by Bruce Page
Not so the Sun. There was an exuberant reaction to the first wire-reports of a hit on an Argentine ship, and long before serious detail was available the front page had gone away under a vast main headline:
GOTCHA
with more in like spirit:
Our lads sink gunboat and hole cruiser … WALLOP; they torpedoed the 14,000-ton Argentine cruiser General Belgrano and left it a useless wreck … its 1,000 crew needn’t worry about the war for some time now … The ship was not sunk and it is not clear how many casualties there were …
This was mostly guesswork. But by the time the first edition was out it was clear there were many dead – and not combatants as defined under the British government’s rules. MacKenzie himself was shocked, and rebuilt the front page for later editions with more guesswork and less glee: ‘DID 1200 ARGIES DROWN?’
But he was worried about updating Murdoch. Even some of the team had wondered if ‘GOTCHA’ was excessive – Murdoch might think so too, and now it seemed the facts of bloodless triumph were illusory. Peter Chippindale and Chris Horrie, in Stick It Up Your Punter, report a first-hand account of the exchange:
… Murdoch strolled out on to the editorial floor, where MacKenzie caught up with him. ‘I wouldn’t have pulled it if I was you,’ Murdoch said in a casual way. ‘Seemed like a bloody good headline to me.’ MacKenzie protested. ‘A lot of people have died, Boss,’ he said. ‘Maybe our own people have been hurt. We don’t know yet.’ But Murdoch assured him: ‘Nah, you’ll be all right,’ walking off apparently unconcerned.
The death-toll turned out to be 368 – victims of the fact that a sea fight never fits well into boundaries drawn by land-based politicians. Within the Sun those troubled by ‘GOTCHA’ kept silent; elsewhere it was called reckless, incompetent, brutal or all three. But Murdoch had liked it, signalling that the limit was not yet.
The war was not unpopular in Britain – some Tories were quite thrilled. But even in 1939–45, when approval was near-absolute, the country had continued to be a democracy at war, where the government’s actions were regularly challenged
– and that custom persisted in 1982. Mrs Thatcher clearly did not like it, perhaps even less than Winston Churchill. But like him she had to endure it. The Sun now came forward to set her free.
Murdoch had installed as chief editorial writer Ronnie Spark, a Sunday Express veteran and old Oxford acquaintance. Spark was supposed to stabilise the flighty MacKenzie, and in this spirit he wrote a leader declaring, ‘There are traitors in our midst.’ The Sun ‘does not hesitate’, he went on, to state that the BBC’s defence correspondent, Peter Snow, was guilty of ‘treason’, and so were the editorial writers of the Daily Mirror and the Guardian. Snow had impugned the British government’s veracity by quoting Argentine communiqués, and the two newspapers had criticised its refusal to negotiate. Treason is of course the worst crime short of genocide, and so the Sun’s words caused deep, deliberate offence.
But even when produced by allies of the government they could not cause fear in a country with its legal system intact – as Britain’s of course was. Though criticism has often been hobbled in times of stress (with varying success), not even the Star Chamber took it as proving an intent to rupture allegiance to the state and assist its enemies.
Murdoch’s promotion of this kind of gaseous melodrama poses the question of what part nationality and patriotism play in his own character – of whether he understands what allegiance means to people generally. The primary evidence comes from his native land, and it means stepping back a few years from the Falklands, to when he was challenged on the exact point – on the depth of his national loyalty and whether it could be relied on.
On some accounts national, regional or particular sentiment hasn’t much significance in a period of corporate globalism. Doubtless there are complex reasons for the vitality of this general notion, in the face of massive disproof from formal research and pragmatic experience, but one of its sub-texts springs from a simple motivation. It argues that the ownership of media business no longer has any political or cultural effect, and it is admired by investment bankers. There can be more merger deals on an unbounded playing-field.
Obviously national feeling is scarcely less potent – or potentially dangerous, as the Falklands showed – than it has been throughout the modern era. Personal expression, naturally, varies. In the Australian case it doesn’t usually run to the hand-on-heart manifestations Americans relish, or to British pomp-andcircumstance. Self-mockery is rarely far distant – this is an identity first articulated by an all-convict company, opening the Sydney Playhouse in 1796 with ‘True patriots we, for be it understood / We left our country for our country’s good.’ But intensity of feeling is no less – may even be greater – and includes an exceptional collective sense, still tinged at times with paranoia. In church-going terms Australia is close to pagan, and increasingly multi-cultural, but with little detriment to the Anzac ‘lay religion’. For an Australian sports team there is nothing affected about using the Gallipoli battlefield as a bonding-place, and only slight knowledge of the culture is needed to know that it strongly protects from suspicion any statement of patriotism.
During the 1970s the assumption had grown in Australia that Rupert Murdoch was turning into an exile. It is a common rite of passage in a nation where migration has always been multi-directional, and by that time it no longer caused angst in itself But an exile is different from an absentee landlord, and by the end of the decade many people were seeing Murdoch in that light, with implications of erratic action based on fading local knowledge.
What brought the issue to definition was a dispute over the TEN-10 Sydney television licence, which News had failed to win in 1961 – a failure due in Murdoch’s view to a Prime Ministerial veto by Robert Menzies, which was due in turn to News having given editorial aid to Labor in the 1959 federal election. (This aid looms larger in Murdoch’s memory than in the record. On the other hand the inconsistency of Murdoch’s licence applications was marked, and Menzies could certainly have found non-partisan justification.) On 29 April 1979 the 1961 winners United Telecasters sought and gained a routine licence renewal. Two weeks later the Australian Financial Review reported that News was acquiring 48.2 per cent of United – effectively, control. Vendor and emptor denied having had these plans at the licence-renewal moment. They suggested that the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal should nod the deal through.
The Australian Labor Party, and several citizen groups, immediately protested before the Tribunal. Senator Gareth Evans said, for the ALP, that the deal was an ‘unhealthy aggregation of media ownership’: News owned four Sydney papers (the Daily Telegraph, Sunday Telegraph, Daily Mirror and Australian). This advance to monopoly, he said, would join bad practice to bad, for both United and News had ‘appalling track records … in respect of … bias and distortion’. And control, it seemed, would be illegally exercised from outside Australia. The Television Act didn’t require licence-controllers to be citizens (the US position) but specified in Section 92D that anyone holding 15 per cent or more of a licensed company must reside in Australia. And Evans thought Rupert Murdoch was a New Yorker – even flamboyantly so – when not resident in Britain.
Hearings began on 4 July, the News lawyers opening with the stormin-a-teacup ploy. Mr H. Nicholas doubted there was such an entity as the ‘Murdoch newspapers’ complained of. And Mr Murdoch was not personally making the application, so there was no need for the Tribunal to hear from him. Did it even need to hear protests against this simple share-transfer? The Tribunal rejected this. A News executive stated that Mr Murdoch would some day return to Australia – but clearly it was insufficient. Nicholas changed tack: Mr Murdoch was exiled, perhaps, but not by desire. When, aged thirty-seven, he had ‘left Australia’s shores’ he had done so, at his company’s direction; after time in England, he had been moved to the US, ‘again, because the News Limited board so desired’.
Rupert as the board’s humble cipher may have
been less convincing than suggestions that the application didn’t involve him or that there were no ‘Murdoch papers’. Counsel shifted a gear: Mr Murdoch might rarely be present, but he was always Australian at heart, and resident emotionally.
More than once, Mr Nicholas recited the case. There was the Cavan homestead outside Canberra, Mr Murdoch’s address on the electoral roll. He voted in state elections. He had an Australian passport. His children had Australian passports. He had his investments in Australian companies. (True, of course, but their business was mainly overseas.) Cavan, and offices in Sydney, contained valuable personal property. In Australia he had ‘brothers, sisters, mother and so on’.* It might be of interest that the family home was maintained by Dame Elisabeth in Victoria. Mr Murdoch’s stated intention was to remain what he rightly considered himself to be – an Australian resident. The High Court had said a person could reside simultaneously in different places; this was in accordance with modern facilities, allowing men of commerce to span the globe with ease. ‘That they may do so, and in fact do so often, does not mean that thereby they must sever their links with home or be denied their Australian birthright and inheritance, or become less an Australian.’
But Senator Evans doubted that patriotic emotion could perfectly cancel geography for the purpose of Section 92. Mr Murdoch might well retain his passport. ‘He may even remain a Digger at heart … the question is whether he lives here …’ Mr Nicholas was losing ground. For the concept of emotional residence to compensate for so small a physical component, some powerful statement was required – hardly issuable by proxy. Having read the transcripts, Murdoch arrived on 26 July, apologising for his initial non-appearance. He then offered a display of national feeling rarely surpassed in passionate solemnity.
And he came in shooting. Television owned by newspapers never showed bias: ‘In Australia … the only stations that have suffered serious criticism on their handling of news and special events have been the stations not associated with newspapers. I refer of course especially to the ABC.’ The shot was characteristic, for it was his own newspapers which did the criticising. He eloquently agreed that aggregations of media power afflicted Australia. But he, Murdoch, was not the problem. He – if but permitted to be – was the solution. He was battling ‘those great monolithic newspaper and television companies’ – Fairfax and the Melbourne Herald group.
My life has been spent fighting them, starting with a very small newspaper, standing up to attempts to push me out of business at the age of 23 in Adelaide; but I kept it alive through my own skill and effort, a second voice in that city and it is still there and still strong as a newspaper, giving the people of Adelaide an alternative voice. [Adelaide today has no alternative newspaper voice.]
The same in Sydney: I came here only after John Fairfax had bled the Daily Mirror dry and, as you would well know, through great effort, perseverance and help from many people we have made the Mirror last.
In addition to that, I started the Australian. I am now accused of not being an Australian. Who in this room can say I am not a good Australian, or a patriotic one? Who else chooses to be battered and bruised ten months of the year in being an Australian, when it would be a lot easier not to be one?
Why being Australian was so arduous, he didn’t say. But he told the chairman, Bruce Gyngell (who had worked in British television, and would soon return), that it was an ineradicable allegiance:
You will remember … your happy experiences in London, yet you chose to remain in Australia just as I did, because I love this country, because my wife does and my children do, and I bring them here at every opportunity. Who else goes on building an Australian company around the world employing more than 15,000 people with opportunities throughout the world for my fellow Australians? Who else has risked his every penny, his reputation and his career in fighting for what he believes is right for this country? Who else has risked everything to establish a national newspaper across the length and breadth of this nation? No nation this size or age at this stage of its development has had national media before. But Australia has. It is a time when it is searching for identity and purpose. Sooner or later we have to do some uniting in this country. I started the Australian 15 years ago as a dream and nearly $30 million has gone into making that dream a reality and I certainly did not do it to come here today to be called a foreigner or to be punished for standing up to the entrenched monopolies of this country. The story of News Limited since 1954 has been fighting these other great media establishments which have gone to any lengths to try to stamp me out. You will remember a company I used to work for was rather active in that at some stage, at many stages.
This referred to his brief passage under Sir Keith’s benevolent eye. But his chief concern was present enemies – lurking ubiquitously, running a unique ‘gutter campaign’ against him. Fairfax’s senior editorial officer had promoted the scurrilous thought that he, Murdoch, had tried to make somebody Prime Minister. Eventually this man – in fact the well-known journalist Max Walsh – had written it in the Sun-Herald.
I know that you are sophisticated men, that you would not normally be influenced by those things, that you know how these things are done, but nevertheless these things must be said because they have other avenues. Mr Walsh I am referring to, of course. His wife is a very trusted and senior officer of this tribunal.
That was irrelevant, said chairman Gyngell. Murdoch was glad to hear it. But the problem still was two great companies owning ‘over 75 per cent of the newspapers in this country and God knows how much of the television and the radio’.
The difference now is that one great company does so – Murdoch’s but in 1979 he was the man promising to avert the consummation of monopoly. Such a disaster would ensue only if the Tribunal were to place handicaps on News Ltd.
I am a competitor establishing competition and if you, I submit, Mr Chairman, are going to suggest that News Limited should not have a television licence in this city, you will see the press develop in this city the same way it has gone in nearly every other city of the world since television came into being … Already in Australia we have monopoly daily papers in three states, all in the one monopoly – Queensland, Western Australia, Tasmania. If you want that to happen in Sydney, so be it. But that is the position and I thank you for indulging me in stating my feelings about Australia and my feelings about this issue of competition.
This was the democratic dress of media cross-ownership: Murdoch’s newspapers needed television revenue to survive and sustain diversity. ‘I believe it is one of the most important things for the maintenance of democracy that we should have newspapers and as many as possible. The written word is fundamental …’ In fighting for democracy, he knew he had to face anti-competitive practices. Fairfax, making record profits from television, were using them to sell newspapers at a loss and ‘engage in predatory competition against News Limited’. Taken with the later record, these denunciations of monopoly and predatory pricing are benchmarks against which to check whether Murdoch’s statements ever meaningfully reflected his intentions.
The protestors (who thought he would be absent) did not suppose his grip on TEN would be anything but tight. Murdoch’s concern was to suggest that it would be relaxed – just a few News executives joining the board. Asked if he had ‘any views as to the situation of the remainder of the board’, he replied:
Yes, several of them are known to me, Sir Kenneth Humphries, for instance. I asked him and he agreed to represent the public interest in the first Channel 10 company that we proposed back in 1962. I think that he has done a magnificent job in steering this company through very difficult waters … I know some other members of the board, whom I respect but it would seem from the results of the company, the ratings, the service it is giving the public, that it would be madness to contemplate any change at all. Contrary to what might have been said privately or feared, there is much rumour about this in the industry: I wish to give an assurance to the tribunal that no chan
ge is contemplated at all.
His company was ‘long steeped in the traditions of journalism and interference and non-interference’. And in twenty years he had not given directions over the operation of a television business. That startled the chairman: ‘Can you say that you have never interfered with the news and programming of a TV station controlled by News Limited?’
‘Since I relinquished my role as managing director of Channel 9 Adelaide back in 1959 or something I can say that absolutely.’
Gyngell asked him to think back to Wollongong, 1963. Didn’t he construct WIN-4’s service with programming bought from the US?
‘I am sorry, I was on the board – I was thinking of Adelaide. Yes, when we first bought WIN-4 and saved it from bankruptcy.’
Gyngell, saying he had asked his question for the record, made clear that he didn’t like Murdoch’s answer: ‘Bear in mind that you are under oath’. ‘I thank you for reminding me about Wollongong, and there was a period of a very few months, but as you remember I subsequently joined the board of Channel 9 …’
By then, of course, Murdoch had, for good or ill, decided the entire character of WIN-4, as we saw in Chapter 4 Senator Evans asked about newspaper command practices, and Murdoch said he was certainly consulted by his editors. They talked at length on great issues such as elections. Evans persevered:
Sometimes it goes much further even than that, does it not? Can I ask you whether this is an accurate statement, this very familiar passage from the Village Voice in 1976:
In 1972 I ran all the election policy of my papers in Australia and got deeply and far too deeply involved. Looking back we did some dreadful things to the other side.
Later on: In 1975 I changed my mind. It is true I did come in and turn our newspapers around.
Did you say that?
The writer, said Murdoch, was an irresponsible Stalinist. But the alleged ideological flaws of Alexander Cockburn of course had not misinformed the Voice readers about Murdoch’s politicking in 1972–5 (see Chapter 6 above), and when Evans persisted Murdoch conceded having been ‘involved’ – and proud of it. Television, he said, he would not use similarly. ‘I view the television station as a public licence and there is a duty there to remain impartial at all times.’ Not that the ABC did, he added.