The Murdoch Archipelago

by Bruce Page

  The curiosity is that Christiansen himself admired great reporters for succeeding where he had not, and intended his ‘black arts’ for their service: ‘Our Page One purpose is to give the hard, cold, complicated picture of real events in bright focus, as well as to project the human twiddly-bits that make for conversation in the pubs.’ This hard, bright expertise fascinated reporters of Murdoch’s generation throughout the Anglophone world, Australians especially. They were inclined to think highly of their own news-gathering – but felt that it might look best in the Express, attracting, perhaps, a line in one of the pungent bulletins Christiansen addressed to the performance of his team.

  While Rupert wrestled with PPE, twenty-eight-year-old Adrian Deamer arrived in London with roughly that idea. Adrian had grown up while Syd edited Frank Packer’s Sydney Daily Telegraph, and went to university set on circumventing heredity and becoming an architect. By the time he had done with the Second AIF and the RAAF, Syd was a legend still but no longer a newspaper power. By the reversed dynastic logic of the Deamers, this opened journalism as a career for Adrian.

  His record of five years with the Telegraph and the Melbourne Age persuaded the Express to offer a trial: an opportunity to survive among the pitiless men and women Fleet Street papers sent out during those days to hunt exclusives. In this he prospered, and led the paper with one of the nuclear defectors of those Cold War years. ‘Newcomer Adrian Deamer gave us a useful beat on Pontecorvo,’ wrote Christiansen approvingly on Adrian’s story of an ex-Italian physicist en route to Moscow with another shipment of British weapons expertise. Deamer was encouraged to stay, but he could see that while the Express still gave a superb postgraduate class in news-presentation, its noontide was past. In 1952 he returned to Australia, not quite crossing paths with Murdoch – who arrived on a very different basis the next year – but taking with him skills which would help him, seventeen years later, save Rupert from corporate humiliation.

  From this point onward the Express appears ingloriously in the background to the Murdoch story, but Christiansen’s idea of popular journalism deserves a parting glance. A newspaper’s business, he thought, was continuously to reeducate both its staff and its audience. Readers might be uninterested in opera, vintage claret, modern poetry or ‘dry-asdust economics’, but ‘It is our job to interest them in everything. It requires the highest degree of skill and ingenuity.’ The Express approach to people in ‘the back streets of Derby’ contained neither flattery nor contempt; it saw in them a ‘thirst after knowledge’. It had little in it of Northcliffe – a commercial, not an editorial innovator – saying his readers were ‘only ten’, and nothing of Murdoch’s reply to a proposal that the Sun in its triumphal 1970s might attempt some current-affairs briefing: ‘I’m not having any of that up-market shit in my paper.’

  One flaw in the Express model has since undermined the entire popular project. Christiansen insisted on a principle that Hearst (and before him Horace Greeley) also stated: ‘There is no subject, no abstract thing, that cannot be translated into terms of people.’ It is true enough to be useful: we may take to physics better with Newton’s apple than with orders to ‘Consider the equation F = MA’. The Express strove to reveal everything through an exemplary victim, beneficiary or hero – of disaster, triumph or insight.

  Yet some abstractions rendered in ‘terms of people’ intrinsically mislead. The image of one gaunt child may project the famine of sub-Saharan multitudes. But no such image of a murdered British child – singularly tragic conveys the absence of multitudes: just the reverse. Infanticide’s decline in modern society is real, but stubbornly abstract. Newspapers’ refusal to engage with abstraction and number corrupts popular reportage most visibly in crime and ethnicity. David Krajicek refers to ‘the tabloidization of America’, but the phenomenon is international, taking place over a half-century in which society has altered in ways which are unavoidably statistical.

  No rigid distaste of audiences for mathematics is responsible for this sports cover is numerate, and opinion-poll data is a tabloid staple when convenient. That popular papers, so far from modernising their discourse, have spent decades in regression is viewed by financial analysts as business realism, owing much to Murdoch’s sagacious leadership. As we shall see, it has been accompanied by a vast decline in popular-newspaper sales – a curious sagacity.

