Tell the Truth

Apr 24, 2019

Images courtesy of Julian Meehan

Who is responsible for News Corp’s non-compliance with basic journalistic codes of ethics that underpin the right to hold media licences?

Reduced to just one entrance during the busy lunch period, people could not miss the Climate Guardians

Climate Guardians are staging ongoing ‘visitations’ to highlight that the media giant’s shameless championing of climate deniers and populists (no matter how racist and divisive) is inconsistent with its responsibility to report truthfully.

Silently holding space can be extremely powerful

As revealed in numerous exposés, including Nick Davies’ book Hack Attack, The Monthly’s article The Endless Reign of Rupert Murdoch and the New York Times recent feature Planet Fox: How Rupert Murdoch’s Empire of Influence Remade The World, the influence of the Murdoch media’s ‘weaponised’ ‘propaganda machine’ is chilling. News Corp’s so-called ‘strong set of values’ are about as truthful and credible as its reporting on climate and clean energy issues.

Rupert Murdoch is closely tied to hard line think tanks including Australia’s notoriously secretive and deceptive (yet highly influential) Institute of Public Affairs (IPA), which was founded by Keith Murdoch, Rupert’s father. Across the board, News Corp’s global media ‘dictatorship’ enables the ‘Big End of Town’ to perversely exploit the public sphere to further enrich its own at the expense of the many, and our global commons. Those making these choices are threatening our democracies in order to continue profiting from entrenched industries that are dangerously degrading our world.

We appreciated the time and courtesy of police who attended

Major advances in science and sustainable technologies have enabled us to create everything we need to meet basic food, water, power, shelter and education needs necessary for healthy and happy lives in fair and sustainable economies at the local level on a global scale. Effectively addressing critical and converging societal problems (deepening inequity within and between nations) and ecological crisis (the climate emergency and mass extinction to name a few) demands globally cooperative, democratically organised societies based on facts, fairness, and justice.

As human history has tragically shown time and again, unrestrained propaganda ideally feeds dysfunctional political systems that lead to dangerous socio-dynamics that enable the most power craving and cruel to exploit people and nature ruthlessly and seemingly without limits. It’s wrong for a polarising ‘propaganda machine’ like News Corp to have a lucrative media licence that allows it to hugely profit from misleading and deceptive reporting.

In advocating for a more fair and sustainable world, we hope our non-violent action will prompt other global citizens to demand that all media outlets profiting from deceptive reporting, and from fostering a culture of fear and loathing be held to account.

Climate Guardians are calling on all Federal 2019 election candidates to commit to a public Inquiry into News Corp’s ongoing breaches of trust and undue influence in Australian public life. In doing so the Angels encourage concerned global citizens to hold the Murdoch media to account wherever they are spreading misinformation and seeding division.

Prior to their ‘visitation’ of HWT headquarters, Climate Guardians greeted attendees of the international Earth@Peace Landmark Conference.

We gratefully acknowledge Julian Meeahan for his wonderful photography.