The Murdoch Archipelago

by Bruce Page

  It was a triumph as well for MacArthur and Emery. They organised The Times coverage so resourcefully that we were on press exceptionally early with the result and a full analysis … Readers of the Telegraph and the Guardian in comparable circulation areas got either no result in their papers or a skimpy report …

  The competitors thus recorded this setback for the government less visibly than did The Times.

  But where an upturn could be seen amid the economic gloom was in the sales of The Times. At the start of 1981, things had been quite nasty. The bloated sale of 400,000 at the beginning of the 1970s had been allowed to decline to a more sustainable 297,738 by the time of the shutdown. Times Newspapers spent heavily on relaunch promotion, and the Sunday Times returned undamaged. But The Times slowed badly in 1980 as promotion tapered off and January 1981 averaged 276,903, down more than 50,000 from the 327,576 of January 1980. There was not (and is not today) a clear thesis about a profitable level for circulation of The Times. But decline at that rate would soon eliminate any need to discuss it. It continued through the first quarter but then – without promotion the monthly averages started catching up with the 1980 numbers. June was only 5,686 down from June 1980, and July was 4,064 up on July 1980 (there is of course a seasonal fluctuation in newspaper sales). By the third quarter it was clear that the downward trend had been broken, and in the best way possible.

  As Christiansen said, you cannot beat news in a newspaper. Circulation trends, we know, do not change direction easily, and usually show less effect than people hope from one-off sensations and promotions. But when there is a lengthy run of big events, and a famous title responds distinctively providing insights others don’t – there is an excellent prospect of response, and everything suggests this happened between The Times and its readers.

  A number of the Times staff took little pleasure in this turnaround. (Some of the specialists were still complaining about life being ‘chaotic’, which never sounds right in a journalist – like a banker moaning over high interest rates.) Murdoch and Long showed even less pleasure in The Times’ editorial performance. Long went first into the attack, presumably having a lower profile than Murdoch as a guarantee-buster, though plainly acting as his agent. The David Blake lead ‘RECESSION GOES ON’ was the principal target of a two-page ‘Private and Personal’ memo to Evans. The headline of the story, Long said, might ‘otherwise be expressed as “Sir Geoffrey Howe is a liar/idiot”’. This was fantasy. No sane journalist or politician would have read it as calling Howe a liar, any more than one member of the Royal Society would have called out another for challenging experimental results. To be sure, Howe could have done without Blake’s assiduous statistical inquiry, but it was another case in which the story – written quite impersonally – could only have been different by remaining undiscovered.

  Long’s discontent took him into still stranger territory: This broadside on the unfortunate Chancellor, while not undeserved, seems to me again to be largely irrelevant unless some journalist seeks personal gratification in bringing the Chancellor down …

  The whole tone of the Times story is that the figures prove that the recession has not ended. Of course nothing so vague as ‘tone’ was involved. Blake’s story said in plain words and figures that the recession had not ended. Nor was it a ‘broadside’. Given the facts, the headline could scarcely have achieved purer neutrality. But Long insisted on seeing it as part of a propaganda campaign permeating both news and opinion pages, designed overall to ‘criticise the Government and to consider its economic policies mistaken’.

  Under the statutory constitution of The Times, it was not the managing director’s business if the paper did or didn’t criticise the government’s economic policies. It would be his business, of course, if the editor’s notion of a package of accurate news and free opinion should turn out radically unsaleable. That can lead to very tricky debates about fair and foul means of making a paper pleasing to its readers. But in this instance the readers were increasingly happy. What Long was talking about was making The Times more pleasing to the government, which is not a legitimate aim for a managing director or anyone else around a newspaper. Evans made no reply: ‘… I was determined to go on with a proper reporting job, however many memos and threatening scowls there were. It might satisfy Murdoch and Long if The Times suggested the recession was over or Mrs Thatcher was doing well in the polls, but that was not what the news happened to be.’ Indeed it was not. A lift in SDP-Liberal support was clearly the sorest of points.

