Llewellyn King: Ditch your optimism: U.S. democracy is imperiled

We are an optimistic people. And in today's world, there's the rub.

By nature, we are sure that the extremes of any given time will be corrected as the political climate changes and elections bring in new players. The great ship of state will always get back on an even keel and the excesses, or omissions, of one administration will be corrected in the next.

Maybe not this time.

The norms uprooted by President Trump are possibly too many not to have left lasting damage to this Republic.

Consider just some of his transgressions:

· We have abandoned our place as the beacon of decency and the values enshrined in that.

· America's good name has gone up in smoke, as with the Paris climate agreement and the Intermediate-Range Nuclear forces (INF) treaty.

· The president has meddled in our judicial system by intimidating prosecutors and seeking to influence judges.

· The president has blown on the coals of prejudice and sanctioned racial antagonism.

But above all, Trump has tested the constitutional limits of presidential power and found that it can be expanded exponentially. He has expanded executive privilege to absolute power.

Trump has done this with the help of the pusillanimous members of the Senate and the oh-so-malleable Atty. Gen. William Barr – his new Roy Cohn.

The most pernicious of Trump’s enablers, the eminence grise behind the curtain, gets little attention. He is Rupert Murdoch, a man who has done a lot of good and incalculable harm.

The liberal media rails -- indeed enjoys -- railing against Fox News but has little to say about the 88-year-old proprietor who, with a single stroke, could silence Sean Hannity and tame Tucker Carlson (whom I know and like).

But Murdoch remains aloof and silent. The power of Fox is not its editorial slant but that it forms a malignant circle of harm. It is Trump’s daily source of news, endorsement, prejudice, and even names for revenge.

There are two other conservative networks, OAN and Newsmax. But neither has the flare that Fox has as a broadcast outlet, nor acts as the eyes and ears and adviser to the president.

I am an admirer of Murdoch in many ways. But like a president, maybe he should get a lot of scrutiny.

Murdoch’s newspapers in Australia, where they dominate, have rejected climate change, and possibly played a role in the country not being prepared for the terrible wildfires.

In Britain, he has stirred feeling against the European Union for decades. His Sun, the largest circulation paper, is Fox News in print and was probably the template for Fox having campaigned ceaselessly and vulgarly against Europe.

After long years of watching Murdoch in Britain and here, I know the damage he can do and why he should be named. I must say, though, that Murdoch's Wall Street Journal is a fine newspaper, better than before he bought it.

The Democrats, to my mind, present a sorry resistance. None of their presidential candidates has delivered a speech of vision, capturing the popular imagination.

Democrats search the news for the latest Trumpian transgressions and get a kind of comfort by seeing, by their lights, how terrible he is. But there is none of the old confidence that the president will be trounced in the next election and the ship of state will right itself because it always does.=

Maybe it will list more.

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com. He is based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

Revoked Harvard admission not a free-speech case

Freshmen dorms at Harvard

First ran in Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

Harvard College has rescinded its offer of admission to Kyle Kashuv, a survivor of the mass shooting on Feb. 14, 2018 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Fla., that killed 17 people. No, it’s not because he’s a big fan of Trump who reveres the NRA, which Harvard knew about when it accepted him. Indeed, his articulate outspokenness and that he went to that tragic school probably got him into Harvard, which only admits about 6 percent of applicants.

His problem was that Harvard learned that he had made virulently anti-black comments (extensive use of the “N’’ word) and, oddly, since he’s a descendent of Holacaust survivors, anti-Semitic remarks, too, via text and group chat before the shooting.

He asserts now that he was just being, well, silly, and didn’t really mean it: “We were 16-year-olds making idiotic comments, using callous and inflammatory language in an effort to be as extreme and shocking as possible,’’ and that despite, among other things, his links with Turning Points USA, which has a fair share of racists, he isn’t a racist.

Who knows? But his argument that his profuse apologies upon being found out, and his youth when he made his odious comments, should have been enough for Harvard to admit him anyway doesn’t wash. After all, all such institutions have to make judgments on the intelligence and character of teenage applicants. In the character department, his racist remarks look bad both for the overt racism expressed, however sincere or insincere it was, and for Mr. Kashuv’s apparent pathetic desire for the approval of his smug and maybe racist friends.

This is not a free-speech case. He can say or write whatever he wants, just as Harvard, as a private institution, can admit whomever it wants. Now we’ll see if Mr. Kashuv is truly regretful or tries to turn himself into a well-compensated “victim’’ on Fox News.

