On August 15th, the Center for Political Innovation convened an expert web panel on the topic of Rupert Murdoch Media and its deceptions about China. The panel was hosted by the Center for Political Innovation’s director Caleb Maupin, and featured 3 expert guests: Susan Banaszewski, activist with the CPI Midwest chapter and writer for Main Trend News, Daniel Burke of the Schiller Institute and Professor Danny Shaw of John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

Daniel Burke’s opening remarks focused on the relationship of Rupert Murdoch to the entrenched pro-British foreign policy circles that have long welded power across the anglo-sphere. Burke linked Murdoch, who now owns a media empire of newspapers and TV networks to Cecil Rhode’s Round Table Group and the Council on Foreign Relations. “He’s one of a crowd of people who manifesto a media cartel…What we are looking at here is in general an effort to prevent people from looking at what China is doing to bring about a new economic system, to cause people to be confused about the Belt and Road initiative for example,” Daniel explained.

Host Caleb Maupin reflected on the phony nature of FOX’s pseudo-populism, with shows filmed in the expensive areas of midtown Manhattan by hosts who live in luxury apartments while pretending to midwestern, rural social conservatives. “It struck me how fake it is… This is smoke and mirrors and utter deception,” he remarked.

“What type of democracy can you have when information is so tightly controlled?” Remarked Danny Shaw, reflecting on the concentrated power in the hand of media elites like Murdoch. He observed that the deceptive portrait of China that Murdoch peddles is a stark contrast with reality, saying “They are afraid we would go visit China. I was in China three years ago… The Chinese have developed the coastline, the interior, it makes Times Square look like Little House on the Prairie.”

Susan Banaszewski discussed the role of Didi Tang, a US-educated journalist based in Beijing who writes articles for Murdoch’s The Times. Tang’s January 5th, 2022 article claiming that people were reduced to bartering for food with cigarettes and video games made her the laughing stock of Chinese social media users. She has also mongered unproven claims about the uniforms of Chinese Olympic athletes being manufactured by “slave labor” in Xinjiang hoping to provoke a full US boycott of the Olympics.

Panelists went over the hypocrisy of the Murdoch press, whose reporters often refers to Black Lives Matters activists in the USA as violent thugs while swooning over the Hong Kong separatist demonstrations. Danny Shaw noted similar hypocrisy and how FOX news ignored the protest movements he witnessed first hand on the streets of Haiti.

“In the US the coverage is all Blue Lives Matter, anything a police officer does in the US, they’ll come up with any excuse imaginable about why the person who was victimized by the police officer deserved it… You would think we are in an utterly lawless society based on their coverage of protests.” Susan Banaszewski reflected on how her relatives who watch FOX regularly fear for her safety because she lives in an urban center, and Murdoch media portrays her city as being nothing but burning cars and mobs. “I live in Minneapolis Saint Paul, and they’ll constantly ask me what its like there. They think I live in a burned down city because of what happened during the George Floyd uprising,” she remarked.

The Murdoch owned Wall Street Journal has run articled on the Hong Kong protests from Wenxin Fan that gloss over the violence, property destruction and terrorism of those who want to break Hong Kong away from China. Fan also exaggerated and promoted over the top claims about lockdowns in Shanghai. Fan went to Harvard on a full scholarship, groomed by the US foreign policy establishment to promote their propaganda narratives.

The panelists all reflected on the growing danger of war and the need for Americans to look at China as a potential friend and ally rather than a menacing rival. The hundreds of viewers who watched the broadcast as it was live-streamed seemed to indicate agreement about the need to challenge anti-China paradigms in western media.