by Bruce Page
Actually the British, proletarians and all, were already running-down their tabloid habit when Murdoch bought the News of the World in 1969. Its then six million sale (down from a eight million peak in 1950) had dropped well below three million when it was put out of its misery this year: nor is the ‘Soaraway’ Sun essentially better-off, in spite of a triumphant raid against the Daily Mirror, which is analysed in Chapter 5 (‘Trading Tabloid Places’). Remorseless decline of the tabloid audience surely contributed to the desperation which drove the News of the Screws into quite reckless criminality. (It was due to mild but worthwhile improvements in the character of British civilisation: a better-educated society, and one less oppressed by the Grundy legislation which used to package sexual nonconformists as ready-made tabloid fodder.)
But more particularly, Murdoch’s epoch-making success as a political entrepreneur and mogul of broadcasting was the direct product of his journalistic incapacity: the characteristic enabling him to produce newspapers uniquely wellfitted for delivery of blackmail or blandishment. Most newspapers have been largely useless for either purpose – the utility varying inversely with their editorial quality. While they exist at all, this is unlikely to change.
The point about a blackmailing threat is that there must be no uncertainty. And an obliging toady, the blackmailer’s vital doppelganger, must also be predictable. (Instances of both, from the Sun’s Murdochmoderated relationship with the later Blair administration are given in Chapter 15: ‘Statesman – and Media Saviour’.)
But in journalism being predictable is a serious crime, perhaps the only capital one. To borrow from the jazz critic Whitney Balliett, journalism is ‘the sound of surprise’. Uncertainty is not dispensable.
No inspired editor can tell the chairman and chief executive what he will really do next because s/he doesn’t have that knowledge him-herself, and nor does his or her staff. Rupert was eager to appoint Harold Evans as a saviour-editor of The Times, but as it emerged that Evans could not be trusted with failing to discover things which would certainly enrage Margaret Thatcher, the relationship broke down and Evans had to go – even though the paper’s sales were then really turning around (see Chapter 10, ‘Cases of Conscience’).
However when Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell made their deal with Murdoch in 1995 they were confident that John Major would be dumped. And so he was.
Newscorp has generally stuck with uninspired editors who knew quite well what they would do next – as in the case of Rebekah Brooks: let’s start vigilante operation against paedophiles – and it has seemed to be agreeable to Murdoch. Firing editors is not something he enjoys, and so long as sounds of surprise are rare, an incumbency may be extended. Some have been mildly distinguished, like that of Simon Jenkins, who refurbished The Times after some down-market experiments which even Murdoch recognised as disastrous. Jenkins, having the outlook of the classical Stoics under the mad Julio-Claudian emperors – no events to be thought really significant – never sought urgently for troublesome stories, and so found Murdoch amenable. Andrew Neil at the Sunday Times did claim to look for trouble: some horribly unsuccessful efforts are described in Chapter 12, and the one worthy success – leading naturally to departure – is noted at p414.
There are of course complexities about selling journalism, and web potential is adding rapidly to them. Mathematical economists have shown that a reliably profitable newspaper audience can be built on giving readers news in a form which appeals exactly to their existing prejudices. (Probably this kind of mechanism underlies the rise of Fox News and other far-right broadcasters in the US.) But this is no help to anyone needing to switch products in the political market-place: when an audience nourished on one rigid viewpoint is fed an equally rigid alternative the sure result is catastrophe. Still less is it useful to anyone trying to create a new and broad-based audience, or rebuild a derelict one. There is good evidence suggesting that surprise may break through prejudice but little to suggest that the consequences may be foreseen.
Very good reporters – quite a small minority among journalists – actually enjoy this uncertainty. But authoritarians – and few people doubt that Murdoch is authoritarian (see The Southcliffe Inheritance, p74–5) – find it uncomfortable, or intolerable. Nor, generally, do they share the natural reporter’s urge to publish. The authoritarian has a narrow form of curiosity, centred on collecting matter (mainly gossip) to squirrel away for tactical advantage.
This is far from suggesting that Newscorp’s drear mediocrity results from any cunning scheme. Examination of the New York Post – Murdoch’s one personal creation (in Chapter 7, ‘An American Nightmare’) suggests that it does represent his earnest best.
Undoubtedly Murdoch, over some three decades, has parlayed control over these dim and failing newspapers into the possibility of control over assets of vastly greater wealth and significance. Those who grasp this point often attribute his success to radical character-defects in the political elite, but this book offers a somewhat different perspective. On our argument, modern political systems present intense, expanding difficulties for their organisers: these Murdoch and his family did not invent but are peculiarly well suited to exploit – explanations are sketched in Chapter 13, ‘Present Necessities’.
Talk of innovation aside, the Murdochs are really a throwback: a dark survival trying to lay claim on the future. Much effort during the years 1880-1960 separated politics and journalism enough for them to have an abrasive but salutary relationship with each other. Murdoch’s achievement has been re-creating symbiosis: a mutual exploitation.
