The Trump Presidency | Biden Inaugurated

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fergieisold said:
Why not? When was the last president like him? I'm not saying I'm right but I find it hard to be concerned long term about the impact of Trumpism.
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Because the problem isn't limited to Trump but the party behind him, they are a mainstay and they will deal with the same people that they are currently antagonizing. No decent foreign government will tell himself, that it's an anomaly, they will think, "The Republicans aren't allies and they are a danger to our own well being".
 
fergieisold said:
Why not? When was the last president like him? I'm not saying I'm right but I find it hard to be concerned long term about the impact of Trumpism.
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For as much as GWB may hate Trump and may disown the current GOP party, they're not as far away in rhetoric and general views as he'd have you think. Same can be said for much of the current Republican party, hence why they've mostly fallen in line...for all their occasional feigning as to Trump saying or doing unacceptable things, he furthers their agenda while taking the spotlight away from them. He's a monster that's been created by the party he represents. A party that currently dominates all levels of government in the US.
 
Raoul said:
We are barely scratching the surface with Trump imo. Once Mueller puts his report out I am guessing we will see a sprawling web of International financial entanglements across the globe.
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I agree. A guaranteed financial crimey.
 
Cringe Factor 11. Mnuchin an EyeVanka go on Fox to answer softball questions about the awesomeness of Trump's economic policy and its the latter who takes the lead on most matters.

 
I cannot believe how a Canadian politician being seen to support Trump can be good politics.
I'd expect Trump to be one of theost unpopular people in Canada at the moment. Pretty sure Canadian politicians regardless of party would avoid him like the plague.
 
Adisa said:
I cannot believe how a Canadian politician being seen to support Trump can be good politics.
I'd expect Trump to be one of theost unpopular people in Canada at the moment. Pretty sure Canadian politicians regardless of party would avoid him like the plague.
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Trudeau has pretty bad ratings IIRC, and will lose to the Conservatives next time.
 
Adisa said:
I cannot believe how a Canadian politician being seen to support Trump can be good politics.
I'd expect Trump to be one of theost unpopular people in Canada at the moment. Pretty sure Canadian politicians regardless of party would avoid him like the plague.
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Sounds like its Trump getting even with Trudeau after the comments he made while Trump was on his way to the Kim summit.
 
fergieisold said:
Luckily I'd hope most countries know he's an anomaly and will just have to wait until he's gone to sort everything out.
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fergieisold said:
Then business as usual I guess until he's gone. Trump inviting Canada's previous prime minister might be bad politics but it's absolutely meaningless.



I dunno, I think he is likely an anomaly...not saying we won't get Trump version 2 at some point but the most likely outcome are more moderate presidents that look to foster relationships with the USAs allies rather than destroy them. Who knows though!
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My apologies in advance for a long post but its important to not view Trump as an anomaly.

He is the conclusion of a very intentional, organized set of interconnect operations designed by far-right conservatives to gain and maintain power and control over laws and policies. This organized effort began after Barry Goldwater's defeat. But its important that some of foundations of Trump's supporters lie in a strain of anti-intellectualism in the US that was superbly documented by historian Douglas Hofstadter in 1963.

After Goldwater was defeated there were organized attempts to create socially conservative institutions from think tanks like Heritage Foundation whose sole goal is to produce research supporting social conservative ideas. There was nothing comparable on the liberal side. These conservative think tanks differed from traditional think tanks like Rand and Brookings in that they have a specific goal for research. They don't just study the facts. They cherry pick the facts they want to form the socially conservative narrative they are trying to spread. Here are some references to how powerful this conservative think tank movement from the 1970s (unmatched by progressives in any way) has influenced the public:
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.1034.1547&rep=rep1&type=pdf
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.833.7268&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Then you have the legal angle. They formed the Federalist Society in 1982 and basically invented/reformatted a new judicial theory. They created the framework to push on all levels (from law school to Senators who wouldn't move on nominations). This is well documented in two great books: Cass Sunstein's Radicals in Robes: Why Extreme Right-Wing Courts are Wrong for America and Jeffrey Toobin's The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court

Finally the evangelical right was empowered in the 1970s-80s with the Moral Majority and TV preachers like Falwell and Pat Robertson. And perhaps even more important was the Focus on the Family and James Dobson. Dobson was very influential in organizing religious conservative lobbying of Congress and influencing Republicans to maintain hardline stances.

