The Murdoch Archipelago

by Bruce Page

  Yet the perception that authoritarian ruthlessness is apt to coexist with radical lack of inner assurance (and with the appearance of humility) has a solid pedigree. In Book IX of The Republic, where Plato considers the upbringing of tyrants, he sees their alternate modes as supplication and dominion: ‘if they want anything from anybody … they profess every sort of affection for them; but when they have gained their point they know them no more’. Plato’s description of the tyrannical character as fluid and yielding in search for power – as essentially without convictions – varies the older Greek picture of the tyrant as unflinching despot, pursuing substantive (not always wicked) politics. Plato seems to have drawn live from the corrupt, unstable politics of his day.

  Modern investigators have sought to formalise such classical insights. Their foundation text is The Authoritarian Personality by Theodor Adorno and others (cited often as TAP) – much revisited, rethought, re-examined (even reviled) by social and political psychologists since its launch in 1950, and substantially updated in Strength and Weakness by William F. Stone, Gerda Lederer and Richard Christie in 1992. The TAP research, focused initially on far-right politics and anti-semitism, has expanded since to authoritarian and xenophobic attitudes of varied political colour. Theodor Adorno was one of the Frankfurt School stars exiled by Nazism, but alpha-listing slightly enlarges his role; another exile, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, did the pathfinding surveys with the Americans Daniel J. Levinson and R. Nevitt Sanford. Some of their Freudian theorising may have dated, but not its descriptive armature.

  They identified authoritarian individuals via their expressions of hostility to nonconforming minorities – ethnic, moral or other – which are abused with as much enthusiasm as mainstream society allows. Anti-semitism is unacceptable in the mainstream today and so is rarely open. But alternatives abound – foreigners, drug users, sexual eccentrics – broadly, the usual tabloid suspects. Authoritarian intolerance has yielded much ground in modern societies. But, where it appears, it does not appear alone. Whatever the scale used, high-scorers display suggestibility

  – even gullibility – with a tendency to truncate complex argument and seize dogmatic conclusions. Personality centres on an adherence to convention which exceeds that of the conventional majority.

  Genetic make-up, parental actions and social pressures have all been proposed as origins. What Frenkel-Brunswik and her successors demonstrate is that there are variations – however caused – in human capacity to endure ambiguity, and that authoritarian characteristics are found when that capacity is low. Authoritarians, for instance, feel implausibly victimised – Murdoch (he and his friends agree) is a hard-done-by multibillionaire. Often there are bold promises, quickly forgotten: again, prominent in the Murdoch record. But most consistently reported is Plato’s ‘tyrant’, oscillating between submission and dominion. The authoritarian perceives equality – which after all is an ambiguous state as threatening. ‘Object cathexis’ is low: in plain language, principles are lightly held, though often strongly expressed.

  For Plato friendship required a dialectic of equality. Of course there may be other definitions, and Murdoch does not lack long-term companions. Many, however, have been acolytes, subject to abrupt expulsion journalists especially. Aggression is no necessary part of the authoritarian display; benevolence, indeed, may be conspicuous in assured, conventional settings. Rupert exuberantly romping with the Rivett infants accords with this. So does the magnate in later years discreetly aiding an old war correspondent – instances charming in themselves.

  But an issue for those amenable to Murdoch’s charm in testing conditions – where it may disintegrate without warning – is their degree of alertness to flattery. ‘Authoritarian’ and ‘authoritative’ are not equivalent – an executive trying to be firm and reliable may forfeit the advantage of ‘charm’. The authoritarian essence is plasticity – a quality allowing others to see in Rupert Murdoch what they wish at that moment to see. Jean-Baptiste Clamence, Albert Camus” “judge-penitent’ in The Fall – having observed that a mental humiliation hardly matters if it enables one to dominate others – says of himself, ‘I was considered to have charm … You know what charm is: a way of getting the answer yes without having posed any clear question.’

