The Murdoch Archipelago

by Bruce Page

  Rivett and family relationships. The Oxford Companion to Australian History is excellent on the persistent influence of distinguished families in Australian life and culture, somewhat modifying the stock notion of Australia as a proletarian enclave. The main facts of Rivett’s life and the details of his relationship with the Murdochs are drawn from the Rivett family papers in the National Library of Australia, supplemented by personal interviews with Mrs Nancy Rivett, Professor Ken Inglis, David Bowman and others.

  Rupert the Fear. Andrew Neil (Sunday Times editor 1982–92) in the Guardian, 2 March 1998.

  Plato, The Republic, Book IX, ‘On Right and Wrong Government: The Tyrannical Man’. This famous passage has been much discussed. The British philosopher R. G. Collingwood was one of the first to stress the labile, fluid quality of the tyrannical character (‘jetsam, floating on the surface of the waves he pretends to control’) as against the resolute despot (‘The Three Laws of Polities’, 1943, in his Essays in Political Philosophy).

  Charm. There are innumerable references to Murdoch’s charm and persuasiveness: a fairly detailed (and rueful) account is in Harold Evans, Good Times, Bad Times. Neil Chenoweth in Virtual Murdoch says his subject is the most persuasive force in the world.

  Modern investigations. T. W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson and R. Nevitt Sanford, The Authoritarian Personality (1950) was initially funded by the American Jewish Committee as part of a series studying the origins of extreme right-wing regimes. The literature on the development of the Frankfurt School is of course part of the foundation material of modern social science. Strength and Weakness: The Authoritarian Personality Today by William F. Stone, Gerda Lederer and Richard Christie collects essays reviewing the vast literature which has criticised and developed TAP in the years 1950–92, including the extension to left-wing authoritarianism. Christie worked on the original surveys under Frenkel-Brunswik. Links between gullibility and authoritarianism are emphasised by Frenkel-Brunswick.

  Rebel, outsider etc. Stelzer, an economist and columnist for Newscorp’s Sunday Times, is quoted extensively in the Wyatt Journals, where Murdoch’s supposedly rebellious character is presented as a refreshment to British society.

  Oxford’s ‘extraordinary success …’ Professor John Kay in the University Council, 1999.

  Lenin, etc. The anecdote of the bust is well known, and confirmed by Murdoch to Shawcross. As stated, Murdoch’s activity in the Cole Group appears in his correspondence with Rivett. Cole (1889–1959) was Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory. The Group was ‘recruited each year from the Oxford University Labour Party and Ruskin College by the previous year’s group … it met one evening a week during term-time and discussed the social, economic and political ideas that interested the members … [it] helped prevent radical people from following the Communists into the political wasteland’ (L. P. Carpenter, G. D. H. Cole: An Intellectual Biography, 1973). The essence of the Group was an interest in the realities of political power. Cole’s wife Margaret (a Cambridge alumnus) thought it might be over-successful in establishing a grip over British Labour politics (Growing Up into Revolution, 1949).

  ‘Help bring about the inevitable’ was Karl Popper’s caustic version of much socialist motivation prior to the fall of communism. Leszek Kolakowski in Main Currents of Marxism (1978) discusses the attraction of Marxism during the first half of the twentieth century as a route to power and prestige likely to appeal to ambitious authoritarians. Eric Beecher (editor Melbourne Herald1978–82) interviewed by Christopher Hird (Murdoch, 1990) thought Rupert developed a fascination with political power-figures early in life through the example of his father (who also displayed left-wing attitudes when Labor dominated Australian politics pre-1917).

  Pickering and the Express. Shawcross, Munster and other sources mention this connection. A fine account of the rise of the Express is in Francis (Lord) Williams, Dangerous Estate. This is supplemented by Christiansen (Headlines All My Life) and by the author’s personal observation of Fleet Street (Evening Standard 1960–2; Daily Herald 1962–4), by discussion with Michael Foot, Adrian Deamer and others, together with accounts in A. J. P. Taylor, Beaverbrook; Michael Davie and Anne Chisholm, Beaverbrook; William Barkley, Reporter’s Notebook, James Cameron, Point of Departure; Rene MacColl, Deadline and Dateline. The decline of the Express is brilliantly evoked by Anthony Delano in Slip-Up.

