by Bruce Page
Though tracts of normality exist, fear and conformity – sufficiently attested – set Newscorp apart from other companies. The mechanism depends essentially on the characteristics of media work: people must always court uncertainty, making themselves vulnerable to the authoritarian’s spurious assurance. Those tough enough to confront it are sidelined or ejected. Sophisticated defences of Newscorp hardly bother to deny the basic facts, but say the abuses submitted to are mostly voluntary, absurd or trivial, and that cock-up frustrates much of the corporate purpose. Isn’t it over-reaction to find Gulag qualities in The Times’ subs’ desk?
Yes, but the question is misguided. The Murdoch family cannot operate in the west a literal copy of the Chief Administration of Correctional Labour Camps. Here, the lawful state and its countervailing institutions constitute to a dynamic structure which has so far resisted such systematic abuse. The question is whether Newscorp contributes any strength to that structure, or simply weighs on it as a parasite – and, if the second is true, how much it matters.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn gave in The Gulag Archipelago a resonant warning to those who imagine there are places perfectly immune to the monstrous things he has to describe. ‘All the evil of the twentieth century,’ he says, ‘is possible everywhere on earth,’ and obviously the words apply equally to our current millennium. In explaining how repression diffused itself throughout a scattered system – an archipelago, linked by its subjection to a single arbitrary will – Solzhenitsyn’s ‘literary investigation’ deals harshly with himself Showing how much was voluntary, absurd and trivial, he records the grotesque fact that the men arresting him couldn’t find the Lubyanka, and that he showed them the way, fancying it might improve his situation. At times he was about to resist, ‘or at least cry out’ but things were never quite so acute, or the audience quite suitable. Opportunities were hard to discern: especially ones sure to improve one’s own position. And things happened under appearances of normality, among nonwitnesses occupied with ‘studying the safe secrets of the atomic nucleus, researching the influence of Heidegger on Sartre, or collecting Picasso reproductions; [who] rode off in … railroad sleeping compartments to vacation resorts, or finished building … [a] country house near Moscow’.
What our own inquiry adds is that in a well-ordered society – anyway, one better ordered than the old USSR – a media business may present still fewer choices, certainly fewer than excuses to overlook them. But of course a structure is not more resilient for being checked and tested less often.
Max Weber was not surprised that journalists should be corrupt. What he thought remarkable, given their circumstances, is that many are not, and this applies – with everything said about choices – to those have worked for Murdoch, or still do. Among them are some who have sought to rebel – or at least not to compete in toadying – and have taken the consequences. Journalists as a group have paid dues – have recognised that diversity has costs – and if some have paid heavily, some little, and others nothing, that is scarcely novel.
Nowhere in the democratic societies where Murdoch operates can this yet be said of the elected political class. On the contrary – and irrespective of partisan alignment – they have smoothed Murdoch’s way, so regularly as to imply that media chieftains who don’t emulate him (not yet a majority) are simpletons. An attempt has been made here to avoid rhetoric about politicians’ moral fibre, and to comprehend their present necessities. Still, these can’t be reduced by easing the ambitions of Murdoch and those ready to follow him: canvassing their goodwill, the record shows, is helping the jailers to find the jail.
By prevailing assumption the left considers Newscorp profit-driven, but the record suggests that this reaction oversimplifies. A striking financial point about Newscorp in the last decade of the last century is not that it made huge profits, but that it scarcely paid tax. In 1999 The Economist calculated that the group’s operations in Britain had generated £1.4 billion profit since 1978 – a strong but not startling performance – and paid net British corporation tax of zero, which is startling. It is unlikely that any major company outdid this kind of performance.
Basic corporate tax rates are 36, 35 and 30 per cent in Australia, by America and Britain. Investigating Newscorp’s worldwide operations over four years to 1999 The Economist found profits of A$5.4 billion and A$325 million paid in corporate taxes: roughly a 6 per cent rate. Disney, a comparable megacorporation, paid 31 per cent over the same years. With vast cashflow and minimal tax bills, profit and dividend don’t have quite the significance found elsewhere in capitalism.
Profit excites moral reflexes. But its pursuit is not identical with pursuit of market dominion – indeed, for entrepreneurs generally, the two are incompatible. No route to profit is as direct as fortunate trading in a market which expands through competition centred on quality. Qualifications abound, but the statement matches neatly with economic theory, and not badly with large tracts of commercial life. Sub-texts include step-changes in technology and operational peculiarities – media businesses exhibit many – and from such complexities are born ingenious plans to generate exceptional profits, or super-profits (often some form of short, victorious war involving price). In theory, none pay off over time in a fair market. In practice, fixing large markets is a costly game, rich in counterproductive potential (even if you are Bill Gates). It is simpler to accept the uncertainties of living with assorted competitors on roughly equal terms. In business rhetoric, competition resembles apple pie. Nobody eulogising apple pie sounds wholly sincere. Many people, all the same, quite like it.