Three pronged organized attack from academic, legal and religious angles. (I didn't even mention media and the Fox, Koch push either)

Then you get the amoral operators that these institutions empowered like Roger Stone. The film Get Me Roger Stone is very important in showcasing how some of these operate behind the scenes.

What all this adds up to is a specifically socially conservative infrastructure that has been built since the 70s-80s and has nothing comparable on the other side. All of this post-Goldwater conservative infrastructure has served to continually push the general masses further to the right as they are uncompromising while the progressive politicians completely outflanked, have just given up concessions without gaining anything in return. Any progressive victories have mostly ridden the natural wave of the technology boom and its subsequent progressive social consequences. All this infrastructure pushing explicitly right wing ideas makes it easy for things like Breitbart or alt-ring extremists to become empowered in such a climate.

Unfortunately this is also where the two-party political completely breaks down and loses its purpose and effectiveness. Traditionally game theory has always argued that the benefit of the two party system is that it is allegedly always supposed to moderate candidates and keep them honest to attract voters. But that long time formulation has been broken now. The incentives and payoffs don't work as classic game theory set up the model. What the conservatives realized is that by no compromising they can keep pushing the center further and further to the right.

Trump really was foreshadowed by Reagan. Reagan was a Hollywood movie actor (not an intellectual or academic), anti-communist activist and a charming figurehead. With all the conservative infrastructure I mentioned above, its really more predictable that a Trump would be nominated by the Reps and elected than it first seems.
 
oneniltothearsenal said:
My apologies in advance for a long post but its important to not view Trump as an anomaly.

He is the conclusion of a very intentional, organized set of interconnect operations designed by far-right conservatives to gain and maintain power and control over laws and policies. This organized effort began after Barry Goldwater's defeat. But its important that some of foundations of Trump's supporters lie in a strain of anti-intellectualism in the US that was superbly documented by historian Douglas Hofstadter in 1963.

After Goldwater was defeated there were organized attempts to create socially conservative institutions from think tanks like Heritage Foundation whose sole goal is to produce research supporting social conservative ideas. There was nothing comparable on the liberal side. These conservative think tanks differed from traditional think tanks like Rand and Brookings in that they have a specific goal for research. They don't just study the facts. They cherry pick the facts they want to form the socially conservative narrative they are trying to spread. Here are some references to how powerful this conservative think tank movement from the 1970s (unmatched by progressives in any way) has influenced the public:
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.1034.1547&rep=rep1&type=pdf
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.833.7268&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Then you have the legal angle. They formed the Federalist Society in 1982 and basically invented/reformatted a new judicial theory. They created the framework to push on all levels (from law school to Senators who wouldn't move on nominations). This is well documented in two great books: Cass Sunstein's Radicals in Robes: Why Extreme Right-Wing Courts are Wrong for America and Jeffrey Toobin's The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court

Finally the evangelical right was empowered in the 1970s-80s with the Moral Majority and TV preachers like Falwell and Pat Robertson. And perhaps even more important was the Focus on the Family and James Dobson. Dobson was very influential in organizing religious conservative lobbying of Congress and influencing Republicans to maintain hardline stances.

Three pronged organized attack from academic, legal and religious angles. (I didn't even mention media and the Fox, Koch push either)

Then you get the amoral operators that these institutions empowered like Roger Stone. The film Get Me Roger Stone is very important in showcasing how some of these operate behind the scenes.

What all this adds up to is a specifically socially conservative infrastructure that has been built since the 70s-80s and has nothing comparable on the other side. All of this post-Goldwater conservative infrastructure has served to continually push the general masses further to the right as they are uncompromising while the progressive politicians completely outflanked, have just given up concessions without gaining anything in return. Any progressive victories have mostly ridden the natural wave of the technology boom and its subsequent progressive social consequences. All this infrastructure pushing explicitly right wing ideas makes it easy for things like Breitbart or alt-ring extremists to become empowered in such a climate.

Unfortunately this is also where the two-party political completely breaks down and loses its purpose and effectiveness. Traditionally game theory has always argued that the benefit of the two party system is that it is allegedly always supposed to moderate candidates and keep them honest to attract voters. But that long time formulation has been broken now. The incentives and payoffs don't work as classic game theory set up the model. What the conservatives realized is that by no compromising they can keep pushing the center further and further to the right.

Trump really was foreshadowed by Reagan. Reagan was a Hollywood movie actor (not an intellectual or academic), anti-communist activist and a charming figurehead. With all the conservative infrastructure I mentioned above, its really more predictable that a Trump would be nominated by the Reps and elected than it first seems.
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Good post. Also relevant is the Powell memo.

