The Murdoch Archipelago

by Bruce Page

  It’s not hard to agree that profit is generally a good thing, and some fine newspaper and broadcast journalism has been done on that basis. But it’s not foolproof: Newscorp claims always to run with a view to profit, and generally fails to produce either independence or plurality.

  Nonetheless the James Murdoch vision holds, and he believes unregulated BSkyB should be left to itself in an open field to restore the trust so wretchedly destroyed by the authoritarian creationists at the BBC.

  When I say this I feel like a crazy relative who everyone is a little embarrassed by and for sure is not to be taken too seriously.

  Well, he said it. Doubtless he meant the words to show that he had been talking sense all along. But it seems appropriate to take them at face value.

  Naturally enough, the lecture tailed off into excited praise for BSkyB as having succeeded, with aid from Charles Darwin, in producing the best television in Britain – indeed the world. He did not say anything about its overbearing extent.

  But at the end of 2010, just as Jeremy Hunt was about to start focusing on his final – seemingly final – decision about the grand takeover, the distinguished media analyst Clare Enders produced some illumination. Writing in the Guardian she showed that with the merger in place Newscorp would provide 22% of news consumed in the United Kingdom.

  That seems a big number, seeing that economists generally think a market share of 30% is likely to confer monopoly power. And no other commercial provider comes close.

  But this is actually the least disturbing way the situation can be described. When we look further into Ms Enders’ work, and put in the full political context, it appears that Newscorp – with a little help from some of its friends – has made the end of liberal democracy quite achieveable. Reasonable prospects for remedy still exist. But they seem unlikely to prosper unless it’s possible to do to the Newscorp empire what it clearly wishes to do the BBC.

  There is no totally reliable way to measure the impact and extent of media power when it exists as print, broadcast radio and broadcast television – with the Web producing new phenomena almost daily. But we should not take too much notice of James Murdoch and others who insist that everything is in constant flux

  – and therefore even thinking about regulation is a waste of time. (So analogue.)

  As Ms Enders points out ‘the characteristics of media companies are such that they are steady-state businesses that can stay under one person or family’s control for generations as long as the owners don’t over expand and take on too much debt.’ (Or if they do can escape via fancy accounting or political favours.)

  To examine audience-size and cross-media effects Enders’ analysis took figures from the Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board (BARB) and the National Readership Survey (NRA) and added up the amount of time people spent looking at particular broadcasters and particular newspapers. There are all sorts of methodological quibbles which can be made about audience statistics.

  For instance some researchers think television has more impact-perminute than print, and some think exactly the reverse, arguing furiously that their samples should be variously weighted; Ms Enders’ team gave print, screen and radio equal weight. But such fine-detail arguments aren’t going to invalidate the overall pattern. (Though Sky owns no radio it has displaced ITN in supply of news to commercial radio.) And she writes:

  Here’s what the figures tell us. News Corp has a 14.6% share of news consumption; Sky another 7.4% (mainly because of its position in radio). Together they are 22% – or 22.6% if you count the Five News bulletin that Sky produces for Richard Desmond’s channel.

  Nobody in the commercial sector comes close – next up is the Daily Mail group with 10.5%, then ITN at 7.6%.

  In fact, what is being proposed is a merger of the number one [Newscorp] and four [Mail] commercial media groups, which is the sort of thing that in most other markets would be questioned hard.

  Yes indeed. But Ms Enders, as a neutral analyst, didn’t add up the political numbers. Taking Newscorp, the Mail and Telegraph groups together with Richard Desmond of the Express group and Channel 5 makes up a broadly right-wing market share of 39 per cent.

  Only the Guardian Media Group (2.6 per cent) and the Daily Mirror (Trinity Mirror: 6.7 per cent) are frankly aligned with the large proportion of British citizens whose politics are broadly left-wing. And neither is significant in television.

  Of course, there is one ‘glaring exception’ says Ms Enders: the BBC, which at 39.3 per cent is slightly larger than the right-wing group. And here we inevitably come to the assertion (not confined to the Murdochs, but made especially baldly on their part) that the BBC is a left-wing organisation.

  To be sure this would hardly be accepted by its chairman, Lord (Chris) Patten, who has had a long and forceful career in Tory politics.

  But as a thought-experiment let’s pretend it’s true. Suppose the BBC took on the approximate colour of the Guardian (or even the Daily Mirror). That is about what would be needed to roughly even up the political balance in the British media system.

