by Bruce Page
criminology.
At www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Friedrich_Gauss on the Web there is a
biographical note which lists and describes all of Gauss’ achievements, among
them: ‘In 1818, Gauss started a geodesic survey of the state of Hanover, work
which later led to the development of the normal distribution for describing
measurement errors.’
Quetelet, ‘law of large numbers’, polls etc. Professor John Allen Paulos (A
Mathematician Reads the Newspaper) provides an excellent brief account of the
ubiquity of Quetelet. Doubtless he is right to say that economics may be
considered as ‘social statistical mechanics’: my opinion is that the best economists
are those who know when the analogy between the human and the mechanical will
break down. Reporters can still be found who think they can sniff the air during a
by-election and produce a better analysis than an opinion-poll can do, but mostly
they are wrong. To take a reliable sample of (say) people’s voting intentions needs
several hundred respondents randomly selected, and even if a single reporter could
do it the first data would be obsolete before the collection of the last. A reporter
with really powerful intuition may be able to assess opinion in exceptional cases
where survey technique isn’t applicable, but that person will be far too intelligent
to do something extremely difficult when a good a result can be obtained by a
simple team procedure.
‘Out of the ordinary’. Many writers record Northcliffe as giving this
definition – and his saying ‘News is something someone wants to suppress’ and
‘When a dog bites a man, that’s not news – news is man bites dog’ I have not
found any record of Northcliffe claiming these as original perceptions, but the
official life by Pound and Harmsworth makes it plain that he believed them.
Today, somewhat more sophisticated ideas about news and probability are
beginning to be discussed – stimulated by cot deaths, vaccination risks and so on.
However, many people still find it difficult to grapple with probabilities, and
distinguish the random from the significant in daily events. The mathematician
and financial trader Nassim Nicholas Taleb suggests (Fooled byRandomness: The
Hidden Role of Chance in the Markets and in Life) that this is something we owe
to human origins in a simpler and less abstract world:
a natural habitat does not include much information. An efficient computation
of the odds was never necessary until very recently. This explains why we had to
wait until the emergence of the gambling literature to see the growth of the
mathematics of probability. Popular belief holds that the religious backdrop of the
first and second millennium blocked the growth of tools that hint at the absence of
determinism, and caused the delays in probability research. The idea is extremely
dubious; we simply did not compute probabilities because we did not dare to?
Surely the reason is rather that we did not need to. Much of our problem comes
from the fact that we have evolved out of such a habitat faster, much faster than
our genes. Even worse; our genes have not changed at all.
The biologist Edward O. Wilson (quoted in Chapter 11) suggests from a
different direction that human rationality is limited by the small scope of the
societies in which it developed. Chapter 13 refers again to Taleb and Wilson in
discussing contemporary attempts to broaden the framework of social decisionmaking.
‘Small Earthquake’ etc. Harry Evans comments on Morison with great
restraint, but with some impatience. Claud Cockburn (In Time of Trouble) tells the
‘small earthquake’ story saying that it won an informal competition among Times
sub-editors to write the most boring headline possible.
Weber’s ‘ideal types’. Weber worked on an expansive scale, and most of his
commentators go the same way. Ideal types are well documented in; Max Weber –
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Penguin 2002).
10: CASES OF CONSCIENCE Unless stated otherwise, quotations and documents are from Harry Evans’account, which forms the major part of his memoir Good Times, Bad Times. Nowhere else is there any substantial quantity of quoted documents and contemporary recollection. Inevitably Evans’ account, being written essentially in defence of his own reputation, has been criticised as self-serving: there are two main groups who take this view. Some people essentially accept the Murdoch version, and there is little to be said to them. Another group I refer to in the text as ‘the Old Times’. They were not necessarily old at that time by the calendar, or generally of one mind, except in considering themselves opponents of the journalistic values they saw in Rupert Murdoch. They then persuaded themselves that Evans’ values were essentially the same – that he was the tyrant’s agent and deserved no better than one of Tamburlaine’s discredited lieutenants.
