by Bruce Page
When the story of Murdoch’s surrender to Beijing’s authority broke, in 1994, Jonathan Mirsky filed the story – but The Times did not run it. ‘We don’t run Murdoch stories,’ said the deputy foreign editor, David Watts. ‘We’, it turned out, meant the foreign pages. The practice was to confine stories about The Boss within the business pages. Mirsky kept trying, and filed ten more stories about the eclipse of the BBC, including a report of Chris Patten’s speech on the matter, which was not friendly to Murdoch. None of them made the paper anywhere.
Somewhat later, both Patten and Mirsky found their accounts of China anathema to the Newscorp subsidiaries which had commissioned them: Patten’s book East and West unwanted by HarperCollins; Mirsky’s journalism by The Times. During the consequent arguments over censorship Andrew Neil wrote that Murdoch terrorised his subordinates, and Mirsky remembered being told, on joining The Times, that it was an office dominated by ‘fear’.
Qualities of demonic genius may inspire terror, but to some observers these are no more visible than Murdoch’s celebrated charm. Patten, like Gough Whitlam, found the leader of Newscorp mildly tedious – combining unique access to China with simplistic, off-the-peg ideas.
Murdoch’s style doesn’t include the swagger seen sometimes at the top of a Media business, nor is the (usually dubious) epithet ‘larger than life’ applied to him: this is just a sinewy man of middle height, with a casual gait (one shoulder carried a little forward) and the unaffected demeanour of his class. Overtly, Australian privilege likes to keep the egalitarian faith, and Murdoch was bred in that culture by good tutors and a careful mother. The sages certifying him later as a Times proprietor were wrong to consider ‘colonial aristocrat’ a full description. But what they chose to see was in itself real. The latter seventies clearly aged him: he is an ‘old 80’ says Michael Wolff, but the easy manners remain effective in small, uncontentious groups: there, charm is still reported. As a listener he outclasses many media bosses, and to Margaret Thatcher seemed an admirable conversationalist. (Wyatt’s diaries say that Murdoch spoke little in their meetings. With a Patten or Whitlam, conversation is always something of an all-comers joust.) In another mode, however, Murdoch may pour sudden abuse over some individual target within a group.
Media companies, of course, don’t resemble a Household Cavalry officers’ mess. Still, the rule against dumping on people in front of their colleagues is roughly respected, and even in Old Fleet Street many of the famous ‘bollockings’ were just louche horseplay. In Newscorp they have a regular disciplinary character
– of a piece with the notorious silent phone calls. Nor would loyalists of the MacKenzie type, considering Murdoch a genius, deplore it – ‘bollocking’ is a stripe of honour, to hand down to lower ranks. Outside the tabloid newsrooms, self-respect is not quite so plastic, and shrewder courtiers can apply evasive tactics. Simon Jenkins (editor of The Times, from 1989 to 1992) noted outbursts to be rarer one-on-one: contention should be avoided in group settings. Veterans tend to stress their own resistance to treatment visited on others: Neil, explaining the method of silences to a television audience, said that he managed one day to contain himself till Murdoch broke into speech. Jenkins says he suffered no tirades himself, but that Andrew Knight, when chief executive of the British division (News International), submitted ‘like a butler’. John Menadue, however, states frankly that individual survival tactics leave the culture of autocracy undisturbed.
It confers tactical advantage in deal-making. Murdoch – therefore Newscorp – switches briskly between attack and retreat, or walkout and handshake. He sees here a principle that media companies, being in ‘the ideas business’, can’t be ‘run by committee’. But if the ideas are to be real ones, such companies can be run no other way, for any worthwhile check is in principle a committee. A classic illustration was the ‘Hitler Diaries’ case, which also reminded Hugh Trevor-Roper how correct he had been about restraints on power.
He was by then Lord Dacre and a national director of Times Newspapers; he was also the one source of intellectual credit for the historical coup Murdoch desired. That eclipse of a scholar’s judgment was transient, and ended when he wrote a Times article to certify the ‘diaries’. Writers often know the sick realisation that expounding an argument has revealed it as bilge: sadly, due to frantic deadlines, this came to Dacre after it was printed. Steeling himself, he told Times editor Charles Douglas Home that embarrassing retreat was necessary.
