Sophia A. McClennen — Is Trump Aiming to Become the King of Right-Wing Media, Win or Lose the Election?

You heard it here first. It's a no brainer, and I would be amazed if it doesn't happen regardless of the outcome of the election.

If Trump wins, it will be a media megaphone oriented to his reelection and the destruction of any opposition. If he loses, it will be a cash cow and payback to Rupert Murdoch and the anti-Trump faction at Fox. Most importantly, however, it will provide a venue to whip up right wing resentment against the Democratic machine "stealing the election." In either case it will be designed to be incendiary.

AlterNet
Is Trump Aiming to Become the King of Right-Wing Media, Win or Lose the Election?

Sophia A. McClennen |  Director of the Center for Global Studies at Pennsylvania State University.

Carl Bernstein — Why the US media ignored Murdoch's brazen bid to hijack the presidency

So now we have it: what appears to be hard, irrefutable evidence of Rupert Murdoch's ultimate and most audacious attempt – thwarted, thankfully, by circumstance – to hijack America's democratic institutions on a scale equal to his success in kidnapping and corrupting the essential democratic institutions of Great Britain through money, influence and wholesale abuse of the privileges of a free press.

In the American instance, Murdoch's goal seems to have been nothing less than using his media empire – notably Fox News – to stealthily recruit, bankroll and support the presidential candidacy of General David Petraeus in the 2012 election.

Thus in the spring of 2011 – less than 10 weeks before Murdoch's centrality to the hacking and politician-buying scandal enveloping his British newspapers was definitively revealed – Fox News' inventor and president, Roger Ailes, dispatched an emissary to Afghanistan to urge Petraeus to turn down President Obama's expected offer to become CIA director and, instead, run for the Republican nomination for president, with promises of being bankrolled by Murdoch. Ailes himself would resign as president of Fox News and run the campaign, according to the conversation between Petraeus and the emissary, K T McFarland, a Fox News on-air defense "analyst" and former spear carrier for national security principals in three Republican administrations.

The Guardian (UK)
Why the US media ignored Murdoch's brazen bid to hijack the presidency
Carl Bernstein (yes, <i>that</i> Bernstein. Shades of "Deep Throat"?)
(h/t Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism)

Woodward and Bernstein still on the job.

All this was revealed in a tape recording of Petraeus's meeting with McFarland obtained by Bob Woodward, whose account of their discussion, accompanied online by audio of the tape, was published in theWashington Post – distressingly, in its style section, and not on page one, where it belonged – and, under the style logo, online on December 3.

The take-away.

Murdoch and Ailes have erected an incredibly influential media empire that has unrivaled power in British and American culture: rather than judiciously exercising that power or improving reportorial and journalistic standards with their huge resources, they have, more often than not, recklessly pursued an agenda of sensationalism, manufactured controversy, ideological messianism, and political influence-buying while masquerading as exemplars of a free and responsible press. The tape is powerful evidence of their methodology and reach.

The Murdoch story – his corruption of essential democratic institutions on both sides of the Atlantic – is one of the most important and far-reaching political/cultural stories of the past 30 years, an ongoing tale without equal. Like Richard Nixon and his tapes, much attention has been focused on the necessity of finding the smoking gun to confirm what other evidence had already established beyond a doubt: that the elemental instruments of democracy, ie the presidency in Nixon's case, and the privileges of free press in Murdoch's, were grievously misused and abused for their own ends by those entrusted to use great power for the common good.