These are for tex. 
His response? That “they’re both foreign countries that don’t care anything about the United States. Kind of strange. It’s all an absurd performance, but it’s all they’ve got in the end”. He also suggested that US support for Ukraine is established entirely upon “massive lobbying campaigns by Ukrainian politicians and American defence contractors” and not on shared democratic values.
Unsurprisingly, Russian state-controlled television networks beamed Carlson’s monologue into living rooms across the country to show that pro-Kremlin talking points are being corroborated in the US media, while pivoting on the Fox News anchor’s words to attack President Biden, Ukraine and NATO.
Last month, when Carlson told his viewers that “NATO exists primarily to torment Vladimir Putin”, while baselessly accusing President Biden of fomenting a “hot war with Russia”, Russian networks praised the Kremlin for its successful “influence operations” in the US.
Australia’s ex-prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, has long accusedRupert Murdoch of bringing his prime ministership down—and, at a parliamentary hearing Monday, it was very clear that he’s out for revenge.
Turnbull, a former journalist who has known Murdoch for more than four decades, delivered a furious takedown of one of his country’s most notorious sons during Monday’s evidence session. He accused Murdoch of doing more to divide America than Vladimir Putin and blamed his media empire for causing the presidency of Donald Trump as well as the Capitol riot that marked the disgraceful climax of his time in power.
“What does Vladimir Putin want to do with his operations in America? He wants to divide America and turn Americans against each other,” said the ex-PM, who first met Murdoch in 1974. “That is exactly what Murdoch has done: Divided Americans against each other and so undermined their faith in political institutions that a mob of thousands of people, many of them armed, stormed the Capitol.”
Learning about Rupert Murdoch’s Billboard company through the added lens that my 80 year old mother was transformed by the Birther story into a rabid Fox News cultist was sort of a “Of course that make sense moment” combined with a “Almost No one in the US gets this moment”.
The simple fact is that Rupert Murdoch owned the largest Billboard company in Russia from 2002 until 2008. The reality is that he didn’t run it on his own and that it’s unquestionable that Putin had at minimum his eye on the project.