For this he probably had to start at the top (as proprietor), since his original abilities seem unlikely to have permitted ascent from below. Gullibility, natural to the authoritarian, lays many traps for the junior reporter, and the mature Rupert seems to have fallen into some spectacular examples: the man who bought the Hitler Diaries bought the idea of oil falling to $20 consequent on the Iraq invasion. There are family parallels: Sir Keith Murdoch in 1918 could not see real military genius in General John Monash; Rupert in 2003 failed to see through the pseudowarrior George W. Bush (Chapter 15, ‘Statesman – and Media Saviour’.)
To be sure Ofcom is not a historical commission but will have nonetheless to take account of several decades of corruption in media systems based in high technology – which have rightly been thought the bright hopes for enlightenment, liberty and entertainment. The harm done is not irreversible: but it is certainly serious.
The Newscorp dynasty isn’t sole author of the process: but it provides the exemplary case. And as the century proceeds through new waves of technical change, the Murdochs seek to be established as a cyberspace power – with expanded reach, but morals and rules unchanged since Keith was a propagandist during 1914-1918, those critical years which have been called ‘the golden age of lying’.
The phenomenon they represent can’t be understood in isolation, as disease can’t be understood without knowledge of the healthy body. The story therefore includes the ideas that people like Thomas Jefferson, Delane and Camus had about the necessity of free media: illustrated in the record of newspapers like the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Sydney Morning Herald and – before Rupert engulfed them – The Times and Sunday Times in London, and the Herald in Melbourne; of television networks like CBS and the BBC.
Their independence of government, Jefferson believed, was more important than government itself – even if he did find, in office himself, that it was a difficult principle to live by.
Computers, television, the Internet and the Web are closely related descendants of the 17th-century and its array of discoveries in science, politics and technology. The link between today’s discussions of electromagnetic bandwidth and Victorian advances in the economics of printing and communications is an obvious one. Subtler and still more important is the notion of truth as having a social value created by particular rules and manners: sometimes one must look outside the media histories, to works like Steven S
hapin’s Social History of Truth.
Web press and electric telegraph ended direct subsidy of newspapers and made commercially practical the independence that Jefferson desired. But in the mid20th century great gains were eroded by great political mistakes: broadcast media were necessarily licensed, and governments used (still use) this to truck, barter and exchange with media bosses.
Of this trade Murdoch is the supreme exponent. Jefferson’s time assumed press freedom would disinfect itself. By the mid-20th century there was ample reason for the British lawyer Hartley (Lord) Shawcross (less suggestible than his son William, a Murdoch biographer) to warn that in the practical circumstances of industrial society freedom of expression would need strong defences against monopoly.
Our narrative confirms his foresight: the gap through which Murdoch reached to seize the world’s first independent newspaper (The Times) was exactly the one Lord Shawcross wanted the law to close. Today the Stanford University cyberspace lawyer Lawrence Lessig argues that the pseudo-libertarianism peddled by Murdoch and his friends masks a lust to regulate and control – for Newscorp’s profit. Nobody, he says, can be neutral over the organisation of the Websphere and its related systems, any more ‘than Americans could stand neutral on the question of slavery in 1861’.
The liberties involved are not simply American: when we find Newscorp’s greed and naïveté combining with the despotism of Beijing, the story becomes one of world-wide danger.
The First Amendment states classically the liberties which every democracy considers fundamental – and are known everywhere to carry duties. Newscorp classically is the case where those duties have been scoffed at, and compromised for the sake of leverages enabling it to write its own rules on accounting, tax breaks, corporate governance and social responsibility.
Professor Lessig will say that all the media giants offering urgently to escort humankind into the digital future should be regarded at least with caution. In the case of the Murdochs, the record suggests the offer should be rejected altogether. * Obviously ‘the media’ is a term covering many technologies and disciplines. It can be clumsy to make specific and inclusive definitions over and again, so when we refer to ‘journalism’ we generally assume it may be found in newspapers or magazines; in radio, television, books and websites.
Similarly ‘freedom of the press’ does not necessarily refer only to printing machinery. When Rupert’s father wanted to become the grand censor of Australia in 1940, he sought power not over newspapers alone. He added magazines, radio and theatres. Television was omitted only because it was not yet in the country. Both sides of the censorship argument appreciate that the means to free expression do not exist independently of each other.
‘Editorial independence’ is another term used frequently in this narrative. Journalists sometimes make it sound like an excuse for doing whatever they fancy and looking down on their commercial colleagues. It has been best put by Andreas Whittam Smith who founded a newspaper called The Independent, and saw its finances ruined by Newscorp’s lumbering attempts to apply a kiss of life to The Times. The notion of independence, he wrote
doesn’t mean an absence of strong opinions, or the perfect balance of arguments for and against this or that. It doesn’t mean a particular system of ownership. It is simply a promise to readers. That everything you find in the newspaper represents the editorial team’s own agenda and nobody else’s; neither the advertising department’s, nor the owner’s, nor any particular political party’s, nor any business interests’.
It is in fact a strenuous doctrine, for reporters as well as those reported on. As the Murdoch story shows, it is often easier to forget what the readers were promised, and let the highest bidder set the agenda.
