The Murdoch Archipelago

by Bruce Page

  If he meant it, he was massively out of touch with his own country, for Australia was visibly, fiercely divided (in Queensland, core rugby territory, a state of emergency was declared). But he flew to Sydney set on tackling Deamer, and this time with deliberation. When the paper-flipping routine failed again, Murdoch at last said, ‘You’re not producing the sort of paper I want.’ ‘Rupert,’ said Deamer, going to the heart of the matter, ‘I don’t think you know what sort of paper you want. So until you do I’ll go on producing the paper I want.’

  Murdoch withdrew to the Cavan homestead, and conferred over the next three days with Ken May, Menadue and Tom FitzGerald, perhaps the country’s most respected journalist, and recently appointed editor-in-chief of News Ltd. None of these discussions identified actual issues of editorial performance; their aim was to discover whether enough executive solidarity existed to make removal of the editor embarrassing.

  It did not. Menadue, in retrospect, is bleakly self-critical: ‘As manager … my view would not have been decisive against Murdoch’s clear determination. But I had influence and I didn’t support Deamer as I should have … I have regretted it ever since … I was … keeping on-side with the boss …’ Menadue’s motives were not simple corporate ambition. He was a major figure in the opposition Labor Party, and deeply involved in switching Murdoch’s support away from the decayed, long-victorious ruling coalition. FitzGerald also had unsimple motives: he owned the small, distinguished but uneconomic Nation Review. He thought a threat to quit might deter Murdoch, but if he had to fulfil it and lose his salary, Nation would die. He too later thought he had made a sad mistake. May, though he admired Deamer, was purely a footsoldier.

  Murdoch now summoned Deamer, and said he must choose another job in News Ltd – an important one, of course. He seems to have been authentically puzzled when Deamer said, ‘Rupert, you don’t want me, and I don’t want you.’ The relationship of their families had taken much the same course in the second generation as in the first.

  Back at the airport Murdoch met Owen Thompson, an assistant editor of the Australian who had just written to recommend himself for promotion. Thompson found himself made acting editor, and he asked, ‘What’s this about “acting”, Rupert?’ The meaning didn’t long remain obscure, but executive succession at the Australian, the paper’s chequered further history, and the last crossing of Deamer and Murdoch paths must be taken later in the story. A postscript to the Springbok case may be added, however, to illustrate the uses of controversy.

  Non-union transport became available, whereupon the military option lapsed. The demonstrators halted no matches, but believed that their representations to Australia’s cricket authorities influenced Sir Don Bradman’s announcement that cricket against South Africa would cease until selection was non-racial. The debate included some pointed South African remarks about Australia’s own racial record, which are widely thought to have benefited the Aboriginal cause. And on the thirtieth anniversary of the contested Springbok tour a rugby team of Aboriginal schoolboys toured South Africa by way of commemoration.

  Deamer was right that Murdoch had no positive vision of what the Australian should be. But in another sense he clearly knew what he wanted: a vessel empty enough to ship any political freight considered profitable. With Deamer as editor the Australian could not have been used in the relentless pro-Labor campaign which Murdoch ran in 1972, when Gough Whitlam became Prime Minister of Australia. Subtler than his father, Rupert never echoed Sir Keith’s boast that he had put Honest Joe Lyons into that job. He did not suppose he could personally create election outcomes. His concern was creating obligations, as he had successfully done with McEwen – but new ones, as Black jack had become a figure of the past.

  Eric Walsh, author of the Murdoch–McEwen alliance, set to work on its replacement with relish, as the ALP was homeland for him, and its general secretary Mick Young his intimate friend. Walsh, Young and Menadue, toiling like diplomats before a superpower summit, found Murdoch eager but Whitlam severely reluctant.

