Murdoch's global whore-on-terror

This is from a few days ago:

"For the past 10 days, Australian media outlets have bombarded the public with lurid headlines and reports designed to justify last week’s massive raids by state and federal police and intelligence agencies on homes in Sydney and Melbourne.

On the basis of unsubstantiated police leaks and prosecution allegations, the media—with Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers in the lead—have accused the 18 men arrested in the two cities of “stockpiling” weapons and explosives, training in remote locations, planning “violent jihad to cause maximum damage” and discussing “dying for holy war”. [...]

The purpose of the media coverage goes far beyond demonising the accused, whose prospects of anything resembling a fair trial have been severely compromised. Its aim is, rather, to smother criticism of last week’s politically motivated raids, and to silence opposition to the unprecedented anti-terrorism bills currently being pushed through federal and state parliaments.[...]

Led by Murdoch’s outlets, but also joined by the Herald and other Fairfax papers, the media then began selectively quoting from the police allegations and presenting them as facts. It is impossible to verify any of these claims, or predict whether they will stand scrutiny in court, but there have been, at the very least, definite distortions of the truth.[...]

Whatever the exact truth behind the latest claims of a terrorist network, there is no doubt about the political motivations of the highly-orchestrated media campaign. It plays directly into the hands of Prime Minister John Howard and the state Labor leaders." ^WSWS

A mirror of what is happening in the US and the UK. Considering that every single one of Murdoch's global portfolio of 175 newspapers were for the Iraq War, I guess that is no shock.

Murdoch