by Bruce Page
Ironically, bushwhacking Maxwell would have been superfluous had the News of the World or the Sydney Mirror (or any of the financial advisers) possessed real watchdog capacities. The truth – demonstrated by the Sunday Times shortly afterwards – was that most of Pergamon’s value existed only in its over-cooked books. (Official proof that the truth was even worse did not preclude City help for later Maxwell swindles, and his reappearance in our story.)
Murdoch of course had been throughout the privileged protege of both Black jack and the Square Mile bluebloods. Yet within a few months he again saw himself victimised by political prejudice and social snobbery – thwarting, suddenly, his British television ambitions. His difficulties began with the News of the Screws.
Turning NOTWO’s profitability around was largely a matter of not being Sir William. ‘I am sober after lunch,’ said Murdoch once, ‘and in some parts of Fleet Street, that makes you a genius.’ It was not a rating Sir William had aspired to for decades. Editorial philosophy was more complex. Six million copies per edition generated vast income – mostly as cash – but this was far from the peak of 8,441,966 in 1950.
The decline of British popular circulations, conspicuous as the 1960s became the 1970s, was associated with broad changes in media technology – most obviously, television’s rise – and with changes specific to individual papers. Defects of the legal system had long aided NOTWO’s trade in prurience and pragmatism (in the old grim sense). When public provision for criminal defence was inadequate, the stories of eminent murderers could be secured by paying their legal fees (the noose usually claimed them in the event, providing an exemplary denouement). Meanwhile police entrapment of homosexuals, contested divorces and unrestricted reporting of preliminary proceedings produced numerous injustices – and acres of low-cost copy.
As legal reforms were imposed and consolidated, the News of the World had to prospect elsewhere for deviant activity, and even before the arrival of News Ltd the results seemed encouraging – in fact, deceptively so. It was natural that involvement with sexual experiment and drugs should become easier to detect from the Swinging Sixties onward. It was ceasing to be deviant.
This helps explain, in social retrospect, why a newspaper once read by almost half the British population was read today by less than one-fifth at its demise (and the Daily Mail shows that popular circulations do not inevitably contract). Profit was richly sustained, but on altered terms. Working inside legal notions of deviance, the News of the World rarely fell out with society. During the 1960s, a behavioural Berlin Wall was crumbling, and when tolerance widens, moral and editorial sensibility is needed to prevent exposé journalism becoming, not just offensive.
News Ltd took control in transitional times, and almost immediately a certain Christine Keeler turned up, with a recycled memoir of her part in the famous Profumo affair. Its publication was a defining moment for the corporate ethos of News International (as it soon became). Profumo in 1963 had been a scandalous classic, incorporating sex, espionage, high politics, low life and aristocratic excess. Its central disclosure – the sex-worker Keeler servicing both the Russian officer Eugene Ivanov and Britain’s Secretary of State for War – was modest as a security issue, though it was sufficient to deflect charges of gratuitousness, whatever lush byways Fleet Street explored. And for overseas papers – notably Rupert’s Mirror
– it had been a bonanza without opportunity cost.
Its revival by the News of the World in 1969 provoked a backlash which staggered Murdoch. The Press Council (like the Takeover Panel) had no sanctions, but what strong words could do they did – with bishops and editorial-writers in support. Murdoch was skinned alive on David Frost’s television show, and indelibly tagged the Dirty Digger by Private Eye magazine. The shock was worse because, briefly, his status as a privileged City dragonslayer had combined advantageously with the charisma of his nationality. Though prejudice is complained of – and insistently, from this moment on, by Rupert himself – the British have usually taken a generous view of Australians, crediting them – from Nancy Wake to Germaine Greer and Edna Everage – with talent and dash, particularly in Fleet Street.
