The Murdoch Archipelago

by Bruce Page

  Naturally this is a picture full of complex movements. In America the decay of national voting has gone further than in Britain and much further than in Europe generally. (It cannot formally happen in Australia, where poll attendance is legally enforced, perhaps masking apathy.) But many processes of civil participation are stronger in America, notably local responsibility and jury trial. Whitehall’s attempt to limit jury rights to ease the task of incompetent police and prosecutors would meet stern resistance in the USA. Everywhere consultation often turns out to be ‘consultation’ and crucial promises – such as Britain’s Freedom of Information Act – are stalled, sidelined or emasculated.

  The development of structured, interlinked communities is obviously possible within a mass society. Much of this structure already exists, even if tremendously increased complexity has made some of it hard to understand. It obviously isn’t possible for everyone to participate equally throughout a very large society. But if there are decent levels of participation within devolved groups which interact with each other, there will not be very many degrees of separation between people, and in those circumstances trust indeed will be manufactured in enhanced quantities. While it will not be maintained by accident, it is not more or less implausible than the lonely crowd.

  Repair of the political process therefore isn’t impossible. But the decisive issues are interlocking ones of news-media regulation and administrative disclosure, and they have yet to be addressed seriously. Genuinely competitive media operating in a world with official secrecy largely dismantled – a strengthened set of ‘virtuous circles’ –would eliminate any need for politicians to have mercenary help in communicating with their constituents.

  But there would be discomfort, as in Halley’s regime for Newton. The politicobureaucratic nexus which dominates the practical constitution in every present-day industrial democracy would be shattered, and ministers would find themselves using their own words (truthfully or otherwise) in response to demands for information. And Machiavelli’s last service is to show that life would be strenuous for the media as well as for bureaucrats.

  Secrecy, even in the minimal quantity of his times, Machiavelli considered deadly. Rule, being based on perception and reputation, is undermined by ‘detestable calumnies’ – hence his enthusiasm for suppressing them quoted at the head of this chapter. But not with an Official Secrets Act. The Discourses, observing that calumny is ‘practised more where accusations are used less’, says society must ensure ‘that it is possible to accuse every citizen without any fear and without any suspicion’. Political health depends on the whistleblower and investigator. The Discourses doesn’t argue for people’s courts or privileged denunciation, rather for a public process using legally admissible evidence. This is ‘justified defamation’ in modern terms. Clearly Machiavelli would back it up with a swingeing Freedom of Information Act.

  ‘Calumnies’ then equate to libel or slander in modern terms – defamations which cannot be proved. And – in his drastic way – Machiavelli demands evenhanded peril. As there will be no anonymity or immunity, but retribution, for those who are successfully accused, there must be tough consequences for accusers who cannot prove their case. A MacKenzie theory of libel is far from his mind. The Roman practice of tossing calumniators of the Tarpeian Rock would be worth reviving, he considers.

  What this is saying is that disclosure lies at the centre of all political communication, and should tell us that any useful reform of media legislation has to relate increasingly powerful Freedom of Information legislation to questions of libel and privacy, and relate both of them to the issues of media ownership, competition, control and organisation.

  There is a very powerful argument, with strong historical evidence behind it, which says that the most successful media systems up to now have contained a principle of nationality. Roughly speaking this means that effective ownership of media businesses should be in the hands of citizens of the countries in which they operate. The view is taken very strongly by the United States, and less comprehensively elsewhere. A good deal of our story has concerned Rupert Murdoch’s unrelenting campaign to erode all such inhibitions – one of his specific targets being the British legislation confining commercial television ownership to British companies. His arguments are usually characterised by being selected purely for reasons of tactical opportunism, and are thus incoherent. The point here is that virtually nobody seriously committed to the future of the British media considers them convincing – even as a poor conclusion reached by interesting means.