I believe that Evans is accurate as to fact, and restrained – even excessively–as to judgment. Indeed, I doubt we have any better or more detailed evidence of power corruptly at work in British society: instances may well have been worse, but we know very much less about them. Brilliant as Evans’ account is, he had to describe a débâcle which was set moving by his own decision. This restrains him from putting his own evidence as clearly as he might – but never clearly enough, of course, to prevent Mr Worldly Wiseman (a reliable Murdoch ally) from discounting it altogether.
I followed the story at the time and reported some of it in the NewStatesman, from a viewpoint strongly critical of Murdoch, and not much less critical of Evans. He was after all maintaining publicly that all was well with Times Newspapers and that those of us who said otherwise were cynics. The corporate smokescreen was not thick enough to disguise altogether what was really happening, and Good Times, Bad Times later confirmed that. There can be no doubt that it would have been far more comfortable for Evans simply to accede to Murdoch’s demand, or simply to make a settlement and run away with the money. Fortunately, he chose to give us the record.
I have checked my own recollection and the Evans account by discussion with others then close to the events, particularly Peter Hennessy, Hugh Stephenson and Richard Davy.
A complicating factor in the story is that people who were close friends of the late Charles Douglas Home generally cannot accept the Evans version of his behaviour. One must respect their loyalty, but there is separate evidence – in, for instance, the Hitler Diaries case – which suggests they were mistaken about his character.
Lamb and The Times. Larry Lamb in Sunrise.
An upturn could be seen. Figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulations. Striking against the Guarantees. The bare facts of this matter emerged at the
time, though the people Murdoch struck at and through chose to make no protest. In 1992 the Sunday Times quite grotesquely accused Michael Foot of being a KGB spy, and Foot sued for libel. Foot’s lawyers intended to subpoena Rupert Murdoch to cross-examine him on the degree of control he exerted over Times Newspapers, and the means by which he gained it. They were able to obtain statements from Frank Giles and Ron Hall about the subversion of the guarantees. When this was disclosed to Newscorp’s lawyers they displayed a sudden readiness to settle the matter, and Foot – chiefly because he was then in poor health – was advised to accept. On Foot’s instruction his solicitors showed me the papers in the case, and they suggest that determined pursuit of the issue in 1982 would have posed serious problems for Murdoch.
The paper has no conscience, etc. Richard Davy was the leader-writer who dealt with Eastern Euro
pe and the USSR, and was in place when Evans arrived. Davy argued, with support from Evans, that Nato’s policy of detente, involving negotiation and multi-level contacts with the USSR and its allies within a balance of power, was more likely to keep the peace and erode the Soviet empire than the confrontation Ronald Reagan at first proposed (and later modified). Davy is well known separately from The Times as a writer on Soviet and European history. Scarcely anyone would accuse him of supporting a position in which conscience played no part.
11: PATRIOTIC LIKE A FOX Epigraph. In The Meaning of Treason West studied British citizens who committed acts of treachery on behalf of Nazi Germany (such as Joyce) and of the Soviet Union (such as Nunn May). Her notion of patriotism as contributing to moral equilibrium has never quite gone out of fashion.
Citizenship. More of less the same story is told in most accounts: Chenoweth in Virtual Murdoch stresses the private and privileged nature of the hearing.
Safire. New York Times, 16 May 1985.
Breslin. Daily News.
Failure of the Post. The financial woes of the paper are very frankly acknowledged in Cuozzo’s It’s Alive. To Cuozzo Murdoch’s willingness to keep the paper going amid heavy losses is a proof of his unselfish qualities. Thomas Kiernan in Citizen Murdoch is quite dry-eyed, suggesting that Murdoch’s motivation had more to do with political power-broking than with editorial romanticism. Kiernan surveys the two Reagan campaigns and emphasises the prevalence of sound and fury over substance.
Lamb Sun v. MacKenzie Sun. Lamb’s memoir Sunrise, having celebrated the ‘rise and rise of the Soaraway Sun’ concludes on a bitter note. He suggests that during his editorial regime there was a degree of restraint absent from the MacKenzie case. Many journalists are prepared to agree.
