The Murdoch Archipelago

by Bruce Page

  Arthur Marriott had acted for the Sunday Times as a partner in one of the major law firms handling its libel work. And Marriott (who became one of the rare solicitor QCs) had just then started his own practice: he could take the case personally without the huge overhead of his old firm. Immediately Marriott booked as advocates Geoffrey Robertson (later a QC) who was familiar with the Australian use of judicial review, and Leonard Hoffman QC (later a Lord of Appeal). All three had worked together before, often with investigators from the Sunday Times – it was a combine the opposition could not match quickly, if at all. Barry’s swiftness in grasping and expounding legal concepts made him an effective link between the lawyers and the journalists.

  Hoffman in their first conference said the law was plain: if the Sunday Times had going-concern value, application for judicial review would succeed, and the court could order Biffen to refer Murdoch’s bid. But judicial review, though solid in principle, was not then familiar in Britain. The case would be sensational, and no judge would relish thwarting the government. So an eminent accountant would have to be found to testify unequivocally against the Secretary of State.

  Fortune intervened again. Raw called Gerry (Gerhardt) Weiss FCA, then Britain’s best-known insolvency practitioner – and Weiss had been following the debate. Biffen’s position was absurd. Weiss would testify to that – and having examined the available figures for the Sunday Times, he gave an affidavit saying that as the paper’s receiver he would propose to sell it as a going concern. Were he to close it down at once, he would expect to be sued for negligence.

  Hoffman said this brought success almost to certainty. On 30 January, a hundred Sunday Times staff gathered and John Barry made an inspirational speech urging them to stiffen their sinews, summon up their blood – and file suit. Only six voted against following into the breach. The application was listed for Monday 9 February. As the days ticked by, Murdoch could do little to save his bid – now laden irrevocably with prestige except implore Evans, unrestingly, to persuade his journalists against litigation. Seemingly, Murdoch did not grasp that his own craft had achieved its aim of dividing the editor from his staff.

  But as emotional pressure rose, fear, uncertainty and doubt worked hard for News, Thomsons and the government. Confusion about the state of the law was too deep to be dissipated in the few days available. James (rather than Harry) Evans struck a shrewd blow by taking John Barry aside and proffering the ‘advice’ that Biffen would only ignore a Commission report. James Evans had enjoyed great respect as the Sunday Times staff lawyer, and Barry seems not to have aimed off for an old comrade’s new obligations. With the lawyers actually on his side, he remained so gung-ho that they tried to inject a little doubt: unhappily, he did not reveal the chimerical doubt imparted by Evans.

  Many rumours insisted that costs were ballooning. A TNL staff lawyer distributed a memo suggesting personal bankruptcy as a consequence of resisting Murdoch. Marriott had advised that cost commitments were modest for the immediate action, but the hectic process of documenting the case allowed no moment to circulate that information. Essentially, a brilliant campaign had been improvised, from several amazing strokes of fortune, but time did not exist to provide it with a clear-cut objective and chain of command. (With an editorial succession imminent, many senior executives were playing cautiously.) Friendly pressure for briefing from politicians seeking to counter-attack Biffen added more distraction. (The Labour leadership came out in support, though the print union bosses lobbied hard for Murdoch.) Eventually Harry Evans managed to set up a meeting for Murdoch on Saturday 7 February.

  Murdoch talked with Barry, Raw, Linklater and Jacobs in two separate sessions. He was accommodating, but had only tokens to offer. There was indeed little to add to the guarantees – if you liked that sort of thing they could hardly be wider. He offered to add working journalists to the national directors. He did not threaten to win the lawsuit; he only threatened to surrender. If the case went ahead on Monday, he said he would pull out. And that, he alleged, would be the end of The Times.

  At about 6.00 p.m. the four reported back to a meeting of some eighty colleagues. Jacobs, who had never pretended to be other than a cautious warrior, preferred to accept Murdoch’s faint concessions and withdraw the action. Linklater and Raw thought they were reporting some minor gains, and that there might be something much more interesting after a successful application on Monday. They had not expected Murdoch to say he would pull out, but it did not after all impress them. They thought Jacobs would go with the meeting, which they assumed would vote to go ahead. Probably it would have but for John Barry – who, unknown to them, had changed his mind as dramatically as John Biffen.

  Barry launched a passionate appeal for withdrawal, stunning everybody present. Costs were frightening, Biffen would be unmoved, and Murdoch had made all the concessions he ever would. Murdoch was untrustworthy, yes, but also invincible – a great white shark, merciless and deadly. Resistance was futile. And he himself, anyway, was now leaving the paper. It was rather as if Henry V had made it from the Harfleur breach to Agincourt, only to say that those gentlemen in England now abed were smart fellows and he proposed to join them.

  For a gathering racked by insecurity, it was shattering. Linklater and Raw were personally resolute, but they were men whose style ran to irony, not eloquence. Unprepared for Barry’s scintillating collapse, they could not stem the panic it unlocked. Such was the dégringolade that no proper count was made of the majority for withdrawal, but it was certainly large. Twelve people voted against. Among many crimes they were accused of was digging a grave for The Times, so they had a Gravediggers T-shirt made.

