The Murdoch Archipelago

by Bruce Page

  – the most consistent British opponent of primitive power. The reasons for this were more technical and professional than political (which means, incidentally, that absence from the list of challengers is not necessarily due to a deficit of honour). They have to do with what began in the 1960s to be called ‘investigative’ journalism – a word Delane doesn’t seem to have needed – and with the preference of Roy (later Lord) Thomson for having journalists develop journalistic products.

  An ability to produce disclosures of its own has simple commercial value to a newspaper which only publishes weekly, and this has become more so with the long rise of competitive media. But there is a well-established philosophy of media work which inhibits development of ‘investigative’ reporting, by conceiving it as an optional extra. Charles Moore, editor of the Daily Telegraph 1995-2003, expressed this view when writing that in spite of his admiration for the work of some journalistic muckrakers, newspapers should recognise ‘a higher aspiration than exposing corruption, although one that is perfectly compatible with doing so. It is to tell people the news, and to interpret it in a way they find interesting, honest and helpful.’ This implies a body of stuff, ‘the news’, existing objectively and essentially uncorrupt, the newspaper’s business being to collect and distribute it, perhaps remedying obscurity or urging a case. And like any durable illusion, it makes good sense most of the time – certainly if one looks at really well-organised sports coverage such as the Daily Telegraph offers.

  But sport is a special, enclosed universe. The idea of the ‘news’ in general as having objective existence surely grew up since the organisation of sophisticated news agencies in the later nineteenth century. The vital date is 1868, when 120 British newspapers co-operated to form the Press Association. Today the lacework of agencies is developed so far as to enable broadcasters and newspapers to retail ‘news’ which they have little or no part in originating. ‘Interpretation’ may mean nothing more than the packaging used to put a brand image on a commodity which other retailers get from the same wholesale co-operative source.

  Things were not like that when Barnes organised his coverage of the Peterloo Massacre. The ‘news’ did not exist for a newspaper unless it made its own arrangements, and they were investigative by nature. The ‘commodification’ of news – about which much more has been written since the rise of the Internet – isn’t in itself either deplorable or avoidable. International coverage, particularly, would be impractical without Reuters, the AP, Agence France-Presse. But the fact that modern societies generate vast quantities of information which can be circulated without much contention over its meaning does not mean there is such a thing as the ‘news’.

  There are limits to the ingenuity with which commodity news can be repackaged and retailed (the decline of the Daily Mirror, seen in Chapter 5 above, had much to do with Hugh Cudlipp’s over-indulgence in the practice). The limits are reached more quickly as volume falls; this becomes very clear to anyone editing at weekends, when populations have more time to consume news, but produce less of it. An obvious development for a commercial-professional newspaper trying to distinguish its brand is to look beyond commodity supply and develop its own material. Some of this can be done by buying serialisation rights and by hiring specialist writers, by advising about cooking, cars or investment: and some of it by ‘investigative’ journalism, which essentially is journalism in which the reporters are closely involved with the subject matter and share in the uncertainties, emotions and unpredictable accidents of which their stories consist.

  In essence it is far from new. The American poet Randall Jarrell observed that when Queen Victoria or any of her ministers (like Lord John Russell) wanted to tell lies, they did it for themselves, as they had no media consultants; equally, if the newspaper which then annoyed them so much wanted to know something, it had to find out for itself (elements of the professional background to this were sketched in Chapters 3 and 6). In many news organisations the objective fallacy runs deep, making it hard to create a staff with investigative skills.

  There is a story about a Daily Telegraph piece on the crash of an airliner caused by a fire in one of its two engines. An executive imported from the Sunday Times, toiling over the copy-flow, found two sequential paragraphs which contained survivors’ quotations – and placed the fire each time in a different engine. Not even a ‘but’ moderated the contradictions. His plea that the conflict must either be resolved by inquiry or acknowledged in the text was dismissed as ‘getting reporters to comment on the facts’ (emphasis added). Later when a government minister stated that eyewitness reports were contradictory and would be looked into, the Telegraph quoted him. No investigative outcome will result from reporting ‘the facts’ in this passive way (an impoverished version of the American ‘objective’ method). The engagement with fact must be an active one, and must be selectively destructive.

