by Bruce Page
Yet he speaks of ‘making the world a better place’, which must in some sense mean producing the kind of newspaper he wanted to see. In 1988, when his first period of ownership ended – under cross-ownership rules that he and certain allies have since buried – he presented every Post executive with a gold Tourneau watch, engraved on the back, ‘My thanks and appreciation – Rupert Murdoch’. One of the executives said, ‘That’s the first time an owner retires from the company and buys the employees a gold watch.’ It is also reported that after a long, sad farewell dinner he ‘cried like a baby’. Perhaps he did. But along with the sentimental attachment to his own journalistic creation there goes something rather harder: the fact that the Post was Murdoch’s political bridgehead in America, and without any sentiment at all that would have made the losses a good investment.
And this is the working principle of the entire Murdoch machine. Whatever his ambition may have been, he did not turn the Post into a good newspaper, even in the limited sense that the Sun is a good newspaper: rich, that is, admired for its circulation success, and feared by competitors within its own declining territory. But the Post’s value, as it has turned out, is in its lack of quality, its entire dependence on Newscorp to pay its way, and the absence within it of any reporter who might doubt Rupert Murdoch’s right to determine the truth as the Post ought to see it. It is an American newspaper which has turned the clock back as near as possible to the way things were before one of its own editors persuaded Pulitzer to change, if not quite his own ways, the ways of his successors. And it’s an indication of how politicians essentially see newspapers that the Post’s political leverage isn’t cancelled by its louche incompetence.
Without the Post – or some equivalent source of political leverage – the coup which brought the Fox network into being would not have been possible. In that part of the narrative the Post’s wider influence on the American news media is examined further. But, in view of the paper’s claim to be carrying out a historic mission set down by Alexander Hamilton, something is required here.
Steven Cuozzo again is the lead spokesman of a curious case. Roughly speaking, it claims that Murdoch’s Post restored to American newspapers and then transferred to television – a disposition to ransack the world frantically in search of sensation and celebrity news. A great virtue of this approach, to Cuozzo, is its total incoherence (including a cavalier approach to fact) and he quotes Neal Gabler as defining a ‘tabloid worldview’ to perfection: ‘in place of facts marching in neat ranks, conveying the essential orderliness of things … a jumble of words and images conveying the essential disorderliness – CHAOS’.
Via gymnastic interpretation of The Federalist, the origins of this worldview are ascribed to Alexander Hamilton – which of course confirms the Post’s duty to expound it. To call this preposterous isn’t quite enough, for the first issue of Hamilton’s paper contained a reflection on news values which not only demolishes those of the present-day Post, but raises issues which are still challenging to anyone engaged seriously in media work. It assumes that the desire of newspapers for extraordinary events is due to pressures of the marketplace, and continues:
Surely extraordinary events have not the best title to our studious attention. To study nature or man, we ought to know things that occur in the ordinary course, not the unaccountable things that happen out of it.
This country is said to measure seven hundred millions of acres, and is inhabited by almost six millions of people. Who can doubt, then, that a great many crimes will be committed, and a great many strange things will happen every seven years! There will be thunder showers that will split tough white-oak trees, and hail-storms that will cost some farmers the full amount of twenty shillings to mend their glass windows – there will be taverns, and boxing-matches, and elections, and gouging, drinking, and love, and running in debt, and running away, and suicide. Now, if a man supposes eight or ten of twenty dozen of these amusing events will happen in a single year, is he not just as wise as another man who reads fifty columns of amazing particulars …?
Strange events are facts, and as such should be mentioned, but with brevity and in a cursory manner. They afford no ground for popular reasoning or instruction, and therefore the horrid details that make each particular hair stiffen and stand upright in the reader’s head, ought not to be given.
Hamilton observed that ‘America’ was not a concrete personal reality, but a set of measurements presented in documents, newspapers primarily. For himself he had not only outgrown Owen Glendower’s sensibility, but had seen just how ‘columns of amazing particulars’ could be devoted to maintaining its existence: and producing an abstract fantasy.
Hamilton was a man of his time who often saw piercingly into the future. The questions asked in the first New York Evening Post are part of the technical background to the next part of our story, which describes Rupert Murdoch’s alliance with Margaret Thatcher, and the further development of his political method.
8
TIMES AND VALUES, 1819–1981 For herein lay the most excellent wisdom of him that builded Mansoul: that the walls thereof could never be broken down nor hurt by the most mighty adverse potentate, unless the townsmen gave consent thereto.
JOHN BUNYAN, The Holy War
Man may smile and smile but he is not an investigating animal.
JOSEPH CONRAD, note for 1920 edition of The Secret Agent
I: Attempting independence As often as it has been suggested that the acquisition of The Times and the Sunday Times by Murdoch’s News International was made possible by political influence – the influence of Margaret Thatcher – it has been denied. The ministers in charge have said, plainly and to Parliament, that they took the decision on their own, and that the Prime Minister had nothing to do with it. Suggestions that the accounts of Times Newspapers were misrepresented continue to be rejected by News Limited spokespeople and by Peter Stothard, editor of The Times from 1992 to 2002.
