by Bruce Page
Such sentiments helped to dress up a commercial coup – merited in terms of energy and nerve – as something greater. The financial worth of News International was reckoned so overwhelming as to demonstrate lasting editorial achievement, based on supreme refinement of Mencken’s Law. But the fact that capitalism has lived alongside free media far better than its rivals does not mean its valuations apply sensibly to news-media assets beyond the immediate term (communications infrastructures, like railways and the Internet, similarly escape its measure). Christiansen’s time-scale of ten or fifteen years was tolerably accurate. But for some journalists, and most financial analysts, it was just too long.
Of course there were (and are) other assessments. One carrying liberal-left overtones suggested that popular newspapers all became culturally worthless – financial value aside – during the 1970s, and should face inevitable erosion in a society increasingly dominated by television. This can still attribute great potency to News, for Murdoch and his followers may be seen as strategists of damageresistance – even as demoniacally skilful ones by those who find that some tabloid exploits make them gag. Such assessments subsisted readily together while circulation trends were still ambiguous. But we now know that the television environment was not corrosive to all British newspapers. The Daily Mail, a Popular by history and technique, grew steadily in the television environment after its 1971 relaunch in tabloid format. (That progress can be seen starting in Figure 2.) It requires more analysis when broadsheets enter the Newscorp story (along with terms like ‘mid-market’), but may be taken already as disproving inevitability.
Worldwide evidence is that serious newspapers usually coexisted quite happily with television – though the Web makes another story. It’s therefore important to establish at this narrative stage that a major part of the strategy Murdoch and Lamb initiated with the Sun was a hot, close embrace between tabloid and television – cohabitation, more than coexistence. Insofar as they added anything to the Mirror formula, it originated in their view that television was getting ‘far less coverage than the huge role it played in … readers’ lives warranted.’ The Sun, Lamb and Murdoch both agreed, would cover TV in great depth. This was a resolution thoroughly made good – the origin of a practice in which television’s fictions are reported with more intensity than most of the actual world (though mixed with incursions into the actual lives of the actors projecting the fictions). It was swiftly emulated, and during the 1970s a symbiotic relationship with television came to be accepted as fundamental to tabloid vitality. The question to be asked later in the story is whether television’s effect on newspaper readership has been rather subtler in the long term.
Another important sequential point is that today’s high levels of distaste for popular papers – whether or not justifiable – would have been hard to justify purely on Fleet Street evidence in the years 1970-80. Present feeling reflects the cumulative effect of things done to and with tabloids – primarily by Murdoch and his entourage – and many of those things happened elsewhere in time and place. Larry Lamb’s Sun was crudely derivative, and many of its scoops were factitious. But it was never much like the Murdoch New York Post, a paper which the Columbia Journalism Review called ‘a social problem, a force for evil’. Nor was it Lamb’s Sun which the media commentator Raymond Snoddy said in 1990 had become a ‘bigoted, foul-mouthed fantasy factory’. Lamb, who left the paper in 1981, was an unhappy witness of that progress.
But it of course was never Lamb’s Sun – it was wholly Murdoch’s. There was no journalistic sense in which Murdoch had made the Sun, but he had made its editor, and never allowed Lamb or anyone else to forget it. By the 1970s the corporate style of News was fairly mature, and distinctive for curious practices which Murdoch developed as intrinsic to his authority. The first to become notorious were the phone calls. These any executive had to expect from any international location at any moment, and consisted from Murdoch’s side of terse enigmatic questions and long, eerie silences. The effect, as John Menadue states, was to create insecurity in those who submitted – that is, everyone, for anyone who rebelled was disposed of. Free spirits occasionally tried out-silencing the boss. Most embarrassed themselves with their garrulity, says Menadue, and Murdoch collected many hostages to fortune.
Administrators, like Menadue himself or the finance director Mervyn Rich, were least affected as they were working in areas where the corporate agenda might be quite orthodox – or largely orthodox in professional terms. Rich and Murdoch from the early days of News conducted an intense crusade against corporate taxation, and many accountants might think it morally dubious. But they would not think of it as something counterproductive to doing accountancy at all – as it would be to make credit entries without matching debits.
Pressure fell mostly on journalists – placed anyway in the company’s front line
– for their equivalent of the accountant’s double-entry rule was subjected to a contempt barely (if at all) disguised. At its best or its sleaziest journalism depends on exchange and interaction: events and individuals (the controllers of the system, as much as its subjects) must be interrogated continuously, with no judgment being immune. No other means exists to extract sense from the gabble of incident. Murdoch imposed from the top of News an arbitrary style, stripped to an unprecedented degree of all such dialectical qualities.