The Hitler-fakes had expected gloriously to exploit the world’s publishers – but they did not know Murdoch. Once he had built them up, cut them down and cracked their nerve, the expectation vanished: converting to a belief at Times Newspapers that the boss was bringing in, as one hit, the scoop and bargain of the age. To be a corporate nay-sayer in such circumstances was unappetising, and Douglas Home avoided passing Dacre’s news to the Sunday Times team busy on the ersatz journals. By chance they found out just as their own print-run was beginning.
For a paper like theirs the sole professional option was to replace the edition – stripped of world-scoop claims – and put checks in hand. For most of them, only the word of a one-time Regius Professor of Modern History had held back scepticism: using Dacre’s better judgment – acting, indeed, in committee fashion – they might have saved some intellectual capital.
But it was in practice Murdoch’s call – though he was in New York, and not legally entitled to influence any Sunday Times editorial decision. Brian MacArthur, deputy editor, phoned to say Dacre thought the diaries phoney after all.
‘Fuck Dacre,’ said The Boss.
Whereas Starry Sky Satellite TV concerned censorship within China the Patten/Mirsky incidents were about western censorship appeasing Beijing. Patten’s East and West argued that for democracies to accommodate political monopoly in China was not honourable, prudent or necessary: Mirsky’s complaint was that The Times, having once been bold, was restricting his accounts of dissidence in China, particularly any involving Tiananmen.
Newscorp denial took various forms. Peter Stothard, then editor of The Times, boldly declared that Murdoch never influenced – had never once dictated to him – any item of policy. Promptly John Izbicki, a former Times man, described in the Daily Telegraph an act of Murdoch dictation he had seen taking place. Stothard surely convinced himself, but few others.
Subtler colleagues rebutted charges not seriously made, such as the existence of efficient conspiracies to keep Murdoch-unfriendly matter off the news pages. Admittedly the Patten scandal didn’t make The Times until it had been well ventilated elsewhere, wrote the media editor, Raymond Snoddy – but that was cock-up, disproving conspiracy. Presumably he wasn’t in on the conspiratorial little rule about Murdoch stories which had been explained to Mirsky. But that’s a cock-up for you.
HarperCollins tried first to suggest East and West wasn’t fit for publication. Its subsequent, most successful publication by Macmillan was then cited by Murdoch fans as proof that it had not truly been censored (that this torpedoed the initial argument didn’t trouble them). Of course the book was censored as completely as lies in the power of any enormous publisher, and doubtless the Chinese leadership took it very kindly. That Western publishing maintains diversity is hardly Newscorp’s fault.
Naturally the real issue was (and is) self-censorship, better called autocensorship. This, everyone knows, is unlike administered censorship something barely legal in liberal states, and unusual in authoritarian ones. China, following its minimal bureaucratic tradition, uses little of the Nazis’ egregious machinery. Speech and assembly are quite free – so long as Marxist-Leninist-Maoist thought, the dictatorship of the proletariat and the incumbent satraps aren’t disturbed.
Auto-censorship works through faculties its subjects must possess to merit restraint: only part of a reporter’s ability is needed to estimate (or over-estimate) the desires of the powerful. Like Adam Smith’s invisible hand, auto-censorship then responds to contingencies which planned suppression
cannot reach. To understand the Chinese application, says the American scholar Perry Link, imagine that writers work under a chandelier in which lives a huge anaconda. Coils drop occasionally to crush a victim. But at such moments the snake remains undemonstrative. No serious effort is made to disguise the menace of this situation; still less to explain it. ‘You decide,’ is the anaconda’s message.
The West requires disguises – some of which we’ve examined – and explanations, commonly supplied as pseudo-technicalities. When Mirsky quit The Times in 1997 over rejection of his China writings, Brian MacArthur – writing as an elder columnist for the paper – assured its readers that censorship wasn’t involved, just issues of professional method. As an ex-academic, Mirsky could not fashion the ‘telling intros’ The Times required, and the subs could not ‘disentangle’ his copy. It had been just the same at the Observer.
