Here's what you might not know about Rupert Murdoch: he's one of the leading religion publishers in the world.
Maybe one day soon Murdoch will go to jail as might his son, as will several of their UK editors if many alleged and disgusting and illegal acts of pirate "journalism" are proved true, ranging from bribing the police to hacking the phones of bereaved family members of killed service men and women and child murder victims. Make no mistake: when it comes to the Murdoch media "empire" we're talking about the lowest form of "journalism" as detailed by the Guardian newspaper.
So are religious moralizers and others writing about religious and/or "moral" themes prepared to enrich the Murdoch "media juggernaut" forever while Rupert Murdoch further corrupts UK, American and Australian politics while his companies trade in human misery for profit by hacking murder victim's phones, paying off the police, elevating smut to a national sport and even hacking the phones of killed soldiers' families?
You bet!
Rupert Murdoch is one of America's number one publishers of evangelical and other religious books, including the 33-million seller Purpose Driven Life by mega pastor and anti-gay activist Rick Warren. Murdoch is also publisher of "progressive" Rob Bell's Love Wins.
Rick Warren, Rob Bell and company helped Murdoch fund his tabloid-topless-women-on-page-3 empire, phone hacking of murdered teens, and Fox News' spreading "birther" and "death panel" lies about the president. They helped Murdoch by enriching him. And these weren't unknown authors just lucky to get published anywhere, they could have picked anybody to sell their books.
Do the religious authors making their fortunes off Murdoch wear gloves when they cash their royalty checks? Do they ever dare look in the mirror?
The authors publishing with Murdoch serve a religious market so fine-tuned to grandstanding hypocrisy and moralizing, that, for instance, my novels about growing up religious (Portofino, Zermatt and Saving Grandma) will never be sold in the thousands of CBA member (Christian Bookseller's Association) bookstores because -- horrors! -- my books have profanity and sex in them!
But those same CBA stores gladly sell tens of millions of books -- annually -- published by Murdoch, a man with the moral rectitude of the herpes virus, a man who runs the companies that gave Glenn Beck a megaphone, that hacked a dead girl's phone, that lied about Iraq's involvement in 9/11, and thus contributed to the war-of-choice needless killing of almost 5,000 American soldiers by George W. Bush.
You see, Murdoch has bought into and now owns a huge chunk of American religion and is suckling from the profitable God-teat along with the likes of Rick Warren and Rob Bell, et al.
Murdoch bought the venerable evangelical Zondervan publishing house. I knew the founding Zondervan family, a clan of strict Bible-believing Calvinists who'd have bathed for a week in the Jordan River to purify themselves if they'd ever even brushed up against Murdoch and his minions! Later generations sold out.
Murdoch also bought the all purpose all-religion-is-great-if-it-sells-something "religion" site "Beliefnet" and "Inspirio" -- religious "gift production," specialists making tawdry religion-junk of the one-more-pair-of-praying-hands made of pressed muck kind.
And Murdoch publishes Rob Bell and other so-called progressives evangelical "stars" as well as run-of-the-mill evangelical right winger's books though Harper One, the "religious" division of Harper Collins, another Murdoch company.
Murdoch knows something I found out way back in the 1970s and 80s, when I was still my founder-of-the-religious-right Dad's sidekick and a right wing evangelical leader/shill myself: There's gold in them-thar God hills! James Dobson alone once gave away 150,000 copies of one of my evangelical screeds that sold more than a million copies. (I describe why I got out of the evangelical netherworld -- fled -- in my book Sex, mom and God.)
So here's my question to Rob Bell of the God-loves-everybody school of touchy-feely theology and/or to the right wing "family values" crowd who worry about gay marriage between responsible loving adults while they perform financial fellatio on the mightiest and most depraved/pagan media baron to ever walk the earth.
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