by Bruce Page
Operation of a balance depends on the coinage in use: weight mattering far more than profusion. In assessing media outfits, we find some having massive items on the black side, with Newscorp a prominent instance. Well, this applies to the New York Times and the Guardian: also to the Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail (perhaps more so for a writer who does not vote Tory). But in those cases I can find some quite enduring balance items. For Newscorp there is nothing but vast piles of ephemera, and some pieces of good work by outfits Murdoch assimilated.
Complaints about media dishonesty often centre on false assertion: something which certainly occurs, and has done under Murdoch’s command. Consider the grotesque concotions the Australian used to support claims that the Federal treasurer was under the influence of a Japanese agent’, (Chapter 4, ‘Black Jack and the Student Prince’), and the Sunday Times’ wild report that Michael Foot, leader of the Opposition at Westminster, was a KGB agent. But fabrication has a tendency to fail by autodestruction. Silence is more reliably lethal. When C. P. Scott said that every newspaper was something of a monopoly (at a time of media ownership more diverse than ours), and that comment was free but facts are sacred, he said abuse of monopoly was as much a negative as a positive action –
Neither in what it gives, nor in what it does not give must the unclouded face of truth suffer wrong [emphasis additional].
Or in Rupert Murdoch’s words:
The basic premise of the democracy we live in must be the citizen’s right to know, and if we do not publish what we know if we know the facts that are in the public interest and are of importance and do not publish them, then we do not deserve our freedom.
Well put – and on the record, thoroughly specious. Murdoch’s actual commitment to disclosure has been intermittent always, though not randomly so. It is part of the Newscorp business model, and when the Fox network suppressed a film version of Strange Justice – giving a break to Clarence Thomas, furthest right on the Supreme Court bench and a US political heavyweight – that ran counterpoint to the redtop treatment of British actors who have major celebrity but zero political clout.
The evidence for Justice Thomas’ sexual eccentricity was well above the standard needed for showbiz exposés in the News of the Screws or the Bizarre section of the Sun. And part of the same pattern can be found in The Times’ interludes of silence about brutal repression in China, when Murdoch was the Communist Party’s much-flattered friend (Chapter 14).
Newscorp acts as if a sheen of CEO ruthlessness enhances the corporate image. And it often obscures the fact that Rupert Murdoch has never exclusively, personally brought home a significant revelation for his public (a ‘scoop’, as reporters still call it, thinking presently of the Guardian’s Davies). Though not unique among the corporate-media elite, it remains a striking negative achievement after sixty years engaging with page-proofs and rushes, while being celebrated by financial masterminds as a ‘great newsman’ with ‘ink in his veins’.
Like his father Sir Keith Murdoch, Rupert has always been eager for stories. But as in Keith’s case, stories as material for secret leverage and private alliances, rather than publication. At critical stages in Newscorp history – the fall of the Australian government in 1975; the narrow survival of the British government in 1986 – suppressio veri has been decisive, and suggestio falsi marginal (Chapter 6, Chapter 12).
In order to decide whether News Corporation is ‘fit and proper’ to direct the operations of a television company able to enter every home and workplace in the British Isles, Ofcom must come to grips with a business altogether unlike its contemporaries in the world media industry, which as a general habit cultivate neutrality, in appearance at least. Any partisanship is usually of a kind which has been displayed for some years past without much substantial change.
Newscorp is not similarly anodyne, or not consistently so. Among its many constituent parts vivid, sometimes startling passions are found: the Sun’s distaste for the European Union is such that anyone favouring it may be labelled a ‘traitor’ to Britain. The Fox network carried in 2010 a two-part series by Glenn Beck which accused the financier George Soros of subverting the US Constitution, and included so many tropes from classic anti-semitism that few if any major publishers would consider it a legitimate exercise in free speech. As head of Newscorp Rupert Murdoch has generated editorial support for a diverse sequence of political candidates: often polarised, essentially Manichaean.
