by Bruce Page
Lamb’s achievement. Michael Leapman, obituary, Independent, 20 May 2000.
Columbia Journalism Review. See Chapter 7.
‘Fantasy factory’. Raymond Snoddy in The Good, the Bad and the Unacceptable:The Hard News about the British Press (1993).
Techniques of control and domination. Admirers (e.g. Kelvin MacKenzie), neutrals (Simon Jenkins) and critics (John Menadue) describe very similar phenomena: the silent interrogation by phone and the intolerance of multi-sided discussion. This passage collates evidence from Menadue, Things Tou Learn Along the Way, and from Chippindale and Horrie, Stick It UpTour Punter. In Channel 4’s 1998 film The Real Rupert Murdoch Andrew Neil described one of these phone calls which was memorable to him because he successfully determined to make Murdoch break the silence.
Deamer’s Australian. Once again, Munster (Murdoch) and Menadue (ThingsTou Learn Along the Way) give a generally similar story. But the chief source here is personal conversation with Deamer, supplemented by his taperecorded memoir in the National Library of Australia. One handicap in this was a curious Deamer characteristic: that of becoming irascible if he felt he was being tempted into anything like boasting. But apart from Professor Mayer (The Pressin Australia) there is ample evidence from observers like David Bowman of the Australian’s startling improvement under Deamer.
Dismissal of Deamer. This is pieced together from Menadue, Munster, Deamer himself and Professor Ken Inglis, who was close to the late Tom Fitzgerald. Deamer was not bitter about Murdoch, for whom he never felt any respect, but he could not forgive Fitzgerald’s failure to tell him what was happening.
Campaigning for the ALP. This is Menadue’s evidence in Things Tou Learn Along the Way: again, a story outlined by Munster in his Murdoch is amplified from inside knowledge, putting Murdoch’s aims and motivation beyond sensible doubt.
6: MR MURDOCH CHANGES TRAINS Global ambitions. Menadue, Things Tou Learn Along the Way. Local and international. Max Frankel in The Times of My Life has an illuminating passage on how the New York Times (the most sophisticated worldcitizen among newspapers) remains at heart a local sheet which never loses sight of the New York parish pump. A reading of Downie and Kaiser, The News Aboutthe News, provides more evidence for a proposal that the US papers which cover the world best enjoy a strong municipal base: among other things, classified ad revenue can buy a lot of foreign travel. Britain’s ‘national’ newspapers are something of an exception, formed by London’s extraordinary dominance over a fairly small island.
American beginnings. Shawcross, Murdoch, conveys the strenuous character of the Star campaign, and Murdoch’s angry claim that only snobs would doubt the value of supermarket tabloids.
The CIA and the Coalition. Toohey and Pinwill, Oyster, explain this delusion one very characteristic of intelligence agencies.
Gough stands Rupert up. An interview with Walsh conveys the impression that organising a Whitlam schedule was like steering a skittish supertanker: extra turbulence appears to have set in whenever it was necessary to bring him alongside Murdoch.
Alwest. Munster’s account in Murdoch, which Whitlam elaborates in The Truthof the Matter.
Pentagon Papers content. Frankel’s summary in The Times of My Life.
Pentagon Papers, Watergate and the Washington Post. The principal sources are the memoirs of Katharine Graham (Personal History) and Benjamin C. Bradlee (A Good Life), with important background from Frankel and from Bernstein and Woodward (All the President’s Men).
Cantankerous press. In this instance quoted from Frankel (The Times of My Life), but Google will find it in many places on the Web.
Thomson and the gun-runners. Personal knowledge, as writer of the story. Further details in an obituary note on Denis Hamilton (Independent, 9 April 1988) as editor of the Sunday Times.
Delane and disclosure. Williams makes this point in Dangerous Estate.
Tits in the mangle. This was Attorney-General John Mitchell’s phrase aimed at Mrs Graham. Personal History records her pleasure, after Mr Mitchell’s downfall, at her editorial colleagues’ presentation to her of a small brass mangle.
