The Murdoch Archipelago

by Bruce Page

  Sky and Fox, Times Newspapers, the monopolisation of Australian journalism and lesser coups in parallel amounted by the early 1990s to sweeping victory for Murdoch over structures devised by democratic states and intended to limit abuses in news media. Each carried its own business justification, but the overall pitch presented them as campaigns in a crusade. The rhetoric of ‘liberal totalitarianism’ perched the democracies on a continuum with the authoritarian states – not at the Evil Empire end, to be sure, but liable to move towards it but for the vigilance of Murdoch and other friends of liberty.

  To proceed from this to the idea of freedom as negation of the state is just shuffle-ball change. It’s a proposition which holds when an authoritarian government monopolises power; then its local retreat advances local liberty, and nothing else can. But in a democracy, where the state’s power is constitutionally restrained, no one-dimensional continuum exists. Constitutional action narrows some freedoms and widens others – something that is especially clear in the case of media systems. More freedom from defamation is less freedom of speech; freedom of information reduces freedom of bureaucratic diktat; less freedom to create monopoly is more freedom to compete. Under democracy, government is always a problem and always a possible (not automatic) solution. Simplifications like the Reagan one-liner ‘Government is not the solution, government is the problem’ in reality confuse the issue, like the oxymoronic ‘liberal totalitarianism’ formula, or the relabelling of the ruling class.

  Not everyone believed in theories of Murdoch the freedom crusader (the practice in Newscorp’s operations having rather been to eliminate or marginalise competitive and other problems by seeking political advantage). Still, they were clothed in free-market economic arguments by Stelzer and others, while Murdoch himself acquired the badges of American right-wing principle: supporting the Cato Institute (named for the two minor 18th-century pamphleteers, fans of the suicidal Roman) and subsidising conservative intellectual journalism of the right. But all this was laid over a programme much in the style of Black jack McEwen, who saw the state as a business association (if not a personal property) and would have found the Weekly Standard a trifle precious. Some contradictions were therefore visible. The Murdoch Doctrine, however, carried a saving guarantee. Every inhibition on liberty was to be liquidated by revolutionary technologies, installed under Newscorp’s direction. And Newscorp, nemesis of the Establishment, was revolutionary wherever anyone sliced it.

  In September 1993, three months after taking control of Star T-V, Murdoch delivered the remarkable speech in London – written according to Newscorp insiders by Stelzer – in which he seemed to say that his company’s operations would shortly be putting an end to authoritarian politics everywhere in the world.

  Advances in the technology of communications have proved an unambiguous threat to totalitarian regimes: fax machines enable dissidents to bypass statecontrolled print media; direct-dial telephone makes it difficult for a state to control interpersonal voice communication; and satellite broadcasting makes it possible for information-hungry residents of many closed societies to bypass statecontrolled television channels.

  The effect was partly to re-emphasise that the Western media regulators he had overcome represented the liberal brand of repression. But they were the old frontier and Star the new, so his remarks were taken as a challenge to Beijing, and Murdoch seemed sincerely happy with that. Satellite television, having saved Britain from ‘snobbery’, would save the Middle Kingdom from tyranny.

  A Newscorp employee who found this particularly interesting was Jonathan Mirsky, whom The Times had just appointed to Hong Kong. Mirsky, an American, was expert in Chinese culture, driven powerfully by conscience and trusted by many brave dissidents: he may have been the Western journalist most loathed by Beijing. Dispatches from Tiananmen Square to the Observer had won him a British Press Award as foreign reporter of 1989 – and unlimited exclusion from mainland China. For The Times to embed him, as it were, in Chris Patten’s forthcoming attempt to fortify democracy before the Hong Kong handover was to slap a glove down in front of the Communist Party, in just the bold spirit The Boss had (apparently) been showing.