  Naturally Rupert Murdoch and his admirers see nothing regrettable in the process which put the Times idea – not just The Times newspaper into his hands. That assessment is best made after looking at what Murdoch did with it, at what he did to the Independent newspaper (unborn in 1981), and at other consequences. But there are probably more people in the media business who feel regret or outrage. Our claim is that Murdoch was never invincible in the matter, and succeeded only because enough townspeople gave consent – in Bunyan’s imagery to ramparts being dismantled. Their motives were various, and some hardly grasped what they were doing. Sir Gordon Brunton and his lieutenants gave no real sign of a concern beyond placating their boss Ken Thomson. They produced boilerplate about ‘responsibility’ and ‘great newspapers’ but this can hardly be taken more seriously than a chat with Milo Minderbinder about the value of the Bill of Rights.

  Hamilton was a great editor who had created much of what was now abandoned. He got the challenge of reviving The Times wrong; somehow the error embittered him, and became self-replicating. There were managers and journalists such as Cruickshank, Linklater and Raw who kept their heads and did all that lay in their own power to repair the defences. So did some politicians, particularly the Tory dissidents (that list, of course, includes Jonathan Aitken, as a reminder that none of us gets it right every time).

  Harry Evans has said bluntly that during the Times sale he made the greatest mistakes of his professional life – critically, to disregard the warnings of Cruickshank and Donoughue on 20 January and throw away an invincible position by supporting the so-called vetting. The trap was baited with an ambition, but not a dishonourable one. John Barry only threw away a forlorn hope – but he did so by bolting at the prospect of its success, and if his colleagues had been able to foresee that eccentricity they would have saved him from the overhot ambition of leading it. Few speeches have done more for the myth of Newscorp invincibility. However, Bunyan’s hard idealism should be put against the circumstance that most of these people were strung out after months of stress and confusion – itself just the racking up of a two-year sequence of catastrophes. Only at the last did it become dimly apparent that there might be legal defences against a political scam which they knew was happening but at that time could not prove.

  For walls to be used by a city’s defenders they must
be visible and in good repair, as well as cleverly sited. Similarly with laws. If not, they fail in their aim of keeping within tolerable limits the quantity of moral courage society must consume in sustaining itself. Arthur Marriott had looked ahead, knowing that success in the 9 February application might lead to further action demanding large costs from members of a well-paid but insecure group. He wrote to the AttorneyGeneral, Sir Michael Havers, suggesting that he take over the litigation, in his role as guardian of the public interest – the interest of how far the law might protect competitive supply of news and opinion.

  In that role an earlier Attorney had sued the Sunday Times on behalf of the public interest in knowing whether the law protected thalidomide’s makers from certain devastating criticisms (it did not). Marriott made no direct comparison, but wrote, ‘We are aware that it is unprecedented … to assume such a role in adversary proceedings aimed at upsetting the decision of a Government Minister’, but important issues were at stake which might be pursued ‘in both the Court of Appeal and the House of Lords by the Secretary of State, Thomson’s and News International … You may agree that litigation of this importance should not be conducted on a financial knife-edge, and should not in any event be aborted through lack of funds.’ This was a slightly tongue-in-cheek first shot in a campaign Marriott thought might evolve in many directions; it would have been important to make it hard for the Thatcher administration and its allies simply to bury the Sunday Times protest in legal fees. (Had the battle been joined, Woodrow Wyatt’s interchanges with Mrs Thatcher would have made his diaries even more fascinating.)

  At this point the world of Catch-22 is a valid comparison, though not through Minderbinder. We can imagine Yossarian himself giving a ‘respectful whistle’ as he appreciates the symmetry involved when the people protecting the media’s freedom are the people who least want the media free to embarrass them. That’s some catch, Yossarian might say. It’s the best there is, answers Doc Daneeka.

  9

  VIRTUALLY NORMAL, 1650–1982 Most of what we are told about the world is likely to stand in broad agreement with what we already know, and indeed it is hard to imagine a stable situation in which very much testimony amazed or astounded.

  STEVEN SFIAPIN, A Social History of Truth, paraphrasing Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding News, news, news – that is what we want. You can describe things with the pen of Shakespeare himself, but you cannot beat news in a newspaper.

  ARTHUR CHRISTIANSEN, editor of the Daily Express, in a staff memo an essential emblem … of those who sit in the top tier of the machine [is the] comfortable belief that nothing really serious ever happens.

  JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES, Essays in Persuasion Harry Evans records that during his brief editorship of The Times, which began on 18 February 1981, a memo came from Rupert Murdoch asking, ‘I wonder sometimes what we would lose in all our papers if we simply shut the New York office down. There would be moments of loss, but they would not be fatal …’ James Evans, Gordon Brunton’s chief lieutenant in the selling of The Times and the Sunday Times, once looked back and said, ‘Whatever you say about Rupert, he knows how to run newspapers. You may not like the way he does it. But he knows.’ Many publishing executives, bankers and journalists, assuming a sagacious air, have echoed James Evans. Clearly, though, anyone who has been around major newspapers since youth and still wonders about keeping the New York office has a curious attitude to running them.