  Bribes, etc. This point is made in Williams, Dangerous Estate, and the honesty of Australian papers is described by Twopeny, Town Life in Australia. Copper in Scoop (1938) by Evelyn Waugh is generally reckoned a composite caricature of Northcliffe and Rothermere.

  See you to the devil. Captain Stevens’ conversion is in Dennis Griffiths’ history Plant Here The Standard (1996).

  More powerful. There is ample evidence in Pound and Harmsworth, Northcliffe, for Northcliffe’s belief that he enjoyed more power as a newspaper magnate than he could as a Cabinet minister. But there is also much evidence for his delusionary cast of mind.

  Legendary Baldwin oration. The best account is in Keith Middlemas and John Barnes, Baldwin: The Unknown Prime Minister. Kipling and Baldwin were connected through the Burne-Jones family (Pre-Raphaelites). Kipling first used the ‘harlot’ phrase as a rebuke to Beaverbrook in a personal argument: the Kipling Journal (2002) quotes Baldwin’s letter asking permission to use it in public.

  Hot-metal technology. Compresses press history references with my own personal experience as reporter and production executive on several newspapers. Christiansen’s role is described (admiringly) by Williams in Dangerous Estate and (modestly) by Christiansen himself in Headlines All My Life.

  Hardware, bandwidth limits. ‘High-speed’ (56k/bit) modems are the present maximum for analogue telephone installations and are borderline for real Web access. The spread of ADSL and cable-modems offering data-transfer speeds up to ten times higher increases the possibility of real Internet newspapers. But many issues remain – the size and weight of monitors, resolution and refresh rates and so on. Possibilities for the electronic newspaper are important but most prophecies inspired by the Internet bubble have collapsed with it.

  Electronic print technology. Even standard word-processors can perform instantaneously type-management operations which were arduous in hot-metal. Comparison is truly dramatic with publishing systems like QuarkXPress or Adobe InDesign.

  Christiansen’s disciples. Williams, Dangerous Estate and personal observation. James Cameron in Point of Departure describes vividly the barrier many good journalists found in hot-metal editorial technology. He was appointed mistakenly as an Express sub in 1940, and was dysfunctional, but as he had been exempted from military service (also mistakenly, as it turned out) the Express would not let him go. Only after 1945 did Christiansen agree that ‘I would never be able to work out a heading across four columns in 48-point Cheltenham Bold without using my fingers’ and allow Cameron to become a brave and eloquent foreign correspondent.

  British subs best. Murdoch has repeatedly made this point during interviews, especially in disparagement of American newspapers (see Chapter 7).

  Big toad. Quoted in David Dary Red Blood and Black Ink: Journalism in the Old West.

  Page-one purpose. Quoted in Williams, Dangerous Estate.

  Hard, bright expertise and its fascination. Adrian Deamer taped biographical interview, Australian National Library, and personal discussions with him at various times.

  The ‘newcomer’ memo referred to the Daily Express front-page lead on 21 October 1951.

  Northcliffe considering readers were ‘only ten’. Williams, Dangerous Estate.

  ‘Up-market shit’. Murdoch discussion with Godfrey Hodgson c.1975 re Mirror scope feature in Daily Mirror (personal from Hodgson).

  No subject etc … Christiansen in Headlines All My Life; similar statements from Greeley, are in Emery et al., The Press and America. Synecdoche and the avoidance of numerical reality is analysed further in Chapter 9. Real decline in child mu
rder being accompanied by a popular belief in its increased danger culminates with the tabloid (especially News of the World) coverage of the Sarah Payne case in 2001.

  ‘Tabloidization’. David C. Krajicek in Scooped! Media Miss Real Story of Crime while Chasing Sex, Sleaze and Celebrities.

  ‘Faraway country’. Christiansen in Headlines All My Life. Beaverbrook and the Express supported Appeasement (Richard Cockett, Twilight of the Truth) but changed dramatically when war broke out. Michael Foot, a socialist anti-appeaser, was made editor of the Evening Standard; he and Beaverbrook (intimate friends) agreed that they would inevitably become political opponents some time after the war. Many gifted journalists covered the war for the Express, pre-eminently Alan Moorehead. Not the least of Christiansen’s achievements was packing Moorehead’s dispatches into four or six pages of rationed newsprint. Moorehead’s own account is African Trilogy, comparable with the best of Crane. The Library of America offers two superb volumes: American Journalism: Reporting World War II: 1938–1944 and 1944–1946. Sadly no British collection is as thorough.