  Sometimes people like Murdoch are supposed to have duplicate personalities – one aggressive, one emollient, the famous ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ notion. But Multiple Personality Disorder – if it exists – involves dissimilar multiples: typically, one conventional and one rebellious. Murdoch, whether dominant or submissive, displays conformist attitudes – separate modes of a single performance. Naturally one mode displays more vividly if time adds status to an authoritarian disposition. Even emperors are rarely powerful in youth, so this is a character which reveals itself in phases. And if we glance ahead, from Murdoch as student to Murdoch as a media chieftain, and to the Hitler Diaries fraud, we can see the difference status confers – and see its effect on professional formation.

  High-level news-media errors are rarely simple. Inattention, crookery or blind chance usually interact, and certainly did in 1982 when the London Sunday Times

  – just absorbed by Newscorp – decided that these Führer ‘diaries’ were real. Calamitous presentation of the claim resulted, however, from a simple, honest error by Murdoch himself. The great scoop originated dubiously. The New York Times and the Daily Mail had rejected the story – and Murdoch’s acceptance troubled his staff, for diaries and ‘proof’ derived from the same source. Their own expert was positive, thereby reducing doubt sufficiently to make publication tolerable. He then reversed himself, which the Sunday Times only discovered just after starting the presses.

  The commitment could have been unravelled, but it would have been costly and messy. Murdoch’s decision was as clear-cut as Russian roulette: keep printing. Such a decision is hard to parallel. Rarely does anyone with the aptitude acquire sufficient rank. The matter is not risk itself, but an urge, in its presence, to simplify. Among paths to editorial disaster, none is so direct. But it is discovered usually at the level of Albert, a Herald cadet-colleague of mine, whose scoop was ‘delivery’ of a ban by the Presbyterian Assembly on dancing in church halls. The reproductive effect for the Melbourne Scots – for whom such dances were an important sexual marketplace – should have raised doubt: ‘deliver’ turns out, in Presbyterianism’s intricate democracy, typically to mean ‘dump’. But, having his notes and his deadline, Albert took a clear-cut decision, as he did in all things. Another, soon after, was to find other work.

  Some details of the Sunday Times and Nazism’s legacy must come later, but we should briefly examine the debacle’s aftermath. Editorial investigation has little of the gambler’s fatalism about it, because the participants believe that their tense engagement with fact is deciding the result (‘cathexis’ is just a term for the focus of emotional energy on a mental target). Thus failure produces a fierce recoil, and Murdoch’s colleagues felt shattered, professionally humiliated. Murdoch was calm, not so much avoiding blame as seeing little to shoulder. The experience for him had not been intense. A bet had simply gone wrong. In businesses depending on public performance, shame is always a potential, often a real, danger to executive stability (try the words ‘Wen Ho Lee’ on a New York Times veteran, or ‘Leyland slush fund’ on one from the Daily Mail). As the Newscorp story develops, rich in editorial mishaps, the commercial value of Rupert’s curious immunity may be found to grow.

  Liberals often conflate ‘authoritarian’ with ‘conservative’, but in truth authoritarianism traverses the spectrum. Its values are consistent with each other only in lacking rebellious or deviant content, being jackdawed from the mainstream and stripped of the mainstream’s tolerance. However, the Murdoch described by allies such as Irwin Stelzer is Rupert the Outsider, a rebel nothing like the tyrants in Strength and Weakness. Much of that case derives from struggles with the establishment – an unknown dragon in Rupert’s youth. But part is from Oxford days, and th
e radical implications of student socialism.

  Rupert’s course was Politics, Philosophy and Economics (PPE), a replacement for the classical readings once used to polish captains of affairs. Some philosophers and economists disparage PPE’s content, but they can hardly deny its part in what one Oxford voice called an ‘extraordinary success … in educating people effectively for major positions in the outside world’. If it is superficial, it seems strenuously so: the two sizeable weekly essays can be remarkably eclectic and, if rhetorical aptitude exists, PPE will maximise it.

  Murdoch notoriously decorated his room with an image of Lenin, which he and others serenaded intermittently with Soviet verse and addressed as the ‘Great Leader’; he has described this, plausibly, as less than ideological. But Rupert’s correspondence with Rivett records his less noticed membership of the Cole Group, then Oxford’s most distinguished socialist society, led by Professor G. D. H. Cole (a designer of PPE), with members selected from the Labour Club rank and file. These activities have been presented (with Rupert’s own indulgent smile) as the vague rebellion which usually evolves into conservatism. (‘We are reformers in the morning,’ said Emerson, ‘conservers at night.’) The Cole Group, though, was not vague: it toiled at details of administrative power, having bred a notable Labour Party leader (Hugh Gaitskell), a Foreign Secretary (Michael Stewart) and serried officials and legislators (some Canadian and Australian).