On August 23, 1971, prior to accepting Nixon's nomination to the Supreme Court, Powell was commissioned by his neighbor, Eugene B. Sydnor Jr., a close friend and education director of the US Chamber of Commerce, to write a confidential memorandum titled "Attack on the American Free Enterprise System," an anti-Communist, anti-Fascist, anti-New Deal blueprint for conservative business interests to retake America for the chamber.[14][15] It was based in part on Powell's reaction to the work of activist Ralph Nader, whose 1965 exposé on General Motors, Unsafe at Any Speed, put a focus on the auto industry putting profit ahead of safety, which triggered the American consumer movement. Powell saw it as an undermining of Americans' faith in enterprise and another step in the slippery slope of socialism.[14] His experiences as a corporate lawyer and a director on the board of Phillip Morris from 1964 until his appointment to the Supreme Court made him a champion of the tobacco industry who railed against the growing scientific evidence linking smoking to cancer deaths.[14] He argued, unsuccessfully, that tobacco companies' First Amendment rights were being infringed when news organizations were not giving credence to the cancer denials of the industry. That was the point where Powell began to focus on the media as biased agents of socialism.[14]

The memo called for corporate America to become more aggressive in molding society's thinking about business, government, politics and law in the US. It sparked wealthy heirs of earlier American Industrialists like Richard Mellon Scaife; the Earhart Foundation, money which came from an oil fortune; and the Smith Richardson Foundation, from the cough medicine dynasty;[14] to use their private charitable foundations, which did not have to report their political activities, to join the Carthage Foundation, founded by Scaife in 1964[14] to fund Powell's vision of a pro-business, anti-socialist, minimalist government-regulated America as it had been in the heyday of early American industrialism, before the Great Depression and the rise of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal.

The Powell Memorandum thus became the blueprint of the rise of the American conservative movement and the formation of a network of influential right-wing think tanks and lobbying organizations, such as The Heritage Foundation and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) as well as inspiring the US Chamber of Commerce to become far more politically active.[16][17] CUNY professor David Harveytraces the rise of neoliberalism in the US to this memo.[18][19]

Powell argued, "The most disquieting voices joining the chorus of criticism came from perfectly respectable elements of society: from the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians." In the memorandum, Powell advocated "constant surveillance" of textbook and television content, as well as a purge of left-wing elements. He named consumer advocate Nader as the chief antagonist of American business. Powell urged conservatives to take a sustained media-outreach program; including funding scholars who believe in the free enterprise system, publishing books and papers from popular magazines to scholarly journals and influencing public opinion.[20]

This memo foreshadowed a number of Powell's court opinions, especially First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, which shifted the direction of First Amendment law by declaring that corporate financial influence of elections by independent expenditures should be protected with the same vigor as individual political speech. Much of the future Court opinion in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commissionrelied on the same arguments raised in Bellotti.
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And Buckley's very telling switch:
Reacting in 1957 to southern blacks’ demands for voting rights, the National Reviewdeclared in a Buckley-penned editorial that whites were “the advanced race,” while blacks were culturally and intellectually unfit for democracy. “The claims of civilization supersede those of universal suffrage,” Buckley wrote, labeling assertions to the contrary “demagoguery.” (Less than a decade later, adding an inclusively interracial overtone to his anti-poor condescension, Buckley argued in a debate with James Baldwin, “The problem in Mississippi isn’t that too few Negroes can vote, it’s that too many whites can.”)
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Our PM is meeting with Trump on monday. Will probably be largely symbolic.

Think Rutte should tell Trump we used to own New York, might impress him.
 
Adisa said:
Why is it symbolic?
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They’re not going to actually accomplish anything. At least that’s what most people think. The actual talks should be between members of our and Trump’s cabinet.

Our media does not take Trump at all seirously though, which fuels this as well.
 
oneniltothearsenal said:
Trump really was foreshadowed by Reagan. Reagan was a Hollywood movie actor (not an intellectual or academic), anti-communist activist and a charming figurehead. With all the conservative infrastructure I mentioned above, its really more predictable that a Trump would be nominated by the Reps and elected than it first seems.
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I think that conclusion does a grave injustice to Reagan. He may have started as an actor, but was a union leader and a governor before becoming president. He redefined conservative politics and had very clear cut objectives as to tax and deficit reduction etc. He had a wider connection to voters (Reagan Democrats) as against to Trump who has trouble getting support of his own party.