  The Croydon by-election coverage had diverged fractionally from the ideal commercial-professional model: part of the advance plan had been lining up Shirley Williams, matriarch of the SDP-Liberal Alliance, for a comment. On the night her piece, understandably exultant, was run on the front page – MacArthur and Emery would have made a better call by running it inside. By the time Evans spotted the problem moving the Williams piece would have cost The Times its exclusive coverage, so he took no action. Next day Long caught Evans on his car phone, and there were no congratulations for beating up the opposition. ‘He wanted to know why there were ten paragraphs on the front page by Shirley Williams and Rupert would want to know …’ There was, of course, no ‘why’ and Evans didn’t offer one. It was just a bum call made under pressure. The question essentially resembled those Adrian Deamer had swatted away as witless when Murdoch threw them at him in Australia. Not much real experience is needed to know that a basically accurate broadsheet newspaper always contains ‘noise’, in much the same way that honest scientific measurements do (any flawless bellcurve is usually a phoney).

  Paradoxical as it may seem, if a newspaper is to be decently precise it cannot be very tightly controlled, nor its content be rationally explicable throughout. To quote Professor Paulos again (A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper) it must cope with real systems characterised by ‘sheer size, intricate connectivity, sensitive dependencies, self-referential tangles, random juxtapositions, and meaningless coincidences … uncharted and nonlinear interactions’, and doing this successfully does not mean indulging sloppiness, but it means devolving – irreversibly – a great deal of ground-level control. Different editors choose differently but all of them know that there is a point where tighter control over minor points increases errors in major ones. The more complex the newspaper and the more active its news-gathering, the less rigid its organisation has to be.

  The only papers which can be read in the nit-picking sense of Long’s question are those of totalitarian societies – the sort of sheet Kremlinologists used to scan for a few paragraphs, a few words, ‘meaning’ that a party bigwig had risen or declined. These exact journals contain no picture of the real world at all. Long and Murdoch had shown by the third quarter of 1981 that ‘accurate’ as in ‘presentation of news’ meant to them ‘likely to please to the government’. What about ‘free expression of opinion’, the other public interest under their care?

  The 1981 Nobel Prizes were announced simultaneously with the Tory Party conference, and the winner in Economics was James Tobin of Yale, for his work on financial markets. He was one of the world’s great authorities on the link between inflation and unemployment – the main theme the Tories were to debate. When someone gets a Nobel Prize just as the ruling party happens to be discussing his particular subject, the conjunction can hardly avoid appealing to anyone interested in the free play of opinion. When The Times planned its coverage some unknown genius proposed the idea of getting Professor Tobin to write a piece about British economic policy. Evans approved, and Tobin delivered.

  The professor suggested in firm but generally mild language that Mrs Thatcher was conducting an interesting experiment which he viewed sceptically: ‘The idea that you leave money supply to determine employment and everything we want is burying your head in the sand … The public never believes that unemployment is a solution to inflation and they are right. It’s crazy.’ Murdoch, who was meeting Evans at his house for dinner, did not just disagree with Tobin�
�s view. He was outraged that it had been canvassed.

  The outer limits of ‘free’ opinion are hard to set, but if the concept makes sense at all an eminent, mainstream US academic commenting on British public policy must be near to its core. Murdoch, scowling at Evans, thought otherwise: ‘Why d’ya run that stuff?’

  ‘Well, it’s timely.’

  ‘And it’s wrong! Wrong! What does he know, anyway?’

  Evans cited the Nobel award, and Murdoch flashed back, ‘Intellectual bullshit!’ Free debate doubtless could include classing the whole Nobel economics canon

  as bullshit – but that would take out Milton Friedman (1976), F. A. Hayek (1974) and others much quoted in the Thatcher cause. Evans’ attitude was that The Times should look at the opinions freely on offer in the world, and make choices roughly representative of them. Murdoch’s was the one he had imposed on the staff of the Australian: opinions not consistent with his allegiance of the moment were free – to go elsewhere.

