Rupert Murdoch is the bogeyman.

You should be scared of this guy. This may come off as hyperbole, but this guy has no scruples. His affection for conservatism knows no bounds. He is a free-marketeer that doesn’t recognize the crippling effect that his media empire has already had on the very health and function of the U.S. and now he’s bought Dow Jones, Inc.. Can you get any crazier? This approximates George Bush buying the U.S. Army and National Guard or Karl Rove copyrighting the concept of ‘credit’.

Murdoch is an ideologically-driven and smug political hack who has enough money to actually break our financial system. His influence is so inflated (in no small part by weakening of the federal government since 1994), that his taint can infest and spread disease throughout our global media system. Consider that the Dow owns the Wall Street Journal, whose editorial page is already rabidly pro-Republican, but it restrains itself to what it knows best: economics and market politics. Their interest is in the over-valued business that is the Stock Market. The problem with having an economy that is so tied to and dependent on the NYSE is that real measures of economic health (employment, salaries, job satisfaction, and exposure to health care) are meaningless before the buying and selling of corporate stocks. The value is in the number of transactions of what amounts to credit. It isn’t even the real money of the nation.

At first glance, you might see this as a perfect match, but it exposes the devious and destructive nature of Murdoch—he is unabashedly and inappropriately partisan and destructive. Where as the people who work for the WSJ may tend to vote Republican and have a conservative framework, they are just as likely to fall for Clinton’s pro-corporate policies and pro-NYSE agenda. Their allegiance is to the markets. Murdoch, on the other hand, is toxically political and hastily lashes out at his enemies. No sooner has Murdoch signed his name and closed the deal, but he is making attempts to take on the New York Times, the most respected and politically astute newspaper in North America. It truly is the most trusted name in news. Murdoch hopes to take the WSJ partisan and take out the Times the way Fox beat out CNN.

The MO is the same: despite the Times (until recently) voracious support for the war and its increasing disinterest in investigating stories beyond White House quotes (due in no small part to cuts in staffing, travel, and other expenditures), Murdoch thinks that it is a loony bin of liberalism and that his seemingly centrist political opinion must win the day. Perhaps Murdoch is deluding himself. More likely, he just always spins it that way, like William Kristol at The Weekly Standard. The ideology’s success means more than the truth.

In actuality, this is all devastating news for us. Our chances of getting objective news has all but disappeared and the media’s tendency to avoid making waves and unintentionally supporting Republican lies through weak fact checking has meant that we are all confused to what is right. As Karl Rove said in 2006 “You have your numbers and I have the numbers.” Republican exploitation of relativism leaves an awful taste in the mouth, doesn’t it?