FOR MOST of 1987 Murdochs English papers pursued Elton John with the same sort of vicious prurient anger they used on Julia Gillard a few years back. The singer had fired off a few snide remarks about the Murdoch empire & thus made himself a target. One claim (completely false, as a reporter from another paper discovered) was that hed had a vet remove the voiceboxes from his guard-dogs, because their barking was interfering with his sleep. Another was that hed wallowed in unspeakable bacchanalia at a weekend-long party on some toffs estate. The Sun led the charge. Couldnt find the transcript on Google, but I remember details of the trial quite well. Youd give ten years of your life to write stuff like this: Rent boys were brought to his bed - naked, bound, and high on cocaine. This may well have happened. But it certainly did not happen in England on the stipulated date. Elton John had not long before bought into a large fashion house & had spent the weekend in question at a glittering Paris knees-up attended by every fashion writer & photographer in Europe. The Sun & its high-profile editor, Kelvin McKenzie, had made the whole thing up. John was awarded a million pounds in damages, plus costs. His comments after the trial were also worth remembering. Look, they can say whatever they want about me. They can say my musics boring, they can say my talents worn out, they can call me an old poof. I dont care. But they MUST NOT lie about me. Kelvin was by no means the worst of Murdochs editors, just an arrogant mug who got caught,as Rebekkah did 25 years later. Elton Johns no hero of mine either. His performances make me want to leave the room, if not the suburb. The point of this wee feel-good anecdote is that, if you feel powerful people are lying about you, or lying to you, you dont have to cop it. Few of us have huge followings or deep enough pockets to fund a defamation action. But we all have a pencil, a phone, computer access. The Hearsts, Beaverbrooks, Packers & Murdochs of this world cannot be affected by an idea. They regard themselves as godlike, beyond ordinary concerns. Yet they were greedy men before they became powerful ones. We need large numbers of people to contact major companies advertising in Murdoch papers & say, Look, weve had enough of this man running the country. As long as your products or services are advertised in these papers, well boycott you. And well tell our friends & theyll tell their friends - As a teen I took part in the earliest anti-Vietnam protests in 1965. They were miserable, straggling affairs, most of us feeling hugely irrelevant, outnumbered, quite threatened & vulnerable. A decade later helicopters were struggling to lift the last evacuees off the Embassy rooftop in Saigon. If enough people put their hands up & say NO, things can change. Challenge their ethics, theyll roll over & go back to sleep. Challenge their income, theyll start listening.
Posted on: Tue, 13 Jan 2015 09:31:49 +0000
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