Murdoch could understand the abrupt retraction of his welcome mat only in terms of low work in high places. Lecturing at Melbourne University in 1972, he said there was reason to suspect ‘certain forces’ in British society of ‘coming together … to try to stop us because they did not want the public reminded of the events of 1963’. The real problem was that the events were so well recalled as to make blindingly clear that Keeler II offered nothing new – nothing making it worth while to exhume the corpse of Profumo’s good name and slaughter it afresh. Recycled thus, the classic scandal was a non-story, a classic of gratuitousness – Murdoch’s conspiracy theory being equivalent to the tale of McMahon and the secret agent. Perhaps it was credible to Murdoch himself in some similar fashion. No doubt he was furiously angry – perhaps panic-stricken – when the Dirty Digger reputation seemed to threaten his cross-media ambitions, just as another fat target hove in sight.
In 1970 London Weekend Television (LWT) was in a predicament like WIN-4 Wollongong’s in 1962. The architecture of British commercial television was reckoned a great credit to the Independent Television Authority (ITA). Under a system of regional franchises – which competed and co-operated to produce network output – several companies, Granada perhaps most famously, had become highly profitable sources of original television.
To give further space to new ideas, the second licensing round (1968) split London into weekday and weekend franchises. Whether a lesser base harmed LWT has been hotly argued; certainly it missed its high programming targets, and by 1970 its finances were shaky. Major industrial and media firms held shares, but their board representatives were fractious and disengaged. Dr Tom Margerison, LWT’s managing director, thought a non-executive newcomer with panache and leadership might refocus the board. He thought of Murdoch, and conceived the idea of arranging for the LWT shares owned by the General Electric Company to be transferred to the News of the World.
The ITA regulators were keen to stop LWT collapsing into the arms of the London weekday operator, Thames. But they also needed Margerison’s undertaking that Murdoch – by now operating the Sun also – accepted the legal status of cross-media investment. Such investment was considered beneficial, because the risk of television draining profit from newspapers – and indirectly reducing media diversity – would be less if they held electronic-media shares. But the purpose would fail if editorial controllers of newspapers could control television output, directly subtracting from diversity. Margerison assured the ITA that Murdoch’s contribution to LWT was to be business leadership, not programming, and reported to Murdoch that the transfer depended on this assurance. ‘I said, I have given my word. He said “Yes, yes”.’
In November 1970 General Electric (later Marconi plc, then Telent) sold its LWT interests (7.5 per cent of the voting shares; 16 per cent of nonvoting; 11 per cent of loan capital) to NOTWO. Murdoch replaced Arnold (later Lord) Weinstock on the board, and, according to Margerison, said at once, ‘Now, what about the programmes?’ Margerison said they must be left to the programme controller, Cyril Bennett. Unabashed, Murdoch started to attend programme meetings. When stopped, he took to gathering the participants privately at his house. Discovering this, Margerison angrily reminded Murdoch of the ITA undertakings, to receive the simple answer: “‘Yes, but that was before I came.” He had no thought of telling the truth, unless it was convenient.’
In December a one-for-three rights issue was needed to shore up the LWT finances. It was underwritten by NOTWO, which took up the issue alone. Shareholders like Pearl Assurance and the Economist were perhaps timid – as Murdoch sympathisers suggested – or perhaps sceptical about his leadership. The outcome was NOTWO putting in £505,000 for 35 per cent of the non-voting shares.
Over the midwinter, Margerison got a close-up view of the leadership style he had imported to LWT – by wa
y of frequent requests to visit Murdoch’s Fleet Street office. Whenever Larry Lamb, editor of the tabloid Sun, was present with page proofs, Murdoch tore Lamb ferociously to shreds. If Margerison offered to leave, he would be asked to stay, and he concluded that Murdoch’s domineering and Lamb’s meek acceptance were linked components of an exemplary display. But as managing director he could still insist on the independence of programming. On 18 February, the board designated Murdoch chairman of an executive committee to take command of LWT; immediately he dismissed Margerison. Anthony Pragnell of the ITA now declared that changes in the company were such that had they been in place during the licence competition ‘LWT would not have got the contract’.