  In spite of a favourite belief of politicians, no radical discontent with society and its authorities enters into this – radical discontent applies only to the story. Generally, investigative reporting requires a confidence running close to faith in society’s adherence to rational, impersonal rules, because resolving alternatives involves an imaginative (and often real) testing of evidence – typically, trial under civil law, which cannot presume innocence, and must finally choose a side. ‘Disorders in relation to authority’ interfere with this process, which requires respect for authority – if qualified and wary – and a belief that it will eventually honour its own rules. Anyone lacking this will find investigation’s pressures intolerable, and shed them prematurely.

  Related temperamental issues run through the gathering and training of staff. Many people will face real physical danger sooner than the social distress of picking at the lies of a swindler who troubles to make himself agreeable – as Conrad says, we are not investigating animals – and only slowly is it learnt that soft questions always have hard consequences somewhere. And it is then difficult, once a staff is trained and motivated, to exert much control over the issues it engages with. These tend to choose themselves. Something may be done by sticking to ‘stings’ and witness-purchases. But these in the end are only extensions of chequebook journalism, with the defect that any significant villainy tends to have a significantly larger chequebook, non-monetary immunities, or both. Though pop stars, actors and athletes remain vulnerable, their sins grow less riveting as readers grow less naive – the consequence for Sunday tabloid sales we noted earlier (see Chapter 5 above).

  The real problem again is one of temperament. Any reporting risks damaging some of its subjects. But investigation, insofar as it is specialised, is developed with that specific intent. Andrew Neil – editor of the Sunday Times after Murdoch’s takeover – tells us he was never happier than when leaving the office with an edition under his arm calculated to ruin the breakfast of someone rich and powerful. Three points about this are striking to an investigative reporter. First, you usually have something worse than a spoilt breakfast in mind. Second, whatever the stakes, they rarely fall so neatly; as a rule there’s some sporting chance of copping porridge-burns yourself. Third, it shouldn’t always be in a cause you feel happy about.

  Nobody with an aptitude for genuine investigation fails to see that it ineluctably does harm, and only hopefully does good. And insensitivity on that score degrades the capacity for emotional commitment on which accuracy depends (see Chapter 3 above). There are few good ways to deal with this other than a version of the ‘cab rank’ rule used by the English bar: accepting cases as they come, and exercising little choice. A good team therefore acquires underdog causes, or gets locked into daunting engagements by being confronted with lies too aggressive to ignore.

  People reporting the ‘news’ could move on from exchanges with the epic swindler Maxwell, in the way Tony Jackson of the Financial Times described:

  Some months before Maxwell’s death, it began to be rumoured that his holdings in Maxwell Communication and Mirror Group were pa
rtly pledged as collateral against private loans. Since this was plainly crucial to the whole ramshackle structure of his empire, I phoned him to put the question … he flatly asserted that none of his shares was so pledged. As we now know, they almost all were. I was fairly sure he was lying … He was correct in assuming I would not undertake a long investigation on the off-chance of proving it.

  The Insight team could scarcely have ignored the lies Maxwell similarly put to them – and continued meanwhile to make profitable game of lesser fraudsmen, wine forgers, negligent doctors and assorted gun-runners. So throughout the 1970s Insight’s resources were heavily taken up by bruising encounters with Maxwell (who died without going to jail, but would doubtless have stolen many millions more but for being harried by the Sunday Times, and then by the courageous work of the author Tom Bower).