‘Crash through or crash’ makes an intriguing credo for a former air force navigator: it is cited by Menadue, and most writers mentioning Whitlam. His unique blend of aggrandisement and self-mockery is caught by an interview with the Age (9 March 2002) in which he suggests he ought to depart the earth via a blazing Viking funeral in Sydney Harbour, were it not for inconvenience to the commuter ferries. During the three years of his government ‘the things we launched and also the ones we tried to launch were extraordinarily well conceived and well executed’. (He did abolish university fees, reform the school system, give welfare payments to single-parent families and the homeless, set the voting age to eighteen, end Australia’s military presence in Vietnam, and open diplomatic relations with China.) Patrick White’s autobiography Flaws in the Glass gives entertaining details of the new honours system and a scathing view of the Dismissal. Constitutional crisis. Surely the reason this story is little known outside Australia is the sheer complexity of events and sources. Again, using the particular material in Munster’s Murdoch and Menadue’s Things You Learn Along theWay, together with well-regarded general accounts such as Paul Kelly’s November 1975 and the ABC’s documentary reconstruction in 1995 (for which Malcolm Fraser was interviewed at length) and David Marr’s life of the Chief Justice Sir Garfield Barwick, I have assembled a basic narrative which attempts to be consistent with the carefully balanced judgments of Davison et al., Oxford Companion to Australian History. I have spliced into this a strand which seems to have been much neglected but is vital to media history: the Melbourne Herald’s independent and persistent investigation which uncovered the basic abuses committed by Senator Connor. John Fitzgerald, then editor of the Herald, was a patient guide to this complex pre-history of the main crisis. Other sources include the late Sir John Kerr’s Matters for Judgement, Richard Hall’s The Real John Kerr: His Brilliant Career and Whitlam’s Truth of theMatter.
Play it down the middle. Munster, Paper Prince.
Menadue’s recruitment is of course his own account in Things You Learn Alongthe Way, in which he convincingly describes conservative resistance, or obstruction, to Whitlam’s government.
Cavan gathering is described by Munster. Menadue, Things You Learn Along theWay, adds detail – emphasising that the Governor-General’s behaviour was never reported until after the Dismissal (and remained secret from the Prime Minister).
‘Torn down’. Murdoch told the ABC documentary in 1995 that Labor supporters saw him as the man who had done that to their leader, though in his own view he had done no more than stand up for constitutional principles.
Government iniquity etc. Munster makes the point about lack of real investigation by Murdoch’s papers; this sparked my examination of the Herald’s role.
Criminal libel. This appears to have been the last spasm of the unlovely corpse. Connor’s writ was not seen as threatening the Herald’s survival in the way the Nixon administration’s legal assault threatened the Washington Post. But there was no doubt in the mind of John Fitzgerald, up to the moment of Connor’s surrender, that he and several of his colleagues were putting their careers on the line.
Senator Withers explained the fragility of his position in the 1995 ABC documentary.
G. P. Scott (1846–1932) lived through the period which created the industrial newspaper.
Sir Martin Charteris is dead. The source for the quotation is John Menadue’s 1975 note of a discussion with Tim McDonald, Official Secretary at Australia House, London. Sir William Heseltine, then Assistant Private Secretary at Buckingham Palace, has since confirmed that Kerr’s action was kept secret from the Queen and her staff, and was not at all admired (SydneyMorning Herald, 10 March 2001).
Kerr’s timing. David Marr (Barwick) establishes this in his account of the elaborate process the Governor-General set in train for secretly visiting Chief Justice Barwick.
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nbsp; Cutler made his attitude clear in the 1995 ABC documentary.
Lunch with Murdoch. This is from Menadue, Things You Learn Along the Way, amplified by personal discussion with Menadue himself. He is certainly convinced that Fraser’s change of attitude on his employment was part of a strategy; this view was expressed by Peter Bowers in the Sydney Morning Herald, 4 November 1995. Malcolm Fraser declined my request for an interview.
Election and aftermath. The evidence of bias is cited by Munster, who does not suggest it materially affected the outcome. Menadue thought Fraser did not fulfil his potential as Prime Minister, finding that the country’s economic problems were indeed exogenous, not primarily due to ALP sins (which he seems to recognise in his 1995 ABC interview).
7: AN AMERICAN NIGHTMARE Epigraph 1. The Uncelestial City, a long narrative poem, had a sizeable success in 1930, taking a view of journalism (and other institutions) which was widely shared.
Epigraph 2. Federalist No. 1, 27 October 1787 by ‘Publius’ (Alexander Hamilton).
Fortunes of the Post. Newscorp doesn’t publish separate accounts for any of its papers. But the unprofitability of the Post is freely described in the memoirs of its veterans, such as Steven Cuozzo, It’s Alive.
