Politics Lessons from Rupert Murdoch's Twitter

While recently bored on his 184-foot yacht, Rupert Murdoch created a Twitter account. Journalists were dubious. But it is, indeed Murdoch and, when he's not tweeting things that make him sound almost like a normal human being — "Just visited ASPCA. Young daughters looking for another dog to adopt! Help!" — the world's most infamous media mogul is providing us with poorly-phrased political analysis.

Say what you want about Rupert Murdoch, but his foray into Twitter illustrates his appreciation for something fundamental about contemporary American news media: Objectivity is a myth, a Beltway obsession that long ago emerged as a false God. Chagrined liberals tend to miss the point, incredulous that a 24-hour news channel, which exists as a mouthpiece for one of the nation's major parties would ever insist that they are anything resembling "Fair and Balanced." They don't get that the "Fair and Balanced" mantra is more of a nudge-nudge to the viewers; a demographic that, recent studies have indicated, has virtually no idea what is actually going on in the world. Even on Twitter, library of throwaway personal trivia, Murdoch has shown that, above all, modern political journalism is about keeping up appearances and developing a compelling narrative.

In an essay about right-wing talk radio, David Foster Wallace wrote, "For obvious reasons, critics of political talk radio concern themselves mainly with the programs' content. Talk station management, on the other hand, tends to think of content as a subset of Personality, of how stimulating a given host is."

This is another fact overlooked by critics of the Murdoch model. There is a perplexing assumption that members of the right-wing media machine genuinely believe everything they say and are simply misguided when, in actuality, nearly every major player has admitted, either directly or between the lines, that the act matters more than reality. As Ronald Reagan once observed, in the most satisfying of Freudian slips, "Facts are stupid things."

This philosophy, visible in nearly everything that Murdoch's Empire has ever done, was nicely crystallized in a Murdoch tweet during the Iowa caucus, "Good to see Santorum surging in Iowa. Regardless of policies, all debates showed principles, consistency and humility like no other."

Here's Rick Santorum, a man who declares with a straight face that privacy "doesn't exist, in my opinion, in the United States Constitution," who says states reserve the power to block individuals from purchasing contraception, and who has stated that allowing gay marriage is akin to approving of polygamy. Rick Santorum perceives himself as a counter-revolutionary that sees American culture as spinning out of control; it must be seized, broken down, and reapplied as a theocracy. No serious human being can take this man seriously, you’d think.

But, again, look closely at what Murdoch is saying: Regardless of policies, Santorum's surge is a positive thing. According to Murdoch, the fact that his vision for America involves rolling it back to the twelfth-century is immaterial. It’s the kind of red meat that supporters and detractors like to fight over, but not something incredibly relevant when we talk about things that fuel the engine of our political discourse.

Cynics like to bemoan the successes of people like Santorum, but there's a specific allure to observing his ascent. Like Sarah Palin and the Lewinsky Scandal before him, Santorum forces media members to digest and cover a story that is completely bananas. Most American journalists and pundits spend their careers refusing to confront the fact that the political system they operate within is eroded and that the ruling class of their country harbors a startling contempt for democracy. They talk about things like the "debt-ceiling" with bizarre levels of zeal and recite the results of polls that mean nothing. They are proud to be non-Murdoch journalists, the kind that look down upon partisan ranting and champion the cause of objective analysis. Then they have to explain to viewers that the President stuck a cigar in someone's vagina.

I was in an airport, during the early morning hours, when the results from Iowa trickled in. I was half-asleep, watching CNN's finest bundled up in bulky jackets, their breath visible as they broke down the numbers, reporting live outside of polling stations and telling me a guy who once compared consensual homosexual sex to having intercourse with a dog had nearly beaten Romney. It was magical.

If you Google "Santorum" you get an extremely vivid description of a possible byproduct of anal sex. This lexicographical modification was the work of Dan Savage, America's funniest advice columnist and, along with his husband Terry Miller, founder of the wonderful It Gets Better Project.

Savage has offered to take the down the website that spread the definition if Santorum donates $5 million to an organization that promotes same-sex marriage, something that has about as much chance of happening as Santorum winning the nomination.

To a lesser extent, Savage's past also haunts his Google results. Somewhere, amidst evidence of his social activism and commitment to human rights are Savage's opinions on foreign policy. For instance, months after 9/11, he wrote:

The American left is content to see an Iraqi dictator terrorizing the Iraqi people, the Bushies in D.C. are not. 'We do not intend to put American lives at risk to replace one dictator with another,' Dick Cheney recently told reporters. For those of you who were too busy making papier-mâché puppets of George W. Bush last week to read the papers, you may have missed this page-one statement in last Friday’s New York Times: 'The White House is developing a detailed plan, modeled on the postwar occupation of Japan, to install an American-led military government in Iraq if the United States topples Saddam Hussein.'

There's something striking about this paragraph, beyond the fact that it is dripping with scorn for the people who stood against the thunderous chorus of "With us or against us!" projected throughout the print media and all over the cable news stations. He's not being even slightly ironic when he writes that the Bush administration is concerned about the citizens and he expresses no skepticism that the "details" he referred to may have contained words like, "Halliburton" or "Blackwater." His level of trust in an administration that will be remembered for its blatant dishonesty is startling. He even quotes Dick Cheney, as if the man has any credibility on the subject.

