Rupert Murdoch really ticks me off.

You may not have heard of him, but you know a lot about him. He's the head of a company called News Corporation, which he and his family control. Mr. Murdoch is a naturalized American citizen, born in Australia, and the king of a huge media empire. Among other things, News Corp. owns DirecTV, The Wall Street Journal, the Fox TV networks, Sky TV in the UK, and The Sun tabloid in London (the actual list is much longer, but you get my drift...). Oh, and don't forget that they own MySpace.

You may have already realized that he owns the Fox News cable network, where he has encouraged a biased political slant to the reporting that conforms to his own conservative political views (the founding head of that network left a career as a Republican media consultant to start this propaganda machine). As I've mentioned before, there has long been a campaign among conservatives to label any news organization "liberal" if it reports in any manner they disagree with, regardless of whether it's truthful and fair. Fox News is the centerpiece of this strategy, although at least they stopped using the disingenuous slogan "We Report, You Decide".

Here's what really bothers me about Mr. Murdoch and his people: They all preach conservative values in their shows and columns, but they never criticize Mr. Murdoch. This in spite of the fact that he owns DirecTV, one of the largest pornography distributors in the country (think of all the pay-per-view adult material it distributes). His paper, The Sun of London, puts a gorgeous topless woman on page three every day for solely prurient reasons (I freely admit to having spotted them a few times, Google Keeley Hazell or Gemma Atkinson if you aren't at work or around kids). How can you possibly shelter kids from this stuff when it's in something as ubiquitous as a paper like The Sun? Mr. Murdoch and his companies are all about conservative values on the air or on the page--until it's profitable for them to lose those "values".

Now, I don't really oppose adult content--much. I would like to observe that the stuff is faintly toxic and harms nearly everybody it touches. Still, I've seen a bit of it here and there and I'm not screaming to ban it because it will "protect children". I just think that Mr. Murdoch should hear it from his "conservative" commentators--that he's a pornographer and he should stop.

Can I just once hear a Fox News host say that Mr. Murdoch should change his ways?

CDs listened to today:

• Matias Aguayo: Are You Really Lost
• Olivier Messiaen: Turangalila-Symphonie (Simon Rattle Conducting)