Where I stand—Mike O’Callaghan: Blood for more money

Friday, April 6, 2001 | 10:30 a.m.

Mike O'Callaghan is the Las Vegas Sun executive editor.

THE AMOUNT OF BRAINS you have in your head doesn't always match up with the number of dollars you have in your pockets. The way some people think in our society it would be difficult to get them to believe this conclusion. There are a few people with big bucks in Las Vegas who would reject this kind of thinking because of being blessed with bulging pockets and a cerebral vacuum.

If being worth $9.4 billion is a measure of brain power then media mogul Rupert Murdoch just has to blow the top off any I.Q. scale. If this is fact, then he passed on only access to his fortune to his 28-year-old son James, and kept his brainpower.

Last month James showed he does have some skills when performing a world-class suck-up job on the People's Republic of China. He used the Falun Gong as a whipping boy to please the Chinese masters who fear anybody whose thoughts they can't control. At this time thousands of the Chinese, who meditate and exercise in public, are behind prison bars and at least 100 have died when being held. An equal amount have disappeared during recent years and many live in fear of life and limb.

So young Murdoch jumping on the bloodied backs of Falun Gong members to promote his own business ventures in China shouldn't surprise us. Like his father, he was just doing it to make some more money. It's tough for a family to make it on less than $10 billion.

The New York Times reported young Murdoch's self-serving comments as follows: "James Murdoch, the 28-year-old son of the chairman of the News Corporation, Rupert Murdoch, stunned listeners at a business conference last week when he disparaged Falun Gong, a religious group that has been banned by the Chinese government, and criticized Western news organizations for portraying China in a harsh light.

"The comments, made at the Milken Institute in Los Angeles, were interpreted by some human rights advocates as an effort by the young Mr. Murdoch, who heads the News Corporation's Asian division, to ingratiate the company with Chinese leaders because of the company's extensive business plans with China."

Murdoch berated Western media sources, not those owned by his family that play kissy kissy with China, for the negative human rights stories being published. He called the meditating Falun Gong a "dangerous" and "apocalyptic cult" and a threat to China.

Patrick Horgan, a Beijing-based technology analyst, told the Los Angeles Times, "I think being a lap dog is something people in certain companies think they have to do but if one can avoid it, one should." Murdoch must have said bowwow after reading Horgan's remarks.

According to Tunku Varadarajan in the Wall Street Journal, young Murdoch gets his money-means-everything view from his father. Varadarajan writes: "The Murdochs have had considerable success in China with their lapdog approach, and they must see no reason why this need change. This is not the first time a News Corp. executive has brown-nosed Beijing since a gung-ho little speech, made by Rupert Murdoch in 1993. In that speech, Mr. Murdoch said satellite TV was "an unambiguous threat to totalitarian regimes everywhere." The angered Chinese clamped down on satellite dishes, much to the chagrin of Mr. Murdoch, who had purchased Star TV in the hope of capturing China's satellite market. The magnate had never before run up against real totalitarians, and was rather startled.

"In a bid to undo the commercial damage, Mr. Murdoch abased himself immediately, dropping the BBC's World Service from Star's China beam. This he did shamelessly, telling all the world that he'd always believed that the folks at the BBC were pesky liberals who were out to portray China in the worst possible light. No wonder that Christopher Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong, called Mr. Murdoch's decision to oust the BBC "the most seedy of betrayals."

Well, on second thought, there could be, in some cases, a relationship between big bucks and big brains. The Murdochs, if nothing else, demonstrate that in their family any relationship between big bucks and morality is a negative one.