  Murdoch has strong rhetorical skills, but prefers using them on an unchallenged floor, like a bad judge or schoolteacher. Evans now realised with some alarm that his chairman had little capacity for handling an interactive discussion with a consistent theme. There was no relish for anything more than a couple of colliding assertions … He got restless or tetchy with any attempt to engage him further. If he could put the name of a personality to any observation he disliked, he pulverised whosoever it was as a wet, an intellectual or a creep, and that was the end of it.

  It was not a happy evening (Evans had not realised that Anna Murdoch would be absent from the dinner – he had already discovered Murdoch’s wife as a moderating influence). ‘Tina later remarked that she had never seen anyone so hunched up with resentment as Murdoch. Tobin had trodden on sacred ground.’ Specifically, he had advertised to the Tory conference that Murdoch’s control over The Times was less than absolute. The editorial technician, seemingly, had some political programme of his own.

  Actually the problem was in the first place technical and professional, not one of specific political sympathies. The Times was moving away from the pseudonewspaper and towards the real type. To the degree it did so the frequency of its collisions with the governing class – in both news coverage and opinion coverage

  – grew quite naturally. There was essentially nothing an editor of Evans’ type could do about this; a similar pattern would have occurred whatever the party in office. And Murdoch, with his ingrained preference for accommodating power, would have been offended. But dramatic charge was added to the 1981 situation, because the factional leader Murdoch was attached to still did not have an entirely secure grasp on power.

  At some point as 1981 turned into 1982 Murdoch concluded that the editor of The Times might have to be driven out. Naturally a case had to be assembled, even if it was only of the specious kind which Burke suggests will do very well with a mob for its second. There was a mob available at The Times, though a rather decorous one. Political indiscipline could not be a charge – or not openly so. The initial one was budgetary mismanagement, which firstly had the advantage that everyone around The Times knew by the latter half of 1981 that its finances were a mess. Secondly, in projecting the blame on to Evans, several sturdy archetypes were available. The ruthless businessman who understands where every penny goes is a notion as familiar as the tart with a heart of gold. And the brilliant editor lacking financial skills comes not far behind.

  Actually the financial mess had little to do with Evans. The Sunday Times experience neither suggested that cost-control was his leading gift nor exhibited any major disasters. But that was in a context of regular, detailed budgeting throughout the Thomson group, where unwise courses might be chosen, but compasses and sextants did exist. The Times operated with no budget whatever for all but two months of Evans’ period – in total defiance of the guarantee that editors would work within an agreed financial structure. Evans had to take an unfamiliar craft through turbulent waters, while rebuilding large parts of it. He had to steer on by-guess-andby-God dead reckoning, and the professional marvel is that he stayed on course at all.

  Murdoch and Long had started their management programme at TNL by firing, first, most of the account executives who understood and gathered in the company’s revenues, and then most of the bean-counters who tracked its costs. With them went the knowledge required to develop a budget. Rather than analysing a flawed and highly complex business, Murdoch’s prime concern seems to have been keeping what data there was in his own secretive hands. To the chief accountant David Lawson he said, ‘You are working for me. You must show figures to nobody.’ And after a short period of producing numbers for Murdoch, Lawson was fired. TNL’s financial operations then turned effectively into a subdivision of News International, the old News of the World company controlled by News Limited (not yet called News Corporation). Executives from the News of the World took over revenue-earning.

  Long then undertook to create a new framework for The Times on the ‘zero budgeting’ principle, which starts by assuming no spending requirements and constructs a new set from basic principles. In any newspaper the task is formidable, for lack of any useful theory on maximising resources. Empirical knowledge is indispensable, and most of it had been fired. Long had no experience except of a steady-state news-agency business, and Murdoch’s chief earners were tabloids with minor news-gathering requirements, simple production costs and cash-dominated revenues. This was the context in which considerable management and editorial time was devoted to the issue of whether The Times might be able to dispense with an office in New York – since it only made a difference at quite exceptional moments.