Though Mirsky had indeed been a professor, it hadn’t stopped The Times expensively poaching him (nor does Donald Trelford, his editor at the Observer, recall missing intros and tangled text). But essentials were involved here as much as presentational zip. Mirsky failed to understand how his ‘obsession’ with the state of democracy in Hong Kong interfered with something MacArthur called ‘normal news reporting’. Although it wasn’t stated, readers aware of Mirsky’s record could infer that his qualities might be useful at such moments as Tiananmen, and for winning prizes. But real journalism was about ‘prosaic’ considerations.
‘Normal news’ is the oxymoron which in a free society helps make autocensorship tolerable to its practitioners. ‘Normality’ implicitly takes the high moral ground. In many activities such usage is legitimate, but in media work it is a seductive delusion to suppose that the mass of normal, prosaic stuff has a value of its own. With the abnormal subtracted, it’s deadly rubbish, and China is an exemplary case. The exiled poet Bei Ling has written of the bright normality which clad China’s capital during George Bush’s presidential visit in February 2002:
On this day of the lunar New Year … Beijing’s Avenue of Heavenly Peace throngs with the last of holiday revelers. The highways are crowded with evidence of new wealth. Customers at a Starbucks in Shanghai pay $3 for a caffe mocha and never feel the sting. And there are writers in prison simply because they are writers. Printing a commentary piece like this could bring a death sentence in China. The sun shone as President Bush’s motorcade made its way through Beijing’s burgeoning streets, but looks can be deceiving.
James Fenimore Cooper saw (in the epigraph to this chapter) that journalists of his day were truthful intermittently, and routinely untruthful by circumstance. Allowing a bit for corruption, he judged their activities predominantly indefensible. Method and technology have changed those statistics: the routine bulk of a broadsheet paper now has little reason to be grossly untruthful, and not much is. Its staff can count their particular actions as mostly honest and this comfort applies in normal circumstances to Newscorp titles like The Times or the Australian. If abnormally – the passions, cupidity or interests of Newscorp obtrude, ‘obsessive’ reactions only imperil the good work done otherwise.
Most newspapers of Cooper’s time were visibly untrustworthy. So today are the Sun and the New York Post, which therefore aren’t trusted. There would scarcely be any need to worry about such outfits except that our elected leaders – still struggling to design an open, efficient and modern statecraft – revolve with them in a dance of folly which has at least the potential to be a dance of death for democracy. But the broadsheet newspaper (and its electronic offspring) will be dangerous even if politicians can kick their tabloid habit. Its normal mode seems trustworthy. And as democracies only place real stress on their essential institutions now and then, they may discover too late which ones do nothing more than seem.
After MacArthur’s rebuke to Mirsky, The Times’ reporting of China achieved consummate normality for several more years – being perhaps least obsessive in the first half of 2001, the period when James Murdoch stated that investors in China should have a ‘strong stomach’ like his father’s (and his own); also the climactic phase in Beijing’s world-respectability campaign (aimed at the Olympic Games and the World Trade Organisation); and Newscorp’s much-desired acquisition of shares in China Netcom, the broadband business run by President Jiang Zemin’s son. This last the China Daily called ‘revolutionary’ and ‘not entirely legal’. The law notionally forbade any such foreign ownership, so the real meaning was that for purposes of Beijing corporatism – of regulation ‘by man rather than law’ – Newscorp had achieved solid insider status, and was no longer foreign.
Many things have shifted in China since Murdoch’s prediction that his satellites would produce a new regime in Beijing. Very clearly the same regime is in charge, and in most respects is more firmly seated than ever. It does face more effective - and increasingly courageous – democratic opposition, and there is at least the possibility of net movement towards liberty. And does Newscorp – viewing itself as the world’s greatest media company – make any contribution to the prospect of a democratic China?
No, because Newscorp isn’t there now.