MacKenzie and the Falklands. The Sun’s activities during the Falklands War have been much discussed in terms of bias and jingoism. The editorial incompetence which emerges from Chippindale and Horde’s account in Stick It Up Your Punter has been less noticed.
TEN-10 licence hearings. These were held by the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal. Its records (and those of its predecessor, the Australian Broadcasting Authority) are held now by the Australian Broadcasting Authority, set up in 1992.
Inoculation. Orwell, ‘Notes on Nationalism’, in Collected Essays.
Paleolithic heritage. Scientific American, 24 February 2002. Professor Wilson is probably the greatest living biologist – recipient of the US National Medal of Science, the Pulitzer Prize for literature, and the Crafoord Prize given by the Royal Swedish Academy for sciences not covered in the Nobel awards. In this article he shows that group loyalty is an indispensable human asset, but one developed within limited horizons. If narrowly exploited it blocks the co-operation needed to save the human world from irreversible damage.
Burke. Reflections on the Revolution in France. Burke’s defence of national feeling accompanies a famous distaste for generalised hatred of any nation: ‘I do not know the method of drawing up an indictment against an whole people’ (‘Speech on Conciliation of America’, in On Empire, Liberty, and Reform, edited by David Bromwich).
Rancid chauvinism. Without being so consistent, other British tabloids sometimes merit the description, but British broadsheets, almost never – apart from The Times and the Sunday Times. Thus, a Times leader (27 March 1998) on the Ardennes:
The Germans have been uniquely handicapped in exploiting nostalgia to sell automobiles. The image of classic German engineering which persists in many minds is of adaptable off-road vehicles crashing through the Ardennes. But now that more than 50 years have passed since the last Panzer fired a shot in anger, the time is ripe for a revival of an earlier, more elegant tradition in German engineering …
The subject was Volkswagen’s plan to revive the Horch luxury-car brand to compete with Mercedes (whose usage of a glamorous past hardly seems inhibited by Battle of the Bulge memories, whatever The Times might fancy). The leaderwriter encouraged Germans to revisit automotive history extensively: ‘By appreciating anew why countries have an attachment to their native traditions, Germans might better understand the reluctance of some to travel on an autobahn without exit to another’s Utopia.’
Then there was the response when Germany’s ambassador protested mildly about a Sunday Times article headed ‘WHY I HATE THE GERMANS’ (18 July 1999) saying no German paper would run anything similar about Britain: ‘It’s not our style.’ Quite right, came back the writer A. A. Gill: ‘Their style is to send the panzers over the border at dawn and shoot the editor.’ Gill, having found that method which eluded Burke, of indicting a whole people, said that his critics (German and British) must grasp that the free press (represented by himself) never worked ‘to a secret agenda’, and wasn’t ‘biddable one way or another’. Certain British were out to impose ‘happy-clappy’ friendship throughout Europe – such people he could ‘hate more than the Germans’. With this went a picture of the author wearing a Stahlhelm.
Personal advantage. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution.
Fox network construction. The outline of this story is well known, and told largely in Murdoch’s own terms by Shawcross in Murdoch. The analysis which cast new light on it in 2001 was Neil Chenoweth’s book Virtual Murdoch, showing how the deal was paid for by redefining the nature of debt. Most of the gross figures cited were on the record before Chenoweth’s work, but he puts them into an entirely fresh context. The other principal source for the foundation of Fox is Thomas Kiernan (Citizen Murdoch), who at this time was working on what was to be an approved biography of Murdoch. Kiernan eventually found that he could not sympathise with Murdoch’s view of editorial ethics and published without approval. But, before the break, his access to Murdoch enabled him to secure several remarkably frank and important admissions.
Michael Milken. The rank of Milken among titans of speculative excess has been reduced somewhat by the Enron epoch and by Milken’s own imagereconstruction subsequent to release from jail. A detailed reminder of the facts is provided by Edward Cohn, ‘The Resurrection of Michael Milken’ in the American Prospect, 11.9 (13 March 2000).
