The Murdoch Archipelago

by Bruce Page

But: (i) a culture loudly claimed as Sir Keith’s foundation couldn’t by then still be fledgling; (ii) Newscorp and Rupert did have their own eerie response to Watergate. It inspired Fox’s cultish asset The X-Files. This word comes from XFiles creator Chris Carter, gratefully celebrating The Boss’s participation in terms amounting to co-authorship.

  The Washington Post, risking its survival, exposed a vicious but limited conspiracy within the US political system, evoking salutary (if incomplete) feedback. What this evoked in Fox was risk-free dottiness. Carter says – citing Rupert’s mind as with him all the way – that the Post’s work proved the existence of universal conspiracy, in a world full of hidden evil.

  Such cultural junk food could be light entertainment had Newscorp any battle honours against actual conspiracies; it hasn’t. Rather, it’s peculiarly qualified to aid them because its Boss, as a practising authoritarian, can believe almost anything. Without referring to WMD fantasies Sigmund Freud’s grandson Matthew (public relations entrepreneur, husband of Elisabeth Murdoch) has revealed that his father-in-law generally believes the stuff in his own papers. The psychoanalyst’s descendant perhaps wasn’t surprised. But the master spin doctor was amazed.

  Such gullibility enabled Rupert to plug the General War on Terror as readily as did Keith the conscription-fed meat-grinder of a previous age.

  Newscorp displayed its essence in the Sun’s performance from mid-2002, when Blair’s team feared public and parliament might actually block his crusade. A vote once taken would gain assent (for elected leaders do have an overdraft on loyalty once shooting starts). But the whips were troubled, and for months before Dossiertime needed every possible help with the threatening dictator and his terror alliance.

  Any one Sun edition (such as LET’S GET HIM) diffuses a monomaniac impression, but that’s modified somewhat by continuous study: Bum Week, you see, fell in this period, requiring space for the paper’s parted-buttock fixation. Business first (Murdoch long ago laid down entertainment as the empire’s first business) is the unceasing Newscorp staple.

  Not that entertainment quite eclipsed calls to duty – particularly against chattering-class attitudes – as 16 August stated a mighty threat:

  The Number One item on the world’s agenda should not be global warming, rainforests or saving the whale. But not Saddam either just then – though it had been just before. Rather, it was the ‘terrible cancer of child pornography and paedophilia, the sickness at the heart of society’. An ‘Earth Summit’ should be assembled pronto. Parliament and law must ‘wake up to the terrible peril that is all around us … even in the quiet lanes of Cambridgeshire horrible monsters lurk …’.

  There was, said the Sun, a paedophile on every street in Britain’. The death of two brilliant little girls in Soham, Cambridgeshire, occasioned this, the Sun seeing in it something far beyond piteous domestic tragedy. It was portent of epidemic paedophile murder – now enveloping the World Wide Web, threatening every family in Britain, and in the civilised world …

  Problems of electronic paedophilia are indeed global – if not at the supreme level in any sane list – but the Soham case was quite devoid of any Web connection. Overall, the Sun’s tocsin was indecently phoney, and its epidemic spectral. Britain has had for some time a falling incidence of child murder, in which paedophile cases are a small subset. Certain threats one can’t bear to call ‘trivial’. But the only way Iraq’s armaments constituted a world menace was by comparison with the Sun’s paedophile battalions.

  Defenders of the Sun have claimed that getting the WMD truth was hard – and indeed no one exactly did. But a couple of phone calls will reveal the basic facts of child murder to anyone who sincerely wants them.

  The Sun’s conduct shows no such desire: paedophilia was just one of the nightmares it peddled in this period, along with powerline emissions, mobile phone masts, mystery drugs and diseases, plus floods of depraved immigrants and asylum-seekers. Though judged equivalent to Hitler, Saddam Hussein had still to jostle somewhat for space in the parade.

  So far from being a journalistic masterwork, Newscorp’s central asset runs largely free of editorial criteria: a conduit into which junk can be shovelled indifferently, to be part-digested, and sprayed from the other end. The Blair government liked to call the Dossier a contribution to grand historical debate; in the Sun it was just another chunk of throughput, showing no sign of editorial attention beyond stripping out what faint caveats the official text did contain.

