by Bruce Page
And then came something like Charles Stuart’s ghost walking in the southern light. The House of Representatives at 3.00 p.m. voted no confidence in the caretaker executive. Kerr’s office agreed an appointment for Mr Speaker Scholes to put this before the Governor-General at 4.45 p.m. But Scholes arrived only to learn that Parliament had just been prorogued. As a mere private citizen, he was shut out. So by the slenderest margin a confrontation of elected and vice-regal authority was averted and how had all this been done so briskly? The proroguing of Parliament is a sizeable exercise, requiring a battery of official actions by the Prime Minister’s Department and others. Fraser had hit the ground running with great speed and precision. Of the many errors lying in wait none was made, and even one might have unravelled everything. (The Labor majority included many republicans, but that would not have stopped a recourse to the Queen had time allowed.)
It was Menadue’s department which organised this. Whitlam’s ‘boys’ had in fact been an administrative success – younger officials did not much regret Sir Humphrey’s departure – and Menadue especially so: the Prime Minister’s Department under him was a sharp, efficient, cohesive outfit. At some time in the last days before Dismissal, Fraser must have seen that expeditiously closing Parliament and arranging elections would require an official team in place – that trying to install a new one would risk fatal delay. So he decided to consider Menadue and all Whitlam’s appointees as legitimate public servants, appropriate for further appointments – exactly the message Rupert Murdoch conveyed to Menadue at lunch. And now a familiar phenomenon recurs. Murdoch remembers the lunch. But he cannot remember anything of the discussion which shows that he understood Fraser’s planning.
Immediately after Kerr’s move, Menadue was with Whitlam and a sizeable group at the Prime Ministerial residence, where the no-confidence motion was being drafted for the House. His office called to tell him the new Prime Minister demanded his presence; he left the meeting and started on Fraser’s problems immediately. Menadue didn’t tell Whitlam where he was going – an omission which troubled him in later years – and Whitlam, doubtless preoccupied, asked nothing. Of course, the last thing he had read about Fraser’s plans for all his appointees – probably the Australian’s story was that they faced instant dismissal. Murdoch, in contrast to his angry staff, had been sensationally well informed. But not so his readers. Even advocacy had vanished from the Australian in the lead-up to 11 November.
Interviewed by Peter Bowers of the Sydney Morning Herald in 1995, Menadue agreed that the Murdoch meeting predisposed him to accept Fraser’s summons, as he knew it would not be a command to clear his desk – something which might well have been expected on the basis of Fraser’s publicly-identified attitude to all of the public-service appointments made by Whitlam.
Murdoch said the Australian’s great interest was ‘the Constitutional issue’, but post-Dismissal this evaporated. The ‘real debate’ became the economy, which it illuminated with a lead story about sharply rising unemployment. Everywhere else falling unemployment was correctly reported: the Australian had reversed things by ignoring the seasonal adjustment it usually understood quite well.
The bias Murdoch’s paper showed in the ‘real debate’ probably had little effect on the election – anyway a foregone conclusion. But it deserves comment because of its extent, and the defence of it he eventually produced. The table below is based on a contemporary study made at La Trobe University, and while the classify-and-measure technique isn’t subtle, neither is the case examined. There need be little surprise about Labor’s zip score in the right-hand column of the first section. This includes the pages openly labelled as opinion (op-ed pages, in US practice). In most papers, though, non-byline news – routine news, the left-hand column – is typically least biased. In the Australian at this time it was more biased than bylined news stories, where some play of opinion is usual in Australian and British papers. This betrays internal resistance: some residual difficulty always exists in manipulating copy to which individuals’ names are attached. Anonymous coverage can be much more plastic.
NB: apparent discrepancies in the two lower sets of figures are due to ‘Unclassified’ not being included. The election was set for 15 December. On Tuesday 9 December the AJA members at the Australian voted to stop work for a fixed period, in protest against bias which they claimed was ethically unacceptable. Next day, the Arbitration Commission ruled that ethics could be a valid industrial issue, and suggested that Murdoch and his principal aides should meet the AJA representatives. Murdoch told his staff that if they disliked the editorial line he was imposing they should set up their own newspapers. It was an argument rooted in Jefferson’s time – though not in his ethic – and in the notion of an infinity of newspapers. It ignored today’s real industry of relatively few franchises, and economies of scale allowing efficient news-gathering – Scott’s scrupulous monopoly.
The idea that in modern conditions media biases can somehow be cancelled out by multiplicity of sources is of course spurious, but it is a favourite rhetorical workhorse of Murdoch’s, and one which has had some political impact. (It recurs later in the context of British and American television.) The true point is that media businesses in a modern economy can be sufficiently profitable to operate without subsidy. But this still involves a duty of attempted impartiality, which in this case was ignored with exceptional arrogance. The meeting broke up in recrimination. Having made their point the journalists returned to work.
Fraser was delighted with the Australian’s performance and invited the editor, Leslie Hollings, to become his speechwriter – perhaps thinking, wrote George Munster, that the editor decided the editorials. Hollings declined.