Much of the uproar which broke out in Parliament and press expanded on the theme of the Keeler publication, and the nature of News journalism. None of this was inspired, or needed to be inspired, by the ITA: disquiet about the News of the World and the Sun was autonomous and widespread – indeed, much of it was linked with accusations of dereliction by the Authority itself. Bernard Levin wrote in the New York Herald Tribune that ‘Americans who grumble about the feebleness of their FCC can now stop grumbling … Britain’s ITA is even feebler.’ To demands for a public inquiry into the handling of television licences, the government replied that it was up to the ITA to sort things out.
The Authority’s decision was to ‘re-interview’ LWT, allowing six weeks for a new submission to be prepared. And while this was discussed by the shareholders, Murdoch demanded a meeting with (Sir) Brian Young, the ITA Director-General. The Authority, he alleged, had been subjecting him to a campaign of ‘character assassination’: he had been ‘pilloried’ and accused of being unfit to control a broadcasting company. The ITA’s history Independent Television in Britain describes this as a ‘ninety-minute outburst’ in which Murdoch asked the Authority either to welcome him or to disapprove of him – and to do so in unequivocal terms. In any case he ‘required the Authority’s co-operation in repairing the gratuitous damage inflicted on his good name’.
It is remarkable that Murdoch should complain of ‘character assassination’. But the significance of his own exploits against McMahon and Profumo may be that he saw it as a perfectly normal device, which the Authority or any other body might employ for the sake of getting its way. In fact Murdoch’s personal character was not something Brian Young and his colleagues considered. They believed they had to deal with a plain legal issue. There was nothing to prevent NOTWO holding shares in LWT, but under the Independent Television Act nobody could hold executive authority in a television company and control a major newspaper. Nobody could be exempted from the rule, and so Murdoch’s fury at being labelled the Dirty Digger seemed to Brian Young quite misdirected. Character, under the legislation, could only be an issue if control came under discussion.
In a separate provision the Act did require the Authority to refuse television licences to persons of ‘improper’ character. No exact definition was laid down. However, a strong case might have been presented against Murdoch in 1971 based on the circumstances of the smear on McMahon, and the nature of his services to the Deputy Prime Minister of Australia. But the ITA was not examining Murdoch as a licence applicant. And the essential facts were anyway still secret.
As it happened, the London Weekend controversy ran out of steam quite promptly. John Freeman, who had been nominated originally as chairman only to be stolen by the government to be British Ambassador to Washington, was persuaded by David Frost to rejoin the company at the end of his diplomatic term. Frost, a shareholder in LWT, also helped to establish that the Authority was immovable on the cross-media issue. Murdoch then stated that he had never sought executive power at all. Under Freeman, LWT proceeded by orthodox stages to become a successful company and a good investment for News International.
But the interlinked episodes at the News of the World and London Weekend – the drama of acceptance and rejection – turned into essential components of the Rupert Murdoch myth. In this account the ‘British establishment’ decided to exclude Murdoch from any participation in British television, because of revelations made in his fearless newspapers about their degenerate behaviour. From this, his admirers have suggested, was born his drive to build satellite television, and escape altogether from such shadowy totalitarianism. Within this view, extended by Murdoch’s followers into a corporate anti-ethos, there is no need to look at what the newspapers actually do, or indeed to respect doubts or criticism at all. In a battle against hidden and inimical forces rough methods may be required.
The passion Murdoch brought to his expression of distress gained him a degree of sympathy in 1970-1. Could he be so furious without there being something in it? The ITA’s historian correctly denied that the Authority had instigated an attack on him, but thought he ‘had cause for anger’. There is really no reason to think there was any more substance to Murdoch’s complaint of being ‘pilloried’ than there has been substance to the contrasting views he has taken on monopoly and competition when trying to win licences in Australia.
A more credible notion is that Murdoch interpreted his studies with Black Jack McEwen as proving the truth of what he suspected – that laws and regulation never constitute a barrier, given sufficient influence with sufficiently powerful people. Any failure of a desired purpose must be due to an occult resistance not yet identified and won over. Notions of impersonal authority, the essential pillar of civil society, seem entirely absent.
