The Murdoch press runs cover for an illegal war by blaming the wrong man entirely, instead of informing the public of facts. Andrew Brown on the Iran war – part 3.
Here is a reliable indicator that you are being managed rather than informed.
When the story gets complicated, when the real cause of your pain points uncomfortably toward power, toward allies, toward the architecture of foreign policy that cannot be questioned, the Murdoch press reaches for a scapegoat.
And so, as Australians watch fuel prices surge by approximately 40%, a direct consequence of the US-Israeli strikes on Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz, as ABC News has itself reported, the editors and columnists of News Corp’s Australian outlets have a different culprit in mind.
Not Netanyahu. Not Trump. Not the war that has sent energy markets into convulsions and supply chains into chaos. Not the illegal military campaign that blocked one of the world’s most critical shipping arteries and sent insurance premiums for tankers into the stratosphere.
No, their preferred villain is Chris Bowen.
Chris Bowen, who did not bomb Iran. Chris Bowen, who does not set the global price of oil. Chris Bowen, whose energy policies, right or wrong, are entirely debatable on their merits, has precisely nothing to do with a US-Israeli military campaign that closed the Strait of Hormuz and triggered the worst fuel price shock in years.
The Bowen beat-up is not journalism. It is misdirection of the most deliberate and dishonest kind. It is the Murdoch press doing what it does most reliably and most effectively: running cover for power, redirecting the public’s legitimate anger toward a safe domestic target, and keeping the real architecture of the crisis, the geopolitical decisions, the alliance commitments, the illegal war, safely out of frame.
Because here is what the Murdoch press will not tell you, and what the mainstream media in general has failed to say with anything like the clarity the situation demands.
Australians are paying more for fuel because a war closed the Strait of Hormuz.
Doh!
That war was launched on February 28 of this year by the United States and Israel against Iran.
It was not sanctioned by the United Nations Security Council. It was not authorised by any provision of international law that serious legal scholars recognise as applicable. It was not preceded by any meaningful consultation with allies, including Australia, whose economies would absorb its consequences.
It was a unilateral act of military aggression by the most powerful country on earth and its primary regional client, conducted because they had the weapons to do it and had calculated, correctly, that nobody with the power to stop them would try.
Puppet on a string
And when it happened, Anthony Albanese went on the ABC’s 7:30 program and told Sarah Ferguson that what Australia supported was the American decision to stop Iran getting nuclear weapons and to address Iran’s role in destabilising the region.
Read that answer carefully. It is not an answer about Australian interests. It contains no reference to Australian sovereignty, Australian economic security, or the fuel price increase already beginning when those words were spoken.
It is a recitation, clean, fluent, almost word for word, of the American and Israeli justification for the strikes, delivered in the Prime Minister’s voice, on Australian public television, as though it represented Australia’s own sovereign and independently arrived at conclusion, which it didn’t.
He later described Australia’s contribution to the conflict as constructive. He has since said he wants more certainty about the war’s objectives and acknowledged there needs to be an end point.
This is the man who endorsed the war before its objectives had been defined, now asking what they are.
Managed complicity and Murdoch
This is what managed complicity looks like up close. You sign on. You use the ally’s language. You call it constructive. And then, when the consequences arrive in the form of 40% fuel price increases and small businesses collapsing under freight surcharge pressure, you allow the media ecosystem you have never seriously challenged to redirect the public’s fury at your own Energy Minister.
The Murdoch press is doing its job. That job is not to inform Australians.
That job, in this specific context, on this specific story, is to protect the US-Israeli alliance from the accountability it deserves and to ensure that the legitimate rage of a population being economically punished for decisions made in Washington and Jerusalem never finds its proper target.
The proprietor of that press empire has spent decades cultivating proximity to exactly the power centres that prosecuted this war.
Murdoch newspapers in the United States were among the most consistent cheerleaders for the military adventurism that set the conditions for what is now unfolding. His Australian mastheads take their foreign policy cues from a worldview that treats American and Israeli strategic interests as essentially synonymous with the interests of the English-speaking world.
That worldview is not Australia’s sovereign foreign policy. It is an ideology dressed as common sense, distributed at scale through the country’s most-read newspapers, and deployed most aggressively when the connection between geopolitical decisions and domestic pain threatens to become too obvious to ignore.
Chris Bowen did not block the Strait of Hormuz. A war did.
An illegal war. Conducted without Australian consent. Endorsed by an Australian Prime Minister on national television, using the language of the people who started it.
And the newspapers owned by a man whose commercial and ideological interests align entirely with the people who started it are telling you it is the Energy Minister’s fault.
That is not a coincidence; it is the system working exactly as designed.
The question is whether Australians are going to keep letting it work.
Andrew Brown is a Sydney businessman in the health products sector, former Deputy Mayor of Mosman and Palestine peace activist