  Under a confident surface the Express at the time of Murdoch’s 1953 tutelage was becoming a vessel of cranky obsessions, ruled by arbitrary power. Pickering was overseer of this process (though the ailing Christiansen held editorial title till 1957). The Beaver might not use his papers for business leverage, but Meyer’s notion of self-restraint was equally remote. Rights to publish he claimed as rights to make ‘propaganda’ – and essentially he had always taken that view. In 1938, when Neville Chamberlain said the Munich Agreement surrendered only a ‘faraway country’, Christiansen felt sick, but Beaverbrook said harshly: ‘Well, isn’t Czecho-Slovakia a faraway country?’ ‘I agreed … and got on with my job of producing an exciting newspaper’ (emphasis added). Admirably, Express philosophy said that ‘important’ was equivalent to exciting, never a lazy synonym for ‘dull’. Less admirably, excitement was something editors could organise independently of its emotional roots, like engineers manipulating electricity irrespective of its generation.

  But war, when it came, changed everything, and among the finest hours it enabled was that of the Daily Express. So far from returning to 1914–18’s ‘golden age of lying’, Anglo-American journalism in 1939-45 was basically honest and frequently superb, and the Express, its technique fired by authentic emotions, operated at the cutting edge. Within the anti-Nazi framework, liberals, orthodox conservatives and outright socialists like Michael Foot could make common cause with Beaverbrook – an effect which did not end immediately in 1945 – and among them were some reporters of a quality hard to surpass, such as James Cameron, Rene MacColl and Alan Moorehead (certainly the Melbourne newsroom’s finest product, able to unite literature and popular journalism as Crane had done for Hearst).

  But by the mid-1950s propagandist orthodoxies were reviving: the Beaver was returning to his political home on the fruitcake right – the slice of it obsessed with Euro-corruptions – and the brilliant individuals, as they moved on, were rarely replaced. Reporters may make mistakes or even lie deliberately, but contact with their sources makes it difficult for them to be good propagandists. Amid oceanic uncertainty, a reporter will cling to any flimsy insight with the object cathexis of a mariner for an upturned boat. And when reporters deform reality, it may not be predictably. The Express solution, in the Beaver’s twilight, was to treat its own reporting staff as a raw input for the creative subs’ desk. I knew a man in the Pickering days who was well paid to write each day one paragraph only – whatever he liked, as long as it tarnished the ‘Common Market’.

  It had also become an advanced workshop of what management analysts wryly call ‘creative tension’. Its shiny Fleet Street palazzo was nicknamed the Black (or Glass) Lubianka: the paper was fascinated by doings in the actual Moscow Lubianka, headquarters of the KGB, and ironic kinship with its own office politicking was implied. Life might be safe, but a job rarely so. The wise sub, it was said, looked around carefully before standing up to fart. It was a bleak environment for dissent, in that almost anyone might be swiftly replaced from the reserve armies in Britain’s provincial cities. The memoirs of William Barkley tell the defining story of a colleague scraping acquaintance in El Vino’s wine-bar, only to find himself talking to the stranger taking over his job the next day. His boss, confronted, could only mutter, ‘But you weren’t supposed to know.’ ‘Well,’ snarled the victim, ‘I used to be a reporter, and I picked it up around town.’

  Nor was the Express unique. Guy Bartholomew of the Mirror set a moral datum by demoting men who left to fight Hitler. In later years the Mirror’s pub was called The Stab in the Back, and his dark spirit probably approved. ‘Come over here – and bring your b
ollocks with you’ was a howled reprimand on the Mirror subs desk well before its incorporation in the Sun’s disciplinary code.

