This is not journalism. The Bowen beat-up and the Iran war

Instead of informing the public about the facts, the Murdoch press is covering up an illegal war by blaming exactly the wrong man. Andrew Brown On the Iranian war – part 3.

Here’s a reliable indicator that you’re being directed rather than informed.

When the story gets complicated, when the real cause of your pain points uncomfortably to power, to allies, to the unquestioned foreign policy architecture, the Murdoch press looks for a scapegoat.

As ABC News points out, as Australians watch fuel prices soar by nearly 40% as a direct result of US-Israeli attacks on Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz, editors and columnists at News Corp’s Australian outlets have a different culprit in mind.

Not Netanyahu. Not Trump. It is not war that has sent energy markets into turmoil and supply chains into chaos. It’s not the illegal military campaign that has blocked one of the world’s most critical shipping arteries and sent tankers’ insurance premiums into the stratosphere.

No, their villain of choice is Chris Bowen.

Chris Bowen, who didn’t bomb Iran. Chris Bowen doesn’t set the global price of oil. Chris Bowen, whose energy policies, right or wrong, are entirely debatable, had absolutely nothing to do with the US-Israeli military action that closed the Strait of Hormuz and triggered the worst fuel price shock in years.

Iran war and the price of Albanese’s complicity

Bowen’s beating is not journalism. This is misdirection of the most deliberate and dishonest kind. It is the Murdoch press that does what it does most reliably and effectively: maintain power, direct the legitimate anger of the people to a safe domestic target, and keep the real architecture of the crisis, geopolitical decisions, alliance commitments, illegal war, safely out of frame.

Because these are the things the Murdoch press won’t tell you, and the mainstream media in general have failed to say with the clarity required by the situation.

Australians are paying more for fuel because war has closed the Strait of Hormuz.

Ahh!

This war was launched by the USA and Israel against Iran on February 28 this year.

It has not been approved by the United Nations Security Council. It is not authorized by any provision of international law that serious legal experts regard as applicable. This was preceded by no meaningful consultation with allies, including Australia, whose economies will accept the consequences.

This was an act of unilateral military aggression by the most powerful country in the world and its main regional client, carried out because they had the weapons to do it and correctly calculated that no one with the power to stop them would try.

puppet on a string

And when that happened, Anthony Albanese appeared on the ABC’s 7:30 program and told Sarah Ferguson that what Australia supported was America’s decision to stop Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons and to address Iran’s role in destabilizing the region.

Read this answer carefully. This is not an answer about Australia’s interests. It does not contain any reference to Australia’s sovereignty, Australia’s economic security or the fuel price rise that was already underway when those words were spoken.

This is a clean, fluent, almost verbatim version of the American and Israeli justifications for attack, delivered on Australian public television in the Prime Minister’s voice, as if he were representing Australia’s own sovereignty and had come to a conclusion independently.

He later described Australia’s contribution to the conflict as constructive. He has since said he wants more certainty about the war’s goals and acknowledged there must be an end point.

This is the man who sanctioned war before its aims were defined, and now asks what they are.

Managed complicity and Murdoch

This is what managed complicity looks like up close. Sign in. You use your ally’s language. You call this constructive. And then, when the results come in the form of 40% increases in fuel prices and the collapse of small businesses under the pressure of freight surcharges, you allow the media ecosystem you never seriously challenged to direct public anger towards your own Secretary of Energy.

The Murdoch press is doing its job. This is not about informing Australians.

In this particular context, in this particular story, that job is to protect the U.S.-Israel alliance from the accountability it deserves and to ensure that the legitimate anger of the population, being economically punished by decisions made in Washington and Jerusalem, never finds a suitable target.

The owner of this press empire has spent decades cultivating proximity to the centers of power waging this war.

Murdoch newspapers in the United States were among the most consistent cheerleaders for military adventurism, which set the conditions for events now unfolding. His Australian bylines take their foreign policy cues from a worldview that treats America’s and Israel’s strategic interests as synonymous with those of the English-speaking world.

This worldview is not Australia’s dominant foreign policy. It is an ideology disguised as common sense, distributed widely through the country’s most widely read newspapers, and applied most aggressively in situations where the connection between geopolitical decisions and domestic suffering is in danger of becoming too obvious to ignore.

Chris Bowen did not close the Strait of Hormuz. He fought a war.

An illegal war. It was carried out without Australian consent. It was endorsed by an Australian Prime Minister on national television, using the language of the people who started it.

And the newspapers, owned by a man whose business and ideological interests completely coincide with those who started this incident, tell you that this is the Minister of Energy’s fault.

This is not a coincidence; It is a system that works exactly as designed.

The question is whether Australians will let this work.

War monsters. Men who risk the world