  Naturally the question occurs in principle to anyone with a talent for the trade, immediately he or she starts training. We saw a young Max Frankel encountering them at the New York Times (Chapter 2 above) and they are formidable. News is infinite, resources limited. Obviously there are places where having your own people is poor value, and using the product of the news agencies will be best. But nobody, having once got to grips with news-gathering, wastes time speculating about New York being such a case. New York is indispensable, not simply for its own drama (which, to be sure, the agencies will cover assiduously), but because it is a space into which uniqueness from everywhere in the world is gathered, and where ten minutes of a reporter’s time is likelier to have exclusive value than decades spent almost anywhere else.

  This chapter and its successor, dealing with the clash between Harry Evans and Rupert Murdoch, describe a conflict between incompatible notions of what a newspaper is: between newspaper and pseudo-newspaper. On the argument of the previous chapter, Times Newspapers could have escaped the grasp of News had Evans acted otherwise. But that he admits, and it leaves a basic circumstance unchanged, giving a benchmark quality to their quarrel. Though someone might edit a newspaper better than Evans did before his Murdoch encounter, few have come near doing it as well.

  At the same time, Murdoch’s standing is also formidable, in James Evans’ terms at least. Even if the rise of the Sun was less magical than mythology suggests, Newscorp still presents as an impressive edifice. Many people inhabit it, considering their own activities blameless and effective. They may defend, even admire, their boss. Many take Murdoch’s part, as does the biographer William Shawcross, over his conflict with Harry Evans. They see a puzzled, misunderstood Murdoch, and a demented or self-serving Evans – anyway, one who, having mislaid Jerusalem, mislaid also his right-hand cunning. But the impressive structure depends in vital places on sham and self-deception; its inhabitants practise the form of journalism more often than its reality, and their failings are explicable.

  There are other accounts of Newscorp’s rise, and one of them should be eliminated quickly. Often it is cited as a sub-text of Gresham’s Law, the assertion that ‘bad money drives out good’ – bad money, that is, has a Darwinian advantage shared by bad journalism, television, movies and mental artefacts generally. In news and entertainment, success and quality are inversely related. Quality needs support from grubbier products. You may not like it, but it works. And some like it. Murdoch’s supporters don’t contest the law structurally. Rather, they recalibrate quality – like Gerald Long telling people at the Sunday Times that Rupert would be unhappy if they failed to see ‘excellence’ in the Sun.

  Gresham has many followers. One can find a commercial director of the Observer saying that its rising quality ‘of course’ will not improve sales, or the Director of the National Centre for Social Research saying that the ‘economic principle’ of Gresham’s Law gives bad survey research competitive advantages over good. A British Cabinet veteran (Roy Hattersley) says that under a Gresham’s Law of Politics edifying speeches are expelled by crude appeals to selfinterest, another (Chris Smith) that suitable policies may one day reverse the Gresham effect.

  Thomas Gresham, goldsmith, and adviser to Elizabeth I, was interested in currencies, but he left us no ‘law’. Henry Dunning MacLeod’s Elements of Political Economy (1858) stated in Gresham’s name that ‘where two media of exchange come into circulation together the more valuable will tend to disappear’. Or: if coins of identical face-value contain different amounts of gold, those with more will be melted and sold for cash. Someone who called Adam Smith and Ricardo ‘worthless’ surely wasn’t all bad, but he was barking up an insignificant tree. The philosopher R. G. Collingwood pointed out that ‘The “best” money, in the sense in which Gresham’s Law uses the term, is the worst’ because, to the extent that it has value other than symbolic, it isn’t money, but a commodity. Some museums exhibit old Malay money consisting of tiny cannon: if rejected as coin, they might still enforce transactions. But, once in action as weapons, they must have lost exchange-value.

  MacLeod’s observation – obsolete in a world of electronic cash – does not prove that bad newspapers enjoy natural advantage over good ones. It only restates the Mencken sneer as pseudo-economics. It was well established in the 1980s as a moral parachute for journalists – who can be blamed for obeying a law? – and a camouflage for bankers, who often dislike newspapers for what is best in them. The idea of television going inevitably bad is more recent – at least in Britain, which long believ
ed that television could and should be good. Gresham is useful only because Collingwood’s refutation prompts us to look carefully at what news media actually do.

  The starting point is that most editions even of a good newspaper are mediocre, with dull news and commonplace features. Arthur Christiansen rightly says – in one of the epigraphs to this chapter – that you cannot beat news in a newspaper. But Shapin, following Locke, is also right that there is never much of it about; news media are the product of stable industrial societies, and where stability exists not much can be astonishing. And then Keynes points out that the important people may ignore such examples as exist. For these three reasons – as honest professionals know but rarely say – what appears mostly is a virtual newspaper, a simulacrum of the real, rare product.