World a better place. Cuozzo, It’s Alive.
Force for evil. Columbia Journalism Review, June 1980.
Yellow journal office. Emery et al., The Press and America. This is the general, if much compressed, account of American newspaper development.
Dark playfulness. Cuozzo, It’s Alive. Compare with Chippindale and Horrie, Stick It Up Tour Punter.
Snake. Sheridan of course was familiar with the real-life Snakes of London journalism.
The Times and the news. Harold Evans (Good Times, Bad Times) and Williams (Dangerous Estate) explain the context well, using basic facts from
History of The Times, vol. 1. The American Democrat . Cooper also thought that plenty of material was deliberately misleading. Our Press Gang. Wilmer’s fine diatribe remains available in the British Library.
Pulitzer. The Press and America of course provides a substantial account, but additional details come from Professor Seymour Topping’s history on the Pulitzer Prize website at www.pulitzer.org.
Schudson, Power of News, was cited in Chapters 1 and 3.
Weber and news media. Peter Lasswell’s essay in Stephen Turner (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Weber discusses plans and refers to this extensive journalism and proposed studies of journalism.
Objective journalism. Everyone who comes into contact with American newspapers encounters something of this debate. A later passage quotes Frankel [Times of My Life) on the editorial crisis caused by a kind of pseudo-objectivity at the New York Times in the 1960s. The discussion in The Press and America is extensive.
‘Let’s not be too technical’. Cuozzo, It’s Alive, gives much further evidences of his admiration for Dunleavy.
Murdoch’s attack on ‘elite’ journalism was made at the American Newspaper Publishers Convention, 1977.
Muckrakers, etc. A. N. Smith Lecture, Melbourne University, 1972. Murdoch’s notion that the Muckrakers were close kin to his own tabloid operations doubtless testifies to the cunning of President Theodore Roosevelt’s attack on them (launched because their criticisms stung his administration). They were like the man sweeping a floor in Part II of The Pilgrim’s Progress, who forgets to look up at the heavens. Murdoch gives the impression that their work was salacious, which was not true at all. He also told his audience: ‘It was not the serious press which first campaigned for the Negro in America: it was the small, obscure newspapers of the Deep South.’ This nonsense he must have snatched out of the air.
Presentational ingenuity. This is supported in great detail by Anthony Delano’s unpublished PhD thesis, which combines extensive historical inquiry with questionnaire results from recent surveys of British, American and Australian journalists.
Cameron quits. He tells this and other stories brilliantly in his autobiography Point of Departure. His first employers, in twentieth-century Scotland, would have chilled Pulitzer, let alone Godkin. He later wrote, ‘British journalism at its best is literate and lightweight and fundamentally ineffectual; American journalism at its best is ponderous and excellent and occasionally anaesthetic.’ This does less than justice to the present quality of papers like the Guardian, the Independent and – in a contrasting manner – the Daily Mail. But it is still truer than it ought to be.
Brady on Dunleavy. Quoted by Krajicek, Scooped.
Journalists and sources. In The Times of My Life Frankel comments on a tension which few journalists can maintain unbroken. Relaxing into the arms of the sources is always comfortable. When I. F. Stone said of Theodore H. White that ‘a man with a prose style like that need never lunch alone’, he was omitting the fact that White as a young foreign correspondent had stood up for unpopular truths. But he accurately portrayed a temptation.
Pulitzer Prize awards are admirably documented at www.pulitzer.org.
Dorothy Schiff’s Post. Working in New York in the late 1960s, one saw the good qualities of the Post, and equally saw that its news coverage of the New York area was at best thin, and sometimes lamentable.
Felker and Murdoch. Described in Shawcross, Murdoch. I talked with Felker at the time, and he said Murdoch had ‘changed his ideas about the nature of friendship’.
Valuing the Post. Jerome Tuccille, Rupert Murdoch (1989), gives a clear and coherent account of newspaper values, US accounting conventions and the purchase of the Post and (earlier) the San Antonio papers.
Son of Sam. The essential facts of David Berkowitz’s killings are easily found and checked by numerous Web postings. I have kept the underlying narrative within the agreed record, then laid over it an analysis of the Post’s antics. Cuozzo, who was present throughout (It’s Alive), provides a devotional account of the activities of his colleagues. Thomas Kiernan, who witnessed Murdoch’s involvement, provides a more sober perspective in Citizen Murdoch. Material quoted from the Post’s files is identified in the text.
