The Murdoch Archipelago

by Bruce Page

  The Post seems to have been the first Murdoch paper to attract quite so unsparing a verdict. Larry Lamb’s Sun (the Mark I version) was called scurrilous, irresponsible, pornographic (frequently) and many other things, but not with any deliberation ‘evil’ – and nor were the ratbag follies of the early Australian and the Sydney Daily Mirror. Not until the Kelvin MacKenzie (Mark II) Sun of the 1980s do we encounter an equivalent loathing.

  It’s stimulated by protean characteristics in the case made for the defence. First, ‘darkly playful’, but sentimental: the Post experience is described as a (physically) reeking chaos ordered by intermittent bullying where images of rotting corpses are privately hoarded, and display (‘HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR’, and so on – see p 195 below) is optimised for callous glee. Amid this, we’re told, jovial togetherness breaks regularly out – like the gothic critters of Hieronymus Bosch rendering a chorus from Oklahoma!. Second, furiously proletarian and resentful: Murdoch denouncing the Post’s critics (especially those from Columbia at the other end of town) for being ‘snobs’ and anti-democrats. Third, high seriousness: this is a newspaper nearly as old as the Republic, offering not just a ‘bracing start’ to New York’s day, but a tireless attack on abusers of the public trust. Fourth, towering pretension: surely it is unique for a paper’s headlines to be praised for their pure ‘trochaic rhythms’, or its text by reference to the literary theories of D. H. Lawrence? Some of this can be rendered as a family quarrel among New York institutions with competing notions of journalism – American ones, naturally, but with resonance beyond America. Uncles from Fleet Street, often unsavoury and arguably evil, have been heavily involved.

  The first attribute of the Post is the aura of its creator – one of the indispensable geniuses who built the US Constitution. Alexander Hamilton happened to be a journalist of dramatic originality. The newspaper historian Edwin Emery calls him ‘one of the fathers of the American editorial. His perspicacity, penetration, powers of concentration and clarity of expression were those of a premier editorial writer.’ This even understates Hamilton, who also was a brilliant soldier, lawyer and administrator, and who established both the financial system and the naval security of the youthful Republic – even if he was a lesser pistol shot than Aaron Burr.

  But his essential contribution to the liberty of news media – one with impact far beyond his own time and nation – was consolidating the Zenger truth principle, first constructed by his namesake Andrew Hamilton to deflect corruption’s antique blunderbuss, the law of seditious libel (see Chapters 2 and 4 above). This was part of Hamilton’s extended quarrel with Thomas Jefferson (elegantly proving the value of conflict between quality opponents). Though Jefferson in 1787 had famously rated the liberty of newspapers as more important than the reputation of government (see Introduction above), he saw things a little otherwise when president, and in 1803 he persuaded New York State to indict Harry Croswell for seditious libel. Croswell, editor of the Wasp, had alleged that under Washington’s administration Jefferson had bribed an editor to defame the president. Croswell was not allowed to defend his report by trying to prove it true.

  A six-hour exposition by Hamilton – usually thought his finest – failed to rescue his fellow editor, but it split the appeal bench, and in 1805 the state legislature adopted his argument, making proven truth a statutory defence to any defamation claim. In 1812, the Supreme Court abolished seditious libel as a cause of action in the federal courts. These were for Hamilton posthumous victories, thanks to the fatal duel with Burr in 1804, and in their own time they were not absolute. But that does not reduce their importance even slightly, for the principle he established even if only imperfectly observed – underpins the accountability of government, the saving grace of Western power.

  The New York Evening Post started life on 16 November 1801, with William Coleman as its nominal editor, but Hamilton plainly in charge. It promised to avoid ‘dogmatism’ and to:

  diffuse … correct information on all interesting subjects … being persuaded that the great body of the people of this country only want correct information to enable them to judge of what is really best … all Communications, therefore, shall be inserted with equal impartiality … we never will give currency to anything scurrilous, indecent, immoral or profane …

  Hamilton was of course a federalist – a conservative – but his central allegiance was to free debate, and under William Cullen Bryant (editor for fifty years, with gaps, from 1829) the Post evolved as a major vehicle of liberalism, supporting Lincoln, and giving fair hearing to organised labour when that was a quaint idea.