  It is argued here that a chronic natural insecurity dominates the reporter’s occupation. Anyone who has done the work knows that nobody truly escapes being ‘as good as the last story’. It may be surprising that sub-editorial cadres should have endured greater professional instability, for practice skews the natural risks of news-gathering away from them. Rarely invested in the unknown outcome of a particular investigation, the sub selects among known outcomes of many investigations by others (exceptions exist, but the principle is true). If, as in the observable Fleet Street case, subs’ insecurities are as great as those of reporters (and acute as often as chronic) this owes less to chance and necessity than it does to corporate design.

  Power, while individually fickle, has been loyal institutionally to the subs’ desk

  – from which, as Roy Greenslade observes, the recent editors of major British newspapers have chiefly come. Honourable men are employed there (and women, though that reform arrived at glacial speed). But the speciality of presentation encourages some into a corruption classically enunciated by Bernard Shrimsley – one of Rupert Murdoch’s first lieutenants at the Sun – in which journalists allegedly resemble a barrister making a case. A rich man, or corporation, is surely entitled under the law to have a cause selectively advocated.

  This ignores the fact that the Bar accepts restraints which the Sun ignores. But it is anyway a difficult attitude for a reporter, who must retain some capacity for personal engagement on the ground. A test of the difference can be made by asking a barrister for the details of a ten-year-old case; more often than not, it will have been wiped from memory. The reporter’s memory will often be highly detailed, even photographic, and a cross-bearing on the issue is provided by Christiansen’s memoir, Headlines All My Life, in which he says that as editor he never kept a diary, because he thought the files of his newspaper would bring everything back to him. But, when he came to look, most of them conveyed nothing at all. His techniques were capable of destroying their own purpose: they had helped the Express to its reputation as a great reporting newspaper, but turned it within a decade or less into a mechanism which could be disconnected from reality at will.

  Newscorp’s standard counter to charges of tabloid degradation is that its papers do no more than was always done. And the characteristics of its decisive cashspinners, the Sun and News of the World, indeed descend visibly from the Express

  – and to some extent from the Daily Mirror – of the days when Pickering imparted the lore of Old Fleet Street to Rupert. The same ‘creative tension’ appears, the same docile subs concocting ‘exciting’ newspapers, with a lack of restraint that can seem grotesque – though the grotesque was never foreign to the Street. The Newscorp flagship, observes Stick It Up Your Punter – the Sun’s very unofficial history – is and was a ‘rip-off’ from pre-existing notions.

  Murdoch’s defence is ironic, in the Greek playwright’s sense of irony truth more than the speaker knows or intends. The Newscorp tabloids indeed have not done anything more than was done when he started in the game. They have done less. The corruptions of the Express are visible, but today’s Camerons and MacColls, the reporters of high quality, are nowhere to be found in popular newspapers. It is of course astonishing that they ever coexisted with Christiansen’s boss, but an important curiosity about Beaverbrook distinguishes him from Murdoch: he never quit the losing side of a political divide. Indeed no resistance, to the Abdication of Edward VIII, the election of Labour, the independence of India or British accession to Europe, was authentically kaput until the Beaver joined it, and something similar is true of Hearst and Northcliffe. If Plato and Adorno are right that a tyrant sides only with prospective victory, the description does not fit them, despots though they were.

  Orthodox accounts are that Murdoch ‘took a job’ on the Express in 1953 after his Oxford finals and before returning to Australia to join Rohan Rivett at the Adelaide News. This was not a position gained and held in the Deamer manner, nor did he make any comparable impact. Murdoch spent four months on the subs’ desk under the aegis of Ted Pickering. Rather than a job taken, this was a hereditary favour via the late parent’s connection.

  It was no place for Murdoch to repair his lack of expertise. The Express may have been in lesser shape than its paladins thought, but it was still too sophisticated a scene for anyone not already expert to practise journalism seriously. In order to acquire anything of the qualities which remained in the Express, you had to be capable of working in its engine-room. For a visitor on the bridge, there was nothing to be seen except the efficacy of arbitrary power in a newspaper undergoing propagandist decay.