Brawlers. Cuozzo, It’s Alive, misses no opportunities to sound a macho note. Rupert Murdoch seems to have had a background role in a famous Sydney battle (1962) where Kerry and Clyde Packer were the stars (details are in Munster, Murdoch). Otherwise his personal demeanour seems usually to have been circumspect. Criminal violence (such as rape and muggings) was prevalent at various times in twentieth-century New York. But if ‘street-brawling’ means large-scale riot and disorder other cities in America and Europe are more notable.
Gold watch and tears. This is Cuozzo in It’s Alive, heart nailed to sleeve.
America and the news. We cannot be sure Hamilton personally wrote these words, as the paper’s launch edition (in the way of the times) did not carry bylines. But what is well established (see The Press and America) is that while Hamilton lived the paper was in every way an expression of his own powerful intellect. No such major statement would have appeared in the Post’s birth unless it expressed the General’s outlook.
8: TIMES AND VALUES Denials. Lord Biffen and Baroness Oppenheim interviewed 15 June 1999 and 26 May 1999 by Bruce Page and Elaine Potter. There are many others, variously explicit: Chris Mullin MP wrote personally to Biffen in 1998 and found the denial impressive, as bound by Parliamentary honour. Peter Stothard, then editor of The Times, gave a representative News Corporation view on Radio 4 in the same year (Guardian, 10 February 1998).
People and government. Harold Evans recounts Barnes’ achievement in Good Times, Bad Times; Grigg, History of The Times, vol. 6, and Barnes’ entry in the Dictionary of National Biography supplement the story. Florentine political theory is analysed further in Chapter 13.
The Times under Barnes and Delane. Francis Williams in Dangerous Estate is another excellent account in parallel to Evans, Good Times, Bad Times, and others.
‘Last analysis and journalism’. Claud Cockburn’s first volume of autobiography, In Time of Trouble.
Appeasement. Williams and many others describe The Times’ abject role. Richard Cockett in Twilight of the Truth gives what may be the definitive version (showing that The Times was far from alone in its offence). Cockett makes the point that The Times’ pro-Soviet bias deserves, but has not yet received, proper investigation. The historian E. H. Carr, active as a leader-writer during the war years, appears to have seen Stalin as a high-minded Fabian reformer whose circumstances justified a degree of ruthlessness.
Cabinet committees. Professor Peter Hennessy, James Cameron Memorial Lecture 2000.
Cruickshank. Personal interview, 28 April 1999.
News on the front page. For many years a reproduction of this blunder was framed in The Times’ New York office. Visiting American reporters found it hard to believe that it was a proud souvenir rather than a hideous warning.
Sunday Times pre-Thomson. Hobson et al., Pearl of Days, covers this period gracefully.
Suez circulation figures. From the Audit Bureau of Circulations database. The fact that the Guardian and Daily Mirror, both highly critical of the Suez expedition, do not seem to have lost sales need not detract from the courage of the Observer’s editorial team. Often the cause of circulation loss is not immediately known. But it is always a confidence-sapping experience, and particularly so when there are other pressures.
Higher duty. Charles Moore writing in Guardian Media, 1998.
Victorian lies. Randall Jarrell, A Sad Heart at the Supermarket.
Objective fallacy and the Telegraph. Personal from Don Berry, managing editor 1986–91. ‘Never happier’. Andrew Neil, Full Disclosure.
‘Sure [Maxwell] was lying’. Tony Jackson, Lombard column, Financial Times, 30 January 1992.
Philby investigation. Details can be found in The Philby Conspiracy (1966) by Bruce Page, David Leitch and Phillip Knightley. In subsequent inquiries others have much improved the record, but basic factual disclosure stands as it was. Lord Chalfont’s warning was issued to David Leitch and me at an interview in the Foreign Office early in 1966. Direct evidence of Whitehall’s whispered counterstrike surfaced a year or two later through the paper’s diplomatic correspondent, who in tradition with the period acted almost as a member of the diplomatic service. When the Foreign Secretary was invited to lunch at the paper, another colleague asked why I hadn’t been invited. ‘Oh, we thought it would be embarrassing for a member of the [Communist] Party to have to meet the Foreign Secretary’ said the diplomatic correspondent kindly Later, Donald Maclean invited me to interview him in Moscow, but correctly predicted I would not get a visa as the KGB were sure I worked for the CIA.