The Murdoch Archipelago

by Bruce Page

  Reliability is the special additive rational bureaucracy offers, whether the base product is census data, pharmaceuticals, entertainment or fast food. But it has a toxic side-effect: secrecy so addictive, thought Weber, that its ‘fanatical’ adepts might ruin civilisation. The witness Keynes illuminated this, saying, on inside experience, that every organisational high-command holds that serious events never occur. The view isn’t purely false – events once serious and incessant for Abigail Adams are not so now. But it exaggerates. The real difference is that they have become rare enough to be deemed unrepresentative, or accidental, making it possible – dutiful – to conceal them.

  Thus events are best kept secret, in case they happen – or secret in principle, and disclosed once they haven’t happened. Any experience of press-releases (government or corporate) reveals this numbing doctrine. In purest form, a head of MI5 once said the Official Secrets Act meant that everything not officially public must be secret. Occasionally during the last century the world maybe seemed from Whitehall so news-free that bureaucratic nirvana – utter abolition of events – might be possible under the Act. It wasn’t, and – as hiding things from inspection is apt terminally to obscure them – Britain’s fine machinery has become not just secret but incomprehensible.

  Among the early Atlantic republicans secrecy could not be so potent a contaminant. Tactical deception fascinated Machiavelli personally, but outrageous fortune often ruined execution. Statistics not collected could not be fiddled. And between the decline of alchemy and the rise of high technology, expertise conferred quite modest leverage and created rather few potential secrets. The Founding Americans tended to be polymaths but by knowing more things than their constituents, not things separate in order. Giving a famous dinner to Nobel Prize winners in 1962, John F. Kennedy said the White House had contained no such concentration of intellect since ‘Thomas Jefferson dined alone’. Jefferson – lawyer, scientist, architect, linguist, diplomat and statesman – commanded personally most of the expertise a ruler of his day might need. Today, even Jefferson would need bureaucratic alliances for daily counsel and intellectual logistics.

  Few reporters of corporate antics will think Keynes or Weber unjust. Still, secrecy is not simply evil. It may be innocent – as privacy or confidentiality – handy, occasionally indispensable. Expertise now does create executive necessities difficult (or risky) to explain. The real problem is secrecy’s dynamism. It circumvents audit, aborts the interbreeding of discovery, immunises ignorance. Errors then demand new secrecy for concealment darkness by chain-reaction, in which each adept becomes, as Daniel Ellsberg puts it, ‘something like a moron … incapable of learning’.

  This is an especially modern threat, because the powers our organisations deploy originated in destruction of secrecy – in the rules of open discourse which grew up beside Atlantic politics, and opened the scientific revelation. That growth was hard: Newton’s distaste for scrutiny puts him nearer the common soul than Halley, who made him bear it (the stern astronomer of course was Newton’s true friend, and ours). The rules still chafe enough that an urge to operate them with scrutiny somehow disabled remains strong among us. Of the mountainous evidence for this, Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s may be most poignant. In Secrecy, Senator Moynihan analyses the Western Cold War debacles caused by untested clandestine fantasy, and concludes that this self-made damage may outrank all the USSR’s earnest malice.

  Like any addiction, secrecy targets real desires – but stimulates what it offers to satisfy, creating shame. In Britain now its role is often denied except when exmandarins lecture on its evils. And a natural defence of the inadmissible is fanaticism – effort, says one philosopher, which intensifies as its aim becomes less visible. Serving mandarins, however, need not make themselves absurd – because elected people are available. To any democrat the ‘nation’ is a stirring concept. But it is an abstract one, whereas officials are present fact, producing the fodder which government needs for its existence. People who can feel a daily need and treat sceptically those supplying it are rare, and so political literature shows that most ministers tell the public the information which officials provide for them to tell – typically, fragments of truth, arranged with no general design of truth.

  Consequently, and contrary to an erroneous and corrosive belief, today’s politicians dissemble very little. Narrow grasp of fact confines them to insistent recitation – the performance we usually see, and a public nuisance by the unsentimental ethic of Lincoln or Machiavelli. Politics for them was speaking what truth the day would bear, so as to permit more later – a flexible purpose, at times requiring untruth. Therefore Machiavelli’s theory makes lying a corecompetence, while his practical discussion concerns its very sparing employment. Because excess will destroy trust – individual ambition may wish to be fooled, but not a people management of untruth is a delicate personal task.

  Over this temperate duty today’s practice lays promiscuous obedience to the bureaucratic script – not shrewd personal dissembling but gross concoctions, serving the delusion Keynes sardonically observed, and now earning rising contempt from smarter audiences. Exercise without responsibility of powers still prone to accident – for what narrows error’s frequency may widen its impact – is the rigid theme, and denials often interlock. In the ‘mad cow’ case, not only was there deception over the science of BSE, but Tony Blair’s ministers defended deceptive claims that the deception was innocent – fanatically, for the offence was off their watch, and invisible to them. Predictably, honest official science is now distrusted.