During the election campaign Menadue had the leisure to write up extensive
notes about the crisis, which enabled him to retain a clear memory of Kerr’s
attitude and of the 7 November lunchtime which has departed from Murdoch’s
recollection. His relations with Fraser followed Murdoch’s prediction exactly:
after nine months’ loyal and competent service he was made ambassador. The visible causes and consequences of the Dismissal were modest. Of course
Strangler Connor’s activities were beyond any democratic excuse, but he was
anyway ejected before the crisis. Labor’s economic sins were never as wicked as
they looked, and the restored Coalition found it difficult to do any better. Less
visibly, harm ran deep. Malcolm Fraser – long retired, and personally reconciled
with Gough Whitlam – has doubted his own wisdom in taking Kerr’s commission.
The manner of the Dismissal, he concedes, damaged Australia more than any of
the constitutional nightmares it was allegedly averting.
That there was unwisdom also on Whitlam’s side – and something of arrogance
– is perfectly plain. His government could well have collapsed, even have been
dismissed, without Kerr’s astonishing ambush. But, had a ‘clear sense of
inevitability’ preceded the use of emergency powers, such a result – however
painful and divisive – would not have carried the freight of deception and
legalistic intrigue which characterises ‘November 1975’ something impossible for
losers to forget or winners to justify; and which might have fatally harmed a less
resilient democracy.
That Sir John Kerr, principal author of the crisis through his inability to
distinguish discretion from deception, confessed no doubt about his role is
unsurprising. Murdoch considers his own role was perhaps significant but also
expresses no regret.
Menadue’s charge is that Murdoch’s conduct amounted to ‘abuse of power’.
And this is obviously true in a general sense. Murdoch had the power to control
the Australian’s content, and abused it, as in 1972, by producing
indefensibly
unbalanced coverage. But the special and perhaps decisive abuse was that the
Australian revealed less than its proprietor knew about the events it purported to
report.
That the use of emergency powers in advance of an emergency was plotted by
several people is obvious, the principals being the Governor-General and the Chief
Justice, and Fraser some time ago ceased to maintain that Kerr’s action was as
surprising to him as it was to Whidam. Conspiracies rarely have well-defined
plans and explicit membership which is why they appear in history, more often
than not, as cock-ups but beyond Kerr, Barwick and Fraser there were others who
knew or suspected much, and Murdoch was clearly one. Very likely he did not
know everything – if he did, we may be sure he has since forgotten – but that he
understood the Fraser camp’s tactical scheme is plain. The details of the
ambassadorship were too specific to be guesswork.
The story of Fraser’s new attitude to – new long-term role for – the head of the Prime Minister’s Department should have been in the Australian some time in the week ending 9 November. Menadue’s account makes evident the level of confidence Murdoch had in his story. It was, if benchmarks are needed, a betterfound story than the nonsense about liability for the vice-regal costs or – making an earlier parallel with Murdoch’s journalism – the involvement of Treasurer
McMahon with foreign agents.
But Murdoch’s instinct was not to publish, any more than his father’s had been.
It was to dole out an insider’s tale in just the way likeliest to aid his partisan cause.
Menadue did not see himself as a mere Whitlam henchman, but as a public servant
with a duty to any formally appointed Prime Minister, and it was in that capacity –
not out of hope for a glamorous ambassadorship – that he organised the
prorogation. But that was the essence of Murdoch’s lunchtime story: Fraser had
accepted the legitimacy of Whitlam’s officials, and expected to work through
them. A real reporter would have gone public with that – it was quite a scoop, in
fact – leaving the actors to make of it what they might.
Would it have changed the outcome? It is hard to think Kerr’s secret could
have survived, for that was the nearest of near-run things. Whitlam’s Treasurer,
Bill Hayden – a detective in pre-political life – was almost certain that Kerr was
deceiving Whitlam, and for him the story would have confirmed a plot in hand. It
would surely, have led to other stories, and then the events of Tuesday would have
unrolled otherwise, for the Speaker and his majority, given the slightest advance
warning, would not have let themselves be moved so readily off the stage. The anger of ALP loyalists who believe Murdoch ‘tore down’ Whitlam has
usually focused on the biases of the kind shown in the La Trobe research. But they
should rather have recalled ‘Silver Blaze’, the story in which Sherlock Holmes
searches for a missing racehorse, and draws Watson’s attention to ‘the curious
incident of the dog in the night-time’. The doctor protests that surely the dog did
nothing. ‘That was the curious incident,’ remarks Sherlock Holmes. The surest thing is that Murdoch’s entire participation represents an approach
to First Amendment tasks utterly unlike the standard set at roughly the same time
by the Washington Post. His was centred on rhetoric, concealment or selective
disclosure in aid of a final cause. The political payoff for Murdoch was not
something simple and immediate, like Jack McEwen’s help with the News of the
World. His relationship with Fraser in office was not much closer than his
relationship with Whitlam had been. All that he gained initially from being on the
winning side was a narrow escape from the losing one. But the later outcome
shows us that the true symbiosis of Newscorp and politics was in train. To add to his repute as a circulation magician, the Dismissal gave Murdoch the
name among politicians of a kingmaker and un-maker (something British exploits
would soon enhance). The ALP’s leaders saw ‘the media’ – along with Kerr and
Barwick – as the cause of Whitlam’s fall, and Newscorp as the media’s cutting
edge. We know this was grossly oversimplified, because Murdoch’s partisan
operations would never have begun without the prior effect of disclosures he could never have organised. But the conclusion Whitlam’s successors Bob Hawke and Paul Keating drew from the Dismissal included little subtlety. It was never to fall
out with Rupert Murdoch, and on the contrary to find ways of appeasing him. With Labor returned to office in the following decade, we shall see them
assisting Murdoch into monopoly influence over Australia’s metropolitan
newspaper industry. Told in Chapter 13, the story shows well that monopoly
insulated Murdoch from the moral hazards of its purchase: a primary example of
the process in which politicians, by making a fantastical estimate of Newscorp
power, confer on it increasing substance.