  Today – when Lenin’s image indicates a taste in graphics rather than ideology

  – it is hard to imagine that socialism was once a political juggernaut mounting Marxist guidance-systems, to recall that ambition sometimes preferred communism to investment banking, and that the left might be an alternative orthodoxy as much as an alternative to orthodoxy. If in those days rebel hearts warmed sometimes (misguidedly) to Lenin, they never did to Cole. Both the ruthless totalitarian and the democratic technician were manifestations of established power, and it seems fair to suggest power as the chief interest of anyone who managed to admire the odd couple concurrently. Though transient, Rupert’s leftism hardly seems vague, and not at all rebellious. Mid-century socialists, though often admirable – as was Cole – were rebels only exceptionally. Sometimes they said, ‘Help bring about the inevitable’ – the ideal authoritarian formula.

  It’s noticeable also that Murdoch the ex-socialist is very unlike a socialist – even unlike the social democrats he sometimes encourages electorally. In people undergoing Emerson’s process the mature portrait resembles the youthful snapshot (social attitudes outlasting economic faith). Lately, Rupert’s newspapers have had to abandon one or two of their favourite targets. But over the years few alumni of the Oxford Labour Club can have done more for homophobia and xenophobia. There is no evidence of the rebel in these early years. Nor is there evidence of conservatism, in the ordinary sense.

  Sir Keith died in October 1952 just as the final academic year began. The Melbourne funeral was an emotional pause before the onset of arguments over inheritance which were to intensify during 1953. Rupert’s degree was undistinguished, but that he concluded it surely proves resolution. When he returned to England, an essential relationship began: with Edward (‘Ted’) Pickering, editor-in-waiting at the Daily Express, and an old contact of Sir Keith’s. In 2003 Sir Ted was still a director in Newscorp’s British operation, occupying an office in the London HQ rather grander than the boss’s own. Murdoch identifies Pickering as the first of his two chief mentors (his second, the late ‘Black jack’ McEwen, enters in the next chapter). Pickering, a Fleet Street adept, introduced Murdoch to the curious environment – the curious professional model which became an ideal incubator for his qualities.

  The Express then reckoned itself the world’s best newspaper, and a sale of four million broadsheet copies, on the basis of hard news brilliantly presented, made criticism difficult. British popular papers of the 1950s seem now like dinosaurs galumphing in a Jurassic arcadia. The lost possibility of such creatures evolving otherwise than into today’s tabloid zoo owes much to Murdoch’s character – and much, naturally, to their own.

  The Express was by its proprietor Lord Beaverbrook (Max Aitken, 1879-1964) was by its proprietor Lord Beaverbrook (Max Aitken, 1879-1964) 1951) and Northcliffe (1865-1922) being joint archetypes of the despot publisher – Welles’ Citizen Kane, Waugh’s Lord Copper. How real were their powers – Northcliffe’s, for instance, which dazzled Keith Murdoch in 1915? Certainly politicians had no purchase on Kane or Copper, unlike the case when their originals were born. The Times was rare among early-Victorian papers in refusing bribes, but that became less of an eccentricity as technical advances steadily increased commercial independence. It was a significant moment when Captain Arthur Stevens of the London Evening Standard, finding that American Civil War telegrams were generating large profits, returned his regular envelope of Tory Party cash and instructions with the words: ‘I will see you to the devil first!’

  Hearst, Northcliffe and Beaverbrook were never bribed: the rotary press, said Northcliffe, was ‘more powerful than the portfolio’. But when Owen Glendower says he can ‘call spirits from the vasty deep’, Shakespeare’s sceptical Hotspur asks, ‘Will they come?’ The issue, notoriously, was tested in 1930, when Beaverbrook, and Northcliffe’s brother Rothermere, tried to impose Empire Free Trade on Stanley Baldwin’s government – assailing his candidate for a Westminster by-election with every armament of the Express and the Daily Mail.