  Prime Minister Blair disliked light falling on his relationship with Murdoch, and when the Independent asked for details of contacts during 2003 and 2004 nothing was released. But the paper sustained Freedom of Information pressure (teamed with the Liberal Democrat peer Lord Avebury) and when Prime Ministers changed some progress began.

  Gordon Brown’s Cabinet Office revealed that Murdoch and Blair spoke three times during the nine days leading up to war. No text was given, but the dates, plus Sun backnumbers enabled the Independent to make a persuasive reconstruction.

  Blair called Murdoch on 11 March and 12 March 2003 – when Downing Street was trying hard to blame the impending military action on President Chirac of France. The Prime Minister had promised Parliament that Britain would only go to war authorised by a new and specific UN resolution. But now, he said, the French were changing everything by blocking the resolution – thus actively protecting Saddam Hussein’s lethal cache.

  The Sun took firm steps on 13 March 2003:

  Like a cheap tart who puts price before principle, money before honour, Jacques Chirac struts the streets of shame. The French President’s vow to veto the second resolution [on Iraq] at the United Nations – whatever it says – puts him right in the gutter.

  And a further broadside on 14 March:

  Charlatan Jacques Chirac is basking in cheap applause for his ‘Save Saddam’ campaign – but his treachery will cost his people dear. This grandstanding egomaniac has inflicted irreparable damage on some of the most important yet fragile structures of international order.

  Again, minimal inquiry would have shown the facts quite otherwise. The French never totally opposed military action – they opposed it while the inspectors were making progress on whether illicit weapons existed.

  This contrivance clad in the Sun’s trademark fustian could hardly affect Chirac, armed with a lifetime’s cynicism. But there was a message for all British MPs: the vote for war was going ahead – without assent from the UN – and Murdoch’s enforcers would be on the track of anyone inclined to follow Chirac.

  Few observers of Blair’s administration doubted that in the drive to war, Newscorp provided essential aid: finally, enough momentum was raised for a Parliamentary majority. Bertolt Brecht spoke once of an East German government ‘dissolving the people and electing another’: Mr Blair’s government dissolved the people and elected the Sun.

  More prosaically: the Newscorp media assets made an effective ensemble. With the tabloids braying, and the elite sheets in silent-support mode – that is, maintaining investigative inertia in the presence of obvious intelligence-faking – manufactured assent to Blair’s programme wore a plausible sheen.

  And of course Newscorp assets were busy elsewhere manufacturing more such stuff – Fox News particularly. A study entitled Misperceptions, the media and the Iraq war was published by the Program on International Policy Attitudes in October 2003. It found that 60 per cent of Americans believed at least one of the following: clear evidence had been found of links between Iraq and Al Qaeda; WMD had been found in Iraq; world public opinion favoured the US going to war with Iraq. None were true and rate of misperception depended crucially on where people got their news. Only 23 per cent of those who got their information mainly from Public Service Broadcasting or National Public Radio were subject to any of these delusions, but it was 80 per cent among those relying primarily on Fox News. Particularly, two-thirds of Fox viewers thought that the US had ‘found clear evidence in Iraq that Saddam Hussein was working closely
with the Al Qaeda terrorist organization’.

  This would not matter except in times – not yet past – when British political decision-makers thought Murdoch-friendliness indispensable. Most are smart enough to know in some mental recess that it’s a dim product: about 14 per cent of the population rate the Sun trustworthy, far below the BBC. But the poor get poor bargains, and the politicians are poor in trust themselves, with survey numbers around 14 per cent also.

  Further, Murdoch’s deal avoids complexities, like those Australia’s electoral left so bluntly identified in his judgment-exercising rivals. Interests once arranged between office-holder and commercial-political tabloid, the official material is amplified without obstruction (see p368 above).