  Dissembling comes in grades (some are mostly truth, and projects like ending slavery involve a variety). Machiavelli tells us that if falsehood near or pure – becomes essential, it works only for a credible ruler. And credibility cannot exist when rulers are routinely reckoned false – when ‘Why is this lying bastard lying to me?’ (Jeremy Paxman of the BBC) is the sub-text of all political interviews. Yet it’s a curious proposition. Though casual lying is measurably widespread, the same is not true of systematic major fabrication by individuals on their own account. It seems that most of us want our personal narratives to display consistency of some sort. There are exceptions, to be sure. But why should the public life of politics attract dispositions happiest living amid a jumble of contradictions? Politics is about coherent stories for specific audiences – indeed their absence causes the crisis we observe. Really, the bastards are rarely lying. Rather, it is the machine.

  Lord John Russell (we noted earlier) ran a small Victorian prototype of the modern state, thus any misleading concoctions he produced involved the personal quality of a lie. His descendants, ministers nominally commanding the mature juggernaut, retail artefacts generated impersonally – a different moral case. Most of these begin as scattered essays in sectional exculpation (or calumny), gaining the monstrous aspect of lies by self-assembly from parts individually harmless. Mystery may attach to this process, but not to its effect on those presenting the results: politicians attract additional distrust when they serve as ministers.

  And they may serve nobly without altering this, because in ‘a good government and in a bad’ – Milton observes – ‘errors … are equally almost incident’. (Indeed, if good means active government, the incidence must be more.) This need not be deadly unless regulation confines ‘the liberty of printing’ (information) to ‘the power of a few’ – but that is government’s temptation, says Milton. Error then causes confusion no sophistry can dispel.

  In the contemporary state Senator Moynihan (social scientist by trade, not poet) found regulation by secrecy capable of wildfire growth. In a single year when US classification authorities contracted sixfold (through Cold War decline) the output of classified documents rose 62 per cent. Moynihan computed that if all America’s newspapers used all their pages to print the secret matter created daily by government, nothing else could appear. Britain, naturally more secretive, may well be more absurd. (Complaints of leakage resound in every capital, b
ut then overloaded vessels will be incontinent.)

  In specialist histories modern secrecy appears as bred by accident out of national security. Writers like Moynihan ascribe something to mediocrity, little to malevolence. And if we trust Milton, an almost natural fallacy about administrative action is enough to wreak havoc in powerful systems. To say that secrecy makes morons is to say it stops people and groups trafficking ideas with those who don’t hold certain occult currencies – though the unsecret world, as Ellsberg points out, contains most true experience. Secrecy’s outcome, for Moynihan, is uncomprehending spaces in and between organisations. It seems fair to guess that these gaps are where things most like lies accumulate – not so much dishonest by design as designed without honest knowledge of their parts, without anything like ‘joined-up government’.

  Secrecy and centralisation – potentiating each other – stop the present state explaining itself credibly. And this, not personal mendacity, is what undermines politicians as a professional group. (Harm must occur to a degree by sometimes telling a free people less than the truth – more, surely, by insulting their intelligence in the regular way of business. Certainly Franklin Roosevelt did the first when leading America towards war, but in relative terms the second offence was then easier to avoid: he retained sufficient trust.) Thus a crisis of rule can exist without a decay in popular intellect – which the evidence denies. Nor need we say our administrators are especially malevolent: only that organisation without responsibility is a prerogative few spontaneously surrender.

  Politicians thus suffer an affliction with deep causes, hard to cure. And Newscorp has a quack remedy no one else bottles so convincingly. Tabloid preparations – works of Murdoch genius – are supposed to win over voters in decisive mass, with alienation and apathy dissipated. The sale pitch inclines to be minatory: in 2003 the label said it would be Tony Blair’s ‘biggest mistake’ to ignore the Sun’s European instructions. Mythology about Euro-schemes for banning items like French mustard, motor scooter, large pizzas, brandy butter, milk bottles, British toilet pans and fried breakfasts – while enforcing straight bananas (also cucumbers, rhubarb), water meters, Latin fish-and-chip labels, school Euro-history and Mother Christmas suits – abound in the Sun. Real accounts of Euroeconomics are vanishingly rare. Nonetheless ‘our readers will decide’ said David Yelland, editor of the moment.

  Advisers of the Blair era – Alastair Campbell, Philip Gould – accepted the pitch. In a government’s media agenda they considered the tabloid section decisive: centrally the Murdoch tabloids. That belief motivated their boss’s journey to the Barrier Reef resort where News Corporation held its annual intellectual exercises in 1995, and hard work went into presenting New Labour as something ex-exponents of Thatcherism might endorse without lightning striking them.

  To be sure Labour worked hard on all media relations, but by any input-output measure – effort and repentance – Newscorp was the Prodigal case. In the 1997 general-election campaign the Sun was first out of the trench, and in victory the government bonded closely with the Murdoch papers rather than with the Guardian and Independent, though they were scarred by real interaction with the departed Tories. Media gurus often assert the existence of a tabloid discourse more significant than anything in highbrow papers or current-affairs television – one reflecting the ‘gut interests’ of ‘real people’. This usually means misreporting crime and race issues, and inflating spurious concerns that neither socialdemocrats nor genuine conservatives can turn into resonant political campaigns and substantive outcomes.

