The Murdoch Archipelago

by Bruce Page

  Administrative, financial and cultural difficulties follow – for one reason, because our rationalistic business models assume an intent to produce steady flows of products, each of consistent quality, with use of resources optimised. Clearly cars, computers, butter and lampshades are made in such a way. The car business would look different if only rare uses involved a genuine automobile. Circulation records prove, by their limited volatility, that newspaper sales generally are not transactions over a single issue. But, while this readership patience helps, news media remain a trickier management problem than cars or lamps. A world which allowed newspapers to optimise both content and production would be too contrary to exist.

  Obviously enough news is a break from some kind of pattern, and the fact that the pattern shifts does not say otherwise – it illuminates the point, and the problems which go with it. In Britain, for instance, child murder has become in recent decades exceptionally rare – and therefore more newsworthy. The exceptional coverage of child murder then creates false perceptions of the crime itself becoming more frequent. For some of us, covering Northern Ireland was wretched in a reverse sense: as deaths increased in number, their news value declined. And the Nobel economics laureate Amartya Sen has drawn attention to the news value of starvation. Spectacular justification for the First Amendment principle exists in the fact that true famine – as in China in 1959-61 – has never afflicted a nation with free media. But, as he says, self-congratulation should be sparing. Regular malnutrition persists, dully, in places where the media are free.

  News media, like life insurance, are offspring of the Age of Normality, with its roots in the seventeenth century, its flowering in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and its seeming dominion in the present. But they bear traces of beliefsystems vastly older. Earlier times had weaker, unformalised notions of the normal and the probable. Physical stability was exceptional even for the rich. People lived amid bizarre, millennial events – assumed commonly to be under occult control. When St Augustine wrote On Christian Teaching, he included a detailed, coldly logical attack on astrology. Today, that would be an eccentric act for a famous intellectual analyst, but in the fifth century people’s lives could be badly damaged by astrological hokum. Stargazing for us has minimal resonance; not even with the support of Nancy Reagan (or, in his desperation, Larry Lamb) can it much influence affairs. But newspapers offer it still – reminding us that communications systems maintain as well as explode delusions.

  Shakespeare, in early-modern times, created people of both occult and rationalistic disposition: GLENDOWER…. At my nativity

  The font of heaven was full of fiery shapes, Of burning cressets; and at my birth The frame and huge foundation of the earth Shak’d like a coward.

  HOTSPUR. Why, so it would have done at the same season, if your mother’s cat had but kittened, though yourself had never been born.

  Hotspur’s is the dry tone of social science – the intelligent ruling-class citizen of our epigraph from Keynes – saying: I think you will find there really is no substantial problem. Shakespeare (like Keynes) doubtless penetrated both illusions, as Hotspur’s rationalism doesn’t avert a sticky end.

  For normality, though useful, and now ubiquitous, is not a profound conception. Around 1830, as the West’s love affair with data-collection gained pace, Carl Friedrich Gauss assembled several mathematical tools developed in the previous century to create the ‘normal’ distribution and its famous – or infamous – ‘bell-curve’. Gauss himself did not rank this among the works which bracket him with Newton and Archimedes. By his account, it might almost be called the ‘trivial’ distribution. It is the mathematics of the case with little news, in which hearts beat evenly, breathing is automatic, and atmospheric CO2 harmless – in which the government is not being entirely truthful, but isn’t shooting anyone.

  It relates the average (mean) of a series of observations to the variance within it, and says that if most instances fall inside a range based on the square root of the variance, then they may be taken to delineate a real process, and the ‘outliers’ ignored. Gauss wanted a rough-and-ready way to decide that this is forest, this a negligible tree (to remove trivial errors from a particularly boring survey task he had been stuck with). Society has made altogether more of it.

  Gauss and his mathematicians rendered the physical and social worlds tractable, by showing that an aggregate – the molecules of a fluid, the citizens of a nation, the readers of a newspaper – may be well understood without much knowledge of its individual components. For physicists and engineers, statistical mechanics and the allied disciplines based on this discovery underpin all our productive technologies. And social scientists commonly refer to ‘the law of large numbers’: no one can imagine a modern state without it; no one can avoid the impact Adolphe Quetelet’s Treatise on Man created by persuading us to be governed according to Gaussian principles, with trends and circumstances universally sampled, predicted and managed, ‘much as we can enumerate in advance the births and deaths that should occur’.

  In A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper, Professor John Allen Paulos observed that Quetelet’s proposal of 1842, since its great welcome by the Victorian administrators, now ‘applies to sociology, sports, sex, political science, and economics, which may be thought of as a kind of social statistical mechanics’. Complaint and controversy has naturally accompanied its march, and its effect on our beliefs about facts and news. The assumption that data conforming to a bellcurve must represent a reality – such as a racial deficit in intelligence – has had to be refuted (for Gauss only said may, not must). Reporters clinging to older ways often refuse to see street gossip as inferior to an opinion-pollster’s random sample. Mostly they’re wrong – but not always, for Quetelet claimed too much, saying:

  we pass from one year to another with the sad perspective of seeing the same crimes reproduced in the same order … Sad condition of humanity! The part of prisons, of irons, and of the scaffold seem fixed … as much as the revenue of the state. We might enumerate in advance how many individuals will stain their hands in the blood of their fellows …

  And we might get it badly wrong. The ‘law of large numbers’, in many contexts – especially the human – is only a sophisticated rule-of-thumb, and is not ineluctable. The modern Central Limit Theorem creates such a law, but that applies only to a universe of identical, totally independent agents – nothing like the place we inhabit, which under normality’s mask, the artefact of our technologies, remains as weird and mysterious as ever.