  In July 1971 Menadue set up a dinner for Murdoch with Gough and Margaret Whitlam, Ken May, Tom FitzGerald and himself. It was awkward, because Whitlam wanted to discuss Deamer’s very recent departure. Two months later the Whitlams spent a weekend at Cavan, much of which Gough devoted to admiring the columnist Mungo MacCallum, one of those whom Murdoch had decided was insufficiently respectful of politicians. Whitlam is huge, sometimes vain or ponderous, but with a core of irreverence. Murdoch is slight, restive, unaffected – except in command mode – but essentially conventional. They found it hard to see eye to eye in any way.

  But the effort went on because the Liberals seemed utterly doomed, and for Murdoch there was the prospect of entering the ground floor of a new political structure. (It was not so for the Packer and Herald groups, Liberals immemorially; even the Fairfaxes, occasional users of a lowercase ‘1’, would be waiting in the street.) Some bonding there had to be, however. Young and Menadue succeeded at last with a cruise in Sydney Harbour, though at first ‘we couldn’t get Gough to be in it. “I’m too fucking busy to see Rupert, I’m too fucking busy” … We finally persuaded him that he had to … and Gough was courteous and relaxed. Rupert paid for the boat.’

  Only ‘some key people in the Labor party’ put more energy into the campaign than Murdoch, says Menadue (who had to manage the Australian in parallel with the ALP campaign: Walsh actually moved to the ALP payroll). Murdoch turned out proposals for speeches and statements, sent to Whitlam through Menadue or Young. Whitlam used only a modest number. But, when he did, their currency was assured:

  I remember one press statement that Whitlam put out about the release of conscripts from jail. I was with Eric Walsh as he spoke to Mark Day, editor of the [Sydney] Daily Mirror. Eric said: ‘It’s a pretty good story that Gough’s put out on conscription.’ Mark said, ‘Oh, it’s old hat, isn’t it? That’s all been said before.’ I remember Eric replying, ‘You’d better believe it’s new, because Rupert wrote it.’ The story was carried.

  Deamer would have killed it. But there were other election stories for which he would have found space – like the true nature of Businessmen for a Change of Government, presented as an alliance of neutral executives with concerns about the state of the nation so grave as to subscribe for advertisements bringing them to public notice. It was a front, devised by Mick Young, with the aid of Walsh – who largely wrote the copy – and Hansen Rubensohn McCann Ericson, the ALP adagency. Murdoch, learning of it, saw no conflict with Walsh’s earlier role as the Mirror’s political editor. On the contrary, he was ‘attracted both by the advertisements and the intrigue surrounding the front we were using. He agreed that he would run the advertisements in his own newspapers free of charge and would pay for their placement in other newspapers …’ Eventually the ‘independent businessmen’ ran A$74,257 worth of advertising, most of it in News Ltd papers. This, with some additional cash, made Murdoch the largest donor to the Labor campaign, some way ahead of his close friend, business ally and poker companion Peter Abeles of Thomson National Transport (TNT).

  From the campaign’s start the Australian sailed as the flagship of Murdoch’s Labor fleet, his other papers taking station in turn. They included now the Sydney Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph, bought five months earlier from Packer, and when they came out for Whitlam some Liberals probably turned their faces to the wall. In short, the Murdoch organisation was slanted utterly in the ALP’s favour during the 1972 elections. (There were no protests or walk-outs by the journalists’ union, as when Murdoch changed tack three years later. The right has rightly taken the point.)

  Enthusiasm came close to producing embarrassment. Work began at the Australian on the speech Murdoch thought Whitlam ought to give at the final rally. Menadue conferred anxiously with Mick Young: ‘We’ve got a bit of a problem … Rupert wants the final speech to be his.’ Baldwin might solicit a punchline from Kipling, but this was a text too far. Eventually some ideas and lines were us
ed, and Young got Whitlam to thank Murdoch for his input. Clear victory on 2 December then swamped everyone in euphoria. Eric Walsh became Whitlam’s press secretary; Murdoch gave a dinner in Sydney including the new Prime Minister and Kay Graham of the Washington Post (which probably confirmed the Nixon administration’s idea that they had lost Australia); and in Menadue’s seasonal card from the Murdochs Anna added to the Happy New Year wishes: ‘–nothing can beat the last, a Labor Government and a new baby’.

