Reporter Ejected From Jeb Bush’s Ed Summit for Asking About Rupert Murdoch

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Rupert Murdoch’s attempt to corner the education market is not going to go smoothly, it appears. On Thursday, Joel Klein, vice president of Murdoch’s News Corp., which owns Fox News, appeared on a panel discussion about school board governance at Jeb Bush’s Excellence in Education summit in San Francisco. Klein was at the conference in his role as the former long-serving chancellor of the New York City school system. But there was no getting around his current position. Klein was testy when I asked him about the protesters preparing to descend on the hotel to greet his boss on Friday morning, when Murdoch is scheduled to speak. And he didn’t escape his panel discussion without having to face more questions about News Corp.’s education ventures.

During the Q&A session, Steve Begley, a blogger from the K-12 News Network, asked Klein about what Murdoch had in mind for his foray into the education business, which Murdoch has said is a $500 billion market largely untapped by the corporate world. After noting Klein’s $4.5 million annual compensation, Begley asked him what sort of “revenue goals” Murdoch had set for him, and “what kinds of goods and services are you going to sell to meet those goals?” Before he could even finish his question, the panel moderator Chester Finn, from the Fordham Institute, cut him off. He told Begley that he was out of line, and that his question was inappropriate. He demanded that Begley pass the microphone to the person behind him. Begley persisted with his questions, until the audience booed him and a woman came up and asked him to leave. As he was being kicked out, he asked Klein, “Don’t you want to answer the question?” Clearly Klein did not.

Somehow Begley’s ejection seemed appropriate in a session devoted to bashing what Klein called the “small bore” democracy of school boards. But it also highlighted the ongoing problems that Klein is going to encounter as he tries to turn the parent company of Fox News into a player in the education market. Given News Corp.’s recent phone-hacking scandal and Murdoch’s reputation as a tabloid publisher and purveyor of conservative propaganda through Fox News, people in the education world are, not surprisingly, suspicious about his motives.

Begley, for his part, thinks Klein should have answered his questions, because beyond News Corp.’s purchase of Wireless Generation last year, Murdoch and Klein have largely remained mum on their plans for the education sector. “I asked real questions on a real issue,” he said later. As he was shutting him down, Finn told Begley that he could take the matter up with Klein outside the session. Begley tried. But, he says, Klein “took off like a shot.”

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

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And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

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