SYDNEY, Aug 11: Australia’s Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is battling not only jaded voters in a bitter election race, but the rancour of Rupert Murdoch, whose newspapers have depicted Rudd as everything from a Nazi colonel to a thief stealing the nation’s savings.
The Australian-born Murdoch’s crusade to oust Rudd in the September. 7 general election has given rise to a heated social media campaign inside a campaign, as Twitter, Facebook and other digital platforms become the weapons used by some to try to outflank Murdoch’s “old media”.
As the campaign kicked off last week, Murdoch’s best-selling Daily Telegraph tabloid urged readers to “Kick This Mob Out” over a picture of Rudd at Parliament House.
In another front page from Murdoch’s News Corp stable, Rudd and top lieutenants were shown as the hapless Nazi guards from the 1960s “Hogan’s Heroes” television show, while another greeted a high-profile recruit to Rudd and Labor’s centre-left cause with the headline “Send in the Clown”.
In the finely poised western Sydney seat of Parramatta, Julie Owens a member of parliament for Rudd’s Labour party, says the influence of the Murdoch press is hurting, with the billionaire’s papers having adopted an even more confrontational stance than in past years.
“People aren’t as aware of what we have done, and they can’t judge us as a government,” says Owens. “They can only judge us as a reality TV show – who is evil, who is bad, who is hard done by – and that’s what the news has become.”
Exactly what Murdoch’s motivations are have been much debated.
Many people think Murdoch is using his 70 per cent grip on big-city newspaper sales to protect the dominance of his prized cable TV investments from emerging digital media threats, chiefly a publicly funded 34 billion dollars super broadband network championed by Rudd.
(AGENCIES)
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