Llewellyn King: The triumph of ruthless uber-cynic Rupert Murdoch

Rupert Murdoch.

Liberals get apoplectic at the mention of the Koch brothers and, by the same token, conservatives gag at the mention of George Soros.

Yet, it can be argued, another rich man might have had a much larger effect on the politics of this century: Rupert Murdoch.

Murdoch is the uber publisher and broadcaster of our time, and manipulator of public opinion. In Britain, he is courted by prime ministers and in the United States by politicians, left and right. Since the emergence of Fox News as the champion of the angry white voter, he has been the comfort and the looking glass of one Donald Trump.

Murdoch is a phenomenon. He is courageous, opportunistic and blessed with an unparalleled ability to divine the often-hidden aspirations of his readers and viewers.

He also does not care what people think. That may be his greatest strength. He does what he damn well pleases and his success at doing that is played out on the world stage. He has gained the social and cultural recognition of media supremacy but has not sought them.

He loves making newspapers, making television, making money and making trouble.

His British newspapers — more than half the people who read a newspaper in Britain read one owned by a Murdoch company — backed Britain’s seemingly suicidal vote to leave the European Union.

The tone of his anti-European ravings was summed up on Nov. 1, 1990, when Britain turned its back on European monetary union with the now famous front-page headline “Up Yours Delors!” in The Sun, Britain’s largest circulation daily newspaper. At the time, Jacques Delors was president of the European Commission.

The Sun was not content just with its headline: It advised all its readers to turn toward Europe and make an obscene gesture. Not exactly sophisticated reasoning, but good at getting the nationalistic sap up.

The same thing you can get on Fox day after day from Sean Hannity, Lou Dobbs and Laura Ingraham, and the thin gruel of reason served up by the breakfast team. Gruel, it must be noted, that is nourishment and justification for President Trump.

I still marvel at what amounted to Murdoch’s conquest of British newspaper publishing. It was genius: He identified a right-wing, jingoistic streak in the British working-class male and he went for it with chauvinistic fury — and naked female breasts on Page 3. Murdoch’s legendary conservatism did not extend to women in front of the camera. If raunchy sold, raunchy it would be.

It paid off and enabled Murdoch later to take over the legendary Sunday Times and daily Times and to finance his American adventure, where something of the same formula applied to cable television has been diabolically effective.

Murdoch’s newspapers in Britain played a key role in the Brexit vote. It is less clear whether Fox played a role in Trump’s election, but it did not hurt. The trick in publishing or broadcasting to an ideological base, a conservative strategist once told me, is to keep the faithful, not to change minds. More troubling is the effect Fox has as an enabler for Trump’s more egregious actions, and his banal but damaging attacks on the media.

Fox floats the idea the mainstream media is a kind of monolithic, left-wing conspiracy and Trump amplifies it. Between Fox and Trump, they toss the mendacities back and forth until the authorship is lost. It is awesome to think mainstream can be turned into a pejorative just through repetition.

Murdoch is a conservative, except in journalistic vulgarity and when it is advantageous to go left, as he did in Britain when he backed Tony Blair and Labor in 1997. In New York, he cultivated the Clintons — maybe as insurance, maybe just as the entitlement to know power that goes along with his own power, or he may just have liked them.

Having been curious about Murdoch and his ways — and at times lost in admiration — since he figuratively invaded Britain in 1969 and seen the good and the bad that followed, I think he toys with politicians and is amused by his ability to influence events. Not much more and not much less.

There is a British expression for stirring things up: putting a bit of stick about. No one has put more stick about than Murdoch and he is not done. Tune in to Fox tonight and just see.

On Twitter: @llewellynking2

Llewellyn King (llewellynking1@gmail.com) is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. He’s  also a long-time columnist and international business consultant, now focusing on the energy sector. For many years he published Washington-based newsletters about the defense and energy sectors. Before then, he was an editor at newspapers in Britain and the United States. He's now based in Rhode Island.

Llewellyn King: Murdoch profits richly by mining resentment, tribalism and sex

Rupert Murdoch.

Rupert Murdoch stands astride the Atlantic. He is the most successful newspaper publisher in the United Kingdom and the proprietor of Fox, the most successful cable news channel in the United States.