  According to Weber’s principle, journalism must have an accidental character; investigative work enhances the accidental, and makes it dominant. Financial costs may be less erratic than managements sometimes suppose (much of the material is naturally exclusive, rather than properties having to be bought at auction). But, if political costs matter, they are certain to be high. The investigative department, in its quasi-random progress, will pick up the state as a target (or part of some target combination, potential or actual) very consistently, just because the state and its limbs ramify much further than any other element of a modern society.

  Choice may start things moving, but accident regularly supervenes. Harry Evans indeed chose to pursue the Philby story, not imagining there could be ferocious official objection to discussing the career of a man known already to have defected to Moscow and who had surely told all to the KGB. Then, with inquiries barely begun, Lord Chalfont, representing the ruling party (Labour) and the always ruling bureaucracy (Foreign Office section), delivered a ukase (secretly) about national security and the pressing need for secrecy respecting Kim Philby. The Sunday Times team would be prevented from (a) learning anything, and (b) from publishing what they would not be able to learn.

  Chalfont’s challenge, which offered no proof of risks to security, suggested the existence of a major story. The paper found many sources of information – its own contributor, Professor Trevor-Roper, provided much critical detail. He had encountered Philby during his own wartime intelligence work. Interviewed, he gave a brilliant historian’s sketch of the secret world and its denizens, laying bare many of the deficiencies Soviet espionage exploited. It took, of course, many weeks and much travelling to substantiate the record of treachery. Much information the officials strove hard to bury. But often their earthworks were illuminating

  Secret outrage was immense when the Sunday Times disclosed that the Secret Intelligence Service had (a) chosen a once suspected Soviet ‘sleeper’ to run its anti-Soviet section and (b) made him its resident with the CIA, thus blowing both services simultaneously. Vengeful whispers were circulated that the reporters involved must be communists. One secret mastermind alleged that Kim’s potential as a double-double was being ruined. The Foreign Secretary, flown with drink, told Lord Thomson that he might be stripped of his peerage if he did not restrain his subversive employees. The ‘Cambridge spies’ became icons in the literature of espionage. Certainly no harm and perhaps some good came to national security by disclosure of incompetence. (In those Cold War days covert political smears were basic Whitehall psywar, and probably did some damage.)

  Philby became a celebrated revelation. The roughly contemporaneous story of national security and the seamen’s union never did, though its keynote phrase – Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s ‘tightly knit group of politically motivated men’ – has lived on. The union launched a strike which was highly damaging economically. Wilson alleged that its leaders were bent on leftist subversion – not on better wages for Britain’s ill-paid seamen – and this unscrupulous fabrication, on the part of a Labour leader, gained swift media impact. The Sunday Times reported that no evidence of subversion existed, challenging Wilson to prove otherwise. His officials alleged that there was much sinister material up the Security Service’s sleeve, but after tense argument nothing was found but hairy armpits. (One of the tightly knit group, John Prescott, later became the United Kingdom’s deputy prime minister.) Official manipulation of news media often exploits the fact that a negative-proof call is always a dangerous call, and even when successful it is basically a non-story. But the investigative challenge – though far less rewarding than Chalfont’s – was scarcely any easier for the Sunday Times to duck. (The Daily Mail also took it up, to similar effect.)

  Over some fifteen years Insight developed methods based around each team member having an embargo over all copy produced in a collective task. Where evidence must be robust, consensual practice forms a kind of internal jury, and members of a group are bonded in the process of defining a common truth. The thalidomide scandal – involving children deformed by drug action during their mothers’ pregnancy – showed the inverse action of this principle among the coalition which sought to suppress the Sunday Times’ story.

  Deviant power, as already suggested, is typically an ad-hoc grouping, and often some members have been deceptively persuaded of a danger to their own legitimate beliefs. At the heart of the scandal was a hardhearted company – Distillers, manufacturers of thalidomide – but its most powerful supporters were misinformed, not hard-hearted. Judges and eminent scientists believed that thalidomide had been developed with highly sophisticated tests. Exactly the opposite was true, but Distillers sustained a myth by their own ignorance of their business: they were whisky makers dressed up as a drug company, like the impostors who put on white coats and are sometimes taken by doctors to be their colleagues.