  Newscorp’s failure to test the Dossier as Dr Jones expected was not unique: just uniquely systematic. A single competitor seriously tried extending scepticism into investigation, when Andrew Gilligan of the BBC told listeners on 29 May 2003 that Whitehall’s account of WMD was ‘sexed up’. Gilligan made certain errors about source material supplied by Dr David Kelly, of Brian Jones’ staff. Their impact on the truth was trivial, but they precipitated ferocious official pressure against Gilligan, and still more against Kelly, contributing to Kelly’s suicide on 17 July 2003.

  Lord justice Hutton’s subsequent public inquiry uncovered much startling evidence which, with Lord Butler’s later work and Curveball’s confession (and much other material), puts the speciousness of the instant-invasion case well beyond doubt. But Hutton reported in January 2004, when Blair’s team remained fiercely unshaken. Via finessing quite as strenuous as that MI6 applied to Dr Jones, Hutton pilloried the truthful BBC and cleared the mendacious government. Newscorp was there to applaud.

  An unknown official source leaked Hutton’s findings to the Sun a day ahead of schedule, and an account was extracted doing all possible harm to the BBC. Clear purpose was to establish the official line ahead of any critics. It did not last, as text challenges the Sun, and the facts long since withdrew all assistance. But the BBC lost its chairman and governor-generals to a panic among its trustees – and remains deeply scarred. The Sun did not do all this, but did all it could.

  As we’ve seen, the Sunday Times didn’t contribute substantially to the debate on weapons of mass destruction while their existence was moot. Its most notable intervention came in May 2005, by which time there clearly were none. It unearthed a document now known as the ‘Downing Street Memorandum’, written on 23 July 2002 to record the views of Sir Richard Dearlove, head of MI6, after visiting Washington. Sir Richard believed the US government was determined to invade Iraq: the justification being that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and was organising international terrorism. US intelligence was being ‘fixed’ to support this policy.

  Clearly some investigative faculty remained after thirty years under Murdoch. But it was never focused on the Dossier, as the author of its main content expected to happen – Gilligan worked alone. Without any dishonour to the Guardian, Observer, Independent and Telegraph, Newscorp’s ownership of Times Newspapers brought British journalism’s largest investigative potential under Murdoch’s control. Any serious testing of the Dossier during the winter of 2002-3

  – an entirely certain assignment in pre-Murdoch days – would have dismantled the bulk of its context just as Dr Jones anticipated. (It very much was not rocket science.)

  The ‘special’ text had tighter, maybe invincible defence, but standing alone it would have attracted enormous pressure. Given the abject quality of Curveball’s story, and the fact that some intelligence officers certainly disbelieved it – notably his German handlers – its breakdown must have been a real possibility. And a real possibility that Tony Blair would not have secured the vote he wanted.

  This is not about right defeating wrong (or vice versa): that argument belongs elsewhere. It is about the rule that democratic governments should have accurate knowledge irrespective of their intentions. Milton, considering the modern state in its infancy, suspected intentions only made much difference once that rule stood in place, for ‘errors in a good government and in a bad are equally almost incident’. And ‘what magistrate may not be misinformed if liberty of printing be reduced into the power of a few?’*

  Or, as we might say, reduced by regular process into the power of one. Clearly, that stage has not been reached in the case of Rupert Murdoch, but just as clearly he has never ceased pressing towards it. Already we can say that no private individual had as much influence in promoting the attack on Iraq – and its ruinous implementation – yet few if any were more ill-informed.

  The duty news media owe to the state under pressure is not a supportive fabrication, but every possible resistance to fabrication and hallucination. For reporters it is always hard to grasp reality, but for governments it is sometimes impossible – and moral turpitude is not necessarily the problem. Power bends the mental space around those holding it just as surely as a gravitational field bends physical space; a journalist’s only sure advantage is the ability to move out of range, freedom no minister and no official can be permitted. Obviously a journalist who deliberately stays within the field is essentially spurious.

