by Bruce Page
Yes indeed. A structure of rules described in your own words as ‘not worth the paper they are written on’, and proved in action to be just so. Despite our proven track record, the Bancroft family chose to put their own interests – and their own misguided conceptions of who we are and who they are – ahead of sanity and reality.
Who indeed were the Bancrofts dealing with? They were dealing with the colleagues of phone hackers. Millie Dowler was four yeers dead, and the offence against her was still unadmitted. But strenuous effort was still being made to conceal all such matters.
Ms Ellison’s account suggests that the movers and shakers of the media world were comfortable with Murdoch’s delusionary corporate self-portrait, and would have been sympathetic had he felt the need to publish it but there wasn’t any requirement to, because the Bancrofts gave in. It was really aimed at people like Professor Krugman, who felt that after all the dealing and boasting, there was something badly wrong about Newscorp.
Murdoch did have a fair point to make: the Bancrofts had pushed their idea of editorial independence beyond anything reasonable journalists could support.
In essence, the Bancrofts are seeking to reserve for themselves a new role as the sole controller of the content of the newspaper, as they take our $5 billion.
Resistance therefore crumbled, and Murdoch fairly soon replaced Marcus Brauchli, the Journal’s incumbent editor, with Robert Thomson, who shared his view that the mainstream of US news media needed bending somewhat to the right. In getting-to-know-you meetings with the highly-educated staff of the Journal they made clear their scorn for the professional standards inculcated by journalism schools. Possibly they needed to listen more. For the great Newscorp crisis is at bottom a problem of professional education: disclosed by a crude inability to distinguish between a reporter and a snooper-for-hire.
* Nor is it an attempt to say All would be well except for …’ But Tyler Drumheller, the former CIA official who had a major role in exposing ‘Curveball’, gives in his book (n the Brink an outline of more hopeful options the US and UK might have pursued if their leaders had been ready to act on decent information about what was going on.
* Mark Maremont, Charles Forelle, James Bandler, Steve Stecklow and Gary Putka.
* Interest declared: I wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review.
16
A DROWNED CHILD, 2005–2011 So on his backe Lyes this whale wantoning,
And in his gulfe-like throat, sucks every thing
That passeth neare. Fish chaseth fish, and all,
Flyer and follower, in this whirlepoole fall;
JOHN DONNE, The Progresse of the Soule For several years up to July 2011, as Rupert Murdoch and his management tried to contain a growing scandal at the News of the World, a major division existed between professional journalists and other kinds of British citizens.
At the end of 2005 Clive Goodman, the News of the World royal editor, wrote a story about Prince William having a knee injury and trying to remedy it by use of some equipment recommended by a friend. Strange, thought the prince: the friend wasn’t due to bring it for a week. And arrangements had only been discussed by phone.
Scotland Yard was called in. Goodman and Glenn Mulcaire, who had hacked into William’s phone on Goodman’s behalf, were arrested in August 2006 and jailed in January 2007.
In March 2007 Les Hinton, executive chairman of News International, and responsible for the paper, told the House of Commons that bugging the prince had been a one-off job. A ‘rigorous internal investigation’ had established that the editor, Andy Coulson, knew nothing about it.
Most people probably had some trouble believing this represented all the facts. Most journalists – certainly those having national newspaper experience – never thought for a moment that it might. All the same, Mr Hinton’s brazen piece of damage-limitation worked, and went on working for five years. Long enough for Newscorp to secure the Wall Street Journal, and install Hinton as CEO of Dow Jones, the Journal’s publishers. Almost long enough for the BSkyB bid to complete its passage.
In short the media industry collectively knew that what Hinton said couldn’t be true – because newspapers don’t work like that – but preferred generally to say and do nothing. And there were several reasons: firstly, reluctance to challenge so large a packet of newspaper and television interests as News International. Second
– in too many cases – fellow-feeling, due to having found services like Mulcaire’s useful, and reluctance to see their use inhibited. And third, the informal Fleet Street philosophy school which swaps around moral fixes in the tradition of Carneades the Sceptic – who on that single day in 155 BCE proved all the principles of Roman justice, and next day demolished the lot.
The devices of Carneades’ descendants often rest on showing the victim to be part of the Establishment – and a royal prince is that way by default. A variant favoured by Kelvin MacKenzie, Richard Littlejohn and their rival pundits states that anyone whose living involves publicity deserves it; another says instead that it’s required in the selfless pursuit of crime.
Obviously Murdoch didn’t invent such moral practices, though his 57,000 colleagues must be among the heaviest users. It would be startling if nobody at the Guardian ever found something of the kind handy. Simply, the ability of journalists to defend the indefensible long lent some failing credit to the inane notion of a ‘rigorous internal investigation’ by Les Hinton. (Mr Hinton used to put in much time with the Press Complaints Commission, centrepiece of the media self-regulation system, celebrated for its facility with brush and carpet.)