  The Party saw the problem. Promises of economic advance required Western co-operation, and thus required the tranquil absorption of Hong Kong. Force at Tiananmen had worked, but foreign sensibilities could not be outraged again. (The book Patten was later to write contains an unwelcome message for the Party: that the West had no need to assist its search for legitimacy.) Study of the Soviet collapse seems to have convinced Party leaders that changes need not undermine their power so long as they could hang on to media control – that is, explode Murdoch’s thesis.

  Belief that communications technology brings liberty without moral choice contains just enough truth to mislead. There is an argument that maritime communications promoted freedom in Europe (as against landlocked armies). This looks neat from a British perspective; for West Africans it promoted intercontinental slavery. Technologies differ tactically from the governmentcontrol viewpoint. Transistor radios, giving cheap, inconspicuous access to Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolutionary harangues, contributed to the Shah of Iran’s downfall.

  Murdoch certainly overestimated fax. On 4 June 1989, as the army moved on Tiananmen Square, government monitors were deployed at every fax machine. Fax can be tapped as readily as telephones. Printing has some good resistance qualities, for no traceable plant need be held by the audience, and personal networks amplify its effects remarkably. But it can be marginalised by sufficient control of advanced machinery. The Internet then was a consideration for the future.

  Probably it did not take Beijing’s propaganda specialist Guangen Ding long to assess satellite television. The reception plant is bulky, and generates an electromagnetic ‘signature’ (used in Britain, that closed society, to detect licence-fee evasion). The dish, from a political policeman’s viewpoint, is delightfully conspicuous, and transmits significant amounts of information only if sophisticated resources are available.

  Star had been active since 1991, and when Murdoch arrived was running five twenty-four-hour channels: Viacom’s MTV Asia; Prime Time Sports (a joint venture with the Denver-based Prime Network); entertainment and cultural programmes through Star Plus; a Mandarin Chinese channel; and the BBC’s World Service Television, WSTV. It would be hard to think of anything ‘information-hungry residents’ of a closed society like China would want on their screens more than WSTV (now BBC World News). It was set up in 1991 as a twenty-four-hour service for Asia and the Middle East, promising to keep viewers ‘not just informed, but well informed, with in-depth analysis and cutting-edge interviews – the story from all sides’. That promise the channel is generally judged to have fulfilled. It is the visual partner of BBC Radio’s World Service, a byword for international reporting with wide range and reliability. It runs many of the high-value features produced at the Television Centre in London, one of which in 1993 was The Last Emperor, a biography of Mao. This was highly critical, and, though it didn’t use Huang Wanli’s term ‘criminal’, Mao’s horrible sexual behaviour was frankly disclosed. Quite credibly, it is said to have rocked the Party.

  Also there were numerous references to Tiananmen on the World news bulletins – as there still are: the BBC website lists more than a hundred a year. Chinese media of course must respect official amnesia, but the BBC uses ordinary newsdesk practice and, after 400 people have been killed in such a fashion, reverberations persist. Tremors from Bloody Sunday, threefold more distant in time, and rather less mortal, still register with comparable frequency. ‘It was driving them nuts,’ said Murdoch, meaning the masters of Beijing. But of course it was a new experience for them.

  Dishes on the mainland were still few, and their status undecided. Early in 1994 the Propaganda Ministry told Murdoch that, unless Star’s programming started conforming with their idea of good television, they would ban dishes wherever Star’s ‘footprint’ reached in China. There would be no adv
ertising revenue from Western firms in pursuit of the Chinese consumer. Star’s potential, and value, could sink to nothing. Of course that too was a new kind of experience.

  Television regulation is complicated and hard to enforce. The notion under democratic government is that you should have a television operation only if you allow independent editorial and creative judgment within it. This roughly is the BBC/ITV model, for which Murdoch has constantly displayed his loathing. He prefers editors who consider his word sacred, practice arbitrary dismissal widely, and thinks entertainment a product distinct from news, and essentially more attractive. (There is nothing to suggest he knows anything about real news, except that it often gets out of control, which to others is its great fascination.) Naturally Murdoch doesn’t put it like that, but argues generally that regulation of course means rules, and society should have the least rules possible.