While he has many other spectacular holdings in the U.K., the United States, Australia and Asia, those are the two pillars on which the empire stands now that he has sold 21st Century Fox Entertainment to Disney.

I believe the two pillars are linked by what amounts to the Murdoch formula: find a chauvinistic, nationalistic vein and mine it.

Murdoch blew on the embers of resentment and stoked the fires of tribalism through The Sun, his big British moneymaker, and Fox News, his American gold mine.

He understood this social stratum, whether it was in working-class Britain or spread across what we now call the Red States in America. This audience felt ignored, put upon and unloved. Its traditional champions on the left — the unions, the Labor Party and the Democratic Party — had condescended to it, but not celebrated it.

Murdoch articulated its frustrations and gave them voice not where you would expect it on the left, but on the right.

A new and exceptional book by Irwin Stelzer, The Murdoch Method, lays out how Murdoch did this and how he holds his empire together. Stelzer should know. He has been a friend and consultant to Murdoch and his many enterprises for 35 years.

Stelzer, whom I have known for 45 years, is worthy of a book in his own right. When he met Murdoch, he had already achieved success enough for many a man. He founded National Economic Research Associates and sold it well. Then, after a stint with Rothschild in New York, he enjoyed running an energy program at Harvard. Then came Murdoch.

Stelzer worked so closely with Murdoch that a rival newspaper in London described him as “Murdoch’s man on earth.” And he was.

He was sometimes the go-between for British prime ministers and leading American figures, from Richard Nixon to Richard Cheney. Stelzer made Murdoch’s case to the mighty, and he crunched numbers. Money and the power of media made this world go around.

As the title suggests, Stelzer explains in his book how Murdoch manages so diverse a company as News Corp. and how he created and grew it from the newspapers he inherited from his formidable father, Sir Keith Murdoch, in out-of-the-way Adelaide, Australia.

What emerges is a portrait of man who thinks of himself as an outsider, a loner: a practitioner of a kind of minimalist management out to war against theestablishment and its elites.

Murdoch, both as a publisher and a businessman, has been incredibly courageous. He flipped The Sun from timid left to truculent right. He also stripped the brassieres off the models on Page 3. Chauvinism, sex and celebrity gossip was what Murdoch offered, and the public could not get enough. He also broke the British print unions in a near-military move to a secret printing site in Wapping, East London, in January 1986.

In America, Murdoch pretty well failed with newspapers he purchased in San Antonio, Boston and Chicago. He has not exactly succeeded with The New York Post, but he keeps it going as a personal indulgence. He is doing well with The Wall Street Journal. But Fox News is the jewel in his American crown.

Stelzer’s Murdoch and his method is one of a small executive staff: excellent executives who are very well paid and prepared to answer a call from their boss day and night. He let really gifted people, like Roger Ailes, of Fox, run their enterprises until there was a scandal and then, bang, the locks were changed, and settlements were paid. Murdoch is generous and ruthless.

Murdoch and Stelzer were in a way made for each other, although they did argue and sometimes Stelzer lost, only to find out just how wrong he was — as when he opposed the creation of the Fox Business Network.

Stelzer acknowledges he does not like everything Murdoch does; and he should not. Murdoch has treated the world as a playground where you make money by making damaging mischief — so you hire people like Sean Hannity and tolerate the inanity. Or you court the Clintons, but back Trump.

Stelzer has been on a wild ride and he takes you along in clear, readable prose.

On Twitter: @llewellynking2
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. He is based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

Llewellyn King: Murdoch created the formula with which Ailes built Fox News

In the beginning, there was Rupert Murdoch. He created the formula.

Then he met Roger Ailes and installed him as head of what would become America’s most successful cable news channel, Fox News Channel, also known as Fox News.

And so the formula of conservatism and sex, pioneered on a newspaper in Britain, came to television and the rest, as they say, is history.

In 1969 Murdoch bought an ailing British newspaper called The Sun. He bought it from the Daily Mirror Group, then the publishers of the most successful tabloid in Britain, The Daily Mirror, and its sibling The Sunday Mirror (where I once worked). The Daily Mirror was firmly left-wing and The Sun, if anything, more so. It had started life as The Daily Herald and was owned collectively by the trade union movement.

The new owners, who used an old formula — the working class as exploited, downtrodden and hopelessly dependent on the largesse of their employers — failed to attract or excite readers.

Murdoch, fresh from Australia (although he had worked earlier as an editor in London), looked around and saw something quite different. He saw a new worker, who owned a car, took vacations in Spain (thanks to jet travel), and did not feel oppressed.