  Yet the faith in tabloid medication remains potent right across the political spectrum. It must have been the main reason why David Cameron took obviously counter-productive risks to have Andy Coulson inside 10 Downing Street as his personal dispenser. (It is worth noting that sex-scandals, perhaps a genuine area of tabloid expertise, do little nowadays to shift voting intentions. In the 1997 election Labour revelled in tabloid support, but nothing serious resulted from lubricious revelations made by their new friends about Tory enemies. But real impact was made by financial-corruption stories, which chiefly originated in the Guardian.)

  The sales trend of Murdoch’s tabloids show Newscorp profitably managing a declining product, but they don’t suggest magic intimacy with the zeitgeist. And opinion-surveys are even less inspiring: about 14 per cent of British adults think that papers like the Sun are trustworthy. This is within a point or two of politicians themselves, and election studies provide little or no evidence that tabloids can change votes. Murdoch’s product may be thought of as the trust politicians have lost since (roughly) Baldwin’s time. His business is selling it back to them despite high prices and lack of proof that the recycled item is efficacious.

  Why do they pay? It’s said that the poor get bad bargains, and in a dark corner of economic theory lurks Giffen’s Paradox, offering a kind of analogy. This is where sales of a commodity rise when the cost increases. The commodity may be an indispensable food, which can support a (perhaps unhealthy) life on its own. While the economic situation is happy, a proportion of higher-quality nonessentials are bought. But, if prices rise, no high-quality product is affordable. So more of the essential is bought to fill the gap. No case has been observed in economics (though it perhaps occurs in ruinous famines). A political analogue is visible when the nation’s least trusted seek the aid of those barely more trusted than themselves. The politician must have something trust-like, however low the quality. Why is trust so scarce and costly – forcing politicians to buy Murdoch’s over-priced Giffen Goods? Attempts are being made to increase the supply. The process, however, is slow and complex.

  Machiavelli did not invent consultation or trust – but he analysed them, with indispensable clarity. It made him unpopular both for thinking our honesty defective and for investigating ways to use it while accepting the flaws. Better than perhaps any other writer he deals with the physics of trust. Really accurate human judgment is ‘by the hand’, but very few people can be intimate enough with a leader to employ it. Most must judge ‘by the eye’. So a leader’s moral failures, if not gross, may be confined to close friends able to forgive them. Those who judge by sight will continue their trust. But nothing more remote existed in Machiavelli’s time. No more than Lincoln did he think of political communities and their leaders as media constructs based loosely if at all on real demeanour. We talk easily now about people – voters, consumers – as existing ‘out there’ in abstract spaces we don’t define.

  Machiavelli’s assumption is that some corruption may escape close judgment by the eye. Writers of the mass age, like Orwell or Kipling, fear that almost anything may be concealed behind the media image. And certainly it was possible in the last century for sane people to believe that Stalin and Mao were amiable, kindly creatures. Lies of this kind they imagine being imposed on a featureless mass of humans – perhaps David Riesman’s ‘lonely crowd’ – something quite unlike the democratic Lazarsfeld crowd, which on examination turns into a dense structure of sub-groups linking people in complex patterns. They fear the decay of the second into the first, and it is not hard to find evidence which might point that way – electoral non-participation, for example.

  Decay, however, is not all the present story. Strenuous efforts – some due directly to government itself, and others to various mixes of popular and legislative action – are being made to illuminate our often mysterious society, to open structures which have been secretive, centralised, unaccountable or all those things. Some are highly successful, some disastrous, many ambiguous.

  Most industrial societies now contain politicians, administrators, corporate executives and professional practitioners who have realised (or realise sometimes) that much authority (or its shadow) must be surrendered to regain something of reality. That was quite specifically the motivation behind the British government’s devolution of power to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and its decision to make the Bank of England independent (again). Nearly everybody can t
hink of examples they hate – and of examples they admire. Most of the present left considers that the present Coalition’s plans for voluntarism and Big Society decentralisation are just cover for tax-reduction: but even if that proves correct it would not show that the issues being discussed are other than genuine. Nor would it show that the process of opening-out society’s institutions, however intermittent its movement is likely to be reversed.

  Ways are being found to understand the dimensions of our society which are beyond the reach of hand or eye, though progress is hampered by misapprehension and confusion. A sophisticated writer celebrating the American Revolution in 2002 showed that the intimate past still has a ghostly existence among us by asking whether today’s politicians would have the resolve of Washington and his colleagues – who did not feel the need to consult ritually abused focus groups before taking action. But they (like the Florentines) had direct knowledge of their intimate communities, and certainly of specialised groups within them. The use of opinion polls and survey data of various kinds – yes, even focus groups – are steps towards understanding what goes on ‘out there’.