Money, of course! But more specifically to generate great wealth (populism attracts lots of readers) while simultaneously protecting the new wealth by using right wing blame-shifting tactics. Make people believe that society's problems aren't related to rich people and corporations not paying their share of taxes, but are caused by a variety of "others", e.g "union members, gays, foreigners, uppity women, and racial minorities."http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2011/07/18/jeet-heer-on-murdoch-couldnt-have-happened-to-a-sleezier-guy/Why has there been such a persistent affinity between right-wing populism and tabloid journalism? A simple economic explanation might suffice:
To own a newspaper such as The News of the World, you have to be very rich. To make the paper a going concern, you have to appeal to a wide swathe of readers. Left-wing populism might gather a crowd, but it creates the danger that your own wealth might be expropriated if the message is too successful. So it is safer for a newspaper baron to put out a paper targeting minority groups rather than the rich. Right-wing populism is a way for plutocrats to wear the mask of plebian outrage, pretending to be the voice of the very people they are economically exploiting.
Despite all his pretended faith in the free-market, Murdoch’s success has always owed much to his uncanny ability to align himself with governments that were able to dole out lucrative broadcasting and cable monopolies. Not just in China but in the West as well, Murdoch has been an expert practitioner of crony capitalism. Again, we see the large element of fraud inherent in right-wing populism.
The comedian and actor Steve Coogan, himself an alleged target of the News of the World’s phone hacking antics, described it as “a misogynistic, xenophobic, single-parent-hating, asylum-seeker-hating newspaper.” Coogan’s characterization might be extended to the Murdoch press as a whole, which tends to go after any group that doesn’t adhere to the ideals of middle-class white society.
The characteristic stance of a Murdoch newspaper is that of defending putatively “normal” tax-payers against various supposed parasites and weirdos, an eclectic and elastic category that includes
union members, gays, almost all foreigners, uppity women, and racial minorities.What are we to make of this remarkable history of ethnic enmity? First of all,
there is no evidence that Murdoch himself is personally bigoted. Murdoch’s third and current wife is of Chinese ancestry.
Rather than being a garden-variety bigot, Murdoch is something fouler: an intelligent man who has found a way to make money trafficking in racial animosities he himself doesn’t necessarily share.