by John Pilger
His accent changed to wind-tunnel ocker and he waved the camera aside. ‘Bloody Poms are everywhere,’ he half-joked. ‘John, take some advice: get off the Murdoch line. We’ve got to bring this country back together again and we can only do it by reaching out to everybody.’
‘How will reaching out to Murdoch help?’
‘At heart he’s a good Australian.’
‘Many in your party regard him as an amoral bastard.’
‘Bastards can change.’
‘Shouldn’t they also be opposed?’
‘John, you don’t seem to understand certain facts about Australian politics. You can’t move forward without the bloody media. That’s a bloody fact.’
‘Are you frightened of Murdoch?’
‘That’s an unworthy question.’
‘Are you?’
‘Let’s wind this up.’
In his fine book, Guilty Secrets, the journalist Robert Pullan wrote that in Australia the very notion of free speech had to struggle ‘against the idea that Australian experience did not count because it was the experience of convicts. Free speech . . . had no foothold at all in the law and institutions the British brought to Australia. It survived precariously in the minds of dreamers and democrats.’42
Nothing in the Australian Constitution or any statute of law guarantees the public’s right to know. Australian politicians have seldom supported this right or that of an honest editor to publish. These have remained, at best, nebulous features of Australian political life, considerably less important than the protection of public reputation; yet, in spite of this and in the face of entrenched and frequently vicious opposition, ‘dreamers and democrats’ laid down the fragile roots of an inquisitive press which owed no sectarian favours and was to play a pivotal role in the establishment of Australian democracy. Like so much else in our secret past, the struggles and achievements of the dreamers are little known.
The enduring assumption in Australia is that the institutions of ‘freedom’ were imported wholly from England, a notion of exquisite perversity when one considers the nature of white origins in Australia. For most Australians the name Edward Smith Hall will mean nothing; yet this one journalist did more than any individual to plant three basic liberties in Australia: freedom of the press, representative government and trial by jury.43
Edward Smith Hall launched his weekly, eight-page, eight-penny Sydney Monitor on May 18, 1826. In the first issue he declared himself. ‘For an editor in New South Wales’, he wrote ‘to withhold his opinions on colonial politics argues either no fixed principles at all, or a distrust of their truth.’44 A month later he left no doubts in the minds of his readers as to the direction of the Monitor by giving prominence to a letter from a reader who described the function of a newspaper as ‘an inveterate opposer [rather] than a staunch parasite of government’.45
The measure of Hall’s principled audacity can be judged by the times. He had launched his newspaper not in a new Britannia flowering with Georgian liberalism, but in a brutal military dictatorship run with white slave labour. The strong man was General Ralph Darling; and Hall’s defiance of Darling’s authority was effectively that of a revolutionary; and he, and other independent editors, were to suffer accordingly.
Hall’s campaigns for the rights of convicts and freed prisoners and his exposure of the corruption of officials, magistrates and the Governor’s hangers-on made him a target of the draconian laws of criminal libel (which, in essence, have not changed in Australia). He was routinely convicted of criminal libel by military juries, whose members were selected personally by General Darling. He spent more than a year in prison where, from a small cell lit through a single grate and beset by mosquitoes, he continued to edit the Monitor and to campaign against public venality. In spite of his privations, his journalism was primarily responsible for Darling’s recall to London in 1831 and for the beginning of free speech in the colony.
When Hall died in 1861 there were some fifty independent newspaper titles in New South Wales alone. Within twenty years this had risen to 143 papers, many of which had a campaigning style and editors who regarded their newspapers as ‘the voice of the people’ and not of the ‘trade of authority’ or of vested mercantile interests. By the beginning of the twentieth century there were twenty-one metropolitan newspapers in Australia owned by seventeen different proprietors. By 1950 this had been reduced to fifteen dailies owned by ten proprietors. By 1988, of Australia’s sixteen principal newspapers, ten were owned by Rupert Murdoch, four by the Fairfax organisation and one each by Alan Bond and Kerry Packer. If Australian journalism could be described at the time of Edward Smith Hall as ‘a medley of competing voices’,46 it has since become an echo chamber. With 63 per cent of national and metropolitan daily newspaper circulation controlled by Rupert Murdoch, Australia has the distinction of the most concentrated press ownership, and the least independent newspapers, of any Western democracy. Most of the media is now the exclusive preserve of a few immensely powerful Mates. Next to the rejection of Aboriginal land rights, this erosion of such a hard-won liberty was the outstanding tragedy of the Bicentenary year.