oneniltothearsenal said:
Unfortunately this is also where the two-party political completely breaks down and loses its purpose and effectiveness. Traditionally game theory has always argued that the benefit of the two party system is that it is allegedly always supposed to moderate candidates and keep them honest to attract voters. But that long time formulation has been broken now. The incentives and payoffs don't work as classic game theory set up the model. What the conservatives realized is that by no compromising they can keep pushing the center further and further to the right.
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Think you have hit the nail on the head here. The two party system has had its flaws to an extent that both parties have become equally unpopular. Though he has a GOP ticket, Trump is by no means a Republican as the party was before the last election. He is just using the party to achieve his own means and mostly it's a marriage of convenience. His penchant for rhetoric echoed the people's dissatisfaction of the two party system and he's essentially a new party on his own.
 
Adisa said:
I cannot believe how a Canadian politician being seen to support Trump can be good politics.
I'd expect Trump to be one of theost unpopular people in Canada at the moment. Pretty sure Canadian politicians regardless of party would avoid him like the plague.
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You'd be surprised. We have fair few knuckle dragging traitors up here, if comments on the CBC are anything to go by.
 
Edgar Allan Pillow said:
I think that conclusion does a grave injustice to Reagan. He may have started as an actor, but was a union leader and a governor before becoming president. He redefined conservative politics and had very clear cut objectives as to tax and deficit reduction etc. He had a wider connection to voters (Reagan Democrats) as against to Trump who has trouble getting support of his own party.
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Absolutely wrong. The man was, in a time of leaders of high intellect, extremely stupid. He was a happy idiot who was led by smarter men. Of course he was good in front of the camera as he had a long career as an actor and then a shill for GE on TV.
 
Raoul said:
Fahrenheit 11/9 will be the title apparently. How clever.
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Brilliant. Though the election was actually on the 8th...but they’ll fudge that and say they mean “the day everyone woke up to the reality of Trump as President” or something..

Still, it’s a pretty perfect tease video.
 
Mockney said:
Brilliant. Though the election was actually on the 8th...but they’ll fudge that and say they mean “the day everyone woke up to the reality of Trump as President” or something..

Still, it’s a pretty perfect tease video.
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The result was confirmed on the 9th.
 
Mockney said:
Okay. But surely we can all agree that the way Americans do dates is backwards and awful? And that it’s probably also why everyone hates them.
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When Sickipedia was a thing, the top rated joke ever was a play on this. Not sure why it’s relevant but there you go.
 
Mockney said:
Okay. But surely we can all agree that the way Americans do dates is backwards and awful? And that it’s probably also why everyone hates them.
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You won't get an argument from me on that front. I went there on holiday once and was almost 3 month late for my flight home.
 
oneniltothearsenal said:
My apologies in advance for a long post but its important to not view Trump as an anomaly.

He is the conclusion of a very intentional, organized set of interconnect operations designed by far-right conservatives to gain and maintain power and control over laws and policies. This organized effort began after Barry Goldwater's defeat. But its important that some of foundations of Trump's supporters lie in a strain of anti-intellectualism in the US that was superbly documented by historian Douglas Hofstadter in 1963.

After Goldwater was defeated there were organized attempts to create socially conservative institutions from think tanks like Heritage Foundation whose sole goal is to produce research supporting social conservative ideas. There was nothing comparable on the liberal side. These conservative think tanks differed from traditional think tanks like Rand and Brookings in that they have a specific goal for research. They don't just study the facts. They cherry pick the facts they want to form the socially conservative narrative they are trying to spread. Here are some references to how powerful this conservative think tank movement from the 1970s (unmatched by progressives in any way) has influenced the public:
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.1034.1547&rep=rep1&type=pdf
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.833.7268&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Then you have the legal angle. They formed the Federalist Society in 1982 and basically invented/reformatted a new judicial theory. They created the framework to push on all levels (from law school to Senators who wouldn't move on nominations). This is well documented in two great books: Cass Sunstein's Radicals in Robes: Why Extreme Right-Wing Courts are Wrong for America and Jeffrey Toobin's The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court

Finally the evangelical right was empowered in the 1970s-80s with the Moral Majority and TV preachers like Falwell and Pat Robertson. And perhaps even more important was the Focus on the Family and James Dobson. Dobson was very influential in organizing religious conservative lobbying of Congress and influencing Republicans to maintain hardline stances.