We shall see how seriously these denials are to be taken. But the assets Murdoch acquired should be described before looking at how he went about the business. It has already been shown (see Chapter 5 above) that his rise to leadership of the popular newspaper market had more to do with the failings and neglect of others than with creative originality on his part. This is still more clearly the case with Times Newspapers: the failings involved being not just commercial and editorial, but deeply political also, and by no means limited to Margaret Thatcher and her party.
The two chief assets of Times Newspapers in 1981 were papers with distinct histories, the longer and more original belonging to The Times. It may fairly be called the prototype of all real newspapers, which of course is why the Irish Times, the New York Times, the Times of India, the Straits Times, the Cairo Times, the Los Angeles Times and many others derive mastheads from it.
In its prehistory it was called the Daily Universal Register but little of that is relevant to to day’s media industry. The period which most matters is referred to in an earlier chapter (Chapter 6), that is, the first half of the nineteenth century, when the paper’s owners and editors used the most advanced technology they could find to free it from the need for subsidy, political or other – to make it independent. Between 1814, when it installed its first power-driven machinery, to the 1870s, when it was pioneering rotary presses and automated typesetting, The Times was at the cutting edge of its industry.
Some journalists – even editors – express disdain nowadays for the technology of communications, suggesting that their essential activities occur on some more elevated plane. That does not seem to have been the way people on The Times saw things under Thomas Barnes (editor 1817-41) and his successor John Thadeus Delane (editor to 1877), but more important than their drive for independence via technical advance was their use of it to work out a relationship with the governing power of their society. Their technology gave substance to the great discovery of Machiavelli and the Florentine republicans, that a free people may be, not a passi
ve weight upon a nation’s rulers, but a reservoir of strength. ‘The enduring contribution of Barnes,’ wrote Harry Evans – whose editorship of The Times Murdoch abruptly truncated – ‘was to conceive and organise a newspaper not as a means by which government could influence people, but as one by which people could influence government.’
The vital element, a news staff trained to provide reliable accounts of contentious issues, was largely Barnes’ own. Not much more than the Prime Minister of the time, Lord Liverpool, did Barnes like the theories of the radicals who in 1819 planned a huge demonstration for voting rights at St Peter’s Field in Manchester. But he sent John Tyas to cover it because the man was independent and ‘about as much a Jacobin, or friend of Jacobins, as is Lord Liverpool himself’. Because Tyas, like a good operator, got himself physically close to the speakers, the troopers sent to disperse the crowd – who conducted the ‘Peterloo Massacre’ threw him into jail. But Barnes got a report from another Manchester journalist, and followed it up in great detail as soon as Tyas freed himself and started writing. Eloquently, The Times denounced the fact that ‘a hundred of the King’s unarmed subjects have been sabred by a body of cavalry … in the presence of those Magistrates whose sworn duty it is to protect and preserve the life of the meanest Englishmen’ – and its basis in fact made the eloquence devastating. (‘Peterloo’ was sardonically adapted from the recent triumph of Waterloo: eleven of those wounded at the hands of their own state died.)
During the twentieth century, discussion of The Times mostly centred on its leader-writers – its dealers in editorial opinions – but in that early zenith it was foremost a reporter’s newspaper. A later Times generation said that Delane – perhaps its greatest editor – wrote ‘nothing’, meaning he wrote reports, not editorials. The famous leader saying ‘the press lives by disclosure’ was composed with his approval, but he spent most of his own time actually chasing the disclosures: revealing that the Corn Laws were going; exposing crooked railway promoters; devising fancy ways to get William Howard Russell’s dispatches from the Crimea and the Civil War to London faster than the military could transmit their own information. ‘The degree of information possessed by The Times?, wrote Lord John Russell to the Queen, ‘is mortifying, humiliating and incomprehensible.’
It is hardly enough to say that in the mid-nineteenth century The Times dominated British journalism; when Lincoln compared it to the Mississippi it largely was British journalism, and a model for much of America’s. All the more curious, then, that it should decline into something which a hundred years postLincoln resembled a shabby ornamental pond more than the Big Muddy.
Central to this decline was antiquarian elitism. When the tide of low-cost readership began flowing at the close of the Victorian era, The Times offered itself as the least, not the most, advanced product available. It declined to compete for the attention of readers from the new middle class, on the deeply mistaken view that they were bound to remain passive spectators of society’s affairs. Readers of The Times ceased to be uniquely informed, except about the views of its leaderwriters, and the contributors to its letters page, giving it the air of a club journal rather than a commercial newspaper.