The British workers — especially working men — had thrown off the past and were now much more like the workers of Australia and the United States. It was also a period of sexual freedom.

These workers would be Murdoch’s target.

Overnight, without warning, he turned The Sun from far-left  whining to triumphant far-right throatiness. Murdoch had realized that the working man had become a man of property.

As for sex, Murdoch would go further. British tabloids had always published “cheesecake” — pictures of busty, young women in bikinis. Murdoch took off the tops: Every day, on Page Three, he published a photo of an English rose blooming in a bikini bottom. It was bold and it was brave and it worked.

The Sun, with its new brawny politics of nationalism, anti-European attitude, right-wing enthusiasm and topless beauties, was a triumph. It began a meteoric rise, almost entirely at the expense of the forelock-tugging Daily Mirror.

The formula was born: right-wing nativism and sex.

When Murdoch came to the United States, he found the society was less louche and he could not put nudity into his newspapers. Also, there was a tradition of editorial duality: Although the politics of newspapers was not concealed, readers wanted to think that the news was impartial. Murdoch bought newspapers in San Antonio, New York, Boston and Chicago, and he started a weekly supermarket tabloid.

None succeeded and gradually Murdoch sold off these properties, except for The New York Post. Murdoch’s daughter, Elisabeth, told me that he was the first to admit that he had misunderstood the U.S. market. That is probably why when he bought The Wall Street Journal in 2007, he was careful to respect that property and to change it incrementally — for the better.

But the formula was not dead. When Ailes applied it to television, it worked all over again. Except this time, the result was even more spectacular in political power and profit.

Fox News is the voice of raucous conservatism, all served up with sex appeal.

Ailes clearly has had a fascination with beautiful, blond women reading the news — and other channels are going that way.

Ailes has done more than apply the formula: He has applied it with brio. He has given the news pace. It moves along and little inventions, like “Around the World in 80 Seconds,” are part of that energizing.

I visited with Ailes when Fox News was just beginning its ascent. He was thrilled with the fact that it had just drawn slightly ahead of CNN Headline News. I do not think he realized then how potent the formula would be and what heights his creation would reach.

Llewellyn King is host of White House Chronicle on PBS.  Based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C., he is a longtime publisher, editor, columnist and international business consultant. This originated on InsideSources.

Will they still love him anyway?

Barker at the 1941 Vermont State Fair.

--- Photo by Jack Delano

Fox News, the broadcast wing of the Republican Party, last night applied its fact-checking skills to Donald Trump’s often absurd, contradictory, chaotic and fact-free “policy’’ prescriptions, while mostly giving Ted Cruz and the man whom Mr. Trump calls “Little Marco’’ Rubio a pass. The GOP establishment is terrified that the real estate developer/operator and “reality TV’’ star will win the nomination and drag the party into an historic defeat in the fall. Yes, he would.

Of course, Messrs. Cruz and Rubio’s allegiance to the truth has also sometimes  been erratic, and they too are not averse to demagoguery, but Donald Trump is in another league. His career has been one con after another.

See: www.trumpthemovie.com

A question is whether Mr. Trump’s followers and potential followers see the way the debate was run  -- to bring  him down  -- as unfair pilling on, leading Trumpists to double-down on  their support of the carnival barker.

Unfortunately for their credibility, and even morality, all three non-Trump candidates on the stage  said that they'd support the New Yorker  if he wins the nomination.  How could they in good conscience endorse someone Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio (John Kasich was milder) called dangerous, corrupt and otherwise immoral?  They have been gentler even to Hillary Clinton.

Meanwhile, the amiable John Kasich took credit last night, as do other national politicians  active in the ‘90s, for the  prosperity and federal budget surpluses of the late ‘90s.

In fact, those happy things resulted from the money freed up by “peace dividend’’ from the end of the Cold War, an income-tax increase accepted bravely by President George H.W. Bush  and the explosion in computer/Internet business, especially after Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, in 1989. The last brought in tons of tax revenue and gave new high-paying jobs to many people, albeit mostly the well-educated.

Mr. Kasich had nothing to do with any of that. But he seems to be a nice man and a competent governor of Ohio, though I would have preferred to see the brilliant and innovative former governor of Indiana, and now president of Purdue University, Mitch Daniels on the stage instead.

-- Robert Whitcomb