  Baldwin’s response was a legendary stump oration. How curious, he said, that Hearst, Rothermere and Beaverbrook fancied newspaper ownership qualified them for political command – Rothermere, for instance, offering to support the Tories if allowed to supervise their policies and their Cabinet selection. In forming an administration, said Baldwin, he would have to tell the King, ‘Sire, these names are not necessarily my choice, but they have the support of Lord Rothermere.’ Repudiating the ‘insolent demand’, he followed up with a lethal soundbite provided by his cousin Rudyard Kipling, saying that what these newspapermen sought was ‘power without responsibility – the prerogative of the harlot through the ages’.

  In routing his enemies, Baldwin showed that a serious politician can crush direct invasion of electoral processes. But it is worth cross-referring the LyonsMurdoch correspondence with less celebrated parts of his speech. The Express and Mail, Baldwin said, were only ‘engines’ for the ‘desires, personal wishes, personal likes and dislikes of two men’. They represented no real interests – not even their famous ambition to save imperial commerce from foreign goods. He quoted sales material that the two managements were using to attract US advertisers, which claimed that with Express and Mail assistance many American brands had become ‘household words in Great Britain’, and he added, ‘So much for the United Empire Party and Empire Free Trade!’

  Beaverbrook and Rothermere were not serious – or not serious about Empire Free Trade in the way Keith Murdoch was serious about radio licences. In another way, the Beaver was serious: the way of the partisan past. He was an eighteenthcentury pamphleteer, his business having grown so profitable through technology that he became his own patron. He patronised additionally much socialist pamphleteering by his ideological enemy and dear friend Michael Foot, later Labour Party leader; no more than Northcliffe did he use newspapers as a direct medium of exchange. But via his technical lieutenant Christiansen he brought about changes in newspaper practice (‘black arts’ he called them) which helped his successors, Rupert Murdoch especially, to do so.

  When Christiansen joined Beaverbrook people understood what the front page was (Ben Hecht had already made it the title of a famous play). Christiansen reinvented it. Columns in Victorian hand-typesetting displayed the regularity of a Greek temple. But after on-line type-casting (‘hot metal’) arrived in the 1890s, headlines and illustrations expanded, and the classical structure decayed. Christiansen dynamited the ruins, recreating the page as free space – into which text and pictures flowed to generate any image necess
ary for projecting the events at his disposal. Though not alone, he was the virtuoso, creating a template which rules every British or Australian broadsheet, and influences many American ones. The Financial Times’ version is the most staid, the Independent’s (or the Australian’s) most polished, but the aim is anyway Christiansen’s – using the whole page (the whole paper) as a swiftly scanned meta-story about the package of stories offered. The layout of the human body makes it harder to do on the tabloid scale (though attempts at it never cease). Limitations of hardware and bandwidth still inhibit Internet emulation.

  Electronic print technology actually favours such an intercourse of word and image. But juggling some 1,200 hot-metal castings per page demanded improbably assorted skills: visual grasp, mathematical insight, verbal wit, Fingerspitzengefühl. It was rather like bonding a wall from small bricks of varying size, while solving (against time) jigsaw puzzles moulded into the bricks. These arts made for a shift in editorial power-structure which, if not irrevocable, remains unrevoked, in Britain especially. They required an expanded corps of printinterface experts: ‘the subs’ (from ‘sub-editor’), a subordinate role which was elevated by technical need.

  With form and content integrated, the British newspaper product improved sharply. But its profession, never so much formalised as in the US or Australian case, split into antagonistic mysteries – for even those few with equal aptitude for subbing and reporting rarely had time to maintain dexterity in both. Positional power accrued to the subs, astride the output channel. Christiansen was the ur-sub, and his disciples expert, office-bound, often happy to come in from the cold of primary newsgathering – invested the Fleet Street village. When Murdoch and his followers say British journalists are the world’s best, they mean – the subs. To William Rockhill Nelson, making the Kansas City Evening Star famous in the 1880s, the reporter was ‘the big toad in the puddle … we could get on pretty well without our various sorts of editors. But the reporter … is the only fellow who has any business around newspapers or magazines.’ Nelson’s Law had been modified everywhere by the 1950s. But the newspaper to which Pickering introduced Murdoch was close to repealing it.