Yet these affiliations are volatile as well as polarised (Tony Blair, for instance, having been a traitor as well as a national hero), and rarely are persistent. As we’ve said, his elective affinity is for the power of the day.
And this Newscorp idiosyncrasy adds a paradox to the Ofcom role: they are officials, with authority delegated from an official source, the government. But they will have to ask whether Newscorp can be reliably insubordinate to official pressure – classically, from the government in office. To be ‘fit and proper’, in the public’s eye anyway, a broadcaster must score something for disobedience, and the BBC enjoys a measurably high level of trust because the record still shows it having done so. Acting as gamekeeper, Ofcom must ask whether any licenceholder will make an effective poacher when the larger public interest makes it fit and proper to do so. And here Newscorp’s record is deeply alarming.
To be sure Newscorp organs sometimes resist official orthodoxy. But in stressful times this has often collapsed into docile, but intemperate endorsement, as in the Falklands War and the Iraq invasion – when Newscorp media assets, said the Independent columnist Stephen Glover, ‘became an arm of the British state’. That may even underestimate, since Newscorp denunciation of media rivals sustaining proper independence has sometimes been more violent than anything done by the state in its own cause.
During various crises, assortments of British politicians have claimed that independent reporting of the government’s actions simply equals criminal perfidy. The non-partisan public has never accepted this, and isn’t likely to think broadcasters who exemplify the idea have much that is ‘fit and proper’ about them. (And few politicians support it when they take a long-term view.) It is a position seemingly congenial to Murdoch.
Some technicalities, definitions and identities should be clarified. News International is the UK-registered company which holds 39.1 per cent of the stock in British Sky Broadcasting plc. This is considered as a controlling interest because the majority of Sky shares are in smaller packets widely held. Sky is managed by News International, which also manages the the Sun, The Times, the Sunday Times and some lesser assets like the Times supplements (plus website titles which might be used were a Sun on Sunday to arise to replace the News of the World. News International is controlled by News Corporation, registered in Delaware and listed on the NASDAQ exchange with secondary listing in Sydney and Adelaide.
Newscorp has a complex history reflecting Rupert Murdoch’s desire at crucial times to organise it as a public US company but one under his personal direction (as a naturalised American) according to Australian law. It owes its present media ascendancy – see Chapter 10 – to being a chimera, in the old Greek sense of a beast incorporating body parts from quite different animals. But through all its transmutations it has always been Rupert Murdoch in corporate form: although his powers at 80 appear somewhat diminished, he still controls the mechanism throughout. To repeat, in no sense does News International have a real, distinct existence: it is an essential limb of Newscorp, one without which the main body would be much diminished and quite likely moribund.
The Murdoch imperium has few if any equivalents among global enterprises (a family patriarch serving as chairman and chief executive is unusual now on any scale), and this adds another special dimension to the ‘fit and proper’ judgment. A candidate accustomed to checks and balances may be very different from a seasoned emperor.
Documents produced by the Financial Services Authority (which regulates important things, but ones less crucial than news media) contain usefu
l hints about judgments of honesty and integrity. A conviction may not quite destroy reputation if decent explanation is available. But what matters is a general pattern of behaviour. Ask whether a person has been candid and truthful in all his dealings with any regulatory body.
And inquire whether the person demonstrates readiness and willingness to comply with the requirements and standards of the regulatory system and with other legal … and professional requirements and standards
Governments have usually suggested licensed broadcasters should be particularly scrupulous. This presumably is because they are given control of public assets (electronic spectrum) which once in practical operation might be used to manipulate and reshape public opinion. (It can be done, given ideological drive sufficient disregard for truth: this book cites instances).
Two years back, when his corporate/political horizon was cloudless, James Murdoch argued excitedly for television regulation to be rendered powerless, and for BSkyB to be freed under his chairmanship to run the medium with profit as its one defining objective. (This 2009 MacTaggart Memorial Lecture is fully analysed in Chapter 16.) The argument sweeps aside the fact that economists don’t yet have a non-subjective definition of ‘profit’: but there is good reason to think James just then conceived that some powerful winds were blowing at his back. Along with, to be sure, Rupert’s profound, if less explicit sympathies.