  Quetelet’s heirs overstate both the continuity of affairs and the fixity of norms

  – neither taxes nor murderers are just what they were in 1842. The revenue of the state is bigger precisely because the predictive methods he advocated enable it to perform functions it once could not. Consequently, a real news business lives with a conundrum it never quite solves. It must recognise that there are scarcely any events which properly cause amazement or shock – without reclining into the fantasy that nothing, after all, does occur. Indeed, it must chase tirelessly after authentic disclosures – the more spectacularly important because of their rarity. It is a strenuous process and costly, though not always in monetary terms.

  None reaches a complete solution. Some, for assorted reasons, don’t try. These are pseudo-newspapers, and, to take an obvious case first, most tabloids answer the description. To say the New York Post’s belief-system is obsolete isn’t enough. Under Murdoch, it has regressed to the condition of Owen Glendower (boasting about its founder, Alexander Hamilton, but ignoring his thought).

  Very often Northcliffe’s solution is taken, defining news as ‘anything out of the ordinary’ – though it was obsolescent when Northcliffe coined it about a century ago. It may look straightforward. When a child is abducted, sexually assaulted and murdered, the instance is ‘out of the ordinary’ in that virtually all children spend virtually all their time without suffering such tragedy. But murder as an event, even of a child,
is ordinary – Quetelet got that right – and furthermore is rare. All the same, a sizeable human aggregate, or catchment area, will offer a flow of instances. These, provided nothing is said about scale and proportion, can be projected as matters of concern across the entire catchment area: the public will quickly imagine a matching population of murderers, and pack its schoolchildren into cars by way of safeguard.

  A trade in news may thus be driven by gathering it on one human scale and distributing it on another. And for a title – how about News of the World? Moral glosses for this business are often sagaciously crafted, along the lines that every individual counts, and didn’t the poet say the bell tolls for everyone equally? But the tabloid trade would look different if it took Donne’s bell seriously and believed that ‘all mankind is of one author, and is one volume … because I am involved in mankind’.

  Assembling packages of pseudo-news is straightforward, particularly in a centralised society with an uninhibited agency trade – the British case supremely. While labelling rules control beer and sausages, newspaper producers apply ‘the freedom of the press’ and say nothing about their ingredients. It does not really need the talents of Hugh Cudlipp or Larry Lamb to marshal some commodity news and spike it lightly with exceptional items to make a ‘virtual’ newspaper which – unless some real news turns up for comparison – can be distinguished from the genuine article only by expert scrutiny. It will seem to be all action. But most of its testimony will be in broad agreement with what we already know, and anything amazing or astounding is likely to have the character of voyeurism.

  Competitive markets assume that consumers can estimate the utility of what they buy, and this may well produce quick feedback when a product is used regularly for its main purpose. Cars do get driven – a product which merely resembled a car could not survive for long. But, if cars were driven just rarely, some ingenious constructor might well produce pseudocars, or virtual cars, with much reduced effort. And the condition applies to news media, especially newspapers – as a condition of their existence. Problems would arise with pseudocars once they were actually driven. But, depending on the frequency of these journeys, this might not trouble an adroit manufacturer, enjoying an easier life and better net revenue while more earnest souls sweated over genuine engines and suspension. Of course the market overall might decline, as customers became forgetful of the real driving experience.

  And this we find in newspaper markets which Murdoch dominates. Typically Murdoch achieves increased market share – and frequently high net revenue – within markets suffering overall decline. Some crucial Newscorp titles are in absolute as well as relative decline, and the News of the World was a case in point when terminated. Not Gresham’s Law. Just demand and supply, moving rather ponderously.

  But the pseudo-newspaper can have a less frenzied manifestation than the tabloid one. The Quetelet world is awash in data, of which a good deal has to be processed – for lack of closer knowledge – under the head ‘news’. John Bigelow was quoted at the head of Chapter 2 observing that the stuff got rather out of hand with ‘the construction of the telegraph’. Little of this is news in the sense of astounding – not even the chunks consisting of sports results, celebrity interviews, stock prices and government handouts (as against traffic signs, sewagepurification records and raw census returns). But the most extensive labour in a news business is handling it. Consequently it may seem the essential part. Human organisations readily assume that what they mostly do is what mostly matters, even all that matters – and sometimes they are right to make that assumption. But there are counter-examples, like the Victorian Royal Navy, which laboured so at beautifying its ships that gunnery practice declined into ceremony. This makes newspaper-like stuff – the supposedly objective ‘news’ discussed in the last chapter – but does not make newspapers. It has long been possible to disseminate it without them, and becomes more so with each extension of the Internet.