Bob Hawke’s victory in the 1983 election was hailed by Rupert Murdoch as ‘a brilliant start’.47 Murdoch’s Australian newspaper made Hawke ‘Australian of the Year’ and poured columns of praise upon him. On the following Australia Day Murdoch received the Companion of the Order of Australia, considered by many the country’s highest award, ‘for services to the media’.
Murdoch’s relationship with Hawke is part of a much wider strategy. Murdoch’s brilliance has been to understand the relationship between governments and the movement of capital. Without the co-operation or patronage of one, the other can be cumbersome and extremely expensive. To Murdoch, politicians are merely the purgatives in this process. During the 1980s Murdoch began to realise his ambition to establish a world media empire – a ‘world newspaper’ as Phillip Knightley has called it. In Britain Murdoch’s mass circulation Sun supported Margaret Thatcher with a vociferousness seldom seen even in Fleet Street. Thatcher duly knighted the editor of the Sun, Sir Larry Lamb, ‘for services to journalism’. (Sir Larry described Murdoch as ‘being on the side of the side of the angels’.)48
In 1981 Murdoch announced his intention of buying The Times and the Sunday Times, a deal which the Board of Trade was expected automatically to refer to the Monopolies Commission. Since its inception the Commission had examined every major takeover of British newspapers by companies already holding interests in the British press. After discussion at Cabinet level and with the support of Thatcher herself, Murdoch became the exception. In his biography of Murdoch, Thomas Kiernan quotes Charles Douglas-Home, the then editor of The Times, as saying, ‘Rupert and Mrs Thatcher consult regularly on every important matter of policy, especially as they relate to his economic and political interests. Around here he’s often jokingly referred to as Mr Prime Minister.’49 Murdoch’s alliance with Thatcher – which both have been at pains to keep secret – deepened following his ‘victory’ over the print unions at Wapping in 1986. ‘Wapping’ had been crucial to Thatcher’s strategy to destroy the trade unions. Three years later he was rewarded when the Government’s de-regulation of broadcasting allowed him to launch Britain’s first satellite television network, Sky Channel.
In demonstrating the ‘cross-over’ power of his media, Murdoch for years had used his newspapers’ editorial pages to attack and undermine those, such as the BBC and Independent Television, who had stood in the way of his broadcasting plans. This was consistent practice for Murdoch. During the weeks leading to the start of his Sky Channel, his journalists were used to promote the new venture; and when the great day arrived, The Times, long faded, published a celebratory picture of its proprietor.
This concentration of power did not seem to concern the Government, nor did the Prime Minister see any contradiction between her support for Murdoch and her regular lectures to the nation, notably to broadcasters, on the need for
higher moral standards. This was understandable, as her own standards are entirely compatible with Murdoch’s. His Sun, far from being a mere comic as many on the left have argued, presents a coherent, ideological view of a society shaped by the Thatcher revolution. It is a society in which you look after yourself and trust nobody, except Lady Luck. It is a society in which money is all that matters, not to mention the fun of looking on at misfortune, sex and violence, especially violence. And those who oppose this society are, of course, ‘loony’; Mrs Thatcher has said as much.
Moreover, Murdoch’s standards are on most vivid display when his papers are supporting the Prime Minister’s actions. Their unbridled backing for the Falklands War led the Sun to gloat over the drowning of hundreds of conscripted Argentinian sailors, and to invent an interview with the widow of a British soldier. Similarly in 1988 the Sun described a Gibraltar woman as a prostitute involved with drug dealing after she had given evidence about the killing of an unarmed IRA squad by British soldiers in Gibraltar – evidence that conflicted with the Thatcher Government’s, and the Murdoch papers’, version of events. The Sun paid the woman £50,000 in damages, the day after it had paid the singer Elton John £1 million, having fabricated a report about his private life.