  Besides the chief items of Sir Keith’s will – the Adelaide and Brisbane papers of the Herald chain – what was Rupert Murdoch’s inheritance? From the Herald and his own country’s reporting tradition he was isolated by dynastic choices and circumstances, which accounts for Australia being journalistic terra nullius in the standard accounts of Keith and Rupert. Oxford, which he found intellectually stimulating, drew out his polemic dexterity. When Murdoch nowadays equates Western media regulation to the restraints of totalitarian China – representing both as erosions of the First Amendment, to which Newscorp defers out of respect for global diversity – something may be credited to those PPE essays.

  Like the classical Express, Oxford offers much else. But if rhetorical fluency engages you, the facilities are superb, and even include vocational training for one newspaper department: the leader column, or editorial. John Douglas Pringle (a fine editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, and professional rival of Murdoch’s) reckoned on the basis of his own degree that almost any Oxford graduate could generate leaders with an Encyclopaedia Britannica to hand:

  ‘[they] are a lot easier to write without experience and training than, say, a news report … it is rather like … being asked to write “not more than 500 words” on, say, the domestic policy of the Emperor Tiberius …’

  As this suggests, leaders are operationally trivial – but they are nonetheless critical, because they are the currency in which politicians (unwisely) value newspapers. However shaky his grasp elsewhere, Murdoch has always coped ably with leaders.

  Biographers present Sir Keith’s personal heritage as Rupert’s chief link to Australian roots, and a professionally challenging example. But by taking the father at face value, they greatly underestimate. For a journalist this could only be a heavy incubus. Keith’s heroic national status depended on secret, untruthful smears against an English officer-class he actually toadied to when convenient. His real quality – as a conspirator reckless of national security – expressed itself in efforts to undo a true Australian hero. Something of his role in 1915-19 might be defended as that of a minor agent in largely misguided causes (any credit must be given to Hughes, his boss). Defending Keith the reporter is hardly possible: the First Amendment bargain, as he showed again in 1940, seems never to have crossed his mind.

  In newspaper operations he was ambitious and shrewd, but rarely creative: jealous of skilful colleagues; adept in flattery and credit-poaching; a fluent, imprecise writer; essentially devious; ‘cold and manipulative’, in the words of the historian John Hetherington; a trader of insider secrets and favours, according to George Munster. He wanted to bequeath an empire, but it was one to which his legal and moral title was narrower than he made it seem.

  The Adorno proposal is that disorders of authority arise out of failure to achieve critical distance from our parents – a failure the parents may enhance. This is only denied entirely by the few scientists who say personality is genetic. Mostly, it is agreed that some free will exists, which we must use to gain perspective, and to discover our parents realistically. As nobody finds exactly their desire, distress is likely: respect, or charity, an achievement. Whether the Freudian bestiary – id, ego, superego – is valid science or not, if psychology only resta
tes the Greek tragedians on the fate of parents and children, the force of the Adorno proposal suffices. The struggle for independence is central, wrote Erich Fromm in The Fear of Freedom, both to normal development and to neurosis.

  It was certainly Keith Murdoch’s project to fashion Rupert Murdoch as a continuation of himself, personal and professional – that is, of his own character as publicly defined, and as loyally maintained by his wife. Dame Elisabeth Murdoch* – from every account a strong, generous character, recipient of more unforced respect than any other member of the family – holds intact the image of the hero she married when she was nineteen. To this example she has consistently and publicly insisted the heir should conform. In 1953, she gave him little choice about it.

  Sir Keith considered in the early 1950s a variety of schemes for reshaping the ‘Murdoch press’ outside of, and competitive with, the Herald structure – including a partnership with the Mirror in London. At the same time several colleagues were scheming to eject him from the group, led by the managing director Jack Williams in the role of Keith during the Finks’ latter days. Amid these intrigues, only one big move was complete at Keith’s death – his purchase of the Adelaide News, owned by the group since Davidson’s death. In part-payment the group received options over his far more valuable controlling minority in Queensland Press (the Brisbane Courier-Mail). Doubtless a chess game was halted in which both sides had seen several moves ahead.