  ‘Common Market’ attacks. Personal knowledge of the journalist who was hired for this task.

  ‘I picked it up …’ Barkley in Reporter’s Notebook. However, in 1953, when Murdoch was there, the Express was still dauntingly slick in the production technology of the time. Nobody was taken on to the subs’ desk with the trivial experience Murdoch then had – or would have survived had it occurred. Cameron’s wartime experience was special to the time.

  Ease of writing leaders. Pringle’s autobiography Have Pen Will Travel.

  Parents, children and independence. The Adorno analysis of authoritarianism is extended and refined in the work of Erich Fromm, particularly The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1974), which discusses the need to develop independently from parents. Material from his earlier Fear of Freedom(1942) is encapsulated, recording the Frankfurt School’s pioneer studies among working-class Germans in the 1930s. The historian Richard Hofstadter summarised much of this (using language perhaps more graceful than that of the psychologists) in The Paranoid Style in American Politics where he connects authoritarian attitudes to ‘pseudo-conservative’ politics, which lack the essential moderation of traditional conservatives (like Eisenhower or Macmillan):

  Among those (Adorno) found … to have strong ethnic prejudices and pseudoconservative tendencies, there is a high proportion of persons who have been unable to develop the capacity to criticise justly and in moderation the failings of parents and who are profoundly intolerant of the ambiguities of thought and feeling that one is so likely to find in real-life situations. For pseudoconservatism is among other things a disorder in relation to authority, characterised by an inability to find other modes for human relationship than those of more or less complete domination or submission. The conservative always imagines himself to be dominated and imposed upon because he feels that he is not dominant, and knows no other way of interpreting his position.

  Fromm emphasises that authoritarianism is rare. Of German workers surveyed in 1932 the majority (78 per cent) were not authoritarian. About 12 per cent had solidly tolerant principles, and only 10 per cent seemed likely to become ardent Nazis (the contemporary authoritarian option). Also Fromm is highly critical of the famous ‘punishment’ experiment of Stanley Milgram (1965) and of Phillip Zimbardo’s ‘Stanford Prison Experiment’ (1971), both of which have been taken to show that majorities are authoritarian and perhaps sadistic. Fromm is emphatic that most people mature without major authoritarian damage, and that society usually contains a leavening of ruggedly tolerant individuals. (In 2001 the BBC abandoned an attempt to restage the Zimbardo experiment after heavy criticism of its methodology.) ‘The main result of Milgram’s study,’ Fromm observes, ‘seems to be one he does not stress: the presence of conscience in most subjects … The Nazis had to use an elaborate system of camouflage of atrocities in order to cope with the conscience of the average man.’

  Inheritance. Sir Keith Murdoch’s will is an involved document due to numerous codicils and alterations.

  ‘I think he’s got it’. This anecdote is in Shawcross, Murdoch, and other versions.

  ‘His ideals’. British Journalism Review, January 2000: Rupert Murdoch interviewed by Bill Hagerty.

  Table talk. Woodrow Wyatt, Journals, vols 1 and 2.

  Courtiers. Neil, Guardian, 2 March 1998.

  Each man for himself. Stevens quoted in Hobson et al, The Pearl of Days, official history of the Sunday Times.

  4: BLACK JACK AND THE STUDENT PRINCE Epigraphs. Rochefoucauld’s style (1613–80) was unlike that of the third man in the Kelly-Nash-Arvey machine which ran Chicago in Roosevelt’s time; both, however, saw politics as a trade in favours. Charles B. Cleveland’s profile of Arvey is in Illinois Issues 34 (November 1977), Sangamon State University.

  Sir Keith installed etc. Acquisition of the News and appointment of Rivett is recounted by Munster, Murdoch, and largely followed by Shawcross, Murdoch, and others.

  ‘Great comfort’ is from Lady Murdoch’s letter to Rivett 1960 (dated only ‘Sunday’ but probably 17 July 1960), Box 5 Rohan Rivett MS8049/2/19, Rivett family papers in the National Library of Australia.

  Not the easiest man. David Bowman letter to Rivett, 1960 (Rivett papers), expanded by interview, 18 November 2002.

  The Bulletin, founded 1880, carried the White Australia banner for most of its independent career. Donald Home became editor on the Packer takeover in 1961 and removed it.