Ofcom’s predecessors have tried to license people who undertake to run unbiased services with profit as one goal in among several and seem likely, on their record, to follow through. The task of supervision then becomes tolerable: a matter of regular small corrections rather than hectic battle joined at extended intervals. (Rupert Murdoch’s first angry confrontation with this approach begins on Page 103.) Such regulation has never worked perfectly, but the polling evidence is that people regard British news and current-affairs programming as reasonably trustworthy. (This trust includes Sky News, the only Newscorp organ to gain a solid reputation for objectivity: its staff privately attribute their success to the regulatory system’s protection.)
But it is an approach which depends totally on the winner of any major broadcasting licence – corporate or individual – coming close to the description of a ‘fit and proper’ person given above. The history of News Corporation, recounted in this book, shows that Rupert Murdoch does not make even the loosest kind of match.
The company’s advance has hewn through nearly every Anglophone culture – and some others besides – a trail of expansive, inoperative promises; of undertakings given with appearance of solemnity, but withdrawn or forgotten with no visible compunction; of simple misrepresentations, and complex ones; of libertarian swaggering which segues into unashamed toadyism; of cruelty justified in terms fit to alarm Seth Pecksniff; and, in counterpoint to the broken public promises, clandestine deals to gain business advantage by remaking democratic politics as a marionette-show.
Significant evidence suggests that Murdoch’s word is worth nothing if he can gain by trashing it. Regulators might expect strict legal form to restrain him, but such is not reliably the case. His record shows a keen grasp of King Lear’s bitter rule:
through ragged dress ‘small vices do appear’, but Robes and furr’d gowns hide all. Plate sin with gold, And the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks …
Apposite, for Murdoch’s operations have classically involved gaining control of media assets by issuing promises about their performance, and initial estimates are inevitably subjective. Passage of time will reduce that ambiguity – demolishing, for instance, the promise that in Murdoch hands The Times would retain its political non-alignment. (Five years on opportunist Tory bias was so gross that its best staff walked out to found the Independent.) But time also bloats costs of legal recourse, and settles goldplate in place. Newscorp practice from the Times to the Wall Street Journal and beyond is one of guns expertly jumped and feet sagaciously dragged.
The record shows that the chief steps in Newscorp’s growth have involved, with few exceptions, circumventing American, Australian and British laws designed to resist monopoly and sustain honest, independent news reporting.
Also the record is replete with injured counterparties, defeated rivals, exemployees and straightforward victims who say they would have acted differently if they had understood Murdoch’s real intentions, or had realised what peril they were in.
He has, to be sure, defenders. There are present employees and beneficiaries – many, though not multitudinous considering Newscorp’s scale and extent. Preeminent among these is Kelvin MacKenzie, once editor of the Sun, who holds that to restrain Murdoch’s appetite for media assets would be akin to holding back Mozart.
Then there’s an important group – often enough media sophisticates that blames the victim: the deceived above the deceiver. This illuminates Murdoch’s adroitness in addressing the sectional resentments of current society: a defender may come to a profound general distrust of Murdoch but subsume that in loathing of some special enemy lacerated by Newscorp for reasons of its own. Murdoch’s crucial ally Woodrow (Lord) Wyatt was an example: he realised by degrees that Murdoch’s attachment to the Thatcherite faith was deceptive, but collaborated nonetheless in outrageous deception of the Newscorp workforce. The unions he considered so delinquent that they had no right to fair dealing. (As will be seen in Chapter 12 and subsequently, that extravagant judgment lost the Sunday Times some of its best editorial talent.)
