How much of a "Divine Plan" or "Divine Script" is there to life? (Main Forum)

by Brian Coyne , LINDEN, NSW, Saturday, April 28, 2012, 13:14 (389 days ago) @ James

Thanks for the link, James. I have read a lot of the news reports and this was among the more interesting. At the end of Eric Ellis's article I followed the link to this 2007 essay in The Monthly about Wendi Deng and found that as enlightening again [LINK]. My own sense from watching all this is that Rupert is intelligent enough to appreciate that he is now in serious trouble and unless he plays his cards right this could end up in the sort of scenario that Robert Maxwell, Conrad Black or Alan Bond experienced. My own view, admittedly from a distance, is that Murdoch has chosen to play this by "being humble and trying to tell the truth". Only once or twice during the verbal interrogation did his "poker face" break and we saw the character of the Murdoch emerge that was more vividly on display in Bruce Guthrie's observations in the SMH some months ago [LINK]. On both occasions he quickly corrected himself, apologised to both Counsel and the Chair.

Murdoch seems to be this enormous paradox — the anti-establishment, establishment figure. I think he has inherited from his father this genuine desire for "truth" over smoozing with the officer class and establishment. (Sir Keith Murdoch established his name for his exposes of what was really happening at Gallipoli when he was a war correspondent there.) His mother, Dame Elisabeth, in her various media appearances over the years seems to embody those qualities also. Rupert though also has an element of the "bovver boy" and back street fighter in him. I don't believe what occurred at News of the World occurred because of some cover-up at lower realms in his organisation and he and James were unaware of what was going on. There may have been some "cover up" of lower executives being reluctant, or slow, to keep the bosses informed but the fundamental failing was a systemic failing in the culture. Despite all the forests of explanation that have been felled in recent days to explain the evidence coming out of the present proceedings in Rome I still think Bruce Guthrie's piece provides better insight into the corporate culture encouraged from the top than anything else I have read. When "push came to shove" Rupert did think any journalist or editor overly concerned with "ethics" was a "wanker".

I honestly think there is an enormous parallel between what we're seeing happening to Murdoch and his Empire right now and what we see happening to the empire of the Holy Roman Catholic Church. The failings are "systemic" — right back at the culture that has developed at the heart of each organisation not at the particular failings of individual editors, journalists, bishops or priests in either "empire".

Murdoch increasingly comes across to me as having really swallowed the myths of the neo-conservative agenda. He really is trying to inflict that on the world through these organisations he controls such as his newspapers, Fox News across the US, and the agendas of his UK papers, and as I've written his "education agendas" (which I scarce knew anything about) which have come across through the probing of the Leveson Inquiry. That's why he employs the likes of Andew Bolt and all these "shock-jock" type characters. Ultimately I see what is going on at the moment in a big canvas sense as "society at large reigning in another tycoon that has gotten a little too big, or smart, for his own boots". He might have been a heck of a lot better off to have retired when his previous wife, Anna, urged him to and he might have been remembered by history as one of civilization's "greats" for what he had built.

I want to also write more on some of your observations about the core question I was asking about whether there is a "divine script" to life. I'll save that 'til later as I want to mull on it a bit more.

Brian Coyne
[Editor & Publisher]