Hello, I've been here since 2006, I comment a lot, I diary once in a while but I've only hinted at my connection to the Post-Soviet world. Recently in comments people have expressed interest in my perspective. I enjoy creating video for other unrelated channels of mine and decided that is maybe my best voice and so today I am going to dovetail on the diary about Fox that is in the main feed.
This is the first of what may be a large series if people are interested.
Here is the link to the story in Time Magazine about Murdoch and The Billboards
content.time.com/...
I know that not everyone here is a video consumer. I'm trying to find a transcribe system that works but I also wanted to test the waters and see what people think.
For those who are more readers than watchers, for today here is a little background on me and a bit of the story about Murdoch.
I've been connected deeply to Ukraine since 2017 when I went to Kiev to visit a friend from my IT/business life and wound up staying through 2018 and became forever connected to my best friend who I have spent at minimum several hundred if not a thousand hours comparing my life as an American Gen-xer who grew up mildly obsessed with the USSR and communism (my BA from Dartmouth - Government with a focus on US-USSR relations),
.... with the life of a woman who grew up in the Soviet Union as a daughter of a party member until 1992 when she moved into capitalist life as a Ukrainian entrepreneur....
And through this I learned that cultural aspects of Soviet life and the absolute insanity that took place in the transition to capitalism are about as foreign to American culture as can be imagined. I also decided to try and learn Russian so I could better understand this world by consuming content that was culturally valid and not an western academic standpoint and through learning I became mildly obsessed with Russian podcasts.
At the same time I started to learn and understand how deeply connected the Republican party has been to the Russian Oligarchy.
I believe that a critical happening in all of this was Rupert Murdoch's Russian Billboard business so I decided to start the series with this.
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. The video goes into greater explanation of this.
The extrapolation of mine is that Rupert Murdoch found a deeply Un-American way of producing media in Russia. The US didn't have a history of a population with a relationship with media that the USSR did and he took it and ran with it to bring the abomination that is Fox News to the US with spectacular success. It was like anywhere that an invasive species arrives with an unknowing population - the invasive species can take over because the indigenous species have no mechanism to deal with it.
The US media never had a state Propaganda machine and was completely unable to deal with it.
Hopefully you will watch the video to get a better sense.
If it's well received I have a huge amount of deeper content to help explain what has become a partnership in my view. Let me know what you think!