  Playford’s dominion over South Australia is described in Munster, Murdoch, following standard sources. Professor Ken Inglis, who was on the Adelaide faculty when he wrote The Stuart Case (1961), neatly conveys its extension into academic life.

  Murder at Ceduna. This generally follows Munster, Murdoch, and Inglis, Stuart Case, taking account of Professor Inglis’ revised edition (2002) which includes interviews with Stuart (see below).

  Williams, Henderson, Menzies. Commercial television and journalism. Munster’s account in his Murdoch is supplemented by personal recollection. Rivett’s challenge to the South Australian authorities was a striking example to my generation of Melbourne Herald trainees. Many of us wished to think well of Rupert Murdoch.

  Cultural detonators. Henry Fairlie’s initial ‘establishment’ articles were in the Spectator, 23 and 30 September 1955, and their resonance continues. Chapter 14 analyses this influential coinage and its importance to Murdoch’s business.)

  ‘Surged and fought’. Professor Inglis supplied a copy of this letter written to him by Reid, 25 July 1961, in which he says he takes no offence at references to him in Inglis’ coverage of the Stuart case in Nation Review. The material of those reports provided a basis for The Stuart Case, which is the chief descriptive source.

  Status of judges. Australian Associated Press, 8 November 1999, reported a solicitor in a Melbourne property case as saying that the judge ‘has got his hand on his dick’. Mr Justice Philip Cummins ruled: ‘It may be offensive, but it is not contempt of court for a person to describe a judge as a wanker.’

  Royal Commission crisis. The basic facts are common to Inglis, Stuart Case, Munster, Murdoch, and Shawcross, Murdoch the latter leaning towards Murdoch’s own interpretation that Rivett’s judgment was eccentric. There seems no real doubt that the news-bill which went too far was Murdoch’s exactly the kind of error inexperienced headline-writers make. David Bowman, who was reporting the case, realised at once that the News would be in trouble – not because the error was serious, but because the authorities would attack on any pretext.

  Zenger. The Press and America, describes Andrew Hamilton’s defence of Zenger. In Chapter 7 we come to Alexander Hamilton’s follow-up blow against criminal libel. Essentially this law died at the hands of the US Supreme Court in 1812, but here and in Chapter 6 we are concerned with the corpse still twitching in twentieth-century Australia.

  Bid for the Advertiser. Munster, Murdoch, describes Murdoch’s attempt to ally himself wi
th the powers of Adelaide and Sir Mellis Napier’s proposed role. A note by Professor Inglis should not be forgotten: Sir Mellis supported Inglis’ promotion within the university, though he is unlikely to have enjoyed The Stuart Case.

  Mirror Group Newspapers. Inglis describes Murdoch’s elation in his historical essay about Nation Review (Nation: The Life of an Independent Journal of Opinion).

  John Norton and Truth. Cyril Pearl’s Wild Men of Sydney often beggars belief but is generally accepted as realistic.

  Murdoch sacks Rivett. This is Rivett’s own typescript in his papers at the National Library (Rohan Rivett MS8049/2/19) headed ‘The Australia [Hotel] Melbourne, Sunday July 17 I960’ and addressed to Sir Stanley Murray Chairman of Directors, News Ltd, Adelaide, SA. It runs to about 900 words, cleanly typed, going into detail about handover arrangements and farewells to colleagues, then commenting on the two dismissal notes, particularly Murdoch’s failure to make any personal contact in spite of the suggestion that he means to do so:

  Mr Murdoch has spoken vaguely of talks and specifically of having ‘many reasons’. There have been no talks in the 10 days since my dismissal nor any reasons advanced. In the 12 days since the letters were written he has not contacted me although I … could have been reached in a matter of minutes.

  This seemed to me – and to everyone who has expressed an opinion on it – a strange course of action, firstly in view of a friendship lasting 14 years, secondly in view of the very firm partnership which had existed especially following the death of Sir Keith Murdoch in October, 1952 and continued and developed mostly long before …

  The document is unsigned, and is presumably not the version sent to Murray. Possibly it was superseded by advice Murray gave to Rivett (see below) and not sent at all.

  The two dismissal notes are also in the Rivett papers, along with the numerous letters expressing regret, amazement and incredulity, among them Professor Walter Murdoch (26 July 1960 and 3 August 1960) saying he has heard various stories, ‘all of them ugly’, about Rupert’s behaviour.