  Before devising and publishing its new Media Bill in 2002, the British government asked for submissions of evidence from interested organisations and individuals. Twenty-four documents were received, many of which rejected in some detail the idea that the British-ownership rule should be relaxed. Others dismissed it quite briefly, influenced by the fact that the relevant Minister, Tessa Jowell, both explicitly and byway of extensive briefing off the record over several months, had indicated that the government was not interested in the idea. Two submissions argued vehemently for the restriction to be completely abolished: News International (the UK division of Newscorp) and Arthur Andersen, then Newscorp’s auditors. (Should the discussion recur Andersen will not take part, having been destroyed by its participation in the Enron scandal.)

  The Bill then emerged with a clause repealing the British-ownership requirement. The supporting documents and briefings from Downing Street did not engage in any substance with the arguments made in the ‘consultation’ documents, most of which were wholly ignored, along with the majority of mediareform issues discussed in recent years. Apart from reversing Ms Jowell’s earlier statements about the ownership clause, most of the Bill was concerned with attempts to revive the prospects for terrestrial digital television – shattered by taking the advice a few years earlier of Rupert Murdoch and the (then) ITV companies. Professor Patrick Barwise of the London Business School, author of the standard book on television and its audience, said that the ‘consultation’ was entirely spurious. ‘They might as well have just said at the start: “We are going to do what News International want”, and saved everybody a good deal of time.’ This amounted to a blunt statement that modest shoots of reform are just that, and that the old diseased vegetation bureaucratic orthodoxy plus tabloid appeasement – won’t easily be cleared away.

  The problem of rule which the Murdochs have exploited is entirely available for others to follow. At the time a favourite Downing Street rationalisation said that it would be wrong to write media laws to deal with just one man, Murdoch. After all, he would soon be gone, like all mortals.

  Of course that was cover for having written a media bill exclusively to deal with him, and to exactly accommodate his desires. If double-think of such an order continues to be acceptable then Murdoch’s operation perhaps with minor refinement – may provide a general model for media empires living in corporatist bliss with slowly degrading national governments.

  14

  RUPERT’S ESTABLISHMENT, 1910–2003 A journal that gave utterance to nothing but untruths would loose [sic] its influence with its character; but there are none so ignorant as not to see the necessity of occasionally issuing truths. It is only in cases in which the editor has a direct interest in the contrary, in which he has not had the leisure or the means of ascertaining the facts, or in which he is himself misled by the passions, cupidity and interests of others, that untruths find a place in his columns. Still, these instances may, perhaps, include a majority of the cases.

  JAMES FENIMORE COOPER, The American Democrat

  antimetabolite

  noun:

  A substance that closely resembles an essential metabolite and therefore interferes with physiological reactions involving it.

  The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language The Murdoch enterprise has prospered through some ten decades from a peculiar ability to penetrate democracy’s imperfect immune system. Its relationship with totalitarianism has b
een simpler, and in the end sterile.

  There being no immune system in totalitarian physiology, Newscorp bonded directly to communist China.

  Democratic elites have tended to honour Newscorp uneasily. When an editor of the Sun who suggested that a gay mafia ran the British Cabinet was handing over to an editor of the News of the World – Rebekah Brooks – who excited the country’s most recent vigilante outbreak – ministers attend the corporate ritual, along with such eminent bureaucrats as the chief of national security. But fear moves them as much as admiration.

  The chiefs of Beijing seemed warmer during Murdoch’s Chinese period. They praised the ‘objectivity’ of his journalism, and called him an ‘intellectual’. Jiang Zemin (when President) stood in once as Great Movie Critic, to assure Chinese audiences they would find in Titanic a noble tale of proletarian heroes versus ‘capitalist lapdogs and stooges’.

  And these people – though they fear many things – did not fear Murdoch. Rather, they granted Newscorp unique trading concessions. What they do fear is disruption of their grand historical project – which is to erase the criminal record of their Party. Among modern terrors, only the Nazi and Soviet examples resemble it in scale. The difference is that its crimes are officially secret.