  However, the most vehement – and effective – campaign of Bryant’s successor, Godkin, was his assault on sensationalist (‘yellow’) journalism. He declared war as editor of the Nation magazine, and extended it when he went to the Post, gaining the support of other journals like Collier’s Magazine and the Dial. Given today’s Murdoch connection, this is a sizeable curiosity. Godkin, according to Emery, was an editor of striking austerity: ‘He disliked sentiment and color in the news, and he would have liked to have kept all news of crime and violence out of the paper.’

  The history of sensationalism is often over-simplified, and particularly in accounts agreeable to Murdoch. William Shawcross’ biography, in leading up to the Post takeover of 1976, conflates nineteenth-century phases with twentiethcentury ones, and suggests that American newspapers right up to Second World War days were tabloids largely staffed by boozy sociopaths. On such a base, the antics of the post-1976 Post appear in lesser relief. The true story is involute, and not yet done: the twists and turns are hard to compress without distortion. But, on a fair argument, the ancestry of American sensation does trace to Britain. That is, New York’s first cheap newspapers, beginning with Benjamin Day’s Sun in the 1830s, took their lead from London’s police-court sheets. Day’s co-owner George Wisner was an Englishman who had developed his relish for mayhem among the Bow Street Runners.

  The journals written and read by people like Hamilton and Madison varied of course in quality (though rarely has magnificence been closer to being routine), but their subscribers were prosperous merchants and professional gentlemen. A reference to ‘the people’ did not mean ‘proletariat’, for few members of such a class existed in American cities until a third of the nineteenth century had passed. It was only as their numbers increased that pay-as-you-go ‘penny papers’ like the Sun appeared to provide them with both information and entertainment. Though media analysis may treat the two functions as separate (even contradictory) their ultimate relationship is a subtle interplay, similar to that between truth and fiction. Earlier chapters traced something of this in reporters such as Stephen Crane and Rudyard Kipling, and should include adulterated cine-history and present-day documentary scams. Subtlety, however, scarcely entered into penny-paper operations.

  When Richard Locke wrote in the Sun a three-part account of daily life on the Moon he knew perfectly well his ‘information’ was fraudulent, and the intimacies provided about aristocratic passion across the Atlantic must also have been on-site concoctions. Day and his followers rummaged through experience like infants in a bran-tub, and used anything they found – inconsequential or fabricated – so long as it seemed likely to be startling.

  But to improve radically on this method was actually hard. Untruth in an earlynineteenth-century newspaper might or might not be reckless, but was anyway endemic. ‘Insertions’ (articles or stories) had to be based largely on letters, and excerpts from other journals delivered by irregular mails. Verification was rarely possible outside an immediate locality, and the real origin of much content inevitably unknown. In The School for Scandal (1777), Snake says that because the paragraphs he plants for Lady Sneerwell are always composed ‘in a feigned hand, there can be no suspicion whence they came’, and for several decades after Sheridan’s time things changed little. The Times in London was developing an organised news staff, but its wealth as yet had no parallel. James Fenimore Coop
er complained in The American Democrat (1838) that most of what the new urban classes might find in a newspaper would be misleading, but often for no more reason than the ordinary editor’s slight ‘means of ascertaining the facts’.

  Day startled his contemporaries most thoroughly by showing that the literate poor made a profitable audience. But he only started things. It was in the second half of the century that growth of circulations became explosive – and alarming – through the interaction of demographic change and electric press technology. America’s urban population increased by half during the hectic 1880s, when Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World recorded the first quarter-million sale – reaching 1.5 million during the next decade, with William Randolph Hearst hot in pursuit.

  Briefly, but not unfairly, the offence of these rich and growing organisations was that they were acquiring ample resources, technological and financial, for ‘ascertaining the facts’ about most things under their inspection, and they showed small interest in doing so. They appeared to use their energies mostly in competitive pursuit of freakish events, and belabouring political opponents. As the potential to clarify them improved, the boundaries of truth and fiction actually became more, not less, confusing, and this to Godkin and his allies was unforgivable – along with the grasshopper attention-span induced by the search for sensation. Novelty is of course an essential element of news. But, where it overwhelms all others, stories actually blot out their predecessors, and the newspaper’s frame of reference shrinks rather than expands.