  If news is abnormality, would it make sense to produce a newspaper only when there is something abnormal to report? No, because the norm requires active maintenance – something has been said in Chapter 3 of the newsroom procedures involved. The ground-bass message of a well-run newspaper has to be ‘NO CHANGE TODAY’ in order to make the exception recognisable: ‘BIG NEWS TODAY: EVERYTHING CHANGED’. And these of course are only ideal statements. In practice there must be a scale with well-understood intervals. In. the commercial-professional newspaper a display scale is not a decoration or a frivolity, but – as Christiansen showed – the message-bearing integument.

  When Harry Evans took over The Times, the chief influence on its twentiethcentury design was still the typographer Stanley Morison, who made the absurd claim that a ‘scrupulously conducted’ paper must not extend a headline across more than one column. It prevented the paper developing an efficient headline style, and the attempt to do without attracted a famous parody:

  SMALL EARTHQUAKE IN CHILE:

  NOT MANY KILLED

  The effect of Morison’s rule was to prevent anything serious happening in The Times.

  Real news is not something out of the ordinary. It is a change in the meaning of ordinary, a crack in normality’s mask. The epigraphs heading this chapter inspect the issue of novelty – of news – from three viewpoints. Shapin’s Social History of Truth describes natural scientists (specifically the early members of the Royal Society) developing the first reliable means to separate rare, amazing truths from fables and travellers’ lies. The story has many threads: the equal necessity of trust and scepticism; the design of etiquettes to distinguish challenges to veracity from challenges to honour (or duels). Along with some borrowings from law, this is the foundation of the investigative method. It contains the paradox of discovery – knowing that not many things are astonishing has enabled us to penetrate some way into those which are.

  Arthur Christiansen was a pioneer in the business of selling news and had some of his most effective years (1930s through 1950s) when newspapers were small and the world almost intolerably newsworthy. Even so, he wanted more than he could get. He represents an industrial need for novelty, and the techniques he devised to make the most of events might be assembled – in their corrupted form – as a Social History of Untruth, in which obsolete belief-systems live on.

  Keynes’ remark is about novelty and the governing class – in which he was a visiting member. These are the people diligent enough to master the administrative systems derived from Quetelet, for whom news is at least a nuisance, and often a threat to their enormous powers. (One must remember that prior to normality which the nineteenth century brought to everyday life in Europe and America serious or unpredictable events were incessant, and nobody was exempt.) Keynes, a probability theorist before he was an economist, understood that normality is only an illusion, but an illusion to which power naturally adheres.

  Journalism’s business is putting itself in the way of accidents – looking for interruptions and breakdowns in the Quetelet world. A broadsheet which minimises their occurrence is not less a pseudo-newspaper than a tabloid which maximises them by its ruthless ignorance. But, if these breakdowns are only intermittent, the pseudo-broadsheet may be hard to identify – it will look like the real thing most of the time. To distinguish between newspapers and their simulacra something else must be taken from Weber: the theory of ideal types. ‘Ideal’ here refers not to ethical aspiration, but the construction of benchmarks. Just as there can be an ideal type of a university or an extermination camp, there can be an ideal type of a newspaper and of a pseudo-newspaper.

  As logical abstractions of social science, ideal types are never exactly realised in the world (even the abstractions of natural science are a rougher fit than we tend to think). There are no pure embodiments of Weber’s ‘Protestant Ethic’, ‘charismatic leader’ or ‘exemplary prophet’. But perfection is not necessary – the extermination camp has been realised sufficiently for recognition, though the examples are rendered impure by slight traces
of humanity.

  The ideal type of a commercial–professional newspaper will exhibit characteristics recounted in earlier chapters. It will have a propensity for seeking and analysing accidents: sufficient resources (that is, physical and intellectual) for dealing with events outside the normal range. This propensity for discovery and analysis will be independent of any opinions which may be advanced in editorials

  – it has a flexible and inclusive agenda. Such a list can be elaborated, but a simple, crucial test of whether the newspaper’s core propensity is effective and independent has been prefigured in the last chapter.

  If it is effective and independent, it will bring the controllers of the newspaper from time to time into substantial conflict with the governing powers of the day – by disclosing shifts of reality which power finds unwelcome. The occasions will generally not be predictable, and will sometimes bring real danger. Similar considerations will apply in broadcasting. In a pseudo-newspaper the principles apply in the reverse sense. Conflict with authority brought about by the paper’s own propensity for accident will be rare, even over long periods, and substantial risk hardly ever an outcome. However, this is only the negative side. In the ideal type of a pseudo-newspaper there will be active support of governing power, to the extent of assisting with official propaganda.

  Actual newspapers will only approximate to these ideals more or less closely. But the distinction between the types will not occur within the range of normal events, because of the abnormal, intermittent character of journalism. News media are not the only organisations which present this problem of distinguishing the spurious from the authentic. Armies may be much the same, because they too practise their trade only intermittently, differing in this from hospitals, schools and commercial airlines.