  Satellite television in the West has certainly eroded a great many of the rules. Murdoch based his original Sky transmission system in Luxembourg, targeted at British audiences but outside the jurisdiction of British regulators. He was able to press this advantage, and get the sort of system he likes, not because the regulators were totalitarian or authoritarian – just the reverse. In Britain there would be profound legal difficulties about preventing people from having aerials to receive signals from space: a free country of course isn’t lawless. (Also, the regulators were responsible to politicians whom Murdoch professed to support, and certainly not to threaten.)

  Murdoch is not greatly troubled by law that tends to circumscribe his media operations. His method is to signal acceptance, and afterwards to find exceptions and loopholes – gun-jumping, or foot-dragging – then, if he gets stuck, he seeks political aid. But loophole-drilling works only if others – especially the servants of the state – hold laws generally in respect. Trouncing the institutions of the constitutional West was not good training for going a few rounds with career totalitarians. One cannot say the leaders of China care little for law – they still care essentially nothing for it. People capable of Tiananmen would find it simple to create a situation in which no sane individual would go anywhere near a satellite dish.

  Murdoch promptly set about ‘trying to make peace with the Chinese government’. He claims to have been puzzled by Ding’s attitude – curiously, it was that of a man responding to a threat. After all, as he told Forbes later in 1994, there had not been anything in the London speech beyond ‘a few standard clichés’. He agreed to remove the BBC channel from Star’s satellite AsiaSat-1, and it was done by April 1994. This stopped it from reaching the few mainland viewers who had seen The Last Emperor and the unhinging Tiananmen reports, and simultaneously chopped off substantial audiences in Hong Kong (then independent of Beijing) and Taiwan (which remains independent, as a pluralist democracy). He also agreed to put $5.4 million into the People’s Daily, which is the central element in China’s totalitarian media apparatus, and so pure a pseudonewspaper that Weber might rethink his dictum that ideal types never appear exactly in the real world.

  The libertarian crusade in China had lasted roughly six months. It would be hard to explain such a surrender in terms of ordinary psychology – how a longserving media executive could have sufficient credulity to be so mistaken about the nature of totalitarianism. Clearly Murdoch must have some left over for believing people who say what a demon he is. He had of course seen off the British print unions, in the previous decade, but that was with a friendly state protecting him (he felt ‘very safe’, as he told Woodrow Wyatt). The rugged images – hero and anti-hero – jointly produce the idea of the boss of Newscorp as an uncompromising character. This is true only if ‘uncompromising’ is used to mean flipping between aggression and submission without intervening tension.

  After his long and successful campaign against the excessive governing rules in Western society, Murdoch agreed to a reduced set of one: just obey the government. Ayn Rand’s reaction is hard to imagine, but there is something applicable in a commentator who received his Nobel Prize just after Murdoch’s speech consigning government authority to history: the US economic historian Douglas C. North.

  The evolution of government from its medieval, Mafia-like character to that embodying modern legal institutions and instruments is a major part of the history of freedom. It is a part that tends to be obscured or ignored because of the myopic vision of many economists, who persist in modelling government as nothing more than a gigantic form of theft and income distribution.

  Murdoch and his supporters, probably without understanding much about them, had taken the most myopic of these free-market doctrines, mixed them with some incantations about new media, and declared that a pathway to the future was open. In fact it was a wormhole leading back to the Mafia state. But perhaps Murdoch hardly noticed. By October 1994 he was telling a Melbourne lecture audience that Orwell had got it all wrong and that political monopoly had been eliminated by technology. In view of what had happened and has happened since in China, this was almost superb. (He had by then bought Star’s remaining equity.)

  The business did expand physically, though its profits were only potential. Xing Kong Wei Shi (Starry Sky Satellite TV) received permission late in 2002 to begin national distribution in China, and claimed great success for products such as its male beauty contest Woman in Charge. But if it had information-hungry customers they did not receive any service of value to them. ‘Star is steering clear of news altogether,’ wrote the Financial Times Beijing correspondent James Kynge, reporting the new concession – the first for a foreign-owned network. It was a reward for:

  the strategy of Rupert Murdoch, News Corp’s boss, who has assiduously courted the Chinese government for more than a decade, trying to convince it that Star TV programming will do nothing to upset Beijing’s authoritarian rule.