Murdoch’s conduct throughout the LWT episode suggests that he expected the ITA to drop its pedantic cross-media rules, and that he believed it would have, but for a conspiratorial prejudice against him. The ‘character-assassination’ tirade perhaps was a last try at smoking out the ‘real’ objection. In his own case, views could be adjusted to serve any necessary purpose – as he had shown – making it difficult for him to see that other people might be any different.
In the same process with Black jack he had tested and proved an essential capacity. In his Melbourne University lecture – contributed to a series which commemorates A. N. Smith, Australia’s greatest exponent of independent political analysis – Murdoch was particularly concerned to argue that tabloid newspapers of his own sort had been the Anglophone world’s bravest enemies of repression. But he also dwelt generally on relationships between newspapers and politicians, and came to a most respectable conclusion: ‘Politicians do not want watch-dogs – they want control … Their control.’ The lecture conventionally states the newspaper’s duty to refuse the politician’s desire. In reality, Murdoch was already practised in the technique of handing over control.
* The Commonwealth of Australia began producing its own currency, the Australian pound (A£) in 1910, and replaced it with a decimal system, the Australian dollar (A$) in 1966. A$0.96 = US$1.0 = £0.61
5
TRADING TABLOID PLACES, 1969–1980 The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done; and there is no new thing under the sun.
ECCLESIASTES, 1:8 Not even Rupert Murdoch, its proprietor, or Larry Lamb, its editor, thought the first issue of the tabloid Sun looked like a success on Monday 17 November 1969. It was more than three hours late, after a night of editorial and mechanical embarrassments, not least the ceremonial starting of the presses by Anna Murdoch. Following some rather ill-tempered argument, she had been specially inducted as a print-union member, to allow her to punch the sacred button. This to begin with did no more than reveal one of the many electrical faults infecting the ancient machinery. It had been acquired with the News of the World, and seemed to resent the task of rolling out a daily paper after the Sunday was done.
Lamb was a seasoned tabloid practitioner, and his first product as an editor made him squirm. It was littered with misprints, battered type, ill-cropped pictures and uncorrected copy: the lead story, ‘HORSE DOPING SENSATION’, was ‘exclusive’ only in the sense that nobody else cared about it. Many inhabitants of the Sun’s squalid edit
orial floor assumed they had only a few weeks’ employment in prospect; some eased their way through the night’s hold-ups by swigging whisky from pint glasses. When at last a few bedraggled first-edition copies made their way to the nearby offices of the Daily Mirror – the market-leader against which Murdoch was aiming the Sun – Hugh Cudlipp, the Mirror’s editorial director, distributed champagne. He had said the Sun would be no threat. Now he felt sure. But, unpromising as it first seemed, the impact of the Murdoch Sun directly revolutionised the British media industries – and via them, the world system.
Fleet Street in the 1970s was Rupert Murdoch’s Klondike gold-strike (with Larry Lamb as Skookum Jim, the crafty native guide). The cash generated from it turned News into a world-scale organisation, and has nourished it through three decades of shifting fortune. The News of the World was a potent asset anyway, but it was transformed by the synergy between it and the Sun. And the Sun also provides his claim to editorial originality. Murdoch’s reputation (in Britain especially) is that of a master-drummer of circulations. The dread of liberal critics, the esteem of businessmen and the awe of politicians all rest on the assumption that he ‘knows how to run newspapers’ and possesses ‘an instinctive grasp of readers’ demands’. Matters are not really so simple. But certain basic facts are dramatic indeed.
The News of the World had an audited average sale of 6,066,928 for January 1969, the month Murdoch took command. He claimed that envy generated much of the criticism directed at his Profumo rehash; supposedly, it ‘put on 200,000 sales’, and his competitors ‘didn’t like it’. In fact the records of the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) show no real remission in the News of the World’s decline during summer 1969. The trend persisted over the next decade, and by January 1979 the month’s average was down 20 per cent, at 4,785,710.