At the end of his column Savage writes:

"In the meantime, invading and rebuilding Iraq will not only free the Iraqi people, it will also make the Saudis aware of the consequences they face if they continue to oppress their own people while exporting terrorism and terrorists. The War on Iraq will make it clear to our friends and enemies in the Middle East (and elsewhere) that we mean business: Free your people, reform your societies, liberalize, and democratize… or we’re going to come over there, remove you from power, free your people, and reform your societies for ourselves."

It's been almost ten years since this column was penned. Nearly every attempt by Middle Eastern citizens to democratize their countries during this past decade has met with either indifference or opposition from the United States. As for Saudi Arabia, a country with LGBT policies that make Rick Santorum sound like Harvey Milk, they still receive financial and diplomatic support from the United States.

Months later, I’d argue that Savage's stance against the war softened, but he demonstrated no reservations about his embrace of occupation. No, his problem was with the fact Bush had not pleaded his case convincingly enough. The Empire's salesman lacked the command of the English language that leaders like Clinton and Obama possess. "George W. Bush failed to make the case. George W. Bush wasn’t able to convince NATO—NATO!—or the United Nations of the necessity of this necessary war," but, "I was—and still am—in favor of the West remaking the Middle East—AKA invading their countries and deposing their leaders."

This seeming paradox — between a defense of gay rights and a defense of invasion — raises an obvious and important question: If Santorum can get booed on stage for making illogical attacks on gay marriage, then doesn't the President receive a boo or two for trampling on citizen's constitutional rights, increasing terror, killing civilians, occupying countries, supporting dictators, and retarding the Peace Process? What gives?

It's a matter of what we call, for lack of a much better word, "normal." Santorum's despicable blend of shocking rhetoric falls outside the status quo, a consensus that tends to find the government's now normal military adventures, well, normal. The contours of accepted political discourse used to end with Anthony Lewis' editorials; now the litmus test is MSNBC, where pundits like Ed Schultz and Rachel Maddow cheered on an American intervention in Libya. "Do you want the narrative of America's role in the world to be 'America leads Western aggression against Arab countries?’" Maddow asked. "President Obama wants the narrative to be something different."

Again, as with Murdoch's Twitter feed, it is easy to eschew facts for feeling and conflate form with content. Maddow's support for military involvement isn't concerned with congressional approval, civilian deaths, or the problematic decision to lend support to a band of rebels that very few western journalists seem to understand. The focus is narrative. Here is a President who can frame the choice to bomb countries in the kind of glowing poetry that Savage wished Bush could master.

Despite disparate rhetoric, the policies remain similar. As Medea Benjamin and Charles Davis recently pointed out in a piece in Obama's "shift" in foreign policy:

Obama can talk all he wants about turning the page on a decade of war and occupation, but so long as he continues to fight wars and militarily occupy countries on the other side of the globe, talk is all it is. The facts, sadly, are this: since taking office Obama doubled the number of troops in Afghanistan; he fought to extend the U.S. occupation in Iraq — and partially succeeded; he dramatically expanded the use of killer drones from Pakistan to Somalia; and he requested military budgets that would make George W. Bush blush. If you want to see what his military strategy really is, forget what’s said at press conferences and in turgidly written Pentagon press releases. Just look at the record.

I have heard of no campaign to equate Obama's name with drone deaths or occupation. While the record may show that Santorum is a politician that lacks influence and respect, the hazards of his actions pale in comparison to the destruction the President has wrought.

Obama recently theatened to veto Congress's National Defense Authorization Act, which gives the government power to indefinitely detain any American citizen suspected of terrorism without charge or trial. He backed off that meager promise too, pointing out that while he had "reservations" about the Act, he thought a veto would be a detriment to our security.

"The fact that I support this bill as a whole does not mean I agree with everything in it." He added, "I want to clarify that my Administration will not authorize the indefinite military detention without trial of American citizens. Indeed, I believe that doing so would break with our most important traditions and values as a Nation."

As NPR's Scott Horton pointed out, the issue isn't exactly whether or not Obama will indefinitely detain anyone, but what kinds of powers he leaves to future administrations. "The concerns of civil libertarians are based more on their recent experience of a Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel that sought to legitimize torture, schemed to bury the Posse Comitatus Act, wrote memos authorizing warrantless surveillance, and approved numerous war crimes," he wrote.

In other words, what would a President Romney do with the powers Obama may, inadvertently, bestow upon him? We are talking about a candidate who doesn't believe that waterboarding is torture and wants to expand Guantánamo.

The day after he Tweeted support for Santorum, Murdoch took to the webs to declare, "Obama decision on terrorist detention very courageous – and dead right!"

Obama's decision was the opposite of courageous. It was cowardly and opportunistic, and it wasn't dead right. Even Obama acknowledged his signing was flawed, "in particular," he wrote, because of the terrorist detention issue. But Murdoch reminds us: It’s not about the facts, or even one’s own opinion. It’s about the narrative.