Profit-seeking may have its evils. But its virtue, for the freedoms discussed here, is that it works naturally with diversity. For market dominion – and whatever it sustains – diversity is a silver bullet.
A necessary memory is that profit funded the first real media freedom that is, made newspapers independent of patronage and political subsidy. Practices of independence, once developed, proved adaptable to different systems – remarkably, even to government-funded ones. Consistent with all this is that market dominion in modern states is unsustainable without political protection or collaboration.
Interaction with competitive markets naturally excites the authoritarian need for dominion. The contest of rough equals, a stimulus tolerable for most people – seductive for a few – irritates the authoritarian by its ambiguity. But the qualities which make competition a burden adapt neatly to reducing it: to marching media teams in and out of political alliances which offer a less stressful future.
This set of reactions is destructively unlike those a free political system needs. But the use of liberty to disguise them as healthy cannot be prevented – only discredited.
Product gaps will occur: the authoritarian can control, but not optimise journalistic performance. Newscorp can recruit passion adequate to editing the Sun or (once) the News of the World— low-grade products in secular, lucrative decline
– or maintaining well-established acquisitions. Profound challenges – say, recreating The Times, a high-grade product now gutted by Newscorp’s reckless price warfare – demands something far more intense.
The British newspaper market’s outstanding product of the last quarter-century was the Daily Mail: under Paul Dacre’s editorship its sales grew 44 per cent between 1992 and 2002. It was not ripped off from anything existing, nor expanded by price-war. Liberals see vividly the vices – traceable back to Christiansen’s Express – and loathing of its passionate post-Thatcherism obscures virtues descended similarly. It has investigative force, and its targets – like the rich, fanatical Moonies, the Real IRA’s bombers, genetic-engineering corporations, and racist gangsters – show the eclectic, risky nature which is not seen in pseudo-journalism.
Murdoch offered Dacre The Times in 1992. Doubtless to Newscorp this was a marriage made in heaven, and to media liberals hell; but a real talent is rarely so predictable. Had Dacre done it, and made it, a Times would have appeared unlike either the Mail or the pr
esent-day Times: we can be sure only that it would not have marched alongside Tony Blair while the strange culture of Blairism took shape.
Few journalists could outdo Dacre as avatar of the profit-seeking market or be closer philosophically to the Thatcherite Murdoch of 1992. He was certainly drawn to the task, aware perhaps of abilities suitable at least in scale. Still, he refused, from conviction that the independence essential for success was something Murdoch could not provide:
I believe passionately that editors must be free to edit and that if they have a proprietor above telling them what to do, it all goes wrong.
The market permits and even encourages this freedom, but provides no complete defence of it. The cause is visible in a famous statement from Rosa Luxemburg (and use of an eloquent Marxist voice may emphasise the irrelevance of partisan tribalism in this business):
Freedom only for the supporters of the government, only for the members of one party – however numerous they may be – is no freedom at all. Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently … because all that is instructive, wholesome and purifying in political freedom depends on this essential characteristic, and its effectiveness vanishes when ‘freedom’ becomes a special privilege.
Freedom on this account is part of the system of public goods, which free riders
– who cannot penetrate a market system directly – may destabilise. In our economic system the amount we will pay for something shows how much we desire it. The mathematical demonstrations don’t convince everyone, but as market economies have (so far) blown up less than planned ones it is hard to say it’s all nonsense. The outcome is that those who express no preferences enjoy no goods.
Except with public goods. In a free country, for instance, everyone gets freedom regardless of preference. Of course public goods have to be paid for, but free riders who deny any preference for the goods – and don’t pay – get the same benefits as those who contribute. Defence is a favourite illustration, partly because it is an instance where a compulsory ‘preference’ is politically acceptable. The issue is central to the construction of tax systems, and their effectiveness depends on carefully balancing compulsion with voluntary disclosure.
Determined free riders do not seem to be numerous (societies in which they are become dilapidated). As a commercial example, few if any of Newscorp’s competitors make similarly rigorous pursuit of negligible tax bills: perhaps because a complicated corporate structure brings many disadvantages. Compulsion of course does exist in tax systems, and nobody suggests that public goods could be financed without it being present as an option.
Naturally, when the goods in question are freedom as Luxemburg defined it, compulsion has limited use. People can’t in principle be made to use the freedom of the press or compelled to contribute to the real cost – in which the crucial components have never been monetary. The First Amendment bargain mentioned early in this book is principally a compact of honour, only enforceable via indirect details – though these are not negligible items.
Freedom is exactly like other public goods, in that the rational individual action is to subscribe nothing personally but to make all convenient use of what others pay for. As it happens, human beings are not perfectly rational about this, and the reasons are not well understood. We can name them – honour, compassion, folly, rebelliousness – but these are labels more than explanation. From writers like Solzhenitsyn we can piece together some understanding, particularly of the costs.