Northcliffe’s takeover of 1908 was like a rich industrialist buying an old castle as a setting for country-house parties, and after its passage into Astor hands during the 1920s its connections with anything as populist as disclosure vanished – no ministers had to apologise to the monarch for ‘mortifying’ exclusives in The Times. When young Claud Cockburn defected from his family’s legal tradition, they could only deplore his decision to join The Times as ‘in the last analysis’ going into journalism, and even that seemed overstatement in the Appeasement years. Of course the Tory government’s contemporary spin doctors bewitched the British press generally. But The Times’ surrender was an especially abject betrayal of its founders. The paper’s reverence for Stalin’s USSR after 1941, coming so soon after the favours it offered Nazism in the 1930s, confirms that its conservatism was not political, but technical and professional: its design and layout and its reporting were unspeakably bad throughout that period. However, the radical triumphs of 1800-70 had not been political either, certainly not partypolitical; chiefly, they had been technical and professional too – in other words, the development of power-printing had allowed the circulation to be increased and revenue to grow, which in turn enabled the paper to recruit and train a staff of skilful reporters.
In twentieth-century decay Times journalism was absorbed into the Whitehall bureaucratic process. When in 1946 a story almost disclosed that the Cabinet operated sub-committees, the Cabinet Secretary represented successfully to the editor that such indiscretions hindered ‘efficient discharge of public business’ and must cease. Delane of course had thought his readers entitled plainly to the truth, not ‘such things as statecraft would wish them to know’, and on the particular issue of Cabinet committees which of course were heavily used for the secret assignment of power the present writer and Professor Peter Hennessy were able some years later to follow Delane’s specification.
But, in spite of decay, the ideal of an independent, critical record seemed redeemable, and not only to journalists. Don Cruickshank, for instance, was a recruit from McKinseys in the 1970s and was briefed to rebuild commercial systems at The Times. He recalls a sense of being engaged in work with a national significance. By then, in late hope of wider readership, ideas were being tried which would have been daring in 1914 and timely in 1940 – running, on 3 May 1966, to a news ‘front page, which asserted, with ill-chosen prominence, ‘LONDON TO BE NEW NATO HQ’. After a half-century spent getting small-ads off page one, replacing them with such a turkey undermined the claim to be ‘authoritative’ – if rarely first – and cast doubt on hopes that The Times could learn by itself how to adjust to the times. The decision was made to merge with the Thomson Organisation and the Sunday Times, an arrangement which promised well, but went horribly wrong.
The history of the Sunday paper was rather like that of The Times in reverse. Its period of conservative conformity was in the past, and its 1960s and 1970s under Denis Hamilton and Harry Evans aspired to Delane’s example (consciously, on Evans’ part). When the Canadian entrepreneur Roy Thomson bought the paper in 1959, it retained the air of modest distinction it had worn fairly consistently since its launch in 1822. In 1915 it had interviewed Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett with results which impressed Keith Murdoch, if few others. Between the wars it had gained a name for fine criticism, mainly through the work of Desmond McCarthy, amplified in the 1950s by Cyril Connolly and others. Its reviewers could be quite feisty, notably the Oxford historian Hugh Trevor-Roper – though surely no one foresaw his impact on the investigative reputation which the paper would later develop.
Its great rival, and sole competitor in the Sunday quality market, was the Observer, which for most of the 1950s had grown faster, and looked like taking the lead early in 1956, when both papers were selling about 600,000 copies. As people recall it, the Oberver’s liberal philosophy seemed to fit the time better; the 1960s social revolution was visible on the horizon, but perhaps hazily to the Sunday Times. Later in 1956, Britain, France and Israel – in secret collusion – invaded Egypt to regain control of the Suez Canal. British society was convulsed, and the Sunday Times took the standard conservative position of war as a patriotic duty. The Observer was among the contrary voices, which were few. In retrospect, almost no one cares to defend that dishonest attempt to grab an obsolescent waterway, but at the time moral courage was needed to tell the nation’s masters they had lost the plot. The upward curve of Observer sales flattened, and that of the Sunday Times steepened: by 1959 it was selling 900,077 to the Observer’s 677,856.
Newspaper circulations are often mythologised – as we have seen in the case of the Sun and the Mirror – and maybe Suez was not the sole cause of slippage at the Observer. The Guardian, quite as sceptical in its Suez coverage as the Observer, expanded its daily readership throughou
t the 1950s with no sign of a midway hiccup. All the same, the story is still cited to explain the fact that newspapers don’t often care seriously to challenge the knot of power which twines around the core of any society, however democratic. Doing so is not the same thing as directing tirades against the political party in office, or criticising an entity which can be found well categorised as ‘the state’ in political-science texts. Nothing is quite so neat.
But there is a brand of opposition that journalistic operations encounter from time to time – not very predictably – which usually includes bureaucratic and elected power close-coupled, and may join itself in various ways with legal prerogative, an excited public opinion, corporate interests and perhaps a wellshrouded criminality. (A dash of cronyism is very usual.) Of this one can say it is different at each experience, but utterly recognisable always. Properly it is not state power, but it has no proper name. It is a remnant of powers which existed prior to the democratic state, and before criminal libel was defused, a primitive thing which never quite dies, and remains in many countries horribly alive.
In the British case, looking back several decades, the list of challengers is rather short: the Guardian, the Daily Mirror and the Observer can be included, and parts of the television system on occasions discussed in Chapter 12 below. After Thomson’s acquisition, the Sunday Times, while keeping its conservative editorial column, both consolidated its commercial leadership in the Sunday market and became – especially through the work of its Insight investigative team