‘Unusual financing’. American Lawyer, December 1993. In this interview Siskind does not really explain the legerdemain involved (see below).
Concentrations of power, etc. Kiernan, Citizen Murdoch, on the basic technique and resemblance to the Times Newspapers case.
Financing Fox. Chenoweth, Virtual Murdoch, on the phenomenal expansion of News Corporation credit.
In truth the money was a loan. Though Siskind (noted above) purported to explain the curiosity, there does not seem to be any specific feature of Australian commercial law or accounting principle under which a debt can be treated as shareholders’ equity. It seems more likely that News Corporation’s auditors, Arthur Andersen, simply did not challenge the point, and there was at that time no Australian regulatory body to do so.
12: MARGARET THATCHER’S HEROES Woodrow Wyatt. The three volumes of Lord Wyatt’s Journals are an essential source for the real relationship between News Corporation and Margaret Thatcher’s government.
Wyatt-Murdoch introduction. Stated by Evans in Good Times, Bad Times. Communism and the Electricians. Some idea of the scale of the battle Wyatt and his allies had to fight can be gained from All Those in Favour by C. H. Rolph (with a foreword by John Freeman), which is an account of the fiercely contested legal actions which eventually settled the matter.
Voices (Joan of Arc). Lord Howe’s Conflict of Loyalties was published in 1994. We now know that Wyatt was indeed a regular telephonic voice. In the early days of the Thatcher regime Sir Geoffrey Howe (as he then was) was himself one of the group very close to the Prime Minister. Every government has a ‘kitchen cabinet’, usually including some members of the Cabinet. In Margaret Thatcher’s case, however, the members seem to have been unusually prone to form subgroups – which traded contempt with each other – and mostly to have departed thinking her either too extreme, or insufficiently so. Wyatt
was one of the few loyal to the end. John Ranelagh, an ex-member of the Conservative Research Department, listed a formidable number of intellectual influences and back-room volunteers in Thatcher’s People (1991): major economists like Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman, middling economists like Sir Alan Walters; minor economists (Ralph (Lord) Harris); PR experts (Sir Tim Bell, Sir Bernard Ingham); Tory MPs (Ian Gow and Airey Neave); grand Tory MPs (Sir Keith Joseph, John (Lord) Biffen); businessmen and consultants (Sir John Hoskyns, Norman Strauss); civil servants (Sir Charles Powell); journalists (Sir Alfred Sherman, Wyatt). Norman Strauss left her Policy Unit because he could not persuade her to more extensive reforms. John Hoskyns left, in part, because he feared that strategic clarity was being lost, and partly because he felt he had done the job he’d come to do. James (Lord) Prior – never part of the inner circle – thought both of them mischievous cranks. Lord Howe – originally part of the inner circle – seems to have felt that the Prime Minister eventually took on something of that quality. Biffen doubtless spoke for most ex-Thatcherites when he told Ranelagh that she had lost ‘the real, genuine Thatcherites like myself. Perhaps Joan rather than Gloriana was the apter parallel: nobody thought Elizabeth Tudor was hearing voices.
BBC as state monopoly. Cited by Wyatt, Journals, vol. 2; also in Sherman papers at Royal Holloway College.
Sherman as communist. Born in 1919, he joined the Party in his teens, and fought in the Spanish Civil War. He told the Guardian (10 November 2000) that he was expelled in 1947 for challenging Stalin’s hostility to Tito. Knighted in 1983. Subsequently Daily Telegraph leader-writer, adviser to Radovan Karadzic, etc.
The Times’ new direction. Notes from Richard Davy, with further background from interviews 24 May 2001 and subsequently. A similar text by Davy was published in the Independent, 9 March 1998. See also note to Chapter 8.
Hussey’s encore. See Michael Grade’s review of Hussey memoirs in notes to Chapter 8.
Sanskrit. MacKenzie interviewed in The Real Rupert Murdoch (Channel 4, 1998).