THE MURKY AND DECEITFUL WORLD OF MURDOCH-LINKED RIGHT-WING BLOGS

As well as Murdoch’s mainstream media blogs, by that I mean major newspapers that employ professional propagandists who euphemistically call themselves ‘journalists’ and who run online blog columns, there exists a peripheral world of amateur bloggers who support Murdoch’s professional propagandists. These blogs are directly linked to via the mainstream propaganda blogs and who then, in turn, link to each other.

In the main, these minor right-wing bloggers consist of wannabe ‘journalists’ in search of their big break into the professional mainstream media world of blogging. Extreme right-wing blogger, Tim Blair of Murdoch’s ‘Sydney Daily Telegraph’, for example, is an Islamophobic racist and extremist Zionist supporter who has made the leap from amateur blogger to become one of Murdoch’s professional propagandists. To the right of his column, appropriately, there is a blogroll which links to a whole range of right-wing blogs, including other mainstream right-wing blogs within Murdoch’s propaganda empire, and also to other amateur but more extremist right-wing blogs that has Blair’s favour. They, in turn, return the favour by constantly posting at his ‘Sydney Daily Telegraph’ blog under various names and avatars. They then also go on to post at each others blogs thus creating the illusion that the right-wing has some broad appeal through the blogosphere whereas in reality there are only a handful of them that have evolved to make it appear as if there are many more.

Part of the right-wing’s blogging modus operandi is to indulge in what has become known in the blogging world as ‘sock-puppeting’ whereby a commenter creates more than one avatar who will usually post under some identifier name which is not the posters actual name, or post anonymously. Usually they make multiple postings using their various identifiers or anonymously and may even use a mixture of both as in when, having made a post using an identifier avatar, they then make a follow-up post using another avatar or anonymously, that is in full support of the intial post. This may be done using two, three, and sometimes more identifiers. The idea is to create the illusion that that there is far more support for a particular argument than there really is with the intention of intimidating those that argue against them.

One of the blogs on Blair’s blogroll is J.F. Beck who runs a small extreme right-wing Zionist blog that seems to specialise in little more than criticising anti-Zionist left-wing Australian-Jewish writer Antony Loewenstein. Beck in the main, however, only ever seems to able to criticise Loewenstein for the occasional grammatical errors he makes rather than actually criticising any argument Lowenstein is proffering, believing somehow that, because Loewenstein makes the occasional grammatical error, that his entire philosophy must therefore also be wrong. Beck is never able to rebut, refute or offer viable counter argument to the substance of whatever Loewenstein writes but, nonetheless, Beck’s faithful handful of supporters, all three of four of them, then launch into a tirade of abuse, insults and ad hominen attacks against Loewenstein without any of them actually being able to directly counter any of Loewenstein’s arguments. Basically, Beck simply cuts and pastes something that Loewenstein has written – preferably something with a grammatical error in it – and then feeds it to his faithful few bloggies who then rip into it in a vain attempt to ridicule Loewenstein for the errors but who never actually argue the point that the error is in.

Now, one normally wouldn’t be in the slightest bit bothered by such blogs because they have such a tiny audience who mostly are already converted to the cause to the point where the blog is simply reduced to a chat room for, in this case, right-wing extremist frothing-at-the-mouth Islamophobic Zionists. However, when they get linked to a blog like Tim Blair’s in a mainsteam Australian newspaper, these otherwise non-entity blogs start to get a wider audience and, since most people that go to Blair’s blog are generally to the right already, these blogs that he links to can wield a little more influence that they actually deserve.

I recently visited Beck’s blog (I won’t link to it; I wouldn’t want to encourage anyone to waste their time visiting it) and found the sort of nonsense noted above. My comments certainly stirred up a hornet’s nest of three or four of his bloggies that immediately morphed into about seven or eight of them as they each pulled on their ‘sock-puppets’ for some multi-posting that didn’t even bother attempting to disguise themselves. After a while Beck decided that I had got the better of them and was making them look fools (which really wasn’t that difficult) as they began to contradict and repeat themselves, and so he switched on his moderation function and then simply deleted my comments.

On Beck’s blogroll there is a link to another right-wing blog, Iain Hall, which, while supporting extremist Zionism, specialises more in Australian nationalism and its associated racism with Islam being the current culture to hate. Hall practices his deceit in another way. Rather than adopting the sock-puppet method of deceit, Hall prefers to re-write comments that dissent from his own. The ruse, of course, is quite transparent and is intended to deflect those that wish to comment from actually doing so by attempting to embarrass them. Naturally, in doing so, those that practice this plainly obvious deceit succeed only exposing themselves as deceivers while, at the same time, also exposing their arrogance.

These are just a few examples of the way the extreme right-wing Zionist blogosphere operates at it spreads its tentacles out from the Murdoch-owned mainstream media into the murky and deceitful world of blogs that Murdoch bloggers link to.