  A little extra could be required in practice. After all on the media right – notably in Newscorp subdivisions – various berserk elements exist which the BBC and mainstream British Tories don’t seem very interested in developing

  In truth the left-wing BBC argument is largely nonsense, based on arguments of the kind Woodrow Wyatt and Harold Soref were kicking around when dreaming of a Thatcherite media-hegemony: they were keen on drawing parallels between Britain and the USSR (which was then in business). In fact the BBC is as close to politically neutral as any media organisation is likely to get. There was a faintly more respectable argument about the BBC as ‘anti-business’: it was more accurate to say that it neglected business, but wider coverage has largely dealt with the issue:

  Actually, the BBC’s main characteristic is plurality (seen by some as chaos). As Claire Enders says:

  Nobody owns the BBC, but Rupert Murdoch owns nearly 40% of the voting stock of News Corporation.

  The BBC is a notoriously plural organisation, tolerating all sorts of dissent, which often manifests itself on screen and on air. Presenters cheerfully take executives apart; a crisis about standards (e.g. the Jonathan Ross-Russell Brand case) is gleefully reported across the whole organisation. In short, the BBC may control 39.3% of Britain’s news consumption by the minute – but it is a more internally plural organisation than those newspapers where decisions about which political party to back are taken right at the top. Measuring internal plurality is, however, tricky – but the essential point is clear.

  However measured, plurality just isn’t a thing that’s available in the Newscorp system. If it were the Sun would be breaking the story of the phone-hackers, and not the Guardian.

  But the real problem with Newscorp as James Murdoch – amazingly–sees it is being altogether too small. During January 2011 he was at the Cannes Lions advertising festival, amid much interest in the British government’s BSkyB deliberations. Of course it would be a sizeable acquisition, James said. But Newscorp, he explained, wasn’t really large.

  In a world of Google, Apple, Telefónica and Verizon, Newscorp needed to get much bigger, quickly. ‘Because, otherwise, we will fail.’

  Was this in fact a cry for help? An underdog’s supplication?

  Seven months later there is no obvious way ahead for the bid. And as we’ve noted, some real chance of the Murdochs losing BSkyB altogether.

  Certainly a great many people in Britain will find it hard to see how Newscorp can be trusted to run the second-largest (and richest) British broadcasting system – when its clear ambition is to become the only one and its reputation says it will play rough in pursuit of things it wants.

  Perhaps after all Newscorp will have to face the perilous world as a $33 billion media midget.

  That would be a very considerable outcome for a most inconsiderable beginning: the hungry gossip machine finding it could not bear to overlook Prince William’s c
ompletely minor pulled-leg injury

  On Saturday 2 July, Elisabeth Murdoch and her husband Matthew Freud gave a party at their house in the Cotswolds, with a guest list in which media and politics overlapped with Newscorp figures. Gossip columns reported a fine time had by all, continuing till 4 a.m.

  Quite pardonably the phrase ‘fin de siecle’ received yet another outing – and certainly with some narrative justice.

  Through April, May and June 2011 there had been relentless escalation of Newscorp’s troubles (not to mention relentlessly black economic news from what might be called the wider world). But still things looked as though they might be containable.

  True, five people had been arrested in connection with phone hacking – though so far no major players. To be sure most veterans of the legendary Street now thought that phone-hacking was real crime, and the Guardian had the comfort of facing some competition on its great scoop. Things could yet stabilise, surely?

  It was a pleasant summer day in the Cotswolds, and a good turn-out. There were serious government Tories: Michael Gove (education, longtime by-line at the Murdoch Times); Steve Hilton (the Prime Minister’s brain); Ed Vaizey (communications). Also chieftains of the not-so-longago government: Peter Mandelson; Jamie Purnell; Douglas Alexander; Tessa Dowell; David Miliband.

  The creationists of the BBC were represented: director-general Mark Thompson; Alan Yentob; Jon Snow of Channel 4; Bear Grylls; Mariella Frostrup; Lily Allen; Patrick Kielty.

  Robert Peston, the BBC’s business editor, was present talking seriously the News International’s manager Will Lewis. Peston had been ahead even of the Guardian on events within the battered fortress, and most people assumed Lewis to be his source.

  James Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks arrived. It is said that she didn’t follow her custom of uninhibited circulation. She and James seemed to spend a lot of time talking together, quietly.

  On Monday, the Guardian ran Nick Davies’ story about Milly Dowler’s hacked phone. And the next weekend the News of the World printed its last issue.

