on the media
Stanley Meises: Rupert Watch


Media Mogul Murdoch has his hands on just about everything. He owns not only the Dodgers, but the broadcast rights to the Yankees...and Stanley Meises wonders if he can trust even the scores in Murdoch-owned papers anymore.

There I was, parked in front of my television set not long ago, watching the first round of the American league playoff series between the New York Yankees and the Texas Rangers, when the camera cut to the unusual sight of media magnate Rupert Murdoch sitting in the stands with Yankees owner George Steinbrenner.

Unusual, I say, not because Murdoch, who recently bought the Los Angeles Dodgers, is a stranger to baseball these days, and not because the camera would find the Chairman, as he is known to those who toil for him, in attendance at a game, since the camera and cameraman behind the arresting visual are in the employ of the Murdoch-owned Fox Network.

But it made sense to me, several days later, with the announcement, on the front page of the Murdoch-owned New York Post, and then later on the local Fox news station, and on the Fox News Network, and again on the Fox Sports Network, that Rupert Murdoch had succeeded in snaring the rights to broadcast Yankee games for the 1999 season. No doubt this news also was re-broadcast on Murdoch's Sky network satellites, which daily blanket Europe, Asia and Australia with Murdoch-produced news, or in this case, Murdoch-produced Murdoch news.

What a lovely way to send out a subliminal signal to the world, with George Steinbrenner no more than a handmaiden to the scene that you own it.

Now, as a local reader of the Murdoch-owned New York Post, I have tried to read between the lines of the tabloid's local and national political coverage, business pages and media coverage, simply because Murdoch's commercial interests-- past, present and future-- trip across so many wires and force a voracious newsie to apply many, many grains of salt before digesting Murdoch-cooked stories. And, it should be said, it's not that Rupert himself makes these choices, but he has provided, from the moment he stepped on these shores and foisted Star magazine on America in the mid-1970s, an atmosphere in which hidden agendas and brass knuckles are neatly packaged for the unsuspecting masses.

But now that Rupert owns the Dodgers outright, as well as the Yankees' broadcast rights, can I even trust the sports section any longer? Just at a moment in my life when the agate-type box scores are getting diffcult to read, can I believe them, anyway? And what's behind those rumor stories, which appeared during the pennant drive, about Mike Piazza, the former Dodger turned New York Met, going back to the Dodgers- stories which only the Post carried? Not to mention the Fox Sports Network's racing coverage and Murdoch's ownership of the Racing Form....and the fact that the Post's racing columnist also doubles as one of Murdoch's political columnists.....well, you get the picture. There's a lovely line in Frank Capra's 'Meet John Doe,' in which Walter Brennan, playing Gary Cooper's hobo sidekick, is tossed a newspaper to bide the time by one of the paper's flacks. He tosses the paper back at the flack and says, "What do I want to read THAT for? I KNOW the world's been shaved by a drunken barber."

That barber, Rupert Murdoch would have us believe, is Ted Turner.

Stanley Meises is producer of WNYC Radio's "New York Voices."

On the Mediawith Brian Lehrer airs on Sunday at 4pm and 10pm on Radio New York, AM820.

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