Murdoch’s record suggests he is perfectly rational. When pressed over nonpublication of Chris Patten’s East and West he said, ‘Let somebody else annoy them’ – that is, the Chinese Government, with which he was making peace. The free-rider ethic could not be more neatly put. But Murdoch isn’t the text-book free rider, who conceals a preference for something actually desired, only to make use of it when others have paid. If he were that, he could not have made the progress we have seen so far. Murdoch, loudly and more consistently than any other Western publisher, presented himself for thirty years as gripped by an overmastering preference for freedom. Nobody could have ridden the theme harder. And without some such appearance, he would not have been able to extract from democratic systems the assistance, the special permissions, the waivers on which his operations rely. Political assistance alone would not have been sufficient.
It is the nature of a free society – in Luxemburg’s account – that its members cannot be made to reveal their preferences. Not even someone who uses freedom to persuade people that he should be allowed to try to turn a free and diverse market into a monopoly. There is nothing to pay. But where freedom is a ‘special privilege’, preferences are starkly displayed. The China story reveals that Murdoch’s preference for freedom only holds when the cost to himself is effectively zero. It demonstrates that the newspapers, television networks and book firms Murdoch controls – a substantial part of democracy’s seeming armament – must be reckoned useless against any risk which might impose real costs on The Boss. But there is also a message for the future.
Governments cannot allocate freedom, and perhaps can’t do much themselves to protect this least dispensable of public goods. But governments can and must allocate the control and use of other public goods which give liberties material expression. This function is the reason Newscorp is interested in governments. The ‘First Amendment bargain’ is not overall enforceable. But governments do not have to – and must not be allowed to – hand over those goods to conspicuous free riders. It is unlikely there are very many of them about – at least, rigorous ones – or our world would not have got this far. But if we have created a society in which liberty makes free riders hard to detect, it would be suicidal for us to take no notice when they do expose their true characteristics.
15
STATESMAN – AND MEDIA SAVIOUR, 2000–2011
It is particularly incumbent on those who never change their opinion, to be secure of judging properly at first
JANE AUSTEN, Pride and Prejudice
There is nothing so terrible in any state as a powerful and authorized ignorance.
WALTER RALEGH in The History of the World We are often told that Al Qaeda’s murderous attack on the Twin Towers in September 2001 was an event which had unique impact on the world. It is obviously true, and in many different respects.
A remarkable one was mentioned in the previous chapter: namely the absurd unanimity with which Rupert Murdoch’s organisation supported and cheered-on the invasion of Iraq which came eighteen months later. And there is nothing comparable in the history of the democracies.
To be sure, decisions to go to war against Nazi Germany attracted virtually no dissent, but in those cases a quite genuine national consensus had been arrived at (or one might say, compelled by events). But the Iraq invasion was deeply controversial, and particularly in Britain where Newscorp’s editorial resources were – and currently are – close to monopoly.
Opinions of actual British citizens about the war never resembled the singlemindedness apparent in Newscorp and as the fighting went dismally on American opinions diverged from it more and more. Social and professional contacts with Newscorp employees suggested that even among them no majority existed truly sharing Rupert Murdoch’s fervent support for Operation Iraqi Freedom. Such feelings were confined to a small number of executives and television presenters.
Being reluctant to offer philosophies and recommendations to the world was never characteristic of the chairman and chief executive though Governor Chris Patten was not alone in thinking the material was quite often banal. But this was Murdoch’s first major outing in the guise of a global policymaker, and it came with two striking attributes. First, the mode was crudely dictatorial, to an extent seen rarely if ever outside authoritarian societies. Second, it was disastrously misguided.
This is not to say that all the politicians, soldiers and plain citizens who supported the war lacked decent reasons for doing so. It applies only to those who, like M
urdoch, saw nothing to discuss. (Among them, of course, none had any similar power to restrict discussion.)
There are analysts and historians who think some effects of the Iraq war are (or may yet be) beneficial, and some who think Vietnam was not a US military defeat: rather, in potential, a victory. There is no space here to examine the details, but it needs to be said that rational arguments can be made for both viewpoints, even if most well-informed opinion now counts both wars as heavily counterproductive.
The problem with Murdoch’s Iraq policy is not its shallow follies – like the forecast that oil might brought down to $20 per barrel. The problem and consequent damage – is that it was promoted by authoritarian means.
The Murdochs – Keith, Rupert and aspiring successors – are mercenary propagandists: ready, like Francesco Sforza and the military condottieri of latemedieval Italy, to assist any state providing attractive concessions. Every media enterprise has something of this quality. Only Newscorp makes it the unique selling proposition: shown in the relentless drive to exclude any patriotic element from media ownership. (With Tony Blair’s devoted assistance: see the last section of Chapter 13, ‘Present Necessities’.)
And early in the present century the terms of this trade produced a supreme editorial test, in the Iraq and Afghan wars: a test Newscorp comprehensively flunked.
Nothing in journalism is harder than keeping faith with a state while honestly reporting its wars. Nobody wholly succeeds. But sure failure lies in uncritically adopting official assertions. Not even a decent war government cares much for truth, supposing some to be available.