Murdoch's World: The Last of the Old Media Empires

by David Folkenflik

  James Murdoch and his allies within the company, such as News International CEO Rebekah Brooks, saw the initiative as a genuine good, a means of forcing environmentally-driven cost savings on the company, and a way to connect News Corp to the concerns of the next generation of consumers. James Murdoch’s wife, Kathryn, had worked for several years for the Clinton Foundation’s climate initiative and would later join the board of directors of the Environmental Defense Fund.

  The elder Murdoch had been won over at a session during a corporate retreat at Pebble Beach led by former vice president Al Gore, who screened his documentary An Inconvenient Truth sketching out the case for the existence of global warming and the threat it posed. Other attendees included then California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, himself branded as an eco-friendly Republican, and British prime minister Tony Blair. The lively conversation that ensued led to studies on how improvements could be made. Murdoch described his son as a major influence on his thinking.

  The chairman’s Beacon Theater speech promised real action. “Now, I realize we can’t take just one year in one city or even one continent as proof that something unusual is happening. And I am no scientist. But there are signs around the world, and I do know how to assess a risk,” Rupert Murdoch told employees. “Climate change poses clear, catastrophic threats. We may not agree on the extent, but we certainly can’t afford the risk of inaction.”

  Each of the company’s various divisions vied to prove its loyalty to the program, though many of the journalistic outlets had built up a record of casting doubt on such fears. The Sun ran a picture of a newly anointed Page Three girl photographed wearing nothing above the waist but a coat of green paint. The Sun and the satellite TV service BSkyB gave subscribers energy efficient lightbulbs. Fox Studios embedded environmental messages into hit movies such as Ice Age and Avatar. “Global warming is a crime for which we are all guilty,” Kiefer Sutherland, the star of Fox TV’s antiterrorism thriller series 24, told viewers at the start of a corporation-wide public service announcement. “We are all releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, thus raising the temperature of the planet.”

  Articles in some News Corp publications subsequently wrote sympathetically of the need for action to stem global warming. While the Sun published the tagline “S.O.S. Planet Earth” over a story about rain forests, the New York Post ran a headline, “Go Green.” All that environmental activism required significant intellectual backpedaling by publications on the record with their skepticism toward climate change.

  Clive Hamilton was right: the Australian aggressively opposed the Green Party’s agenda of addressing climate change through greater regulation and taxation of pollution. Indeed, the paper vowed in an editorial that it would seek to destroy the party at the ballot box. But one reporter for the paper claimed it happened in the news pages as well. At an academic conference in fall 2010, a former environmental reporter at the Australian, Asa Wahlquist, said she fought with editors routinely over the extent and nature of her coverage until she decided to depart from the paper.

  Covering climate change, she said, “was absolutely excruciating. It was torture. There’s no other way to put it.” Julie Posetti, an academic at the 2010 conference, tweeted much of the talk, including the claim that Chris Mitchell had dictated his paper’s coverage ahead of national elections in which Labor formed a government with the Green Party, and that he had adopted an “eco-fascist” line on carbon use policies. Mitchell denounced Posetti, even after audiotapes appeared to confirm the accuracy of her tweets. The editor said he had not spoken to Wahlquist in eight years and threatened to sue the tweeting scholar.

  He never did sue. But the simmering tension about climate change coverage was apparent to outside journalists as well. In 2011 the longtime reporter and professor of journalism Wendy Bacon of the University of Technology in Sydney released a study examining how her country’s newspapers handled the contentious issue.

  Once in office in a coalition with the environmental Green Party, the Labor Party had adopted a series of policies designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 60 percent over more than four decades. Over time, as support for the initiative waned, the proposals were whittled down. Bacon commissioned researchers and graduate students to review six months’ worth of every article, feature piece, editorial, and column in ten leading Australian papers in regard to the governing Labor Party’s plans to tax carbon emissions.