  Recycled regularly by news media – including at one point the Sunday Times itself – by lawyers and scientists, the myth developed substance, making the claim that huge injustice had been done seem itself like injustice by exploitation of populist emotion. Of those involved in the myth journalists were perhaps most culpable, having most obligation to be sceptical – to look back and count bricks. In any event, Distillers’ coalition unravelled fast wherever truth impinged on it.

  A curious intervention by Rupert Murdoch threatened the effort to win tolerable financial compensation for thalidomide’s victims. Their pathos made the issue unavoidably emotional, and it became a national controversy. Through the News of the World, Murdoch secretly began distributing posters containing violent abuse of Distillers. This had the unintentional effect of seeming to give substance to the company’s claim that it was the target of a conspiracy in which the Sunday Times and the children’s families were involved. Fortunately the courts accepted that there was no connection, and the anonymous crusade fizzled out.

  Though the Sunday Times produced great impact under Harry Evans, his precursor Denis Hamilton established the operating framework – one quite distinct from Murdoch’s subsequent version. The principle was editorial decision-making separate from Thomson commercial interests, though like the ‘Chinese walls’ against conflicts of interest in banking it could not be perfectly observed. This made personal example decisive equally, the ‘walls’ in a bank will be as porous as chief-executive demeanour suggests they should be. Hamilton, as editor of the Sunday Times and then as editor-in-chief of Times Newspapers, was rigid at vital moments, which allowed practical relaxation at others. Two cases – the ex-SAS gun-runners, and the Mussolini forgeries – illustrate his approach.

  The first, in 1964, produced a backlash as startling as in Philby, but one which developed late. A group of SAS veterans had a private army and weapons-supply business, rented out to assorted political groups around the world. Their personal links with the official military and diplomatic services were enough to convince some Arab governments that this was the British state in covert action. Inquiries eventually showed the head of the business to be Colonel David Stirling, the founding spirit of the SAS, who initially claimed immunity from disclosure on the grounds that he wa
s serving British national interests (his own profit being fortuitous). But he changed ground deftly when he saw that this might lead to the dangerous prospect of an official inquiry.

  He then revealed he was working with the Thomson group on television franchises overseas, and that one of the companies channelling his military work was jointly owned with Thomson. The story was ready for press. Stirling, however, was confident that embarrassment would kill it. But Hamilton’s only editorial instruction to the Insight staff was ‘Ensure this has adequate display.’ Those five practical words were more effective than any tract on editorial morality. Colonel Stirling was shown that attempting to turn his Thomson connection into pressure merely guaranteed attention. (He had also brandished his rank, which Hamilton, a brigadier, didn’t.) Of course the Thomson group, which knew nothing of Stirling’s military enterprise, had to write off the television investment.

  The Mussolini affair came along, in early 1968, after Hamilton’s move to editor-in-chief. He found that the Thomson Organisation had agreed to buy – for about £2.8 million in today’s money – the dictator’s ‘diaries’, depositing £150,000 cash (£1.7 million, as it were) before finding that, like the Hitler Diaries of 1982, they were forged. It was a rare case of a Thomson commercial deal done over the editorial team’s head. By the time this was put right, the deposit was gone for good.

  Amid great tension it was decided that, once Hamilton had taken a deputation with the grim news to Lord Thomson, the story would be given to the Sunday Times – but of course it would make things worse should thick whitewash appear on it. Just on press-time, the hand of Hamilton’s successor Evans was seen to alter the correct ‘£150,000’ to ‘£100,000’. Words like ‘integrity’, ‘suppression’ and ‘prerogative’ flew about, dripping adrenalin. ‘Have a heart,’ said Evans at last. ‘He took it pretty well. But finally he said “How much?” And they just told him “Six figures”.’ In Roy Thomson’s regime, this classed as significant breaking of walls.