The tension the lopsided phone calls set up was enhanced by Murdoch’s intermittent appearances at Sun edition-planning meetings, where he would promote story-ideas which Lamb – painfully, speechlessly – recognised as consistently ‘wooden-headed’. Though they were rarely implemented – were uneasily forgotten for the most part – they were never treated to the brusque tests such gatherings exist to apply. As Chippindale and Horrie put it, ‘Murdoch expected his every word to be listened to’, but did not ‘show the same interest in what Lamb and the others at the paper had to say. He would sit in meetings firing out questions into space and moving on to the next one before the people had a chance to reply fully. He would leave meetings without explanation … having lost interest in the topics under discussion …’
There was no operational need for Murdoch’s appearances. But the remission of Lamb’s usual way with inadequate notions – harsh, even brutal – produced a clear message. Other people’s judgments could not engage with Murdoch’s, but Murdoch’s would take no coherent form and might (at some risk to fortune) be ignored, so long as they were not challenged. Beaverbrook’s and Hearst’s bizarre views were rarely arbitrary in this sense – not even Northcliffe’s, until his clinically insane phase. Rather they were cut in firm relief: Beaverbrook freely employed the telecoms of his day to goad his editors, but occult silences were far from his style.
The dominion Murdoch imposed was nearly free of content – something apologists have emphasised, particularly veterans keen to testify that service with News involved (in their own case) no ethical discomfort. There is nothing very apparent as a Murdoch programme, they say, and what there is a little modesty can circumvent. The argument has appeared effective in some phases of News history, and in others it has seemed more like a suggestion that it wouldn’t matter if the chairman of a hospital supervised operations without a mask. For the real effect was to demonstrate that basic editorial procedure ultimately had at News the status of a charade – a further stage in the expulsion of judgment which began at the Sun by displacing all estimation of quality and readership in favour of the pseudoobjective circulation theory (which Lamb, its promoter, would live to regret).
Even when the sub’s reflexes have virtually abolished the reporter’s even with cynicism and incompetence lavishly supplied – an attachment to collective method inhibits journalists from acting nakedly as conduits of propaganda. Murdoch, who had done exactly that to oblige Black jack McEwen, made plain that such attachment carried no weight with him.
And this empty domain was ruled by fear, efficiently distributed. The sessions between Murdoch and Lamb to which Tom Margerison
had been an unwilling early witness developed into a ritual built around comparisons between Sun and Mirror. Murdoch:
would lay the papers next to each other and flick through the pages, complaining if he thought the Mirror had done better on any particular story. ‘Why did you print this dreadful rubbish?’ he would ask Lamb … ‘What’s all this crap about poofters?’ he would enquire when there was a fleeting reference to homosexuality …
Any such reference, irrespective of substance, was apt to trigger a ritual joke: why did the sun never set on the British Empire? God, Murdoch pronounced, didn’t trust the Poms after dark. Stick It Up Your Punter says he got a laugh with this initially – an easy one if so, for it was perhaps as old as the First AIF – ‘but Lamb ground his teeth as it was endlessly repeated’. These sessions were wholly one-sided, their acrimony varying only with the chairman’s mood, and Lamb was reduced to searching for ways it could be manipulated. He thought that Murdoch, a gambler, was superstitious and might be influenced by astrology. Thus the Sun’s stargazer had to ‘doctor the Pisces entry to assure his chairman … that he would have a good day and to cast his bread upon the waters …’
Lamb was not a supine character – indeed, friends saw in him a rage which was usually suppressed but never assuaged – and he believed strongly in his own capacities. But he could achieve no relationship with Murdoch other than subservience. And what Lamb had to endure he also imposed, perhaps inevitably. He said he hated to rule by dread, but it was the result: people called the passage outside his office ‘The Giant’s Causeway’, after the Ulster landscape haunted by legendary ghosts.
The rise of the Sun and the rebirth of the Australian were parallel events, and illuminate each other. Of course in Australia there had been nothing to imitate – no concept of what a national newspaper might do and after the Max Newton debacle Murdoch could find no fresh editorial direction. John Menadue’s evidence is that closure was only weeks away at times. It doubtless owed its reprieve chiefly to political utility (which meant that closure would have been a dangerous defeat). Some fiscal footwork helped: Mery Rich shunted the paper’s deficit of A$20,000 a week (‘a lot of money in the late 1960s’) around cash-rich sections of the News group via a series of licences. And with the News of the World in the bag the losses looked much less daunting.
But, while Murdoch occupied himself in London, editorial salvation turned up of its own accord. Adrian Deamer, bored at the Herald group in Melbourne, had joined the Australian as assistant editor, and found it the most disorganised newspaper he had seen. The post-Newton vacuum Murdoch filled, after much delay, by appointing Walter Kammer, but Kommer was unwilling and asked Deamer to take over while he moved to the business side of News. Though not Murdoch’s choice, it was both the best editor and the right one.
It appeared to many people then that Australia might have still more federal disparities than America, and still poorer prospects for nationwide publishing. Canberra seemed as remote to many Australians as Washington to Americans before the Second World War and the imperial presidency. New South Wales supported (as now) enough political mayhem for several sizeable countries, paying faint attention to other states (which reciprocated the ennui). And devotion to sport may be universal without unifying: Australia does not have as many regional sporting idioms as France has regional cheeses, but an editor might think so (and just then cricket, the one national sport, seemed in temporary decline).