  America and Australia shared during this period near-complete literacy – a generation ahead of Britain – but Australia was less polyglot, less unequal, and for the most part less turbulent politically. Its urban culture, if far from innocent, was less violent – less dynamic, some might say – perhaps accounting for the comparative restraint which Trollope and Twopeny observed in its newspapers. Maniac concoctions like those of John Norton and the Wild Men of Sydney were somewhat outside the mainstream in Australia. But in Pulitzer’s and Hearst’s New York they often dominated it.

  According to Professor Hazel Dicken-Garcia the first book devoted entirely to editorial failings in the US was Our Press Gang; or, a complete exposition of the corruptions and crimes of the American Newspapers (1859), in which Lambert A. Wilmer identified fourteen types of dishonesty, incompetence, bias and recklessness. He initiated a vigorous debate, though it took some time to move from complaint to remedies. The word ‘ethics’ appeared for the first time in 1889, and the first ‘code of conduct’ was proposed the year after.

  Pulitzer’s role, in the end, was pivotal. He was far too intelligent not to be moved by the press critics. Indeed, he admired Godkin and his work at the Post, but feared that such austerity would deprive him of the mass audience he craved. Pulitzer thought that with sufficient sales the World could be more powerful than the Presidency, and said, ‘I want to talk to a nation, not a select committee.’ Scarcely anyone can have been called a ‘bundle of contradictions’ with better cause than Joseph Pulitzer. He might denounce ethnic injustice almost in the moment of directing opportunistic abuse at Mexicans, Spaniards or any other outgroup rendered unpopular by the flux of events. Relentlessly pursuing gain, he asserted that his heart was entirely with the poor. And he mourned the bloodshed of war, though it is hard to think of anyone apart from Hearst who did more to encourage it editorially.

  Above all, Pulitzer’s journalistic persona was schizoid. His intellect, certainly first class, was committed to precision, objectivity and persistence. Regularly, he lectured his staff about the duty to carry each story to a conclusion before galloping after others. He himself had been a fine reporter for the St Louis PostDispatch, before becoming its proprietor. But when competitive stress afflicted him – which was often, after he bought the World from Jay Gould – these ideals showed fragility. ‘Accuracy! Accuracy! Accuracy!’ was his favourite injunction. But exceptions were apt to be made if a competitor seemed to excel in riots, fires or hangings. He liked headlines to be spiked with melodrama or alliterative titillation – preferably both, as in ‘DEATH RIDES THE BLAST’; ‘LITTLE LOTTA’S LOVERS’; ‘DOES REV. MR TUDOR TIPPLE?’ or ‘BAPTISED IN BLOOD’ – and his staff devoted much time to working up communications from condemned murderers and wronged servant girls. (The ‘Yellow Kid’, identifying the whole genre, was a cartoon infant published by Hearst as well as Pulitzer, technically notable because his smock used newspaper colour for the first time, in the World’s comic section during 1889.)

  In the last decade of Pulitzer’s life (the first of the new century) the World grew rather calmer, but did not radically alter. Pulitzer’s response to Godkin’s reproofs was a resolve to reform, not his own journalistic generation, but subsequent ones, and to this he made a decisive contribution when his will (1911) endowed the School of Journalism at Columbia (Alexander Hamilton’s university, as it chanced). The assessment of Murdoch’s New York Post as injecting ‘evil’ into the city thus came from another New York institution which the Post itself had prompted into being.

  Like his admirer Theodore Fink in Melbourne (see Chapter 2 above) Pulitzer acknowledged that the communications industry made by the nineteenth century would become a threat to its own society if ruled solely by political partisanship and commercial opportunism. It needed journalists with enough education and training to develop tolerably consistent means of dealing with complex events, and the last period of Pulitzer’s life saw the change which Professor Michael Schudson has most clearly identified – from the political-partisan press to the commercialprofessional model. The Columbia School, indeed, became a major agency in developing and consolidating the process, though it was only the most famous element (and not the first) in a wider movement. Synchronising neatly with expansion of American universities, the demand for journalistic education led to a nationwide establishment of journalism schools, graduate and undergraduate. It may be sentimentally remembered, but the route from copy-boy to editor has not since been heavily trodden.

