Tag: Rupert Murdoch

The Story: Fox News, part of the Murdoch publishing empire, has long been considered friendly to Donald Trump -- first as a candidate and later...

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio tells CNN's Brian Stelter that without Rupert Murdoch and News Corp., "we would be a more unified country. There would be less overt hate."

On the State of Australia and Race Race politics is back. But his speech also follows a recent burst of activity by his office that included several data-heavy reports showing the wide gap between Australia’s ethnically diverse population and the mostly white elites running government and business. Dr. Soutphommasane grew up in Fairfield, an area of Sydney that has long been the first stop for immigrant families like his own — and here he is arguing that those who fear such areas do not understand how they work. On Double Standards On the so-called Sudanese crime crisis in Melbourne, if we turn to the facts, we know that in Victoria Sudanese-born people aren’t the only ones overrepresented in crime statistics. In fact, according to Victoria’s Crime Statistics Agency, criminal offenders born in Sudan make up about 1 percent of all offenders. That’s greater than their proportion of the total population in Victoria, but state figures show that is also true of Australian-born offenders (who make up almost 72 percent of criminal offenders and roughly 65 percent of the population) and New Zealanders (who are 2.2 percent of offenders and 1.6 percent of the population in Victoria). They’re the complaints of snowflakes who can’t hack it when people challenge racism. It’s a fragility that explains why when racism is called out, the real offense in some people’s eyes is not that an act of discrimination occurred, but rather that someone was subjected to being called racist. More tough talk from Dr. Soutphommasane — especially on the point that some people are less offended by a racist act than by someone calling it what it is. He acknowledged at one point that “prejudice and discrimination are like the permanent stains of our humanity,” but phrases like “implicit bias” or “unconscious bias” — schools of thought explaining that racist outcomes are often tied to historical and unseen influences that shape us all, regardless of background — do not appear in Dr. Soutphommasane’s speech.

Against that backdrop, federal prisoner number 40892-424 this week penned a column in the conservative opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal, owned by media mogul Rupert Murdoch who is tight with Trump. Another top adviser and fundraiser went to prison in corruption schemes that served as a precursor to Blagojevich’s own indictment. "I have nobody to blame but myself for my stupidity and actions and words and what I thought I could do. "Here I am in my sixth year of a 14-year prison sentence for the routine practice of attempting to raise campaign funds while governor," he wrote. Five of those counts were later tossed on appeal, but the crimes for which he still stands convicted include: Trying to shake down the CEO of Children’s Memorial Hospital for $25,000 in campaign cash in exchange for a hike in state reimbursements for pediatric specialists. Among wiretaps played at trial were some that captured Blagojevich discussing a scheme to appoint a longtime political adversary to the post, then U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., in exchange for $1.5 million in political donations. "I’m in prison for practicing politics," read the headline on the article by the former Illinois governor. Blagojevich and his legal team also made the "politics as usual, nothing to see here" argument during his trials, but such claims were soundly rejected by federal jurors. Much of the evidence presented at those trials stemmed from court-ordered wiretaps on which Blagojevich was heard scheming to carry out the very crimes for which he was convicted. Illinois has certainly suffered its share of public corruption, and skepticism about politicians abounds.