Murdoch’s Election Coverage ‘Insult to Australians’
Even now, Tom Watson routinely memorises the number plates of unfamiliar cars outside his house.
”To be targeted like I was - to be followed by covert surveillance specialists, to have someone try to destroy your character - is very threatening,” says the British Labour MP who helped blow the whistle on News of the World’s phone hacking scheme.
In 2011, it was revealed Mr Watson had been stalked by the paper’s private investigators as payback for his dogged investigation of its affairs. News International’s executive chairman James Murdoch apologised ”unreservedly”.
AdvertisementBut Mr Watson was not placated. Dubbed Rupert Murdoch’s ”tormentor-in-chief” by the British press, he has since devoted himself to the public scrutiny of the 82-year-old’s global media empire. He is in Australia to discuss News Corp’s coverage of the federal election: an unabashed anti-Labor crusade, he believes, driven by Mr Murdoch and his New York Post editor-in-chief, Col Allan.
”It insults Australians when they produce content like that,” Watson says, referring to the recent front pages depicting Labor politicians as clowns and Nazis and demands to ”KICK THIS MOB OUT”.
More: Murdoch’s Election Coverage ‘Insult to Australians’
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To make it quite clear where the avalanche of pro-[opposition leader Tony] Abbott stories is coming from (and who is ready to receive a new government’s grateful thanks), Rupert Murdoch himself has taken up the cause on Twitter, tweeting that Abbott is a rare man of conviction while Rudd is all over the place. The tweets are about putting down a place marker. And not just for Australia.
From further afield, what politicians in Britain and the US can draw from this is that leaving Rupert Murdoch with a flesh wound is like writing a suicide note. He is taking names. He will come after you.