  When Murdoch asked, ‘How many seats do you think we won?’ he meant News, not the ALP. He clearly thought enough had been done to earn a reward, and he nominated it via Menadue. He wanted to be Australian High Commissioner in London. This is somewhat like a US publisher becoming ambassador in London after endorsing the correct Presidential candidate. But for a true parallel the American publisher would have also to possess huge business interests in Great Britain, with obvious intent to expand them. US politics has yet to produce anyone with chutzpah enough.

  Murdoch’s diplomatic ambition qualifies the ‘anti-establishment’ radicalism which is supposed to animate him. It may be argued that there is no such thing as the British establishment – or, better, that the term is only an imprecise substitute for the ‘ruling class’. But to the extent that such a thing exists, the High Commissioner for the Commonwealth of Australia belongs ex officio, doubtless ranking below the Archbishop of Canterbury, but comfortably above (say) rankand-file Governors of the BBC. Murdoch’s wish to join the club doesn’t suggest any principled objection to its activities.

  The appointment would have had enormous business value at that time, and that alone would have made it impossible for Whitlam. But the remaining importance of the incident is Murdoch’s denial that it ever took place. John Menadue’s account is quite specific:

  Murdoch raised the appointment with me and explained that if he was the High Commissioner he would put his newspaper and television interests in a trust so there would not be a conflict of interest. He believed also that he could influence other Australian media proprietors and avoid media flak … over the appointment …

  I raised it with Mick Young. The absurdity of it amused him. I put it to Whitlam on the phone. It was the Sunday morning a week after the election. We had a lengthy discussion … But Whitlam was adamant about Rupert for London. ‘No way,’ he said.

  Menadue is a substantial witness. After leaving News he ran the Prime Minister’s Department in Canberra, and then the Immigration Department; he was Ambassador to Japan and chief executive of Qantas, the Australian international airline. His account makes it hard to take seriously Murdoch’s claim never to have asked for political spoils. But it also makes clear that to Murdoch the Whitlam alliance seemed a disappointment – scarcely an alliance at all – and that was to have dramatic consequences.

  6

  MR MURDOCH CHANGES TRAINS, 1969–1975 We have to fulfil our role in the democracy. The basic premise of the democracy we live in must be the citizen’s right to know, and if we do not publish what we know, if we know the facts that are in the public interest and are of importance and do not publish them, then we do not deserve our freedom.

  RUPERT MURDOCH on Channel 9, Sydney (quoted in The Age 18 March 1976) Gough Whitlam’s rejection of the idea that Rupert Murdoch had the makings of an ambassador to the Court of St James’s caused no immediate estrangement, but it pointed the way things would go. The personal connection which Murdoch had enjoyed with Jack McEwen would not be repeated with Whitlam, nor would his close relationship with the Thatcher, Hawke and Reagan regimes be anticipated. No intimacy developed, and so there was little to inhibit the war which broke out two years later, when Murdoch was seen, in his own words, as the man who ‘tore down’ Whitlam – as the destroyer of a political settlement he had helped to create.

  Of course News Ltd’s centre of commercial gravity was fixed in Britain by the early 1970s, and – election times aside – Murdoch’s visits to Australia were growing ever more widely separated. When he did appear there, he began expounding to his executives a theory of media development with two principles which he saw as interacting. To John Menadue he said that ‘to be successful an English-language newspaper group had to be established in each of the major English-speaking markets … He also believed that, increasingly, newspapers and the media were about entertainment and less and less about news.’

  Murdoch himself might be – obviously was – fascinated by political news. (To Menadue he appeared at the time to have some authentically radical instincts.) But he did not acknowledge that Western populations at large might share, other than trivially, his own fascination. Naturally, a journalist may find any kind of subject tedious or irrelevant. But it is very curious when he asserts that something he personally finds central is of declining interest to almost everyone else – and that there is nothing to be done about it.

