Rupert Murdoch and the Power of the Media

       Mr. O'Connor mentioned Rupert Murdoch, the man who owns Fox News. I've seen his name in the news about a phone hacking scandal in Britain, so I did some research. I was surprised by how much he seems to resemble Charles Kane's . It turns out that Rupert Murdoch is almost a modern day Charles Foster Kane; they both are massively rich media barons, and both of them suffered a downfall because of a scandal. The most interesting part of his life to me, though, was how he used his wealth to affect politics, specifically by helping create Fox News.
       It is common knowledge that Fox News has at least some bias towards the right end of the political spectrum; they employ or have employed many former republican politicians and right wing figures, such as Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, and Glenn Beck. The news station Murdoch founded was at least more supportive to republican rivals than some of its rivals, such as CNN and ABC, and that must at least partly be attributed to the man himself.
       The support Murdoch's Fox News lends to Republican causes is mirrored by the influence that Charles Kane and his real life analogue William Hearst had over the politics of their time. The ability of those two figures to create public support for a war with Spain is similar to Murdoch's ability to create support for conservative causes through Fox News; all three figures slanted their news coverage somewhat to shape public opinion, though for radically different ends.
       The continued existence of people with such control over media, like Rupert Murdoch, is interesting because news organizations are usually seen as institutions; the power that the few people leading them has is often ignored. We all have heard of "yellow journalism" from the early part of the 1900s, but not everyone realizes that there are individuals around today with influence similar to that of newspaper owners like Kane or Hearst. Is individual control of news an issue today? How can media shape politics?

Image Credit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel