by Bruce Page
After the story appeared I complained to Robin Morgan [the editor] who compiled the story, that my interviews had been inaccurately represented in the paper, and gave him a full transcript of my interviews with Celicia and Bullock, so the mistakes would not be repeated. I also apologised to Celicia and Bullock for the errors, saying they probably occurred because of the speed with which the story had been put together. But some of the mistakes appeared again the following week.
I came very close to resigning then, but my mortgage got the better of me. I did however send a very detailed memo to Morgan and the features editor who is in charge of ‘Insight’ listing my complaints. Two other reporters took similar action regarding complaints about how their copy was used.
No further action was taken and I was advised that if I took the matter further I was unlikely to win in any confrontation between an ‘Insight’ reporter and the Focus editor. I was and still am deeply unhappy that my copy was used to discredit another piece of investigative journalism. A copy of this letter has been sent to Thames TV and Lord Windlesham who is conducting the enquiry into the making of Death on the Rock … I resigned over another unconnected matter.
The ‘detailed memo’ Ms Waterhouse sent on 5 May to Robin Morgan, the editor in charge of the Sunday Times investigation was a formidable document. She told him he had:
left the ST wide open to accusations that we had set out to prove one point of view and misrepresented and misquoted interviews to fit – the very accusations we are levelling at Thames. You were not interested in any information I obtained which contradicted your apparent premise – that the Thames documentary was wrong, and the official version was right … It became almost impossible to make any point which contradicted the official line … You then gave me a lecture on how Insight did not have to be like a provincial newspaper, that Harry Evans has told you how Insight had to make a judgment. I said this whole story revolved around conflicting evidence which should be left to a jury to decide.
This Insight investigation was shown to be flawed. The real version allowed – indeed encouraged – an experienced judgment between conflicting strands of evidence (see Chapter 8 above). It never allowed a judgment between the evidence and an editorial premise: the working hypothesis was set always at zero, and subject to veto by reporters on the ground. In the Rock case, there was no serious judgment to be made between Proetta, Celicia and Bullock, only between the sum of their evidence and the story the Sunday Times desired but ought to have discarded. The false conclusion, as we see, persisted.
It’s important to separate the government’s behaviour from that of Murdoch’s papers. Defending the policies and the servants of the state is the government’s duty. Propagandist excess in this may in extreme circumstances pervert the state itself: the British government in the Rock dispute, though open to criticism, never approached such a point. But a commercial newspaper which makes propaganda in favour of the state is from the very start in a quite different case.
Matters of official killing distinguish most sharply between unfree and free societies. In the first case, the state will automatically suppress questioning. In the second, there is an intense risk that it will try to – an attempt somebody must resist. The pattern – it applied to both Bloody Sunday and Death on the Rock – is quite regular: the culpability of the dead is overstated; the legal system manipulated; inconvenient witnesses are rubbished, or slandered; disinformation is circulated unattributably; and high-level political anger dispensed. In short, an official propaganda campaign is mounted against any media team which asks legitimate questions. It is not something the British state does subtly or does well, which is greatly to its credit – and the more discredit to anyone who actively assists in – as against falls for – the operation. When it ‘investigated’ Death on the Rock Insight was doing government propaganda, not journalism. Either it could not tell the difference or was reckless about it. This we may expect of the ideal pseudo-newspaper, but is found with great rarity in the real type.
Not that the Sunday Times travelled quite alone. Several tabloids went with it part of the way; the Sun, indeed, actually took a lead. Carmen Proetta – shown eventually to be an honest witness – was only accused by Insight of anti-British malice, whereas the Sun campaign asserted she was a whore. (Lawyers finally extracted an apology from the Sun.)
As Wyatt’s journal shows, it was quite natural for Murdoch to use the favours done by his newspapers for the state as occasion to request favours from it. The political fury created by Thames Television’s alleged sinfulness was not the efficient cause of the dismantling of Britain’s system of television regulation – one of the Thatcher government’s last acts. But it was contributory to it. Lord Windlesham’s report concluded that the claims against Death on the Rock were spurious. On the evidence, no other conclusion was possible, but the government refused to abandon the Murdoch version. Mrs Thatcher’s belief in Murdoch’s ‘objectivity’ was to be decisive in the rebirth of Sky as the miraculous BSkyB.
The Gibraltar case does not have the historic resonance of ‘Bloody Sunday, and rightly so – the dead, though perhaps mistreated, were never innocent. But as examples together with Westland they show the systemic difference Murdoch control makes to newspapers when something a little out of the ordinary comes along. The effect varies, however, as between types of journal. For Kelvin MacKenzie’s Sun the Death on the Rock fabrications were by this time almost routine, but they sit less comfortably in the Sunday Times; credulousness in sizeable quantity must have been required just to get them into the paper. What was the source of this, in a newspaper formerly characterised by scepticism?
In Andrew Neil’s Full Disclosure he shows that many of the targets at which he aimed his paper – Thames Television and the IBA were certainly examples – appeared to him as limbs of the ‘establishment’, a pervasive, shadowy force, inimical to life, liberty and the pursuit of satellite television. Though Rupert Murdoch has not attempted any such connected account, he clearly shares the obsession. Insofar as Newscorp has an ideology and a belief-system it is to be militant against the establishment. And in this there are probable connections to credulousness and authoritarian behaviour.
* Control of the Metropolitan Police was devolved to the Greater London Authority in 2000.
13
PRESENT NECESSITIES, 1983–2002 It is clear from this incident in what detestation calumnies should be held in free cities and in every other mode of life and … with a view to checking them no institution which serves this end should be neglected.
NICCOLO MACHIAVELLI, The Discourses … the notion that papers are impotent in the face of so-called public opinion is a myth that tabloid owners and editors enjoy spreading They relish their power while denying its existence. So how do we square the circle?
ROY GREENSLADE, in the Guardian, 3 February• 2003 The way people see politicians is now so awful that some of my colleagues think that you have to pretend you’re not a politician and move around at night in camouflage.
NICHOLAS SOAMES, MP, in Trust Me, I’m a Politician, BBC2, 8 February 2003 Rupert Murdoch has always spent some time denying suggestions that he might be any kind of wheeler-dealer. Nobody, surely, could suggest he had ever ‘asked for anything’? Perhaps we can say that anyone still persuaded of such innocence is persuaded past the reach of evidence. We should now move beyond the basic construction of the Murdoch enterprise to ask other questions. How it has worked is fairly clear. But why should it work why should politicians yield to Murdoch? And will it go on working?
Newscorp achieved its critical mass – a capacity to be self-sustaining in the 1980s, as a phenomenon of three Anglophone societies, connected to but remote from each other. The 1990s and the opening of the twenty-first century saw an extension into other cultures, successful intermittently but without having achieved (as yet) the global scope desired. During these years Newscorp’s notoriety often enabled it to obtain what it desired without explicit (or anyway public) reque
st. This is no essential change: we still find instances where it asks, it demands and – if tactically necessary truckles.
My proposal is that understanding Newscorp means understanding first the real workings, in both sickness and health, of our accident-prone media professions – particularly their interaction with authority – as context to the development by the Murdochs – Keith first, then Rupert – of a capacity to traffic with established power, legitimately or otherwise, while pretending to rebel against it. In this the first component is a peculiar personality – or lack of personality – shown in their actions and already somewhat discussed. Second is a kitsch-ideology, sustaining a crusade against the sins of a supposed ‘establishment’. Through this, Newscorp retains the loyalty of its psychologically orthodox members. Organisations without that capacity endure only if they can deploy repressive force, which is not the case with Murdoch (though it is with some of his advertised friends). Mainly we need to know what in politics puts services like Murdoch’s in demand – increasingly, as it seems.
Newscorp’s imperial years have coincided with changes now said to indicate a crisis of rule in democratic society – its Anglophone subdivisions particularly, where electoral apathy engenders political alarm. Is this crisis real, invincible, and perhaps connected to the Murdoch phenomenon – to the tabloid power which as Roy Greenslade says can be both exercised and denied? The core of the story concerns political leverage developed in newspapers and extended into other business – television especially. As Michael Grade, a particularly successful boss of Channel 4 Television, put it, ‘If Murdoch didn’t own [at the relevant time] 36 per cent of the newspapers, supporting a Conservative Government … he would never have got where he is today.’
Grade’s statement wasn’t comprehensive, of course, in terms of governments involved or of ownership statistics, but it was an otherwise accurate statement of a politico-business model. Its existence Murdoch stoutly denies, typically in 1999 when delivering one of his hectic sermons against state-supported broadcasting (in Western societies):
We are about change and progress, not about protectionism through legislation and cronyism. We are about vigorous competition, not about whingeing or distorting the market. We are about daring and doing for ourselves, not about riding on someone else’s coat tails.
This speech, when placed against a survey of Newscorp’s operations in its years of triumph, raises doubt about whether Murdoch possesses any meaningful internal narrative.
The events outlined in Chapter 6 inspired denunciation of Rupert Murdoch’s editorial practices throughout Australia, often from Labor voters in the simple class-war terms that their parents had once aimed at Keith. Something, they said, must be done. Labor’s leaders – such as Bob Hawke, Paul Keating and Mick Young, busy with political reconstruction – agreed. But, subtle practical fellows, they didn’t try to reduce Murdoch’s media power. Rather, they assisted its growth. This appeasement exemplifies, without yet explaining, some stubborn curiosities of present-day politics. Murdoch’s chief Australian competitors, the Fairfax and Melbourne Herald media groups, they saw as ineluctable enemies and each case involved something other than editorial-page ideology.
The Herald of course had exposed the Connor scandal and made Dismissal possible. An ALP legend – which persists – made out that the revelations were engineered by Labor’s Liberal enemies, the paper being just a vehicle. Thus Labor fell by dirty tricks, not as a consequence of its own abuses, rightly investigated. And that belief was combined with rage against the Australian’s electoral rhetoric, not against its delinquent reporting. Complaint dwelt on subjective, rhetorical items, making a dark victory of propaganda. Somewhat later, Britain’s Labour Party blamed its misadventures on propaganda, chiefly Murdoch’s, rather than on Party blamed its misadventures on propaganda, chiefly Murdoch’s, rather than on 18, called it ‘that branch of the art of lying which consists in almost deceiving your friends, and not quite deceiving your enemies’. The health warning continues to be ignored.)
By all its principles, the ALP should have put aside its Herald quarrel when Murdoch set out to engulf the group, for nobody by then fancied that editorial independence was in his game-plan. Instead it was joined to the ALP’s Fairfax feud – one generated by Fairfax’s being based in the forest home of Australia’s most luminous political tyger, the New South Wales Labor right. The tyger often serves NSW well, but it greatly resents illumination of its doings, and during the 1980s this increased in Fairfax papers, such as the Sydney Morning Herald, in step with a decline in the group’s traditional anti-labour ideology. Not a second too soon, Fairfax was modernising – using some of the country’s best journalists – and in such campaigns professional and political conservatism often perish together. New editorial activism was drawn to Paul Keating and the ALP, as a zoologist turns to vivid fauna (not such sad life-forms as the NSW Liberals). The tyger came to think itself the bleeding underdog. As the ideal types of social science never present ideally, both Heralds displayed some propagandist, pseudo-newspaper qualities. But it was their improving tendencies – the true-newspaper component – which the ALP misinterpreted and loathed.
Complexity heats such feuds because journalists and politicians share some activities closely, others hardly at all. Most serious reporters chastely scorn political involvement (even the humblest grass-root service) and can sound like virgin priests offering sex-advice. Most politicians have significant journalistic ability, but in the leader-writing sub-crafts, least consequential in the moments which separate journalism from propaganda. Disclosure to the reporter is an end: to a politician it is a means.