  In the fearful aftermath of the 1972 Bloody Sunday shootings Edward Heath’s government wished passionately to represent them as the outcome of an IRA ambush aimed against British paratroops. This went so far as applying pressure to Lord Chief Justice Widgery, who was asked by the Prime Minister to help win a ‘propaganda war’. The Widgery inquiry supported the official line, with considerable use of cynically tainted evidence (see pp212-213 in Chapter 8, ‘Times and Values’). The government’s policy – loosely – was to separate the IRA leaders from the population by representing them as planning to sacrifice Catholic lives for the sake of generating anti-British passions.

  Intense ground-level investigation by the pre-Murdoch Sunday Times - and at various times Channel Four News, Thames Television and the Daily Telegraph – gradually discredited the policy (without, to be sure, idealising the IRA). Passages above (pp356 et seq.) describe the Murdoch Sunday Times and Sun collaborating in production of black propaganda calculated to wreck the careers of honest, independent competitors.

  From Edward Heath through to John Major many British government officials really saw themselves engaged in an Irish war against insane killers with whom political interaction was impossible. It was media resistance which prevented that becoming embedded legend; and, if it had, could Major have begun the process which Tony Blair took forward towards a prospect of peace?

  To this process Newscorp generally made a destructive contribution, or none. It failed the editorial test described above: that is, demonstrating allegiance combined with resistance. It had nothing to offer but propaganda: comically inept but for underlying tragic realities. This is to judge Newscorp by standards of independence which it by no means sought to achieve. But so we should while it tries to pretend otherwise.

  The Iraq invasion was foreshadowed as ‘cake-walk’, leading to a prosperous nation which would remunerate its liberators. This vision was no better than the information used to plan the attack, and some of the promoters were moved to withdraw, apologise or change tack.

  Rupert Murdoch did not take that course, but continued stepping forward as a world statesman – around mid-term in the century’s first decade he seemed to become rather a favourite among those who might count as ‘Establishment’ in his own typology. On 20 April 2008 the Atlantic Council gave him its Distinguished Business Award for work on keeping NATO up to the mark.

  It was a fairly ordinary month for Iraq, with tanks going into Sadr City and a bomb killing about 50 people at Diyala. In his acceptance speech Murdoch had just one tangential word for Iraq, but spent a good deal of time advising European NATO members that they should get seriously stuck into the Afghanistan fighting. They also needed to pay attention to the moral values on which Western society rests. Values came up nine times in five minutes.

&nbs
p; As Murdoch spoke, news was going out of removal of the managing editor of the Wall Street Journal, which Newscorp had recently acquired on the promise that its managing editor and several other executives would not be removed. Certain members of the Bancroft family who sold the paper to him have since said they would not have done so if they had properly understood his character. Joining a long list of persons who have needed to reflect about values after encountering The Boss.

  The Wall Street Journal today is now rather different from the unique publication which Murdoch took over in 2008. That was really two newspapers with a single physical existence, resembling each other in character as do Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

  To professional journalists – reporters especially – the news pages under Dr Jekyll were an inspiration. He commissioned long, masterly texts to illuminate corporate America’s most consequential secrets: just at takeover time five of his people* were collecting the top Pulitzer award (Public Service) for a classic account of scandalous ‘golden coffin’ deals, using new disclosure rules on deathin-office benefits. Even in limited space, who can resist the CEO who will get $17 million for not competing with the outfit after his death? Or the Lockheed Martin officer receiving a $1 million death benefit while ‘very much alive’? A consultant is quoted to explain that these macabre perks are used to stop people leaving, although ‘if the executive is dead, you’re certainly not retaining them’.

  The paper now runs much less of Dr Jekyll’s material. But Mr Hyde is busy with the op-ed page, where capitalism is extolled rather than interrogated. It hosts the Laffer Curve/Hypothesis, under which less tax produces more revenue. That even conservative economists consider it an unreliable policy tool proves to The Page that leftists rule America.

  Murdoch promised to retain the op-ed editor, Paul Gigot, and he has done so.

  Lists of the Top Ten minds of the US right are contentious, but most contain a majority of Newscorp disciples and rank Mr Gigot at No.1. There is more to say about Murdoch’s grasp of the hyper-right in a final chapter.