Many details of Murdoch’s Australian record were obscured from public view
in Britain and America during the years when he gained similar – if less
comprehensive – power in those countries. But because the public were unaware,
it should not be thought that the politicians who helped him over legal obstacles
also were. Murdoch was welcome to the political elites of the northern hemisphere
not because they were naive about his business model but because – like the ALP
– they thought it promising.
The title of this chapter is of course adapted from Christopher Isherwood’s
fable Mr Norris Changes Trains, set in Berlin between the world wars. Mr Norris
is adept in trading and betraying allegiances. He isn’t presented as actively wicked
– the narrator finds a certain charm in his freedom from shame. To Mr Norris, it
does not matter with whom he does business, only that he can somehow do it.
Allegiance for him is purely tactical, and people suppose they are using Mr Norris.
But he is a practised operator and they often overestimate their own skill.
7
AN AMERICAN NIGHTMARE, 1801–1980 You cannot hope to bribe or twist
Thank God, the British journalist.
But seeing what the man will do
Unbribed, there’s no occasion to.
HUMBERT WOLFE, The Uncelestial City … of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.
ALEXANDER HAMILTON, founder of the New York Post Many journalists (practising and academic), media commentators and political spokespeople hold that news and entertainment media in America – by extension, in the world – have declined in quality over the past thirty-odd years. The majority position is generally pessimistic, and sometimes apocalyptic: going so far as to doubt the survival of democratic institutions which require an informed, conscientious citizenry. A smaller, more cheerful group claims that things have improved, that dull, self-important journalism has given way to a streetwise populism speaking directly to the people in language they enjoy and understand. This method has been successfully cross-bred into television.
A sub-text of the argument is that many of the tabloid techniques involved were imported to America from Britain – or re-exported, perhaps, from Fleet Street to their place of origin in New York. One side speaks of a corrupt miasma, and
the other of a keen and bracing wind. If there are excesses, say the optimists, they represent a turbulence which has always existed – a cost of liberty which cannot damage a robust people. Where the two sides agree is first that Rupert Murdoch has been central in the process, and second that the decisive phase began with his purchase of the New York Post, America’s oldest surviving newspaper, in 1976, and his startling reconstruction of it, imposed the following year.
The points of agreement between the admirers and the critics of Murdoch seem well based. But it is remarkable that a newspaper which has never made money in his hands – has been for the most part desperately unprofitable – should have had such a seminal impact. If nothing else, it shows that the Murdoch story involves complexities: the Post could not exist within a publishing organisation oriented towards profit-making by conventional, rationalistic means. It is when talking about the Post that Murdoch has said that running newspapers is not, basically, about profit. It is about ‘making the world a better place’ – not a stance he is famous for defending.
But the statement calls for something more than incredulity, given a consensus that the Post’s influence outdoes its slight economic prowess. Clearly Murdoch has made adherents, and at the very least some attempt must be made to grasp what his concept of a better place may be. All the same, the power and extent of the Murdoch empire has not been enough to convince many media analysts of this altruistic purpose, except those actually on its payroll. Many, probably, would go along with the swingeing 1982 judgment of the Columbia Journalism Review (cited earlier), which in 1982 described the New York Post under him as no longer ‘a journalistic problem [but] a social problem, a force for evil’.
Calling a newspaper other than the Völkischer Beobachter evil may appear melodramatic. But precedent exists in New York’s combative past. One of the most formidable of the Post’s great editors, Edward Lawrence Godkin – though using a Victorian idiom – produced a century earlier a very similar denunciation of what was in his day called ‘yellow journalism’, and which both he and the CJR would certainly have thought equivalent to Murdoch’s output: ‘A yellow journal office is probably the nearest approach, in atmosphere, to hell, existing in any Christian state. A better place to prepare a young man for eternal damnation than a yellow journal office does not exist.’