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Getting Murdoched: How Murdoch’s Media Wields Power and Punishment
432 pages, Paperback
Published July 14, 2026
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July 16, 2026
I've given this a one-star review based on my close reading of two chapters - chapter 3, which is about the Murdoch organisation's support for Israel and wariness towards Islam, and chapter 6, which is about the Murdoch organisation's supposed homophobia and transphobia.
In chapter 3, Dodd and Ricketson focus on the supposed suffering of Sarah Schwartz, a Jew who's viewed with something like contempt by the vast majority of Australian Jews and others who think Israel has a right to exist and (with that) to defend itself from a level of existential threat most Australians would find unimaginable.
Since this book focuses on the suffering News Corp caused Schwartz let me tell you about the suffering the Nine (formerly Fairfax) newspapers, the ABC, SBS, The Guardian and other mainstream media have caused me and my fellow opponents of antisemitism.
A few days after the Hamas October 7, 2023, I noticed Greens and other notionally left-wing politicians and their fans calling Gaza "a genocide" and, with that, frequently saying Israel had lost the right to exist as a state. Whatever one might say about the way the war against Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and their patron Iran has developed, it was very clearly not appropriate for senior politicians and other commentators, many with law degrees, to accuse Israel of committing genocide when the official (Hamas-administered health ministry) death toll was 1,900. At that time ALL the dead almost certainly will have been Hamas militia members or civilians caught in the crossfire so there was no evidence whatsoever of an intention to kill Gazans because they were Gazans "as such".
About 1,000 days ago (writing this on July 16, 2026) I (a non-Jew) posted a brief comment on Facebook saying "I personally haven't seen evidence that Israel is committing genocide" and the response was beyond awful. No one came forward with any "smoking gun" videos or still photos. No one produced images of defenceless Arabs being lined up next to a rapidly filling trench, waiting for their bullet to the head. All the other side could do was show photos of flattened buildings (Google Earth images of Gaza taken in 2026 show a fair number of habitable buildings, and flattened buildings do not a genocide make) or point to claims made by activist lawyers acting as salespeople for a particular cause. It's almost as if people were unaware that in many criminal trials one side or the other is effectively lying (albeit often in a don't ask and don't tell way) on behalf of their client. Usually the cause was antisemitism.
Roland Fryer and other principled economists whose analyses start with the idea that people are economically rational would have an easy explanation for WHY it suited non-indigenous Australians, who benefit every day from the fact that a staggering amount of wealth was taken from indigenous people essentially for non-indigenous people, would want to point their accusatory fingers at the 37.5 per cent of Israel's population who are Ashkenazi Jews with a VERY good excuse for choosing to live in Israel. Non-indigenous Australians (including lifestyle colonists like me, Dodd and Ricketson) and the governments we elect effectively own almost all of a 7,688,287 sq km continent but, according to the narrative Dodd and Ricketson support in their book, the REAL problem is that non-indigenous Israelis effectively own 37.5 per cent of a country just 22,770 sq kms in area.
Israel exists because, from the start of 1933 (when Hitler came to power on a platform which had three main elements, one of which was extreme antisemitism, which put 9.5 million European Jews plus North African and Middle Eastern Jews in mortal danger) to the end of 1946, Australia let in just 8,200 Jews. Just as Hitler was able to mobilise antisemitic European Christians who worried that their countries were being overwhelmed by persecuted Jews (Poland's Jewish population went from 200,000 in 1820 to 3.3 million in 1938) so the Grand Mufti and later Arab nationalists have been able to mobilise antisemitic Arab Muslims. We can trace a direct line from the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem meeting Hitler in November 1941 and asking him to work alongside an Arab legion to rid the Middle East of Jews via Nasser and Arafat all the way to Hamas and other organisations trying to drive Israel out of existence.
Dodd and Ricketson say we should feel outraged that News supports Israel's right to exist when their attention should instead be directed towards ABC, SBS, and Nine newspapers-friendly figures like Elizabeth Watson-Brown (Greens) whose official tent was recently festooned with signs saying Israel was "as bad as Nazi Germany or worse". Think hard about that. If Gaza is "just like Auschwitz", as has been frequently alleged, then Auschwitz is presumably "just like Gaza". Auschwitz was the main destination for the 75,000 defenceless Jews rounded up by the Petain regime in France and more than 72,500 of those defenceless people died. That's a 96.66 per cent genocide, a world away from Gaza where conceivably as little as 0.1 to 0.3 per cent of the population has been killed "genocidally".
And then there's the homosexuality and trans chapter. Dodd and Ricketson surely know that Dylan Mulvaney is an effeminate male homosexual who for some reason wants to pretend he's a she. When Mulvaney made a video saying he was celebrating the end of his first year of being a woman he was telling himself and others a lie and the lie has consequences not just for women like Sall Grover and Kathleen Stock who want to preserve women-only safe spaces, but also for vulnerable people like Keira Bell, Scott Newgent, Cori Cohn and others who have learned the hard way that human beings aren't sequentially hermaphroditic like barramundi and clownfish.
Much more COULD be said. It strikes me as spectacularly non-collegial of Dodd (who taught me media law when I was at News) to stigmatise his former colleagues as this book does. It bothers me greatly that two journalism academics should be directing their students and others to condemn Murdoch media when without it conservative voices would barely be heard in Australia.