During the week of the Australian Bicentenary, the Sun published an editorial which described Aborigines as ‘treacherous and brutal’, a people without skills, arts or graces who would have wiped themselves out if left alone. There was an illustration of the stereotype of a savage. The British Press Council described the article as ‘offensive, misleading and unacceptably racist’. Murdoch was quoted as saying it went ‘ten per cent too far’.50
On the day he launched his Sky Channel Murdoch was asked about standards, why almost everything he touched went ‘downmarket’. He seemed puzzled. ‘I don’t know what you mean by downmarket and upmarket,’ he said. ‘That is so English, class-ridden, snobbery-ridden . . . I’m an Australian. I believe in equality.’51 But even this was not quite right. Murdoch is an American citizen.
Murdoch’s heart, it is said, lies in the United States, where his strategy has been especially bold and his own politics have been sharpened.
In July 1980 the New York State Democratic primary was crucial for candidate Jimmy Carter. His main opponent, Senator Edward Kennedy, was an acknowledged supporter of the Israeli cause, while Carter’s quest for dé tente between Israel and Egypt cast him in many Jewish eyes as pro-Arab. Murdoch’s New York Post had found a woman who agreed to speak about an affair with Kennedy. At the same time, with the aid of public relations men retained by Murdoch, a meeting with President Carter at the White House was arranged for February 19, 1980. The same morning Murdoch met the Chairman of the Export-Import Bank (Eximbank), John Moore, an old friend and political supporter of Carter. The subject was the sale of Boeing aircraft to Ansett, the Australian airline owned by Murdoch and Sir Peter Abeles. Murdoch demanded a loan of 656 million $US at 8 per cent interest.
On February 22 Murdoch’s Post published an editorial headed, THE DEMOCRATIC PRIMARIES: THE POST END ORSES CARTER. An Eximbank loan of such size usually took three weeks to develop; and the bank’s current interest rate was well above 8 per cent, rising to 13 per cent in March. Murdoch reduced the loan figure to $US290 million and announced that the deal had been settled at 8 per cent. US Treasury officials expressed their concern; the New York Times published a story about the low interest rate, the lunch with Carter on the same day as the bank meeting, the Post’s endorsement of Carter and Moore’s political background. The US Senate committee on banking called for the documents and Murdoch testified before a hearing. The White House lunch, he said, was unconnected with the Boeing sale. The committee reported that the Ansett loan had been handled ‘sloppily’ and that lending rates several points below costs amounted to an extraordinary subsidy of Rupert Murdoch’s business fortunes. But the loan went ahead.
Later that year Murdoch switched allegiance to Ronald Reagan, whom he embraced as he had done Thatcher. ‘Rupert Murdoch’, said New York Representative Jack Kemp, ‘used the editorial page, the front page and every other page necessary to elect Ronald Reagan.’ After his inauguration the new President paid generous tribute to his Australian supporter. ‘Nancy and I’, he said, ‘want you to know you will always have our deepest appreciation.’52 Reagan’s de-regulation policies meant that Murdoch could now begin to expand. But in order to circumvent laws preventing foreign nationals owning US television stations, he first had to renounce his Australian citizenship and become an American. This he did speedily.
In January 1984 Murdoch was appointed to the board of United Technologies, the United States’ fifth largest manufacturing corporation and part of the ‘military-industrial complex’. The media magnate was now an arms dealer. Why Murdoch chose to be a director of a company in which he had only minimal stock holding was not clear. According to Thomas Kiernan, the chairman of United Technologies, Harry Gray recruited Murdoch partly because ‘the Australian Government was about to make a major investment in military helicopters and Gray wanted United Sikorsky Helicopters Division to get the contract’.53 The Australian Defence Department subsequently agreed to pay Sikorsky $A570 million for sixteen Seahawk and fourteen Blackhawk helicopters.
