The NY Times reports the 89-year-old Murdoch made the remarks in a prerecorded video shown on Saturday during a virtual event for the United Kingdom nonprofit that honored him, the Australia Day Foundation. The video was shared on the website of The Herald Sun, a newspaper in Melbourne owned by Mr. Murdoch.
According to the Times, the video is noteworthy because Murdoch, despite exerting enormous influence over the global media landscape as the executive chairman of News Corp, has been relatively quiet publicly in recent years. He has been weathering the pandemic in his home in the Cotswolds in England, and received a Covid-19 vaccination in December.
In the video, Murdoch said his career “that began in a smoke-filled Adelaide newsroom is still in motion.” He also took the opportunity to condemn “cancel culture.”
“For those of us in media,” he said, “there’s a real challenge to confront: a wave of censorship that seeks to silence conversation, to stifle debate, to ultimately stop individuals and societies from realizing their potential.”
He continued: “This rigidly enforced conformity, aided and abetted by so-called social media, is a straitjacket on sensibility. Too many people have fought too hard in too many places for freedom of speech to be suppressed by this awful woke orthodoxy.”
Murdoch’s beliefs have been noted by the editors of his publications. On Monday, The New York Post published an op-ed by Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, on the front page of the paper with the headline “Time to take a stand against the muzzling of America.”
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