I'll stock Getting Murdoched in my shop but I don't think it's a good book and I don't think the authors should feel proud of it.
In chapter 3, Dodd and Ricketson focus on the supposed suffering of Sarah Schwartz, a Jew who's viewed with something like contempt by the vast majority of Australian Jews and others who think Israel has a right to exist and (with that) to defend itself from a level of existential threat most Australians would find unimaginable.
Since this book focuses on the suffering News Corp caused Schwartz let me tell you about the suffering the Nine (formerly Fairfax) newspapers, the ABC, SBS, The Guardian and other mainstream media have caused me and my fellow opponents of antisemitism.
A few days after the Hamas October 7, 2023, I noticed Greens and other notionally left-wing politicians and their fans calling Gaza "a genocide" and, with that, frequently saying Israel had lost the right to exist as a state. Whatever one might say about the way the war against Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and their patron Iran has developed, it was very clearly not appropriate for senior politicians and other commentators, many with law degrees, to accuse Israel of committing genocide when the official (Hamas-administered health ministry) death toll was 1,900. At that time ALL the dead almost certainly will have been Hamas militia members or civilians caught in the crossfire so there was no evidence whatsoever of an intention to kill Gazans because they were Gazans "as such".
About 1,000 days ago (writing this on July 16, 2026) I (a non-Jew) posted a brief comment on Facebook saying "I personally haven't seen evidence that Israel is committing genocide" and the response was beyond awful. No one came forward with any "smoking gun" videos or still photos. No one produced images of defenceless Arabs being lined up next to a rapidly filling trench, waiting for their bullet to the head. All the other side could do was show photos of flattened buildings (Google Earth images of Gaza taken in 2026 show a fair number of habitable buildings, and flattened buildings do not a genocide make) or point to claims made by activist lawyers acting as salespeople for a particular cause. It's almost as if people were unaware that in many criminal trials one side or the other is effectively lying (albeit often in a don't ask and don't tell way) on behalf of their client. Usually the cause was antisemitism.
Roland Fryer and other principled economists whose analyses start with the idea that people are economically rational would have an easy explanation for WHY it suited non-indigenous Australians, who benefit every day from the fact that a staggering amount of wealth was taken from indigenous people essentially for non-indigenous people, would want to point their accusatory fingers at the 37.5 per cent of Israel's population who are Ashkenazi Jews with a VERY good excuse for choosing to live in Israel. Non-indigenous Australians (including lifestyle colonists like me, Dodd and Ricketson) and the governments we elect effectively own almost all of a 7,688,287 sq km continent but, according to the narrative Dodd and Ricketson support in their book, the REAL problem is that non-indigenous Israelis effectively own 37.5 per cent of a country just 22,770 sq kms in area.
Israel exists because, from the start of 1933 (when Hitler came to power on a platform which had three main elements, one of which was extreme antisemitism, which put 9.5 million European Jews plus North African and Middle Eastern Jews in mortal danger) to the end of 1946, Australia let in just 8,200 Jews. Just as Hitler was able to mobilise antisemitic European Christians who worried that their countries were being overwhelmed by persecuted Jews (Poland's Jewish population went from 200,000 in 1820 to 3.3 million in 1938) so the Grand Mufti and later Arab nationalists have been able to mobilise antisemitic Arab Muslims. We can trace a direct line from the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem meeting Hitler in November 1941 and asking him to work alongside an Arab legion to rid the Middle East of Jews via Nasser and Arafat all the way to Hamas and other organisations trying to drive Israel out of existence.
Dodd and Ricketson say we should feel outraged that News supports Israel's right to exist when their attention should instead be directed towards ABC, SBS, and Nine newspapers-friendly figures like Elizabeth Watson-Brown (Greens) whose official tent was recently festooned with signs saying Israel was "as bad as Nazi Germany or worse". Think hard about that. If Gaza is "just like Auschwitz", as has been frequently alleged, then Auschwitz is presumably "just like Gaza". Auschwitz was the main destination for the 75,000 defenceless Jews rounded up by the Petain regime in France and more than 72,500 of those defenceless people died. That's a 96.66 per cent genocide, a world away from Gaza where conceivably as little as 0.1 to 0.3 per cent of the population has been killed "genocidally".
And then there's the homosexuality and trans chapter. Dodd and Ricketson surely know that Dylan Mulvaney is an effeminate male homosexual who for some reason wants to pretend he's a she. When Mulvaney made a video saying he was celebrating the end of his first year of being a woman he was telling himself and others a lie and the lie has consequences not just for women like Sall Grover and Kathleen Stock who want to preserve women-only safe spaces, but also for vulnerable people like Keira Bell, Scott Newgent, Cori Cohn and others who have learned the hard way that human beings aren't sequentially hermaphroditic like barramundi and clownfish.
Much more COULD be said. It strikes me as spectacularly non-collegial of Dodd (who taught me media law when I was at News) to stigmatise his former colleagues as this book does. It bothers me greatly that two journalism academics should be directing their students and others to condemn Murdoch media when without it conservative voices would barely be heard in Australia.
I'll stock Getting Murdoched in my shop but I don't think it's a good book and I don't think the authors should feel proud of it.
Displaying 1 of 1 review