By Bob Gaydos

Something to consider as you stock the cooler, clean the grill and get the burgers, hot dogs and buns ready for Friday’s Fourth of July celebration: On the eve of Independence Day, Paramount Global, parent company of CBS, agreed to give Donald Trump $16 million because he didn’t like the way the staff at 60 Minutes, the premiere news show at CBS, edited an interview with Kamala Harris last October.

That’s pretty much the gist. Paramount, an entertainment company which has no business owning a news media operation, figured it was cheaper to buy off the president of the United States, than go to court and defend its journalists’ rights under the First Amendment  to the Constitution. A free press, to be specific.

Trump, who was running for president against Harris at the time, sued 60 Minutes, claiming the edited interview was defamatory to him. Editors at 60 Minutes, which has continued to tell the truth about Trump, said it wasn’t. The board at Paramount said we have a bottom line to worry about, new projects to worry about and we don’t want Trump siccing his legal goons on us. They didn’t say that, but that’s the gist.

Trump, who threatens lawsuits almost as much as he lies, just recently threatened to sue both CNN and The New York Times for their reporting on leaked information regarding U.S. bomb strikes on nuclear power sites in Iran.

Trump immediately bragged that the attacks had “decimated” Iran’s nuclear weapon capability. But U.S. intelligence reports a couple of days after the attack cast serious doubt on that assessment. Trump demanded a retraction of the reports by both news agencies.

CNN and The Times stuck to their guns and their reporting. CNN said it will issue no retraction. The Times issued a statement saying, “No retraction is needed. No apology will be forthcoming. We told the truth to the best of our ability. We will continue to do so.”

I sincerely hope so. The Times appears to have gotten over its infatuation with tiptoeing around Trump. Couldn’t have come at a more important time.

The truth is the truth and a free press is a free press. Both have been under constant attack since Trump entered national politics and, unfortunately, a lot of Americans in my opinion have forgotten what it means to have a free and independent press.

You hear a lot of complaints about the so-called “mainstream media,” whoever that may be, but I think the slow death of so many local newspapers, bought up by corporate interests with no journalistic background and concerned only with their bottom lines, has caused many Americans to forget what it means to have a free and independent press delivered every day on their doorstep.

After a while, you don’t know what you don’t know because nobody’s telling you. Except for Trump and his henchmen on social media. And Trump siccing his lawyers on anyone who dares even suggest that he might not be telling the truth.

You can say this is a bit personal for me since I spent more than 40 years working for daily newspapers, 23 of them writing editorials on an almost daily basis. I loved it. From my observation, so did most of the people I worked with. Also, from my observation, the people running the show recognized that, with the freedom guaranteed under the Constitution came a responsibility to be honest and truthful and factual. That’s our job. Tell the truth. Let him sue. We’re not called the Fourth Estate for nothing.

Anyway, something to think about. Have a hotdog on me, forget about the fireworks and maybe let the people at 60 Minutes know you appreciate their efforts.

rjgaydos@gmail.com

By Bob Gaydos

Rupert Murdoch

  I used to work for Rupert Murdoch. Briefly. Not by choice and not directly. It was an accident of capitalism, but not the serendipitous kind I prefer.

   Fortunately for me, it was uneventful. He left me alone, and I left him alone. That is to say, he didn’t tell me what to write in editorials for The Times Herald-Record in Middletown, N.Y., and I didn’t tell him how to run his international News Corp. media empire that at the time included The Sun and The Times in the United Kingdom, the Daily Telegraph, Herald Sun, and The Australian in Australia, and, in the United States, Fox News, 20th Century. Fox, the New York Post and the Dow Jones Co., which included Barron’s, the Wall Street Journal and Ottaway Newspapers, a group of small to medium-sized community newspapers. That’s where Murdoch and I crossed paths, so to speak.

     Or rather, as I said, not to speak. The Record was a good-sized community paper (100,000 circulation on Sundays at the time), but small potatoes in Murdoch’s frame of reference for influencing the way people think and vote. Although Murdoch was well-known for his conservative views, I could write all the liberal-leaning editorials I liked, following in the tradition of David Bernstein, a partner in creating The Record, and Al Romm, a longtime editorial page editor who preceded me.

     In fact, that’s the way things were when James Ottaway Sr. swapped the Endicott Bulletin with Bernstein for The Record and when Ottaway, having created a profitable chain of community papers around the country, eventually sold them to Dow Jones Co. and retired to enjoy his Arabian horses in Campbell Hall, not far from Middletown. Murdoch eventually bought Dow Jones.

   In my experience, owners, whether down the road, or somewhere in downtown Manhattan didn’t usually mess with editorials unless, like Bernstein, they wrote them themselves.

    I’m taking this trip down memory lane because the Murdoch assault on democracy, decency and the journalistic dedication to truth once taken for granted in this country has finally cut me to the raw.

     How dare he? How dare he set up a news franchise to (1) deliberately falsify the news to advance his political views and financial interests then (2) throw his employees under the bus by acknowledging the Fox News fiction when someone with money and the facts on their side decided to sue him for damages to their reputation and (3) act as if he had nothing to do with it?

     The lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems accuses Fox News of letting its “news” anchors regularly repeat as fact the Donald Trump lie that the 2020 election had been stolen from him, with Dominion’s participation, even though, as internal Fox emails showed, everyone there knew Trump had lost legitimately. That there was no fraud.

   In a deposition in the Dominion case, Murdoch said that any Fox executives who knew that anchors who reported that election fraud had cost Trump the election, while knowing otherwise, “be reprimanded, maybe got rid of.”

  This, even though Fox had gone from initially reporting the truth of the election, that Joe Biden had won, to pushing Trump’s election fraud lies, both at Murdoch’s direction. And all because many Fox viewers weren’t buying the truth and were defecting to other conservative media to hear pro-Trump propaganda.

     Money.

     In sum, Rupert Murdoch displays a cynical disregard for the truth or the gullibility of his audience except when it suits his purpose. For example, having known Trump for years and wearied of his many faults, Murdoch reportedly took an active hand in crafting an editorial in one of his other mouthpieces, the New York Post, basically urging Trump to fade off into the sunset  after losing legitimately in 2020. Murdoch felt Trump would actually read and heed the Post editorial, rather than one in the more buttoned-down Wall Street Journal.

      Didn’t happen, thanks in great extent to the cult aura that Murdoch’s empire had helped form around Trump.

       No individual, in my opinion, has been more responsible for the spread of disinformation and the spreading loss of trust in mainstream media — print and television — in America than Rupert Murdoch. Now, at 92, he’s trying to act like an innocent. It won’t wash. 

       Whether the Dominion lawsuit changes anything at Fox remains to be seen. After all, money talks in Murdoch’s world. But thus far, the apple doesn’t seem to have strayed far from the tree. Lachlan Murdoch, Rupert’s son and chief executive officer of Fox Corporation, in a defense of his organization, said: “A news organization has an obligation – and it is an obligation — to report news fulsomely, wholesomely and without fear or favor, and that’s what Fox News has always done, and that’s what Fox News will always do.”

      Forget the fear or favor baloney, Lachlan clearly doesn’t know the meaning of the word fulsome. Cambridge English Dictionary: “Fulsomely: In a way that expresses a lot of admiration or praise for someone, often too much, in a way that does not sound sincere.”

     Maybe Lachlan should forget about calling in editorial suggestions. And notice that he never said honestly and accurately.      

rjgaydos@gmail.com

 Bob Gaydos is writer-in-residence at zestoforange.com.