  ‘Everything in China is about relationships and about mutual benefit,’ said Jamie Davis, head of Star TV in China … ‘I think Rupert Murdoch has a very good relationship with the Chinese government … and we work hard at it,’ he added. Consistent with this, Xing Kong Wei Shi’s apolitical content was reviewed twice to make sure it is inoffensive.

  Perhaps Orwell didn’t think of material already apolitical by construction needing to go through two more processes to ensure Big Brother’s goodwill. Mr Davis, of course, was neatly illustrating Professor North’s point.

  By reversing the one-dimensional model, this story could be made to show the ‘state-run’ BBC as custodian of liberty and private capitalism as the enemy. But it makes no more sense reversed. Neither ownership nor partisan alignment is the real issue here. Liberals may bridle somewhat, but the lesson properly to be drawn is that in an essential way the politically neutral BBC, the liberal Guardian, the illiberal Daily Mail and the conservative Daily Telegraph all resemble each other more than any of them resemble Newscorp media output. All, in utterly dissimilar ways, have worked within the constitution of the state to consolidate their independence from it. Newscorp is about eroding the boundaries between the state power and media operations, meanwhile cloaking this process in fantasies about anti-Establishment revolution which – necessarily – feed back into and distort its journalism.

  Keith Murdoch’s conscription propaganda in 1915, the Sunday Times’ crackpot assault on the ‘AIDS establishment’, the abject history of Satellite Television Asia Region are all manifestations of something which, for a time, made itself marvellously comfortable in Beijing. There are plenty of other distortions of journalism, but none of them matter nearly as much. A good thing about Murdoch’s Chinese activities is that no democratic politician who agrees to examine them can entertain honest doubt about the character of the operation.

  We shall never know what might have happened if Murdoch had used a robust Australian expression (there is a wide choice) when Ding threatened what was only an outpost of his empire financially. Just as we shall never know what would have happened to the United States if Kay Graham and her colleagues had surr
endered to a far more serious threat.

  We may be sure China’s ruling party were pleased with the deal. Indeed, it gave them confidence: they think they know now how to handle Western corporations (in particular, they have been able to get hold of enough firewall technology to keep the Internet fairly well in hand). Murdoch of course ceased to describe freedom as an inevitable by-product of satellite television, but he did air the notion that Western-style entertainment, separated from Western-style news, might incrementally bring change to China, and so make it ‘work’.

  But neither China, nor the world, really has the time for adaptations of Buffy the Vampire Slayer to take subtle effect. During the years which Murdoch spent assuring the Communist Party that media systems need not be significantly contaminated with reality, AIDS was disseminating in China. As near as can now be worked out, it had attacked about 10,000 people by the period of the Sunday Times’ unsuccessful attempt to persuade the British government that it did not exist. Official refusal to admit its existence in China gave appalling impetus to HIV infection and the least alarming projections by outside analysts now predict nineteen million deaths during the first quarter of this century. Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) is a not dissimilar case of disastrous secrecy: the rest of the world is beginning to understand what Professor Wilson meant by his phrase ‘the unsteady giant’.

  To the extent that official China now acknowledges AIDS as a problem, much credit is due to Elizabeth Rosenthal of the New York Times, who in 2000 exposed the scandal of the infected commercial blood-banks in Henan province. Her colleague Nicholas Kristof, following up the story, judged that the government’s response was still so grudging as to be ‘tantamount to murder’. Nobody who knows anything about Newscorp’s investigative record, anywhere in the world, would think it likely to produce work like Rosenthal’s. But the arrangement Starry Sky Satellite TV had with the government actually made it impossible. In that sense, totalitarian societies ‘work’. If they continue doing so long enough, the results will be something beyond even Akhmatova’s capacity to describe.