During the 1990s and the first years of the 21st century the Murdochs certainly devoted much attention to China: behaving rather like members of the Chinese Establishment, if such a thing might be imagined. To this period belongs Rupert’s Vanity Fair interview, which described the Dalai Lama as ‘a very political old monk shuffling around in Gucci shoes’, and James’ applause for the represession of the Falung Gong along with similar ‘dangerous and apocalyptic’ movements.
And of course there were three Murdochs involved as in 1999 Rupert married Deng Wen Di, now known as Wendi Deng Murdoch. Wendi Murdoch became her husband’s adviser on China investments and in the early 2000s they spent some hundreds of millions of dollars – mostly on dot-com startups, and in some cases in partnership with the son of then president Jiang Zemin
Newscorp saw its television reach into China expand under friend patronage. But the good times came to a sharp halt with the end of the Jiang era and the coming to power of Hu Jintao in 2005.
In spite of having cosied up to Hu’s power base, the Communist Youth League, by way of joint ventures, the Murdochs were forced out of their local broadcast television ventures by the new propaganda chief, with a loss which perhaps ran tp $60 million.
Last year, the Murdochs admitted they had hit ‘a brick wall’ in China and sold off their three remaining television channels, Xing Kong, Xing Kong International and Channel (V) Mainland China, as well as their Fortune Star Chinese movie library to an investment fund controlled by the Beijing government.
Very likely there are intricate stories to be told about Newscorp’s failure to keep up with Beijig’s style of political manoueuvre. But there is probably a simple, underlying explanation: the masters of China did not felt they had learned all they wanted to from Murdoch and did not need him any more. During the years of friendly access Newscorp sent teams of experts to China to help state operations such as China Central Television and the People’s Daily newspaper develop their polished, but very well-controlled websites.
And going the other way, teams of Chinese television managers and technicians visited Newscorp’s western satellite TV operations to learn how they worked. Jonathan Manthorp, the Vancouver Sun’s long-term China-watcher wrote on July 20 this year that the China’s authoritarians turned out to be far more successful than the democratic west in protecting themselves from exploitation by the Newscorp. All the kowtowing, all the laboriously made contacts
ended up being a giveaway of News Corp. skills, and Murdoch got nothing much in return.
No one should indulge in schadenfreude over Murdoch losing some two billion dollars to find out that authoritarian regimes indeed can indeed work – but only in the narrow interest of their controllers. Because China’s rulers got what they presumably wanted all along: a good understanding of how to manage a simulacrum of western free media which will work wi
th only trace amounts of freedom in the product. There are of course a good number of courageous Chinese who refuse to be turned back from the democratic cause – and every step forward they can make is one the rest of the world must be grateful for. But no part of the credit is due to Newscorp and the Murdochs.
What has not shifted any more than the Chinese regime is the character of the Murdoch operation. It remains one where journalists are uniquely ready to ‘march in step’. Not incessantly, but in ‘Cooper’s Moment’, as it were: when the proprietor’s passions, cupidity and interest are in play.
A present commonplace holds that war is disastrously dividing democratic opinion. But history surely suggests that war never inflicts its worst damage on democracies until it ceases to divide. Uniformity – doubtless because it tends to the spurious – has restricted application in constitutional systems: a great turn-up of the last century was the resilience, military and civil, of disputatious, disunited free societies, and the propensity of monoliths to shatter.
It’s therefore striking that Newscorp’s contribution to the Iraq war of 2003 – discussed further in the next chapter – was a unanimity not matched by any other body involved – not, for instance, the Pentagon. Soldiers in America and in Britain acknowledged agreements and disagreements, volubly, and quite often on the record. Within Newscorp there were variations in style, from the polished Australian to the oafish Post, but everything was in phase: the editorial equivalent of synchronised swimming. Newscorp then controlled 175 papers around the globe: all sounded the trumpet. (In Tasmania the Hobart Mercury briefly hesitated, but fell in line after a warning letter.) Roy Greenslade, former Daily Mirror editor and professor of journalism at London’s City University, rightly thought this astonishing uniformity worth some discussion. But he could find no Murdoch to editors answer his calls or e-mails – their conviction was not one they cared to discuss. And when editors are more tight-lipped than soldiers, autocensorship is at work.