The New York Times has an interesting expose of Rupert Murdoch and his vast media empire, today, the centerpiece of which is News Corporation, the company that owns Fox News, the Fox Network and other media outlets around the world. There’s a lot to digest, but two grafs jumped out at me. First one was this about News Corp’s profits earned and taxes paid over the last 4 years:
By taking advantage of a provision in the law that allows expanding companies like Mr. Murdoch’s to defer taxes to future years, the News Corporation paid no federal taxes in two of the last four years, and in the other two it paid only a fraction of what it otherwise would have owed. During that time, Securities and Exchange Commission records show, the News Corporation’s domestic pretax profits topped $9.4 billion.
Pretty good work. Billions of profits, teeney-weeney amount of taxes paid. Do you wonder how that happened? Well, wonder no more my friends. Read this second graf to see why Murdoch could legally avoid paying taxes while the rest of us poor schmucks aren’t so lucky:
Mr. Murdoch has an army of outside lobbyists, who have reported being paid more than $11 million since 1998 to address issues as diverse as trade relations, programming decency and Internet regulation. […]
The News Corporation’s outside lobbying team has been a veritable political Noah’s ark. It has included Republicans like Ed Gillespie, former Republican Party chairman; former Senator Alfonse M. D’Amato of New York; and the firm headed by former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York. But it has also included former Democratic members of Congress, as well as several high-ranking Clinton administration officials, including Jack Quinn, former White House counsel.
Sort of tells you what’s wrong about our so-called democracy in a nutshell, doesn’t it? Pay-to-play politics. Republicans, of course, but also many, many Democrats ….
(cont.)
Mr. Murdoch’s association with the Clintons is perhaps the best example of his ever-morphing relationships with the powerful, and theirs with him. For years, the former president was a favorite target of The New York Post, which seemed to delight in referring to him as “former horndog-in-chief.”
In October 2002, Mr. Clinton and Mr. Murdoch had a lunch meeting at Mr. Clinton’s office in Harlem. It was arranged by Mr. Ginsberg, who had worked in the White House counsel’s office in the Clinton administration and is now the News Corporation’s executive vice president for corporate affairs.
More recently, Mr. Murdoch donated $500,000 to the former president’s Global Initiative and was one of its featured panelists at a 2005 event in New York. In 2006, The Post issued a surprising endorsement of Mrs. Clinton in her Senate re-election bid. On June 5 and 6 of this year, Mr. Ginsberg and Peter A. Chernin, president and chief operating officer of the News Corporation, were hosts of back-to-back fund-raisers for Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign, one in New York and one in Los Angeles.
Maybe Mr. Murdoch want’s an unofficial seat at the table in a new Clinton White House, sort of like the one he had with a certain British Prime Minister over the past 10 years:
[I]n 1997, two of Mr. Murdoch’s papers endorsed Tony Blair for prime minister. Mr. Murdoch became a frequent guest at No. 10 Downing Street, “effectively a member of Blair’s cabinet,” said Lance Price, who was a Blair spokesman from 1998 to 2001.
So don’t be surprised if a new Clinton presidency gets better treatment from Fox News, and News Corporation continues to get most favored corporation status from the Democrats should they retain power in 2008. That’s how the game is played these days. And voters? We’re just the suckers who are being played.
Oh, and for you Senator Clinton fans who beg to differ, consider this little tidbit of recent history:
Nielsen Media Research was preparing to switch to a more sophisticated technology to calculate ratings that television stations use to set advertising rates for local programming. Results of a trial run showed sharp drops in ratings for shows carried on stations owned by the News Corporation, particularly those aimed at minority viewers.
With millions of dollars at stake, Mr. Murdoch sprang into action. He hired the Glover Park Group, a consulting firm with deep ties to the Clinton administration, to run a grass-roots ground war. … Among the Democrats who wrote to Nielsen opposing the new system was Mrs. Clinton.
Guess who won that battle? Actually, there’s no need to guess. Murdoch did. And Senator Clinton’s support of Mr. Murdoch’s campaign was purely a coincidence, I’m sure.