  Although Murdoch and Newscorp have done a great deal to further media globalisation – at least, to show that it can be pursued as a corporate strategy – it is not really a law of human development. And neither is the displacement of news by entertainment, though many glib formulas suggest as much. To say that ‘globalisation’ has increased is not much more useful than saying the climate has ‘increased’: the term covers a mass of phenomena, with contradictory trends profusely attached, and investigators are hard put to produce a net estimate.

  It’s obviously true that modern communications are swift and powerful. However, an argument can still be made that the world’s political economy was more close-knit in the days of Queen Victoria and the gold standard than is the case today. While some local sovereignty is being ceded to supranational organisations like the European Union, devolution within every such organisation makes the world increasingly polycentric.

  Media industries certainly show many instances of international ownership and control. But, as a contrary example, some of the most stable, successful newspapers are deeply rooted in locality – and these, usually, are the ones offering a sophisticated account of global events. The New York Times and the Sydney Morning Herald, which have between them more than three centuries of experience and profit, are not joined in any global corporation. But each presents the people of its home city with a tolerably detailed picture of the world beyond. The New York Post, the Sun and the Sydney Daily Telegraph are all run by Newscorp; only in desperation would anyone turn to them for global information.

  And it remains true that most of the legislation which affects media businesses

  – liberties and protections, as well as regulation – has a local or national base. Desirable as it might be, there is no such thing as a globalised freedom of the press. The excellent freedom-of-information laws which Scandinavian countries apply are peculiarly Scandinavian. And British regulations which try to provide for a fair market in television products are British made, even if European influence in them is now evident. The ‘media’ are children of the nation-state – often of its municipal sub-divisions – and while the nation-state’s death has been noisily prophesied its obituary is not yet required.

  Rather than a perception about laws or processes, these were statements of Murdoch’s corporate attitudes and desires. The notions he sketched out in the 1970s have since been elaborated – with the aid of assorted philosophers – into a doctrine with many effects, which dresses Newscorp up in a polymorphous supranational identity. Sometimes Newscorp claims to know what people need far better than their elected governments, and demands the right to serve those needs without interference. And at the same time, but elsewhere, Newscorp is quite happy for unelected-powers to decide what the people may be offered, and volunteers to supply the appropriate stuff under official supervision.

  But when first voiced Murdoch’s globalist notions perhaps meant no more than that he lacked the temperament to build authentic newspapers – in Australia or anywhere else – and, having had brilliant financial success with his imitative adventures in Britain, he wanted to repeat the process o
n still larger territory: the US. He invaded America in the conviction – as sincere as any he holds – that British tabloid technique relates to effete American media practice in the way that Cecil Rhodes’ Maxim guns related to the assegais of the Matabele.

  The British expedition was roughly repeated, in that it began with acquisition of some declining down-market property – though the two papers in San Antonio, Texas, were of course tiny beside the News of the World – and then a new but highly derivative venture: the National Star, imitating the National Enquirer rather as the Sun copied the Mirror. The Star did not achieve the same swift liftoff as the Sun – the Enquirer vigorously protected its franchise as the original celebrity-spattered supermarket tabloid – but persistence eventually produced a profitable outcome. Murdoch invested much personal energy in the project. It was, in a way, demonstration of his belief in the entertainment principle, and American commentators who found the Star a tedious rehash he denounced as ‘snobs’ and ‘elitists’.

  The Star has never had any political impact in America, but it affected the Anglo-Australian scene because it was important in shifting Murdoch’s personal base to New York in 1973. Other factors were involved, and one was desperately sad: the wife of a News executive was kidnapped and murdered in mistake for Anna Murdoch, who consequently and understandably found London a distressing environment. Newscorp folklore adds to that true affliction the curiously Edwardian complaint that ‘good society’ had ‘cold-shouldered’ the Murdochs. Of course, such an entity scarcely existed in London’s plutocratic 1970s.