The Bancroft family, who sold the Wall Street Journal to Murdoch three decades afterward, might be called upper-class boobies, just as the London print unions were called oafish pirates – that is, not altogether unfairly. But that doesn’t make it right that they were tricked-up, and the process of representing it otherwise is what elected people call ‘wedge politics’ (‘hot-button issues’): actually the thing our moral instructors condemned as using ends to justify means. (At the end of the book we’ll come back to ends, as the Wall Street Journal, The Times and the Sunday Times, rescued by Murdoch, are in deep difficulties today.)
The Bancrofts were turned into fair game by a reversed action of simple class prejudice: the ‘Establishment’ kitsch ideology which is insistently deployed by Newscorp and its friends. Once identified as rulingclass individuals, the Bancrofts have only limited rights to fair dealing from the Rupert Murdochs of the world.
Of course simple observers will notice that Rupert has by birth, education and wealth most attributes of the ruling-class as it used to be defined. But according to Newsthink that category is now irrelevant. It is replaced by the ‘Establishment’, a vast, secret – anyway, hazily-defined – committee of powerful figures devoted to selfish preservation of their own status, by blocking the ambitions of vigorous and energetic friends of the common people. It turns out that one of their principal targets is Rupert Murdoch, who has been in combat with them ever since he left Oxford. That anyone should take such stuff seriously – the ‘Establishment’ is actually a left-over fragment of the Cold War’s McCarthy years – is staggering. But it’s commonplace to encounter Newscorp people with radical youth behind them and current unease about doing journalism under Murdoch the dark genius of populist circulation. Imagining the man as a revolutionary seems to bring a little comfort.
However, it should not. In the Wall Street Journal matter this was just peripheral horseplay. But in Chapter 14, which shows how ‘Establishment’ fantasies empowered the Sunday Times’ shameful AIDS-denial campaign, it was very far from being a bit of fun.
And mainly they should free themselves from the myth of Murdoch the journalistic master-mind. In editorial history his role is chief wrecker of the ‘commercial-professional’ newspaper.
That concept took shape in the early years of the 20th century, as one in which a newspaper’s revenue-gathering was operationally distinct from news-gathering – though both were supposed to create value for each other. The 18th and 19th centuries, with some important – developing exceptions, expected there to be payment for
‘insertions’ in newspapers without thinking much about whether advertisements and articles should become quite distinct products and care should be taken to exclude anything in the nature of bribery.
The ‘commercial-professional’ term was invented fairly recently in America by the sociologist Michael Schudson, but titles like the Guardian, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Sydney Morning Herald were giving it practical expression well before the First World War. There is a long and complex literature about whether an ideal form really existed and how closely existing papers stuck to the practice of reporting the news without paying attention to whether or not it might improve the joint bottom line.
There is no space here to settle the grand arguments which raged around it: broadly, the left thought the model could not work, and the right thought that it should not. Certainly instances of failure were sufficient to gratify both sides. Perhaps I may venture my own short view, which is that it did work quite well some of the time, and had it not done so we would not possess even the rather battered democracy that exists today.
But in this context the central issue is that the commercial-professional newspaper does not and never did exist within the empire of Rupert Murdoch – and that his career has been devoted, with no small progress, to its destruction. And this devotion has been the factor raising Newscorp to its present eminence among global media concerns – enabling him to trade propaganda-journalism for political influence, exchanged in turn for major broadcasting assets with a large element of monopoly.
If it should then turn out that a quite fatal blow to his creation has been struck by the Guardian – a surviving classic example of the model – we may think that Sophocles has finally been outdone in irony.
Murdoch the circulation mastermind is an almost perfect myth (or sometime bogey to politicians), and like the Establishment myth it includes some obnoxious motivation. There is a branch of liberal opinion which unreasonably despises the lower orders as much as it (sensibly) despises tabloid journalism: assuming that because it’s nasty it has a fascination for the proletariat which Rupert exploits with matchless skill. Some fashionable self-denigration is often attached, suggesting that we (well, ‘they’) share the authors’ guilt for tabloid excesses because the stuff is gobbledup so eagerly.