  * Sir David Bell, former chairman of the Financial Times; Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty; Lord Currie, former Ofcom director; Elinor Goodman, former political editor of Channel 4 News; George Jones, former political editor of the Daily Telegraph; Sir Paul Scott-Lee QPM, former Chief Constable of West Midlands Police.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I must begin with an explanation of the title page, which states my own responsibility for this book while trying to acknowledge the debt it owes to Elaine Potter, long-standing journalistic ally. We intended a joint project. There was no falling-out, but the essentials of the Murdoch political system – of the News Corporation method, now straddling the world – turn out to lie deep in the Australian media culture in which I grew up, and in distortions applied to Australia’s myths of origin. Restating those myths in a form closer to their truth requires some personal experience of their force, and in attempting this the work gained a character of personal inquiry which persists in its overall structure.

  Elaine, with great generosity, continued nonetheless to lend her support, assistance and counsel – sorting out, indispensably, many aspects of the narrative. She is the entirely outstanding instance among many people who aided this project without gain to themselves, out of belief that News Corporation’s impact on the democratic process is not sufficiently understood. (Elaine was present – one of those who resisted – when Murdoch took control of the Sunday Times, and she saw firsthand the subjection of a formerly independent newspaper.) Though the errors of the final product are mine its completion – thus any virtues it does contain – would have been impossible without her contribution.

  I have exploited others also. I took many hours of Godfrey Hodgson’s time resolving issues which arise in the boundary layer where politics and news media interact. John Menadue provided unique evidence about the institutional growth and present political influence of Newscorp. Jonathan Mirsky gave me access not only to his own deep knowledge of China, but also that of many other reporters and scholars. Jonathan Kaplan, author of The Natural History of Zero, patiently steered me away from many errors in mathematical principle. Nor is this all.

  Some guides cannot be thanked personally. The late George Munster’s name comes quickly to mind: one aim of this book is to build on Rupert Murdoch: A Paper Prince, which he wrote in the 1980s. Adrian Deamer, who expounded his family’s experience of the Murdochs to me frankly but with remarkable dispassion, died in 2000. (I owe to him also most of my initial journalistic tradecraft.) I had hoped to learn greater detail about the period when that remarkable political reporter Tony Bevins demolished the Thatcher government’s one-time media hegemony, but his dreadfully premature death prevented it. (As some compensation, an unpublished Bevins MS is listed in the bibliography.) Work on the book also gave me debts that can’t now be repaid to Johnny Apple, John Biffen, Malcolm Crawford, John D’Arcy, Paul Eddy, Michael Foot, John Grigg, Richard Hall, Eric Jacobs, Leszek Kolakowski and Hugo Young. The scope of the Murdoch’s Newscorp and the media industry it seeks to dominate is beyond any one writer’s reach: this accounts for an extensive bibliography. But along with Paper Prince there must be particular mention of Thomas Kiernan’s Citizen

  Murdoch (1986), Jerome Tuccille’s Rupert Murdoch (1989) and Stick It Up Your Punter (1999) by Peter Chippindale and Chris Horrie. Everyone who studies the Murdoch phenomenon should admit debt to William Shawcross’s biography (Murdoch, 1992): true in my case in spite of reaching very different conclusions.

  I have wherever possible used public record and open sources. But when Newscorp employees discuss their employer, or their employer’s relationships with politicians, the concept of open discussion becomes shadowy. Very much the same applies to politicians where the subject is their government’s relations with Newscorp. (Not that they are silent. Many hours can be spent in denials of the visible: in the examination of square wheels and round bricks.) As Paul Farhi of the Washington Post wrote when investigating Newscorp’s tax affairs, Newscorp diffuses ‘a very real fear’ through its own organisation and a good many others. There are to be sure insiders who will help – some a little bolder than others – but the only appropriate course is general anonymity.

  The names which follow are of people who were able openly to provide information. I must not suggest they agree with all or any of my conclusions: some, indeed, will powerfully disagree. That does not lessen my sense of obligation. Many properly possess titles like Lord or Professor: not to say both; not to say Senator, former Senator, and in many cases editor. But the handling of titles as between America, Australia and Britain gives enough trouble in the main text and here I have imposed an alphabetic equality which I hope does not appear to cancel gratitude.