  Researchers were told to classify stories as neutral if any doubt lingered about their thrust, and many were characterized that way. Still, negative articles about the proposed carbon emissions tax in Murdoch’s newspapers outweighed positive ones, 82 percent to 18 percent. During my visit to Australia, journalists broadly affirmed Bacon’s assessment: to varying degrees, they said, the Murdoch papers were keenly receptive to those who question the science underlying projections of climate change. Each year after the start of the new millennium it became harder to report credibly that there was uncertainty that humans were playing a key role in driving up the earth’s temperature.

  How much did Murdoch really believe in global warming? There is no evidence he was insincere in making his sweeping pronouncement on the need for carbon neutrality. Murdoch projected messages of personal and corporate responsibility. Yet he also watched as his journalists provided readers and viewers with coverage that often cast significant doubt on the very crisis he described.

  Murdoch’s belief in the need to contain climate change was pitted against his hatred for central government regulation. So he set a corporate example but refused to endorse a mandate. The dissonance revealed his blend of cynicism and self-regard. Murdoch is convinced that he has a nearly unerring sense for what his readers will want to see in print, whether in a tabloid or a leading national paper. Instinctively, he sees the environmental movement littered with alarmists, a cadre of managerial elitists who snatch away power and property and wealth from his working- and middle-class tabloid readers (not to mention upscale subscribers to the Times of London, the Wall Street Journal, and the Australian).

  Murdoch comes by that contempt for government intervention by way of personal experience. He is a man whose very history tells him that regulations are designed to trip him up. He is an executive who built up his own empire after seeing his family’s holdings shrink from the taxes levied on his father’s estate. He is an entrepreneur who repeatedly had to win permission to buy television and newspaper properties in all three major English-speaking countries in which he became a dominant presence. He even switched his citizenship in order to satisfy American regulators.

  Professor Bacon argued that the environmental policies of the government of Kevin Rudd and his successor, Julia Gillard, never got a fair shake. Seven of the ten titles studied by Bacon’s team belong to News Ltd, a result of the concentration of media ownership there. And the Murdoch papers put their collective thumb on the scale, Bacon and her team found. That held true from the populist tabloids to the Australian—even though the Oz offers more nuanced and extensive coverage than its sister publications. The lone exception was the Mercury, the News Ltd paper in the Tasmanian state capital of Hobart. The island off the southeastern tip of the continent is considered a stronghold of the ecologically minded Green Party, the minority partner of the governing Labor Party.

  The non-Murdoch papers were viewed as more balanced, with the two papers from rival Fairfax Media offering coverage deemed slightly sympathetic toward the need for carbon consumption policies overall. Bacon said the results showed a campaign by the Murdoch press against the governing Labor Party’s climate change policies rather than tough-minded scrutiny of them. “If that’s happening on that one issue, well, it’s certainly happening on other issues,” Bacon said. “Given that Murdoch is so dominant, we have to at least recognize the very big influence, a big potential influence, on public opinion wielded by one company.”

  During the speech on carbon neutrality, Rupert Murdoch indicated he wanted to use his influence
to lead by example. In disclosures to an environmental group, News Corp cited operations in fifty-six companies where it had a direct carbon footprint. Murdoch’s company would incorporate a green mind-set to do what it could to improve the environment worldwide, achieve savings that such investments could bring, and prove that corporate responsibility was an attainable goal to News Corp’s competitors and peers among the world’s top conglomerates.

  “This is about changing the DNA of our business,” Rupert Murdoch declared. Fox News dutifully contributed a half-dozen muted stories. Ailes appeared in that same corporate video as Kiefer Sutherland, the Simpsons, and the Murdochs. “I was very clear,” Ailes said soberly, looking at the camera, “that energy was gonna be one of the things that was going to determine leadership for countries in the future.”

