[Rupert Murdoch made the world safe for grand fortune. E.W.
Scripps had a better idea.]
[[link removed]]

A TELLING TALE OF TWO PRESS LORDS  
[[link removed]]


 

Sam Pizzigati
September 25, 2023
Inequality.org
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ Rupert Murdoch made the world safe for grand fortune. E.W. Scripps
had a better idea. _

Rupert Murdoch, 92, is stepping down as chair of his global media
empire, which includes Fox News and The Wall Street Journal. , Dia
Dipasupil/Getty Images

 

The world’s mightiest press lord of the past half-century has just
announced he’s stepping down.

The 92-year-old Rupert Murdoch, come this November, will no longer be
lording over the corporate boards of his two media empires, the Fox
news universe and the News Corporation, the publisher of media
powerhouses that range from the _New York Post _to the_ Wall Street
Journal_.

These immensely profitable news-and-views machines have left Murdoch a
billionaire eight times over. But this deepest of media deep pockets
took special care, in his retirement announcement, to position himself
[[link removed]]
as a pal to the people, an ever-appreciative admirer of “the truck
drivers distributing our papers, the cleaners who toil when we have
left the office, the assistants who support us or the skilled
operators behind the cameras or the computer code.”

His entire career, Murdock’s exit statement declared, has been “a
battle for the freedom of speech” against “elites” who have only
“contempt for those who are not members of their rarefied class.”

“Most of the media,” Murdoch’s sayonara went on to claim, runs
“in cahoots with those elites, peddling political narratives rather
than pursuing the truth.” Their “self-serving bureaucracies are
seeking to silence those who would question their provenance and
purpose.”

In actual fact, of course, Murdoch’s media properties have
unrelentingly operated as xxxxxxs for elite wealth and privilege. His
tabloids have kept
[[link removed]]
modest-income readers distracted with “salacious coverage” that
feeds “fears of crime and immigration.” His “prestige” papers
have helped elites forge consensus — across the English-speaking
world — on tax cuts and assorted other policies that have
concentrated wealth and power at levels that would have been
unimaginable in the mid-20th century.

And Murdoch’s empires have, even worse, consistently undercut any
broad public awareness of the price we pay for letting that wealth and
power continue to concentrate.

“Nobody has done more harm to the understanding of climate change
than Rupert Murdoch,” as the University of Pennsylvania climate
scientist Michael Mann has told
[[link removed]]
CNN.

Murdoch, adds Mann, “has wielded his global media network as a
weapon to sow doubt and confusion about the basic science and the case
for action.”

Murdoch has been wreaking all this damage ever since he inherited —
way back in 1952 — his first media property, a daily Australian
newspaper his daddy had owned. Over the years, especially those years
since his Fox News became
[[link removed]] America’s
premiere news network in 2001, no single individual anywhere on Earth
has done more to make our world safe for grand fortunes.

Could we realistically have expected anything even a bit more socially
redeeming from a media mogul as powerful as Murdoch? Well, actually,
history _does_ offer up some models for media moguls interested in
something besides maximizing their mega millions. Take, for instance,
E.W. Scripps, the famed newspaper publisher who passed away nearly a
century ago in 1926.

The youngest of 13 children, Scripps borrowed $10,000 to launch his
first newspaper in 1878. He would spend the next quarter-century
building a chain of dailies and a national news service that would
evolve into the United Press International. His papers,
Scripps pledged
[[link removed]],
would “always be devoted to the service of the 95%, namely the
working man and the poor and unfortunate.”

By 1917 and America’s entry into the first World War, Scripps and a
handful of other socially conscious men of means had come to realize
that the war in Europe had opened up an opportunity to cut our Gilded
Age rich down to something approximating democratic size. To meet the
cost of waging world war, the nation would either have to tax the rich
at significant rates or borrow from the rich, by selling war bonds, a
choice that would leave the United States even more plutocratic.

“The country will be the gainer by tapping and reducing the great
fortunes,” Scripps wrote to a similarly minded man of means, “and
once the people learn how easy it is, and how beneficial to all
parties concerned it is to get several billions a year by an Income
Tax, the country hereafter may be depended upon to raise most, if not
all, of the revenues for the Nation, and the States, and the cities
from this source.”

The Scripps-backed American Committee on War Finance would soon be
demanding a cap on annual income, what the Committee would call “a
conscription of wealth.” No American, the Committee’s tax plan for
the war proposed, ought to be able to retain after taxes “an annual
net income in excess of $100,000,” about $2.4 million in today’s
dollars.

“All income of over one hundred thousand dollars a year should be
conscripted,” Scripps telegraphed
[[link removed]] to
President Woodrow Wilson. “Such legislation would cost me much more
than half my present income.”

“Some of us have very large incomes,” Scripps would later explain
to the House Ways and Means Committee. “We employ servants who
produce nothing for the common good and only minister to our vices. We
purchase costly and showy clothing, houses, food, furniture,
automobiles, jewelry, etc., etc., the production of which has taken
the labor of many hundreds of thousands of men and women, who if they
were not so employed would be producing other commodities in such
quantity as to cheapen them and make them more accessible to the
poor.”

“An enormously high rate of Income Tax,” Scripps argued, “would
have the effect of diverting all this labor, what is given to
practically useless things, into other channels where production would
be useful to the whole people.”

Most all of the nation’s fabulously wealthy — and their most avid
advocates — would respond to the “conscription of wealth”
campaign with predictable hysterics. But by mid-1917 the campaign had
completely redefined the nation’s tax-the-rich frame of reference.

The result? By the war’s end in 1918, America’s rich faced a
top-bracket tax rate of 77 percent, up from 15 percent in 1916.

By 1926, with Scripps passed away, the nation’s wealthy had
regrouped enough to get that top rate trimmed all the way down to 25
percent. But the World War I “conscription of wealth” campaign had
touched a nerve. In the months after Pearl Harbor, President Franklin
Roosevelt would renew the World War I-era call for a 100 percent
top-bracket tax rate, and, by the end of World War II, America’s
rich would be facing a 94 percent federal tax on income over $200,000.

That top tax rate would hover around 90 percent for the next two
decades, years that would see the United States give birth to the
first mass middle class the world had ever seen.

Today, thanks in no small part to the media machinations of Rupert
Murdoch, our richest now face — on paper — a top-bracket income
tax rate less than half that high. In real life, ProPublica revealed
[[link removed]] this
past spring, our tax code’s incredibly ample and generous current
loopholes have America’s 25 wealthiest taxpayers paying a “true
tax rate” of _less than 4 percent_.

What can we now expect from Rupert Murdoch’s successor, his son
Lachlan? Don’t hold your breath waiting for Murdock 2.0 to take his
family media colossus down a path any less plutocratic. Lachlan
doesn’t have much E. W. Scripps in him. Back in 2019, he spent $150
million on an 11-acre estate in L.A. At that time, Lachlan’s new
home rated
[[link removed]] as
the second-most expensive U.S. mansion ever purchased.

SAM PIZZIGATI, an Institute for Policy Studies associate fellow,
co-edits Inequality.org. His latest books include_The Case for a
Maximum Wage_
[[link removed]] and _The
Rich Don’t Always Win: The Forgotten Triumph over Plutocracy that
Created the American Middle Class, 1900-1970_
[[link removed]].

* Rupert Murdoch; Global Media; E.W. Scripps
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]

Manage subscription
[[link removed]]

Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]