In fact, the opportunity existed. There was an economic boom – partfed by mineral speculation – and simultaneously a synergy between three issues with national content. There was the Vietnam War – breaking the tradition that only volunteers should fight in foreign wars. There was land ownership, with real legal challenges being made to the expropriation of the original Australians. And this was the crisis-point of apartheid’s bid for world acceptance, making sporting relations with South Africa explosive. The combination tested Australian concepts of ethnicity, social equity, military honour and sporting decency further than existing newspapers recognised – and lifestyle, furthermore, was changing in ways their discourse barely registered. The Sydney Morning Herald, like the Sun, excluded ‘orgasm’ from its vocabulary, and was little better equipped for mature discussion of morality and gender.
Circumstances appropriate for creating a significant new newspaper are clearly unusual – it is another aspect of the accidental quality which Max Weber diagnosed in journalism. The final circumstance, perhaps least usual of all, is the presence of an appropriate journalist.
Adrian Deamer had been a reporter good enough for the Daily Express in its last bright phase, but his chief gift was for imparting architectural logic to a newspaper, edition by edition. Something of this he gained watching Arthur Christiansen packing news and features into the Express, but he knew he had started with ‘a good eye’, and technique for once was servant to the moment. What struck people about the Australian once Deamer took charge was its limpid structure – a simple paper to use, even when it presented a ‘hard, cold complicated picture of real events’. It was not, for the most part, very opinionated about the nation’s issues, but conservative politicians (of various ideologies) thought so, because it illuminated matters which obscurity improved for them. (Deamer’s own views were left-wing, but he held that partisanship should never appear in newscolumns, and only sparingly in editorials.)
Though promotion was modest, circulation, having sunk to 50,000 in 1968, effectively trebled, reaching 141,000 (in one audit period) in 1970; instead of humiliating losses there were increasingly frequent periods of profit. Not remotely was it a financial bonanza like the Sun, but by 1970 it was on the way to becoming a first-class property. And in spite of cross-readership with the deep-rooted Sydney and Melbourne broadsheets, this was essentially a new product in a new market, not a cheap substitute in an existing one. (There was a general slump in 1971.) ‘The Australian,’ wrote Professor Henry Mayer, the country’s leading press historian, ‘has created its own personality; it is a paper … about which people argue and to which some have a strong attachment. For the first time in many a decade here is a paper some of its readers feel they like … [and do not simply] find bearable …’
Technically, it was becoming pre-eminent. David Bowman, then on the Sydney Morning Herald, remembers that day after day the SMH news conference began with a sad admission that the Australian had found the dimensions in the day’s news that everyone else had missed. Managers like John Menadue and Ken May (still wincing at the Canberra Times defeat) were equally pleased. But Murdoch was not. Although preoccupied in London, he took what opportunities he could to make that visible.
He used the same approach in Deamer’s office as in Lamb’s – flipping through a run of papers, picking out individual stories, and demanding for each one the editor’s instant, detailed provenance. Technically, this is an absurd scale for assessing a daily paper, where decisions flow densely and reflect much random turbulence. In a real news operation, the editor knows – should know – little more about individual stories than a divisional general knows about company commanders’ actions. An editor must maintain an overall mental scan of the process, and many fail through excessive second-guessing.
The Murdoch inquisition was a technique of personal domination with zero professional relevance (as Larry Lamb knew). But it bounced off Deamer. Each time Murdoch asked why this story or that story made the paper, a roughly similar answer resulted: ‘Christ, Rupert: I don’t know. If you stick around while we’re getting the paper out, you’ll find out that kind of thing.’ Nor was the telephone method applicable. It exploited the obligation people usually feel to succour a dying conversation. Deamer always put such things immediately out of their misery. All this might have been welcome among rugged colonials. But Murdoch found it distasteful, and fell back on grumbling that the Australian exhibited ‘bleeding-heart attitudes’ and apparently wanted to see ‘the country turned over to the blacks’. Menadue says, ‘Murdoch spent a lot of his life
tugging it back from the left when he came under pressure from his business friends’.
In July 1970 Murdoch was in Sydney to announce the Sunday Australian – pointedly under separate editorial control. (It somewhat resembled the Newton Australian, and never prospered.) Departing, he summoned Ken May to the airport, and told him to order changes in the daily paper: removing or restraining columns and cartoons which had caused distress in the political class, and placing over Deamer as editor-in-chief a former golf columnist named Neal Travis, briefed to constrain new excesses. When May retailed these instructions, Deamer pursued Murdoch by phone, and asked, bluntly, ‘What’s this about Travis being put in over me?’ ‘That’s something you’ll have to work out between yourselves,’ said Murdoch (who dislikes confrontation not initiated by himself). Deamer told Travis and May that he would ignore Murdoch’s vicarious instructions and any personal ukases Travis might care to offer. Little of this had effect, because May feared that internal disputes might bring back chaos, and Travis had little relish for his task.
In June 1971 South Africa’s Rugby Union footballers arrived to tour Australia, and when transport workers ‘blacked’ these all-white Springboks the government offered to supply military aircraft. The Australian in a front-page editorial said this was a ‘cynical misuse of Prime Ministerial power’ which would ‘divide Australia’. Murdoch, in London, declared furiously that this was the worst thing since Newton’s attack on Catholic schools.