Three pronged organized attack from academic, legal and religious angles. (I didn't even mention media and the Fox, Koch push either)

Then you get the amoral operators that these institutions empowered like Roger Stone. The film Get Me Roger Stone is very important in showcasing how some of these operate behind the scenes.

What all this adds up to is a specifically socially conservative infrastructure that has been built since the 70s-80s and has nothing comparable on the other side. All of this post-Goldwater conservative infrastructure has served to continually push the general masses further to the right as they are uncompromising while the progressive politicians completely outflanked, have just given up concessions without gaining anything in return. Any progressive victories have mostly ridden the natural wave of the technology boom and its subsequent progressive social consequences. All this infrastructure pushing explicitly right wing ideas makes it easy for things like Breitbart or alt-ring extremists to become empowered in such a climate.

Unfortunately this is also where the two-party political completely breaks down and loses its purpose and effectiveness. Traditionally game theory has always argued that the benefit of the two party system is that it is allegedly always supposed to moderate candidates and keep them honest to attract voters. But that long time formulation has been broken now. The incentives and payoffs don't work as classic game theory set up the model. What the conservatives realized is that by no compromising they can keep pushing the center further and further to the right.

Trump really was foreshadowed by Reagan. Reagan was a Hollywood movie actor (not an intellectual or academic), anti-communist activist and a charming figurehead. With all the conservative infrastructure I mentioned above, its really more predictable that a Trump would be nominated by the Reps and elected than it first seems.
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I think you underestimate one man, Rupert Murdoch. He has systematically brought himself into a position of power in the news organisations around the world and used them to spew his right wing agenda on the unsuspecting population of the world.

Countries dance to the message that he decides to ingratiate us with. Presidents and prime minsters are made at his whim.

If Trump knows one thing, it's not to turn on Fox.
 
Fully Fledged said:
I think you underestimate one man, Rupert Murdoch. He has systematically brought himself into a position of power in the news organisations around the world and used them to spew his right wing agenda on the unsuspecting population of the world.

Countries dance to the message that he decides to ingratiate us with. Presidents and prime minsters are made at his whim.

If Trump knows one thing, it's not to turn on Fox.
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Yeah I could have written a lot more about the media aspect but that came a little later in the infrastructure development so I just mentioned it in a line but didn't expand.
 
oneniltothearsenal said:
Yeah I could have written a lot more about the media aspect but that came a little later in the infrastructure development so I just mentioned it in a line but didn't expand.
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That's fair enough. I just think that liberals need to know how decisive this one man is. It's not just to America but to the western world as a whole.
 
Fully Fledged said:
That's fair enough. I just think that liberals need to know how decisive this one man is. It's not just to America but to the western world as a whole.
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I didn't have a specific article on him (I am not an expert on Murdoch or media conglomerates) but this one by James Fallows from 2003 is certainly a fair view (maybe overly fair)
You might have an article to link that is better at delving into the worst aspects of Murdoch (there are a lot of interesting references to him in Get Me Roger Stone)

Excerpt from Fallows' article on Murdoch said:
He entered British journalism in the late 1960s and was soon in a tussle with Robert Maxwell for control of the British tabloid News of the World. Over the next fifteen years he mounted campaigns to take business and editorial control of the low-end Sun and the high-end Times and Sunday Times of London. In the mid-1980s, as Margaret Thatcher was fighting coal miners, Murdoch waged an epic battle against press unions and built an entirely new printing plant so as to operate with much cheaper labor.

He entered the U.S. newspaper world in the early 1970s, with a quiet takeover of the San Antonio Express and News; noisier takeovers of the New York Post and New York magazine soon followed. (It was under Murdoch that the Postpublished the great tabloid headline "HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR.") He also owned, briefly and improbably, the Village Voice. To satisfy U.S. ownership requirements of the time, he applied for U.S. citizenship and was naturalized in 1985. Murdoch was forced to sell the Post in 1988, mainly because of the efforts of Senators Edward Kennedy and Ernest Hollings to overturn a previous waiver of ownership rules. But he bought it again, out of bankruptcy, in 1993.


His real entry into the American consciousness came with his move into television. Murdoch took over 20th Century Fox in the mid-1980s, and at about the same time announced a fanciful-sounding plan to assemble small TV stations into a fourth national network. In the late 1980s he bought the parent company of TV Guide and also began creating his Sky and Star satellite systems in Britain and Asia. In the early 1990s Fox Broadcasting shocked CBS by outbidding it for the rights to National Football League games—the first of many contracts that have made Fox the dominant broadcast sports network. Murdoch fell out with Ted Turner in the mid-1990s, and the two waged personal and business war. (After Turner compared Murdoch to Hitler, the Postran the headline "IS TED NUTS? YOU DECIDE.") Murdoch started the Fox News Channel partly with the goal of overtaking and thus humiliating Turner's CNN.