How serious is the matter of freedom and independence of news media? One of the little problems of interpreting Newscorp is that it takes itself very seriously – until it finds itself in a tight corner. Then it typically asks everyone to lighten up, and remember that we’re only in the entertainment business. (Of course the entertainment is held by some to damage individuals caught in its glare, but Rupert Murdoch accepts no responsibility for that. ‘I don’t destroy people,’ he says. ‘They destroy themselves by acting badly.’)
In reality, the condition of the news and entertainment media is a matter of life and death, something which becomes sharply apparent whenever the the state chooses – or is forced to use – deadly force against its own people.
This is something that happens only exceptionally in free societies. But a vital part of our argument says that to live by disclosure means dealing in the exceptional. Media organisations cannot demonstrate their value by routine activities, and establishing a scale for the exceptional requires examination of events as far separated in place and time as Bloody Sunday and Tiananmen Square: also, occasions earlier and in between.
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A CONTINENT OF NEWSPAPERS, 1700–1960 News as an element of interest in the Press has so far transcended all others since the construction of the telegraph that the force of a newspaper is now largely concentrated in that department.
JOHN BIGELOW in his first editorial for the New York Times, 3 August 1869 Yes, we do perceive her as sprawling and informal; even dishevelled, disorderly. That may be because
we are still of two minds about militarism and class-systems … We darken her sky with our cities.
She is artist enough to manage a graceful asymmetry; but we are more apt to turn crooks.
JUDITH WRIGHT, ‘The Eucalypt and the National Character’ Geoffrey Blainey, one of Australia’s more provocative historians, once called it an improbable country – and this refers to more than the strangeness of the landscape and of its ancient creatures. Much of that, anyway, is disguised by suburbia; to Americans it can feel very like America, and to people from the British Isles very like the places in which they grew up. But, at second and third glance, variations emerge. There is, to begin with, no other place where the English and the Irish have formed the basis of society – together with a proportion of Scots – and spent less of their natural energies in lacerating each another. And perhaps this unusual economy affected the national temperament. In England, stubborn determination is considered admirable. So also is flair, but a suspicion exists that they are incompatible. The most attractive characteristic of the Australian people is a notion that the two qualities go naturally together.
The Anglo-Celtic jealousies which trouble the British Isles remain visible in Australia, but their potency is reduced, and the nation’s vitality suffers little from them. Enriched now with Asian and European components, it manages to be a strikingly cohesive society. Something of this can be put into American terms by recalling that in 1960 there was a soul-deadening debate about whether John Fitzgerald Kennedy – a Catholic – could properly become President of the United States. By 1960 Australia had long ago elected, not to say forgotten, several Catholic Prime Ministers, like ‘Honest Joe’ Lyons (whom we shall encounter in Keith Murdoch’s company).
There are other complexities, which emerge from its unique status as a nation which is also a continent, and a remote one at that. Little more than two centuries ago, what existed here was a subtle, isolated civilisation which, with only neolithic technology available, had mastered a tricky, arid, often deadly environment – far the leanest of the habitable continents. This brilliant culture was so unfamiliar to the invading Europeans that they denied its existence. Having survived the decades during which they relied heavily on its aid, they told themselves they were colonising a vacant wilderness: terra nullius, in legal Latin. Even though the first advocate of this doctrine, Richard Windeyer, identified, piercingly, ‘a whispering in … our hearts that tells us it is not so’, terra nullius remained an assumption of Australian existence – until, with the last third of the twentieth century, the whispering became inescapably audible, with interesting effects on the trajectory of the Murdochs and those involved with them. Australian history is poignant because so much of it
is about clearsighted remedies for old injustices, and so much of it about blindness creating new, unnecessary ones.
Nineteenth-century visitors who accepted the simple wilderness doctrine were usually amazed at the rate of urban growth they saw. The Port Phillip Herald – ancestor of the paper which became Keith Murdoch’s first command – started in January 1840, just after Melbourne’s first buildings rose beside the turbid Yarra river. Some ten years later the city had a university, more newspapers, a spacious street-plan and principal buildings which were generally substantial and sometimes distinguished. Each of the six colonies which were to become the six states of federal Australia evolved as the hinterland of a dominant maritime city. New South Wales and Sydney started first, of course, but during the second half of the nineteenth century Victoria and Melbourne expanded considerably faster.
It was the newspaper publishing of Sydney, and still more of Melbourne – with an associated flood of books, magazines, poetry collections, pamphlets and printed ephemera of every sort – which most impressed that sophisticated Englishman Anthony Trollope in 1871. Trollope the novelist thought he had never seen a people devoted so furiously to written self-expression. He had previously examined – and mostly admired – America. Its newspapers, however, he thought slightly rustic. This was not the case in Melbourne and Sydney, where the journalism showed a metropolitan gloss which he liked. At roughly the same time, the British journalist Edward Dicey described ‘the American’ as ‘a newspaperreading animal’. The Australian, in Trollope’s account, appears to have become, precociously, a newspaperwriting animal.