The came the Milly Dowler case, changing everything, and changing Newscorp’s predicament from highly dangerous to potentially lethal. A single instance – but one quite impossible to discount, in public or private. ‘Who can pass by a child drowning in a well?’ asked Mencius. The answer of course is that nobody can, without becoming catastrophically inhuman (as did her murderer, the multiple killer Levi Bellfield).
Mencius (Meng-Tzu, 371-289 BCE) designed his parable to show that human nature has an instinctive excellence. But he goes on to argue – in creating a systematic Confucianism – that instinct, though a natural growth, needs cultivation and regulation. Perhaps Lord Justice Leveson and his colleagues* will find Mencius useful as they work up their official inquiry into the culture and ethics of the British media. (Alongside the inquiries into specific matters of phone hacking, of police bribery and of Ofcom into the fitness of Newscorp to run a television business.)
One thing they can be sure of is that the Carneades Tendency, if abashed for now, will soon be offering ingenious new products.
Both Leveson and Ofcom will have some heavy historical lifting to do. It’s essential clearly to know how the mess at the News of the World started out, and they may find it hard to go back as far as necessary or look as far afield as required. Fox News and the Wall Street Journal are American institutions owned by an American company. But their present condition traces back to things particularly done in Britain.
It is fairly certain that Newscorp itself won’t provide much help – out of ignorance, basically, rather than obstruction. Michael Wolff, who wrote The Man Who Owns The News about Murdoch, may be right in saying Newscorp has a Mob-like character – by which he doesn’t mean directly murderous like the Honoured Society. Rather that under the gleaming patina of modern business organisation you find a tangle of conspiracies competing for the favour of The Boss, existing so that he can have his way. However over-paid and ruthless modern CEOs may be, most are rather more limited in what they can do.
It’s argued above that Murdoch’s – literally – wilful behaviour has been a huge Newscorp tactical advantage in the past, enabling him to dodge regulations and do political-media deals with a facility normal corporations don’t possess. A serious cost has been the growth of a toady culture, largely incapable of telling the truth to itself, or responding to a crisis of accountability with something better than damage-limitation.
Such organisations don’t have have their own realistic history, and it has to be reconstructed by outsiders. Newscorp’s supposed internal inquiry will do nothing except perhaps trample the evidence – but presumably the numerous costly lawyers hired to assist the company know that they must not do any such thing,
Amid many uncertainties a possible estimate is that the immediate crisis began in the News of the World’s need for fresh raw material. Its ancient appeal was based on hunting down social outcasts, but the supply contracted – and sales with it – as Britain adopted, however imperfectly, a less prudish approach to sexual conduct. During the 1990s it looked as though the paper was hoping to develop drug users as an alternative target, but there’s a difficulty: then and since offenders have attracted a lesser level of censoriousness.
Possibly the nation is going through another long, halting adjustment: moving towards a decision that there is no winnable War on Drugs but that there may be other and less dramatic ways to moderate substanceabuse. The conclusion doubtless remains far distant, but on any time-scale social reform was always bad news for the News of the Screws.
Roughly at this time media interest in celebrities began to rise, and to seem a possible solution to the problem of falling sales. Of course there are other reasons for the decline of print media, but celebrities can look good to editors fretting about content: to an extent the supply can be synthesised. The difficulty, however, concerns privacy: celebrities aren’t generally guilty of much, and can only be made interesting by very intimate invasion of privacy. Dangers of the long lens made mobile phone surveillance attractive.
Glenn Mulcaire, ex-footballer and self-taught electronic maven, has been reported to have begun a £100,000 annual contract with the News of the World. Perhaps there is a written contract for Leveson to uncover, but that seems too neat. Things were still running on an ad-hoc basis by 2005 when Goodman gave Mulcaire £2,300 cash for Prince William. This he reclaimed via his own expenseaccount as payment to an informant named ‘Alexander’. This sounds like a quite usual piece of side-stepping with the ordinary sort of nods and winks. It would have been unnecessary for Andy Coulson to know the accounting particulars.
But Goodman’s letter of 7 March 2007 states clearly that Coulson knew about the system itself. Quite sufficiently to order that hacking must not be discussed at newsmeetings – when it had previously been discussed freely as a technique in regular use by staff members. (This is the letter in which Goodman says he cooperated with the management to ensure that his criminal trial would not collapse the ‘single rogue reporter’ argument being given to the public. It was clearly written to justify and advance a claim for compensation.) In February 2007 Rupert Murdoch told the Guardian: ‘If you’re talking about illegal tapping by a private investigator, that is not part of our culture anywhere in the world, least of all in Britain.’
Accounting details aside, it seems likely that enhanced exploitation of celebrity targets was a matter of deliberate planning. And there will have been others. But the most important project under way – even more important than buying the Wall Street Jpurnal – was the complete takeover of BSkyB, for which Tony Blair had cleared the way. The aim was to achieve comprehensive dominance over British broadcasting, free of competition except for a weakened, perhaps dismantled BBC.