Several striking themes recur in this saga. One is Murdoch's long-standing determination not simply to broaden News Corp's portfolio—by diversifying, for instance, into new or unrelated businesses—but to extend his strategic control of the supply and distribution channels on which his existing businesses rely. His father had moved from print to radio with the understanding that each medium could publicize and support the other. Murdoch's companies now constitute a production system unmatched in its integration. They supply content—Fox movies (Titanic, The Full Monty, There's Something About Mary), Fox TV shows (The Simpsons, Ally McBeal, When Animals Attack), Fox-controlled sports broadcasts, plus newspapers and books. They sell the content to the public and to advertisers—in newspapers, on the broadcast network, on the cable channels. And they operate the physical distribution system through which the content reaches the customers. Murdoch's satellite systems now distribute News Corp content in Europe and Asia; if Murdoch becomes DirecTV's largest single owner, that system will serve the same function in the United States....

Political involvement has been one more constant in his career. The simple view of Murdoch, especially among liberals who fear him, is that he is a dangerously obsessed conservative propagandist—Richard Mellon Scaife with a job. This is imprecise. The exact nature of his political views is a subject of some debate among his associates. Overall he is of course more right- than left-wing. Murdoch likes to refer to himself as a "moderate libertarian" rather than a "conservative" or, in U.S. terms, a Republican. Two of his lieutenants—Roger Ailes, who runs the Fox News Channel, and Bill Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard—have worked in Republican Party politics. Murdoch's own involvement with the party itself, as opposed to with specific politicians who might prove useful to him, has been limited. His associates report that he has never met George W. Bush, hard as it may be to believe. He has, though, developed a respectful relationship with Bill Clinton. Each has lunched at the other's office in New York, and Murdoch came away impressed by Clinton's ability to discuss impromptu almost any issue arising almost anywhere on earth. Associates of both say that despite the political differences between the men, they clicked because of complementary personalities: Murdoch loves to listen, and Clinton loves to talk...

The strongest element in Murdoch's conservatism is his taste for leaders who take clear, decisive, line-in-the-sand positions on important issues. That is what he admired in Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, and what he respects, post-September 11, in Donald Rumsfeld and George Bush. Where he strays furthest from Republican Party orthodoxy is on social issues—gay rights, public religion, "traditional family values," and so on. Given the vulgar-to-raunchy tone of Fox programs like Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire and That '70s Show, it would be awkward if Murdoch publicly pushed a conservative social agenda. As a personal rather than a political matter, Murdoch was known to be unhappy about the violent nihilism of the Brad Pitt movie Fight Club, which the Fox studios produced, and about an episode of Fox TV's recent Married by America in which shots of a woman's naked breasts were not digitally blurred. But he is usually happy with whichever show on Fox—or headline in the Post, or topless Page 3 model in the London Sun—draws a big audience. He is proud of The Simpsons for both its popularity and its wit. He has done voice-overs for a self-mocking appearance on the show, in the role of a grasping plutocrat...

In short, some aspects of News Corp's programming, positions, and alliances serve conservative political ends, and others do not. But all are consistent with the use of political influence for corporate advantage. In the books I read and interviews I conducted, I found only one illustration of Murdoch's using his money and power for blatantly political ends: his funding of The Weekly Standard. The rest of the time he makes his political points when convenient as an adjunct to making money. But there are many examples of Murdoch's using political connections to advance his business ends. "Andrew Heyward [the head of CBS News, a Viacom subsidiary] would be allergic to the idea of attacking a politician who opposes a Viacom interest," says a man who has competed against News Corp. "Murdoch has been shameless about using his journalism for the advancement of his business interests." In this view, The Weekly Standard and the New York Post, neither of them profitable, are more means than ends.
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https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2003/09/the-age-of-murdoch/302777/
 
oneniltothearsenal said:
I didn't have a specific article on him (I am not an expert on Murdoch or media conglomerates) but this one by James Fallows from 2003 is certainly a fair view (maybe overly fair)
You might have an article to link that is better at delving into the worst aspects of Murdoch (there are a lot of interesting references to him in Get Me Roger Stone)



https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2003/09/the-age-of-murdoch/302777/
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The man is evil incarnate as far as I'm concerned.
 
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