Kiernan also claimed that ‘Murdoch’s footprints were all over the Westland affair’ in Britain. In 1985 the Thatcher Government agreed to allow partial foreign ownership of the Westland helicopter company and the Defence Secretary Michael Heseltine announced that a European consortium had the Cabinet’s and the Prime Minister’s approval. Then Thatcher appeared to change her mind and the contract finally was awarded to a partnership dominated by Sikorsky. Heseltine resigned. According to Kiernan, Murdoch was involved. He wrote, ‘If anyone benefited from [the deal], he did . . . a major American corporation in which he had a significant interest had achieved an advantageous position in a multi-billion dollar market that until then had eluded it.’54
Kiernan’s evidence of Murdoch’s influence is circumstantial; what is not in doubt is Murdoch’s commitment to American strategic aims, reaffirmed during the Reagan years, and of which corporations like United Technologies are the beneficiaries. Indeed, imperial America, according to Murdoch, is ‘the richest, freest and happiest country in the world’.55 Such is his devotion that he even admonished Margaret Thatcher for her refusal to support President Reagan’s invasion of Grenada. ‘She waged a war in the Falklands over property rights’, he told Kiernan, ‘and she bloody well botched it up, if you ask me. Reagan’s Grenada action has to do with the freedom of the Western World, including Thatcher’s England. She had no business opening her mouth. I’ll see she pays for it.’56
Murdoch’s ideological advisers have included Charles Z. Wick, whose ‘Project Truth’ and numerous other paranoid campaigns converted the US Information Agency to an instrument of black propaganda abroad. Wick subsequently joined the board of Murdoch’s News Corporation. The ‘world view’ of those like Wick and others on the American far right is ever present in Murdoch’s papers, regardless of where they are published. This can be explicit, as in the prominence given to columnists who are little more than sectarian lobbyists, and in the willingness of some Murdoch papers to act as cyphers of Government disinformation.
In 1979 Murdoch’s syndication network took its lead from his newly acquired New York Post, which (along with non-Murdoch papers) accused the Russians and Vietnamese of plotting to starve Cambodia in the aftermath of the expulsion of Pol Pot: an assertion derived principally from a bogus CIA report.57 In 1983, quoting ‘unnamed intelligence reports’, the Murdoch press reported the presence of Soviet troops in Grenada. There were none. In 1986, following the American bombing of Libya, the Post published a picture of Colonel Qadafi which had been altered to make him appear as a transvestite. The headline read, GADAFFI GOES DAFFY – HE’S TURNED INTO A TRANSVESTITE DRUGGIE. This had come from the same ‘US intelligence sources’ and was recycled through Murdoch’s newspapers around th
e world. The front page of the Sydney Daily Mirror of June 18 was headlined, LIBYAN LEADER ‘ON DRUGS AND MENTALLY DISTURBED’. The Mirror quoted two sources: the ‘influential’ New York Post and ‘unnamed US intelligence sources’.
More than any corner of the Murdoch empire, the Australian press is the compliant recipient of the Washington/ Murdoch view. Wherever there is a choice between the national interests of the United States and those of Australia, as perceived by the administration in Washington, Murdoch’s Australian newspapers generally can be relied upon to confuse American and Australian interests as the same. When in 1985 the Labor Cabinet took the unusual step of forcing Hawke to reverse an agreement he had made secretly with Washington to allow the testing of the MX missile in Australian waters, Murdoch’s Australian, the country’s only national newspaper, was beside itself. Australia’s foreign policy was ‘falling into chaos’; the ‘basic values of our society’ were at stake; a ‘strong treaty’ with the United States was urgently needed.58 Beneath the headline ‘The Americans Give Us a Second Chance’ was this memorable editorial:
The Australian Government should feel grateful to the Reagan administration . . . for the tolerance shown by our friends in Washington towards Mr Hawke’s handling of the MX missile incident. It would, however, be reckless to expect that another such lapse would be treated with similar forbearance.59
Australia’s new economic order is the child of Paul Keating who, long before he deposed Bob Hawke as Prime Minister in 1991, was described by Hawke as ‘the world’s greatest Treasurer’. Indeed, Keating’s policies, according to the Silver Bodgie, had brought about an ‘historic transformation’ of Australian society. Keating himself has described his economic policies as the beginning of ‘a golden age for Australia’ and ‘a unique model’ for the rest of the world. The media agreed; Alan Ramsey, a seasoned political commentator, called him ‘the Van Gogh of treasurers’. Only in 1989, when the ‘historic transformation’ and the ‘golden age’ turned out to be the worst recession in living memory, did the press review its idolatry of this Very Important Mate.