  Though ebullient tyrants and frail democracies abound, authoritarian systems, for various reasons, have found present times increasingly fatal. The Nazi and Soviet organisms are defunct; in the nations they infested, free memory is prophylactic. But not so in China, where power brutally seized remains in the Party’s grip, along with a resolve to legitimise it means to that end being, necessarily, amnesia. Beijing intends nothing less than to prove (though the words are Murdoch’s) that ‘authoritarian countries can work’. This, if it can after all be shown – and on such a scale will be a profound discovery. They were able to make considerable use of Newscorp in progress towards their goal – though for Murdoch it was not a profitable experience.

  Given Murdoch’s personal ductility, it was not surprising that he could be meek and gentle with these business partners while remaining a self-advertised libertarian. However, a media organisation, even so protean a one as Newscorp, must somewhat disguise the contortions involved. Partly _ it was done by misrepresenting China – using such standard means as suggestio falsi and suppressio veri

  But there were subtler ideological processes involved – which apply to the Archipelago generally. A Murdoch ideology may seem implausible, but it exists, as just the thing Marx and Engels initially discussed: a means to sculpt reality, to pull wool over half-shut eyes. And anyway an organisation in plural democracy – still Newscorp’s chief habitat – needs some defining beliefs: the Murdoch ideology, verbally populist, centres on assaulting something called the Establishment. Newscorp befriends the populace everywhere against the elitist, snobbish masters of the world. They, consequently, envy Murdoch’s bond with the workers whose values and interests his tabloids celebrate.

  That this rhetoric achieves noticeable (if tinny) resonance is due to present unease – sometimes guilt – about democratic command and elite responsibility. Our erotically intrepid society treats the facts of rule and class like the Victorians who supposedly dressed up their piano-legs. But social passions, like sex, are irrepressible. Though Britain may seem to disguise it least, exploitation of privilege in Australia and America is quite as energetic – justifying working-class resentments which, tickled with a little philistinism, make easy game for populist flattery (That Alexander Hamilton’s New York Post should be devoted to this is ironic. As we have seen, he thought republics should especially mistrust anyone paying.‘obsequious court’ to the people.)

  The ideology is financially libertarian, militantly so whenever a visionary is restrained from enriching the people. It was very soon after Enron’s colossal bankruptcy that Murdoch’s veteran economic counsellor Irwin Stelzer appeared for the defence in the Weekly Standard, Newscorp’s journal of intellects. Enron may have sinned – here Stelzer briefly resembled a fastidious Maoist chiding overzealous Red Guards but its ‘anti-Establishment entrepreneurs’ made war on great boardrooms, terrified Wall Street, galvanised markets, re-endowed consumers. Like Michael Milken in the 1980s, it had made economic revolution. (Milken’s insurrection of course produced the ‘junk equity’ to float Fox.) For Milken fans his fraud sentence almost outdoes the martyrdom of Bartholomew, and Stelzer was pleading against any similar flaying. That plea may fail, Enron’s lust actually to mulct consumers having been very clearly exposed. But his rhetoric – Enron the populist crusade remains imposing.

  This outfit was advised by McKinsey, grandest of consultancies. Its auditors were Arthur Andersen – ruined now by criminal guilt, but preeminent when hired. The rococo tax-shelters at Enron’s heart were erected by Wall Street’s finest (notably J. P. Morgan Chase and Citicorp), in exchange for monumental fees. Enron the war against big business is as grotesque as the socialist-realist content of Titanic. But in a willing subject all sense of the grotesque is blocked by invocation of the ‘Establishment’, enabling the revolutionary disguise of Newscorp and its sympathisers to be sustained. Kipling tells us that words are drugs, and such a potion’s origins deserve inquiry. The idea of the establishment is in fact a derivative of McCarthyism – one its inventor, Henry Fairlie, took off the intellectual market because of its vile side-effects.

  McCarthyism itself was a product of 1950s secretiveness and Stalin’s espionage against the West. The subversion was hardly remarkable, but the efficacy of US counter-intelligence certainly was: the ‘Venona’ decrypts provided both proof of the danger and the means to contain it. Zeal for security – excessive, in hindsight – entirely hid these victories from the public, and also from President Truman.