The campaign’s theoretical and sociological framework was laid out by James Murdoch in the 2009 James MacTaggart Memorial Lecture at the Edinburgh Television Festival. Almost magnificently, its title was. ‘An Absence Of Trust’. The lecturer made feisty intentions clear from the start:
Of course I’m flattered to be asked, but I am also a little worried. Does this finally mark my invitation to join the British broadcasting establishment? While that thought does terrify me, I am comforted in the knowledge that after my remarks my membership will have been a brief one.
The performance was a thorough-going attack on the BBC. There was some pseudo-intellectual drapery, but it didn’t disguise – and presumably wasn’t meant to – the authentic loathing of the Murdochs, father and son, for their one remaining serious competitor in British broadcasting.
He clearly hoped a new government would close down the BBC, or turn it to a remnant.
If we are to have … state sponsorship at all, then it is fundamental to the health of the creative industries, independent production, and professional journalism that it exists on a far, far smaller scale.
And as to the freedom of the people, BSkyB would be the appropriate replacement, leading the nation into a glorious future of interactive trust.
At some level he must have been dimly aware that Les Hinton’s existing appeal for everyone to trust News International over a matter of criminal law was still out in public – with no sensible person at his own level of sophistication taking it seriously in private. But there would quite soon be an election – maybe putting his friend Andy Coulson into Number 10 Downing Street – and this was the time to put markers down without hesitation. Lobby correspondents were putting it about that Tories were eager to give the BBC a bad time.
The lecture’s intellectual device was elaborately developed from Darwin’s Origin of Species, then celebrating its 150th anniversary. James thought far too many people hadn’t fully accepted evolution, and were still hung up on creationism (or ‘intelligent design’). Many of them were in Ofcom and the BBC, holding back the development of digital media.
Any creationists in the audience must have been briefly thrilled, for such people usually picture the Beeb as wall-to-wall atheism. But James was just launching a figure of speech (and maybe trying for some progressive brownie points).
The argument was that Darwin had proved evolution to be an unmanaged process, best trusted to bumble along by itself. The danger we all faced was that of creationists, thinking they had a better plan. Ofcom regulators and state-fed BBC officials he called creationists deeply authoritarian ones. This media creationism was like industrial planning, abandoned in other sectors since the 1970s.
The recent economic history was a little off. Still, one saw what he meant, eventually. But the point was his point was wrong. Darwin indeed showed evolution was unmanaged, because its processes were not conscious (selection being blind). There isn’t a comparison with humans making highly conscious decisions and (as they will) frequently disagreeing over them.
But James had the evil substantive in his sights, and was determined to strike and its heart:
… it [the creationist conspiracy] creates unaccountable institutions like the BBC Trust, Channel 4 and Ofcom … [there is) no meaningful supervision by the BBC Trust.
Are we supposed to view the stuff going down at the News of the Screws meaningful supervision? The lecturer was revealing a true son of the father in his talent for brisk inversion of reality. The BBC is a reasonably coherent institution, the parts of which all have some (indeed imperfect) public accountability. Contrast the empire’s multiple faces, and vestigial accountability even to its own shareholders.
And maybe James surpasses Rupert when it comes to media independence: Most importantly … the expansion of state-sponsored journalism is a threat to the plurality and independence of news provision, which are so important for our democracy.
Of course he means to aim at the BBC. But as we’ve shown, it’s Newscorp which is likeliest to be found parroting nonsense (or worse) on the officialdom’s behalf. And it’s the BBC which has a respectable record of resisting wayward states, whereas Newscorp’s record consists mainly of collaboration and grovelling.
The ability of several liberal democracies to develop publicly funded broadcasters with some honest independence is one of the most interesting – and important – features of modern politics. The Murdoch response to it never seems to rise above bigoted incomprehension. But then what can be said to James about ‘pluralism’ after one goes back to the Greenslade account of silently unanimous warriors on Page 439?
He wants to claim that his company is scrupulous in
treatment of its customers: they possess power, and can put their trust in Newscorp.
And because they have power they are treated with great seriousness and respect, as people who are perfectly capable of making informed judgments about what to buy, read, and go and see.
There is every reason to believe that virtually all people are capable of making informed judgements. But is that true when what they receive in the likeness of information is really wild nonsense – created, quite likely to follow an agenda not revealed to the customer? All of us, surely, are quite likely to make mistakes if that is the case. Newscorp’s Sun can be shown to have peddled serious quantities of printed delusion – though maybe outdone by their Fox colleagues in television (see p459 above).
It’s remarked above that Sky News is the only substantial Newscorp component which has a record clean of bias and misinformation, and it is the only one produced under the rules which apply to the BBC, ITV and Channel 4. Could that be a chance effect?
Nonetheless James the lecturer insists that Britain urgently needs a new broadcast regime, with a vestigial BBC – at most – with regulation practically eliminated. Virtually all programming would be done to generate, reflecting his conviction that:
The only reliable, durable, and perpetual guarantor of independence is profit.