  Michael Adler, Jonathan Aitken, David C. Anderson, Murray Armstrong, Neal Ascherson, Paddy Ashdown, Lionel Barber, Steven Barnett, John Barry, Patrick Barwise, Don Berry, Chris Blackhurst, David Blake, Roger Bolton, Georgina Born, Peter Bottomley, David Bowman, Tom Bower, Pauline Boyle, Ben Bradlee, Patrick Brogan, Adam Brookes, Tina Brown, Gordon Brunton, Ian Buruma, David Butler, John Button, Neil Chenoweth, Lewis Chester, Pilata Clark, Tony Clifton, Ian Clubb, Kenneth Clucas, Alexander Cockburn, Richard Cockett, David Conn, Barry Cox, Alie Cromie, Don Cruickshank, Richard Davy, Tana de Zulueta, Gwen Deamer, Brenda Dean, Tony Delano, Meghnad Desai, Chris Dunkley, Andrew Ehrenburg, David Elstein, Gareth Evans, Harold Evans, James Evans, Richard J. Evans, Paul Farhi, Stephen Fay, Adam Finn, John Fitzgerald, Barry Fitzpatrick, Laurie Flynn, Denis Forman, Christopher Foster, Roger Gale, Don Garden, Richard Gentle, Nicholas George, Tony Geraghty, Peter Gillman, Stephen Glaister, David Glencross, Geoffrey Goodman, Harry Gordon, Andrew Graham, Anthony Grayling, Roy Greenslade, Bill Hagerty, Ron Hall, Adrian Hamilton, Max Hastings, Peter Hennessy, Michael Heseltine, Isabel Hilton, Christopher Hird, Matt Hoffman, Robert Hogg, Thomas Hogg, Anthony Holden, Brendan Hopkins, Mark Hosenball, Geoffrey Howe, Colin Hughes, Ken Inglis, Philip Jacobson, Oliver James, Peter Jay
, Robert Jones, Andrew Joscelynne, John Kay, Peter Kellner, Phillip Knightley, Daniel Korn, David C. Krajicek, Peter Lassman, John Lawrenson, James Lawton, Tim Laxman, Michael Leapman, David Learmount, David Leigh, Lawrence Lessig, David Lister, Margaret Maden, Tom Margerison, David Marr, Arthur Marriott, Andrew McKay, Tom McNally, Linda Melvern, Anthony Miles, Alex Mitchell, Mike Molloy, Edward Mortimer, Chris Mullin, Robin Munro, John Naughton, Pippa Norris, Sally Oppenheim, David Page, Alf Parrish, Chris Patten, John Allen Paulos, Julian Petley, Greg Philo, Henry Porter, Stuart Prebble, Peter Pringle, James Prior, Colin Pritchard, Alan Ramsey, Charles Raw, Moira Rayner, Nan Rivett, Geoffrey Robertson, Andrew Round, Suzanne Sadedin, Michael Schudson, Andrew Schwartzman, Phil Scraton, Steven Shapin, Chris Smith, Mike Smith, Hugh Stephenson, Sue Stoessl, William F. Stone, Stefan Szymanski, Suzana Taverne, D. M. Thomas, Claire Tomalin, Carol Tongue, Brian Toohey, Polly Toynbee, Donald Trelford, Jeremy Tunstall, Tunku Varadarajan, Steven Vines, Eric Walsh, Rosie Waterhouse, Gerry Weiss, Francis Wheen, Judith White, Andreas Whittam Smith, Robert M. Worcester, Gavin Yamey, Brian Young, Gary Younge.

  My agent, Michael Sissons is in a quite real sense the true originator of this book. As agent to Chris Patten, the former Governor of Hong Kong, he dealt with Murdoch’s outrageous decision to remove Patten’s book East and West from the HarperCollins list – by way of currying favour with the Beijing Communist regime. Michael was the tactician in the subsequent battle, which led to a humiliating defeat for Murdoch: demonstrating that Newscorp, for all its global reach, is not by any means invincible. He then steered this project through many vicissitudes, and to the extent it succeeds in explaining the Murdoch phenomenon, much of the credit it due to him.

  Andrew Gordon and Martin Bryant at Simon and Schuster were patient and supportive in dealing with quite unreasonable burdens; perhaps Rory Scarfe has had still more to bear with this edition.

  David Hooper’s and then Martin Soames’ legal advice lasts the distance. I am sure I am not being original in saying that Peter James is close to the ideal in text editors, combining most remarkably a gift for encouragement with a relentless eye for gaps in an argument. He did not have a hand in this edition, and I am sure it is the poorer in consequence.