  The sufficiently sobering truth being secret, valid distrust of the USSR became morbid obsession and Senator McCarthy found that, where official silence inhibited accusation and disproof, smears (‘calumnies’ in Machiavelli) would luxuriate. When the spies Burgess and Maclean escaped to Moscow, pandemic treachery developed a British potential, tapped by Fairlie’s Spectator column in September 1955. The traitors, he suggested, belonged to a connection pervading all society’s institutions even apparent competitors – which he named the ‘Establishment’. It was not communist. But it protected from the popular mass its privileged practices and members – communism, communists and other unspecified mischiefs included. Today, the spies’ getaway is known, straightforwardly, as Kim Philby’s work. Then, notions of a numinous, eminent conspiracy explosively outgrew the Spectator audience, and have since outlived the USSR. The naming of its members (bishops, bankers, union leaders and so on) makes a gossipy parlour-game along with speculating on the network’s crimes – the railroading of Milken by the US chapter, causing the Second World War (via Appeasement, prior to the unmasking), blocking Princess Margaret’s marriage, inventing AIDS (and more, more).

  But there’s always a dark potential to this game. Its original players, indeed, urged a magnitude of snooping as extensive as that carried out by the supposed Establishment, and called for open season to be declared on individuals they named for suspicious connection to communists. ‘Treason and sedition’ made ‘niceties of protocol’ obsolete, declared the ultra-Tory MP Harold Soref – and was applauded by the Daily Telegraph, where Malcolm Muggeridge was assistant editor for inquisitions.

  For various reasons, they failed to create a proof-strength British McCarthyism, and one was that an idea launched in an intellectual weekly may be torpedoed in the same place. Establishment-hunters, wrote the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper – a Tory, and an MIS veteran – implied that to defend a suspected communist was to become a communist conspirator. The Spectator, surely, wouldn’t say that ‘citizens have personal rights [but] suspected communists have not’? He went on to expose the persistent nature of this brand of thought – its hybrid intellectual tissue. Muggeridge’s followers, said Trevor-Roper, were attacking under ‘the name of an abstraction’ – of the vaguest
sort – things far from abstract: ‘human rights’ expressed as ‘personal loyalties’ to particular people.

  This abstractness many find seductive. Out of a few ecclesiastical overtones Fairlie had conjured a thrilling, vacuous term, in which portent overwhelms content. Targets of infinite opportunity (persons or policies) may therefore be framed in it, and implications attached to individuals with immense economy of evidence. Where the usage is accepted, the effect of accusation may be had without law’s long-grown requirement to be concrete and consistent.

  Abstraction is not inescapably vague, but it is labile in ways impossible for the concrete – which a standard dictionary will define as ‘relating to an actual, specific thing or instance’ (as in ‘the concrete evidence needed to convict’). For that reason analysis mixes them circumspectly. Fairlie was more phrasemaker than analyst. But he was also a Tory of the type intuitively hostile to witch-hunts, and he withdrew his invention from the McCarthy cause. Rather than abusing influence, he said, the Establishment actually restrained abuse.

  One must thank whichever gods control Britain’s destiny that it is there … Men of power need to be checked by a collective opinion which is stable and which they cannot override: public opinion needs its counter; new opinion must be tested. These the Establishment provides: the check, the counter and the test.

  But that possibly was its last favourable reference. Though the term occurs regularly in discussion of institutions, it attracts scorn, even loathing. Establishments are what other people belong to.

  In no culture is the usage more insistent than Newscorp’s. Irwin Stelzer, still an admirer, sees conflict with the establishment as defining Rupert the Rebel. John Menadue, long disillusioned, recalls being initially attracted by Murdoch and Rivett ‘thumbing their noses’ at the Adelaide Establishment, and supposed the Profumo exploitation and its successors to be similarly healthful irreverence. A frequent assumption is that the tabloid style – Murdoch’s speciality – is intrinsically rebellious, and thus a counter-establishment force.