  Perceptions of journalism as a profession – and one in need of some intellectual apparatus – were not uniquely American. In Germany at the same time Max Weber began work on the huge inquiry into news-gathering and its ethics which he hoped to make the capstone of his career as a social scientist. Our understanding of our media industries might be more coherent had he succeeded, but the project was wrecked by the First World War and Weber’s early death in 1919; in English we have only the few penetrating observations cited in earlier chapters (a mass of German material is still being edited). The system which developed in Australia relied less on vocational teaching in universities than did the American, and more on workplace-based training. But it had similar professionalising aims.

  Standard disproofs of journalism as a profession rely on its lack of selfregulating privileges, and the curious status of its members – a caste of influential ‘pariahs’, as Weber noted with fascination. Some of this loses force as ‘real’ professions begin to surrender many of their immunities. And for Weber the essence of a professional activity is not so much the ability of initiates to protect themselves as the asymmetry of information between them and their clients: consumers of news still have little more chance than a doctor’s patients of decoding statements compounded with dishonesty. (A ‘yellow press’ trick which attracted particular loathing was sensationalised medical news – today a fairly rare offence.)

  Most of these efforts at education and intellectual inquiry can be seen as attempts to turn Pulitzer’s aspirations into reliable practice, into rules against deception as a means to entertainment or political leverage.

  ‘Objective’ journalism was a specially American outcome – an almost pedantic collating of alternative viewpoints, with estimates of their relative value forbidden, at least in theory; and at the twentieth century’s midpoint it had largely captured the American newspaper. It is a style easily – even unwittingly – caricatured, and extreme forms can be demolished philosophically by anyone car
rying the intellectual firepower of a popgun. Still, if one has to disentangle real events, a slab of US reportage bearing its stolid imprint can be very welcome (somewhat like the BBC World Service, also scorned at times for a dowdy balance). It did not produce flawless news coverage in any medium. But it hard-wired into several generations of American reporters a belief that some evidence should support any statement offered to the public.

  The gap between this notion and Murdoch’s sophisticated ‘Fleet Street style’ is defined by an account of his lieutenant Steve Dunleavy briefing a Post reporter on development of a story about AIDS being spread by kissing. (The witness is Steven Cuozzo, an enduring Post veteran, who sees Murdoch and Dunleavy as journalistic demi-gods clothed in mutual admiration.) ‘When [Joe] Nicholson protested that the supposition had yet to be proven, he was taken aback by Dunleavy’s scoffing retort, “Let’s not be too technical, mate – it’s a good yarn.”’

  The sensationalist wave didn’t recede evenly from twentieth-century America. In the 1920s, indeed, it produced a deluge exclusive to New York – again with British origins.

  The World and its competitors were broadsheets. The modern tabloid – a halfbroadsheet page built around pictures, not words – was a Northcliffe development for customers several social pegs below his Daily Mail readers. His Daily Mirror swiftly achieved a lucrative million sale, and Northcliffe thought a similar formula would capture New York’s immigrant working class. His friend Joseph Medill Patterson (of the Chicago Tribune McCormick clan) was convinced, and launched the Daily News in 1919.

  Briefly in the 1920s, war between the News and its imitators – chiefly the Daily Graphic – outdid even the yellow decades. The phenomenon was more egregious because newspapers (and now radio systems) were in general moving the other way. The conflict reached its gruesome apex in 1927 with the Ruth Snyder execution. On the day Mrs Snyder was electrocuted for killing her husband, the Graphic put before its readers her final thoughts before she was led to the chair that ‘sears and burns and FRIES AND KILLS …’ However, the News, smuggling in a camera, managed to show her receiving the current. This enhanced sales by some 20 per cent on the day, and 750,000 individual copies of page one were flogged.