  In the context of the corporate video, Ailes’s remarks functioned as an endorsement of Murdoch’s initiative. More carefully parsed, however, the statement was devoid of meaning. It could have come from an environmentalist, an investment analyst, or a Tea Party protester who just finished chanting “drill, baby, drill.” More charitably, Ailes struck an ambiguous note, perhaps indulging his corporate chief’s impulses in a seemingly charged arena while protecting his own news organization’s journalistic prerogative to pursue stories wherever they might lead.

  Bacon’s findings about Murdoch’s Australian publications dovetailed with those of a pair of studies of the coverage of climate change by Ailes’s team at Fox. The first, presented in 2008 by Sol Hart, a professor at American University in Washington, DC, looked at reports on Fox News and CNN from 1998 to 2004. Hart found Fox far more likely than its competitors to stress the uncertainty involved in climate change science.

  A second study, conducted by researchers affiliated with George Mason University in Virginia, found Fox was far more likely to cover global warming in 2007 and 2008 than cable news rivals CNN or MSNBC. Amid that coverage, however, Fox News journalists, commentators, and guests, however, frequently derided the idea that a valid scientific consensus existed on global warming.

  Murdoch’s muse from the Pebble Beach retreat, Al Gore, won an Oscar for An Inconvenient Truth in 2007. As a bête noire of the political right, Gore’s presence in the policy debates led to belittling treatment by many of Fox’s more ideological figures. Prime-time talk show host Sean Hannity called Gore “unhinged.” Fox News analyst Fred Barnes said Gore was “hysterical.” Gore had to admit some errors in his documentary, including his characterization of the plight of polar bears. But scientists in the field said Gore’s argument, while marred by the occasional overreach, remains valid.

  In December 2009, the liberal press watchdog group Media Matters, which scrutinizes Fox for factual and ideological bias, obtained an internal memo sent by Bill Sammon, the network’s managing editor for Washington news. The memo noted the publication of emails hacked from the computers and accounts of faculty members at East Anglia University in the UK, emails which reflected the frustration of some climate researchers that some raw data did not fully conform to expectations. The hacker’s identity was not revealed, but conservative critics called the episode “Climategate.” Cable news, led by Fox, stoked the debate.

  “Given the controversy over the veracity of climate change data,” Sammon wrote, “we should refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed (or cooled) in any given period without IMMEDIATELY pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question. It is not our place as journalists to assert such notions as facts, especially as this debate intensifies.” Many ensuing reports on Fox adhered faithfully to his suggested language.

  In a review released in fall 2012, the Union of Concerned Scientists found an overwhelming imbalance in Fox’s coverage. During a six-month period, it found, 93 percent of Fox News representations of climate science surveyed were off the mark—thirty-seven of forty segments. In ten cases, people interviewed accurately conveyed scientific understanding of climate change only to be drowned out by other participants or hosts.

  The Wall Street Journal’s editorial pages were receptive to climate change skeptics well before 2007, when Murdoch took ownership. Its news coverage was measured, if modest. But opinion writers from industry interests and ideological groups were given prime real estate to cast doubts on the efficacy of major government action through taxation, regulation, or other intervention and to question whether any remedies were even needed.

  The day before I met Professor Bacon at her home in Sydney, the Journal published an opinion piece entitled “No Need to Panic About Global Warming” signed by “sixteen concerned scientists.” It argued that there was “no compelling scientific argument for drastic action,” citing what it saw as the intellectual dishonesty revealed in the Climategate flap, and said a growing number of dissidents were speaking up despite the threat to their careers.

  Bacon’s study of the Australian (and other dailies) focused primarily on the news pages of the papers, not their opinion content. Murdoch’s Australian arm, however, savaged the professor. Greg Baxter, then the director of corporate affairs for News Ltd, asserted she lacked credibility and further deplored that she was allowed to teach students. Baxter offered that the Australian “believes that humans are warming the planet—but obviously there is doubt among those who claim otherwise”—and explained the paper favored a market-based solution. “The fact that Wendy Bacon produces a piece of research that is negative about this company is no surprise to anybody,” he told the Conversation news site. “She’s been doing it for 25 years.”