Such complexity didn’t affect Murdoch, of course. But the ALP reelected in 1983, wove itself a Byzantine two-for-one. Fairfax was more noxiously intrusive, but protected from takeover by family holdings. However, if Murdoch ejected the Melbourne Tories by public offer he would control 70 per cent of the metropolitan newspaper trade and could be relied on to undermine Fairfax’s ad revenue. Hounding the ALP would then be an over-expensive luxury.
After Fox, a government in office could readily have used the country’s foreign-ownership laws to fend off Newscorp’s drive towards monopoly. There was no lack of alternative proposals for maintaining diversity and Australian control. But the administration was steadfast for Murdoch. John Menadue took his dismay to his old friend Mick Young, chairman of the ALP, and received a strategic lecture: ‘It’s more subtle than you think, Jack. The Herald and the Fairfax people – they’re always against us. But you know, sometimes Rupert is for us.’
Completing the deal in 1987 required such financial firepower as lethally to endanger Murdoch’s credit facilities (and we shall find it central to Newscorp’s near-death experience in 1991). But it translated into whacking leverage over the Hawke—Keating administrations: enough details of this are known to show just what Murdochspeak like ‘doing and daring for ourselves’ came to mean at the end of the last century.
Geography and economics make Australia a major aviation market, exploited for many years by the ‘two airline’ policy – a classic of market distortion and corporatist cronyism_ Really there were three forms concerned: Ansett Airlines (controlled by Sir Peter Abeles and Rupert Murdoch); Australian Airlines and Qantas (both owned by the federal government). Qantas flew to and from the country, competing with other long-haul carriers. ‘Two airlines’ was the official regime under which Ansett and Australian kept all business within the island continent, fixing capacity and prices jointly. Customers paid about 30 per cent above anything seen overseas. In Black jack’s day, when pioneers like Reg Ansett invented airlines, some state protection was defensible. By the 1980s ‘two airlines’ was pure marketplace abuse and Labor undertook to end it by privatising and deregulating. A hurricane of whingeing struck this wish for change and progress.
After his Tokyo ambassadorship John Menadue became CEO of Qantas, which as a prelude to privatisation was hoping to be allowed to compete on domestic routes. Mena
due’s executives saw manifest benefits in merging Qantas with Australian Airlines pre-privatisation. But would such a new entity be free to tackle Ansett? Suspecting that the path of ALP aviation policy might not run smooth, Menadue started making notes. In March 1988 Qantas proposed a merger of Qantas, Australian Airlines and Air New Zealand (also government owned), linking the domestic and international networks in both countries. This ‘Tricycle’ plan would let Ansett expand across the Tasman Sea to New Zealand. But it would involve Ansett in domestic competition.
Initially Air New Zealand liked it, as did the Australian Aviation Minister, Senator Gareth Evans. But Prime Minister Hawke and Treasurer Keating were unsure. They told Evans that changes must ‘respect’ the wishes of Ansett’s owners. Menadue and his colleagues were unsurprised to hear axes grinding. But at first Evans ‘kept us briefed on [the] discussions’. Abeles, working with shared capacity in Australia, demanded the same for New Zealand – requiring Qantas actually to cut its trans-Tasman flights. The Qantas team were outraged: domestic capacity-fixing was supposed to be ending; what could justify extending it to international routes? The requirement, Evans told Menadue, was ‘as solid as the Rock of Gibraltar’. Reluctantly, a formula was calculated.
But appeasement encourages enhanced demands. The unions, accepting the Tricycle deal, guessed it would not be ‘sufficient … for Peter Abeles’, and were soon proved right. During discussions with Evans in Sydney Menadue’s team were sent out while a Canberra call came through. ‘On our return, Evans described the situation: “Paul Keating said there had to be enough in the arrangement to get the support of Murdoch and Abeles.” It was very clear from Evans that it was Murdoch and not Abeles on the Ansett side who was now the prime negotiator.’ Immediately, new restrictions hit the Tricycle. It would be too hard on Ansett if Qantas flew its wide-body Boeing 747s within Australia. They had to be excluded.