You don’t have to have criminal prosecutions for tapping voicemails to be a corrupt organization. If you’re a news outfit, all you have to do is print yellowed, sensationalistic profiles solely intended to demean anything or anyone outside your ideological world view.
Such is the case with legendary 60’s icon and cartoonist Robert Crumb and Murdoch’s Sunday Telegraph. That paper printed a piece so inflammatory about Crumb’s life and his association with the 60’s drug and hippie culture, the cartoonist was forced to cancel a trip to Sydney’s graphic arts festival for fear of assassination.
Perhaps Crumb is overreacting. Perhaps. But it’s inescapable that Rupert Murdoch has a singular goal. That is to trumpet the right and tear down the perceived left, even if that left is a 20’s music loving sextagenarian not exactly enamoured with the hippie lifestyle.
Read Crumb’s open letter to the Herald and think a bit about our media a little. Then think about Rupert Murdoch. This is not the way the media should work. The News of the World scandal, CNN’s Piers Morgan, Fox News – all these are not news organizations or even gossip tabloids as much as they are extensions of the National Enquirer with political and cultural goals that seek to destroy what and who they fear.
I won’t even go into the Krista Erickson style attack on the arts. It’s a war with these people about everything that is associated with a progressive lifestyle or history. And they take no prisoners.
Here’s a sample of Crumb’s letter. Like I said, read it all. It says everything that needs to be said.
I’m also quoted putting down Karl Rove, and by extension, all right-wing politicians. OK, fine, I have no problem with such a forthright presentation of who I am and what I think.
Little did Purcell or I know who was lurking in the bushes, just waiting to pounce! The very next day, Sunday July 31, the right-wing media sharks at the Sunday Telegraph verily jumped on this juicy morsel. Me, I know nothing of Australian politics. I had no clue that there were such nasty right-wing media manipulators there. Crumb was somebody they could use against the liberals in the City of Sydney . They obviously did a little research, made some calls to the right people, like ”anti-child abuse campaigner” Hetty Johnston, and got them to rant about what a bad person I am, that ”the Sydney Opera House was endorsing the depraved thought processes of this very warped human being”, ”These cartoons are not funny or artistic – they are just crude and perverted images emanating from what is clearly a sick mind.” Beautiful. Perfect. Thank you, Ms Johnston, for your input.
After I told a journalist who sent me the article that I might not go to Australia because of this, he took it on himself to call and talk to Hetty Johnston, who told him she was contacted by ”the media”, sent links to some of my more ”offensive” images, and asked to comment on the fact that the Sydney Opera House was exhibiting my work.
From this it is evident The Sunday Telegraph was looking for ways to discredit me and the City of Sydney by using people like Hetty Johnston. Who’s going to put down an anti-child abuse campaigner? If this person hates my work, I must be a child abuser myself. And the Sydney Opera House is condoning child abusers.
The Sunday Telegraph, after contacting these groups and showing them apparently offensive images extracted from my work, can then say, as they did in their article, ”Cartoonist Robert Crumb’s visit, funded by the Opera House and endorsed by the City of Sydney, has sparked outrage with sexual assault groups describing the France-based American artist as ‘sick and deranged’.”
