Enduring resolve to fight for freedom and the truth.

That was the leading front-page headline on The Weekend Australian following the retirement of Rupert Murdoch.

The breathtaking and brazen falsity of the headline proves the opposite.  Rupert Murdoch had just agreed to pay more than $US 760, 000,000 to victims of lies that he had consciously promoted at Fox News.  In that he was aided by his son and successor, Lachlan Murdoch.  Who had committed a most grievous error of judgment by suing a publication for libel for saying just that.  And then he ran up the white flag.

Paul Kelly was just one of those who described Rupert Murdoch as the ‘most successful business man in Australian history’.  What are the criteria of such greatness or success?  Money – et praeteria nihil .  It matters not if in the course of amassing the fortune you become one of the most loathed people in the nation. 

On that basis, Alan Joyce would be a strong contender.  And he never put capital at risk.  Au contraire, they kept throwing millions of dollars at him while he trashed the business.  (And when Judas got found out, he at least had the courtesy to throw away the bribe and hang himself.)

But while Joyce trashed a brand, the Murdoch family through Fox News have trashed a nation.  And its failings and current stresses now threaten the whole world order.

All for money.  For Rupert and family.

The poison hit here.  John Howard said ‘At Wapping in the 1980s he stared down the print unions, thus striking a blow for free speech.’  A select poodle, Greg Sheridan, said ‘His contribution is overwhelmingly positive, his legacy magnificent.’

What is the family’s biggest lie?  The competition here is intense.  They say they are engaged in a battle of ideas and they seek after truth.  (Like the prophets of old in the desert?)

But they succumb to the bullshit of their own press.  Two of the richest people on the planet, one educated at Oxford and the other at Princeton (philosophy, no less), say they are standing up for the common people against bureaucracies and elites. 

So you can be magnificent, and utterly successful and above all others, but not elite.

Truth is dying at the hands of this malevolent family for the same old reason.  There’s one born every minute.