  Meetings of the new board of Times Newspapers were rare. Long’s method was to assemble an executive group in his own office without even the formality of a table. The agenda was minimal, and minutes exiguous, much time being consumed with Long expounding management principles – but giving no details of the new budget. Indeed, the notable absentee at every meeting, wrote Evans, ‘was documentation … After a few meetings, I asked for figures. “I’d like to know how we’re getting on” … Long sighed. “Wouldn’t we all. There’s no management here. It’s hopeless.”’

  Long, who had the reputation of a budgetary expert, was clearly troubled, but not Murdoch – for the moment anyway. Between non-meetings, Evans raised with Long the need for a policy on revenue-generation – the linkage between cover price, circulation and ad-rates which decides whether adding sales to a broadsheet newspaper means pain or gain for the profit-and-loss account. The managing director shrugged and said, ‘Rupert likes to do these things himself. And he knows a lot more about them than I do.’ Perhaps he did – though a correct setting for The Times has not since been found – and simply did not care to discuss the process. The chairman’s intermittent appearances produced no visible attempt at policy development. ‘Murdoch’s own board-meetings were even more cursory than Long’s. “Yeah, yeah, well let’s all get back to work, there’s a lot to do” … He shied away from talking strategy or money …

  Just as Larry Lamb and his Sun executives had done, Evans, Long and their colleagues found they would have to do without any consecutive discussion of The Times and its requirements: ‘The conversations were sometimes jumpy. “Johnson’s a scream” (Frank Johnson, a rising sage of the right). “Know anybody to follow Akass at the Sun?” “Got any ideas who might edit the News of the World? Present editor’s too nice …”’ After one meeting Evans did find Long in possession of a covered document which apparently set out financial details for The Times. But, when Evans asked to see it, Long hesitated: “‘Rupert is very funny about figures. You must not say you have seen this.” He lifts the corner for a quick peep.’ The editor of The Times had a peep but it did not reveal whether any substantial data existed. ‘Rupert works by weekly figures,’ said Long. ‘He takes them on the plane with him. I’ve told him it’s deceptive. But who are we to argue with him? He’s very successful. He has a brilliant
financial brain … He just says tell everybody to spend less.’

  It appears from this that Murdoch was still running on the Merv Rich weekly sheet as developed from the Hoyts cinema chain. It was obviously a soundly made system which provided well for arbitrary rule of a cash-rich tabloid newspaper business (which essentially News International remained). But, as Long clearly knew, it could not deal with the problems of a quality-newspaper business in serious strategic and tactical disarray. After his dismissal, which followed Evans’ without long delay, he gave a less glowing judgment. Everything, he told William Shawcross, rested on the fact that Murdoch was a ‘gambler’ who ‘had a martingale. Mostly it worked.’ Martingales – various forms exist – are systems for playing roulette. They all depend on doubling up losses.

  Some time in the latter part of 1981 Long gave up trying to be a serious chief executive of Times Newspapers or to produce a real budget. His chairman kept virtually all the information in his own hands, and Long said that it was difficult – perhaps impossible – to stand up to such a remarkable personality. (His final disappointment came when Reuters went public and he received none of the shares issued to make the executives who had stayed on very rich indeed. Hamilton or Murdoch might have helped him, but for different reasons neither chose to.)

  Perhaps Evans shares some blame for the budgetary mayhem in that he did not protest to the national directors somewhere in the third quarter of 1981. By then Murdoch and Long were indefensibly remote from their promises. During September Murdoch bypassed the board with a memo asserting generally that costs were ‘intolerable’, adding that any fee above £100 must be submitted to the editor or managing editor and anything above £1,000 to the managing director. He also said that he would be checking everyone’s expenses personally. This meant effective editorial control for Long, under Murdoch: Evans would not be able to start any non-routine operation on his own authority, or even commission an opinion poll. Evans thought that going to the national directors would end all possibility of a working relationship with Murdoch. Remarkably, he did not yet see that he was already facing an unavoidable quarrel. But, having defied all the evidence to get this far, he could not yet turn back.