Soros vs Murdoch: The battle for the soul of America
Who knew that Rupert Murdoch and George Soros, two billionaires of not so tender years, had it in them? But consider.
While the one means to impose a right-wing “dictatorial democracy” on America, the other is a “master puppeteer” bent on collapsing the dollar and forming a socialist world government.
Cartoonish this may be, but a joke it is not. These two behemoths of media and finance might, as they approach retirement, have restricted themselves to brandishing their ideological differences over an occasional dinner at their clubs in New York and London. Instead they are projecting their increasingly bitter fight on to the canvas of American politics. To whose benefit exactly, it’s not clear…
Mr Murdoch has had the wisdom to let his proxies – the writers and gabbers on his US media platforms – do his swordplay for him. Fox News has championed the Tea Party movement in 2010 and channelled the most extreme of the conservative movement’s assaults on President Barack Obama. His bravest and most bonkers warrior is Glenn Beck, who parades his conservative prejudices on his own show for Fox News every day and has distinguished himself in recent weeks with a tirade of deeply personal attacks on Soros.
The Hungarian-born financier lets his money do the fighting. His Open Society Institute (OSI) pours cash into many progressive groups in the US. One among them is Media Matters, a band of journalists and researchers based in Washington dedicated to exposing right-wing bias and distortion on the Fox News network and making fun of its on-air slogan, “Fair and Balanced”…