  Bacon is a recipient of the Walkley Award, the Australian equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize, for her work exposing police corruption. Bacon’s work made the cut when Murdoch’s Australian published a list of the country’s top 100 stories of the twentieth century. Bacon and her husband, Chris Nash, live in an eggshell-blue house in Newtown, a neighborhood made up of a jumble of working-class, bohemian, and academic streets on the west side of Sydney. She might well not fit in their profile of a desired demographic for the Australian. But as we sat on the interior brick courtyard of her home, lined by Australasian trees and blooms, Bacon said she was dumbstruck by News Ltd’s reply. She had published little previously on the Murdoch press.

  Robert Manne wrote a lengthy critique of the Australian for the Quarterly Essay in which he, too, devoted a section to reviewing the newspaper’s climate change coverage. His conclusions echoed those of Bacon. “On balance, the opinion pieces and the news coverage in the paper was on the side of those who were against the climate scientists,” Manne told me. “And that might be playing into the hands of the group I call the ‘denialists’ because all they have to do is create doubt in the public mind to make it much more difficult for politicians to take action.”

  The top editors and executives at the Australian took umbrage at that specific characterization, with its echoes of Holocaust deniers. They responded, correctly, that their paper had been open to a free-flowing debate. But Bacon argued the paper embarked on an intentional and insurmountable effort to tilt debate against any carbon consumption tax, a position consistent with the paper’s long-held views on economics.

  She had found the most negative coverage in the country’s top-selling Murdoch tabloids—the Melbourne Herald Sun and the Sydney Daily Telegraph. The Herald Sun’s Andrew Bolt is by common assent the top-read columnist in Australia. He presents as an outright skeptic of climate change, at one point calling competing newspapers that treat it as settled science “propagandists.” The clash over climate change is a frequent subject of Bolt’s program on Lachlan Murdoch’s Ten network.

  “Everybody was rather taken aback and it seemed to change the editorial tone of climate change coverage for a very short period of time—but not very long. I think it lasted a year, perhaps less,” said Monica Attard, a former foreign correspondent, media critic, and host for the ABC, Australia’s public broadcasting network. “And then we were all left scratching our heads as to wha
t Rupert’s missive that News Ltd was to become a ‘green’ company was actually all about. Nobody quite understood. Perhaps they turned the lights off at night. We weren’t really sure.”

  In 2012 tensions within various Murdoch factions in Australia surfaced once again. The Labor-led governing alliance sought modest remedies to contain carbon emissions. But public support had eroded. Murdoch’s mother, the centenarian Dame Elisabeth Murdoch, signed a letter sent to the Age, the up-market Fairfax Media paper in her hometown of Melbourne, calling for a price to be put on the use of carbon. Americans would call that a carbon tax.

  Columnist Piers Akerman of News Corp’s Sydney Daily Telegraph, the nation’s top-selling paper, expressed esteem toward the Murdoch matriarch but told fellow panelists on the TV program ABC Insiders that she had been used: “The very elderly, no matter how cogent they are, should not be out fronting a campaign.” The national editor of the rival Melbourne Age, Michael Gordon, wrote that “Dame Elisabeth’s stand is consistent with the stated position on climate change of her son Rupert, but out of step with coverage in his newspapers.” That observation occasioned a sharp slap at Gordon in the Australian the next day.

  In March 2012, Akerman’s column in Murdoch’s Daily Telegraph carried a provocative headline: “Greens and their crazy cronies are holding a gun to our head.” Akerman called global warming “a bogeyman” foisted on the general public by environmental activists at the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

  In July 2012 Murdoch tweeted encouragement about the great promise shown in new technologies used to extract natural gas from shale. But he now warned against government moves to take drastic action on global warming. “Climate change very slow but real,” he tweeted. “So far all cures worse than disease.”